More Poetic Advertising

Readers of this blog will have already taken notice of my considerable love for Walt Whitman.  If you ever feel blue, just pick up some Whitman and you immediately feel better.  It’s like feeling the sun on your face—Whitman just makes you feel like glad to be alive.

A couple of posts ago I griped about a few of the advertisements in the Toronto subway.  I never thought I’d actually get to post about poems IN advertising, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do.

Levi’s has a new campaign which combines three of my favourite things: Whitman, jeans, and sentimentality.  The new “go forth” ad (below) uses an amazing montage of scenes of youthful revelry in a post-Katrina New Orleans and pits them against scenes of financial scandal in post-Lehman Brothers New York.

The whole thing is actually narrated by Walt Whitman, using an extremely rare recording of him reading an excerpt from “America” (the recording is available online, via the American Academy of Poets, here).

The wax cylinder recording, like the commercial, leaves out the last two lines of the full poem.

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The ad seems to be going for Obama’s call for “renewing America’s promise.”  I’ve never been so stirred by an ad before.  The fireworks are exciting.  And Whitman’s ghostly voice, echoing across the “adamant of Time,” is thrilling.  I think Levi’s did an amazing job of it.  It doesn’t feel like they’ve resurrected Whitman for nefarious corporate purposes (unlike the recent Direct TV Chris Farley ad).   

But I must confess: after watching it I wanted to read some Whitman—or advocate for fiscal reform—not go out and buy pants.

On Naples

When I was a kid we used to have Neapolitan ice cream in the fridge. It came in a box and was really messy to open up because you got it all over your fingers. But you got to lick them afterwards—in three flavours no less!

For a long time that’s all I knew of Naples: it made great ice cream. Many poems have been written about Naples. None to my knowledge about its ice cream. This is probably because Italians don’t eat ice cream like that any more (it evolved from Spumano, a 19th century dessert). They now indulge in gelato, a denser, creamier cousin to North America’s frozen confection.

Naples has an uneven reputation. It’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it places. I will always remember reading the first line of Ralph Kirkpatrick’s 1955 book on Domenico Scarlatti: “In 1685, Naples was as populous, as dirty, and as noisy as it is now.” Ouch.

Poets not surprisingly look on Naples slightly differently. Percy Bysshe Shelley called Naples home for a short time in 1818. He wrote two poems about the place. The first is happily titled “Lines written in dejection, near Naples.” He juxtaposes the beauty of the city against his current state, in which he has neither “hope nor health.” I don’t know what was bugging him that day, but it seems that the Naples of 1818 was a bit quieter than Ralph Kirkpatrick would have us believe: its voice is “soft like Solitudes’s.”

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

Two years later Shelley wrote a poem reminiscing about the great time he had there and praising the townfolk for creating a constitutional monarchy after the revolt of July 1820. One of the striking lines is the second, in which he refers to the sun as the “lidless eye of heaven.” This was an image popular a couple centuries before: Shakespeare famously used it in Sonnet 18 (the “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” one), and Spenser used it before him in The Faerie Queene (I, iii, 4).

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice
Which armed Victory offers up unstained
To Love, the flower-enchained!
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,—
Hail, hail, all hail!

One of the earliest poems about Naples was by the poet Statius, who was born there. His Silvae, written in the first century AD, were lengthy songs of praise. 2.2 was for a villa of Pollius Felix. No one has yet written a rhymed translation of these Latin poems, so it’s not much fun to quote. Suffice it to say he thought that Naples was pretty great.

It seems then that the poets love Naples. People who write books are a different matter. Mark Twain, like Raph Kirkpatrick, didn’t think so much of the place when he visited. He wrote that Neapolitans “crowd you -- infest you -- swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look sneaking and mean, and obsequious.”

I guess when it comes to Naples we praise in verse but complain in prose.

On that Poor Achaean, Taylor Swift

Some weeks ago I set out to write a post about rage.  It seemed like a timely idea since the American healthcare debate had reached such a level of indecency that many media outlets began replacing voter “anger” with the “r” word.  The week of August 10 seems to be the flashpoint.  Google “health care rage” and you’ll find several dozen news articles and op-ed pieces in newspapers like the Boston Herald, the Washington Post, and MSNBC using the “r” word (though not, curiously, the NYTimes).

That week also coincided with this blog’s look at the Iliad.  It’s the first work of literature ever written down in Western culture—and its first word is “Rage” (μῆνιν).  But I had just been to a wedding and wanted to write about something cheerier, so I chose “singing” instead.

This week, however, rage is once again impossible to avoid.  As if crazed rednecks misinformed low-income voters weren’t enough, now tennis champions, members of congress, and music stars are all throwing fits.  The targets of their anger are also surprisingly diverse: an Asian line judge, a black president, and a white teenage country music star.  Pace Jimmy Carter, it can’t just be race that causes such an outburst.  Why is everyone so angry?

William Blake didn’t see a problem with rage.  It was the keeping it to yourself part that he thought was dangerous.  His “A Poison Tree” makes a somewhat too-obvious statement about the importance of sharing.  He would have done well in the Oprah-age of personal confession.

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,--

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

For Dylan Thomas, of course, rage was a good thing, if you knew what to rage against.  Pleading with with your dying father to fight: absolutely.  Foot foul: probably not so much.  It’s hard not to be touched by this wrenching poem, which is somewhat surprisingly cast in a formal villanelle.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

Wallace Stevens is a poet I don’t like very much.  He’s too self-consciously intellectual to be any fun to read—all his poems are such work.  But this is of course a fatuous remark to make about a genius.  In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens ruminates about the workings of the mind using the metaphor of a ship at sea, siren calls, and a sailing buddy named Ramon.  The last quatrain has become famous for his remark about rage:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Using the word “rage” with “order” is indeed brilliant.  It sounds oxymoronic—using an irrational emotion as a verb which takes “order” as its object.  But it makes perfect sense.  As humans we try desperately to make things make sense.  But we’re of course severely limited by the irrational way we think of things.  Linguist George Lakoff has been making this point for years, most accessibly in last year’s The Political Mind.  Lakoff (following Erving Goffman) suggests that our frames of reference, not our reason, govern our understanding.  When we’re confronted with things outside our frame, we “rage for order.” 

That’s not a good excuse for yelling at the president.  And least of all for picking on poor Taylor Swift.  But it is natural to get angry at things we don’t understand.  We’ve been doing it—and writing about it—for as long as we can remember.

On a not-so “Fab” Ad

2007 was a heady year for environmental politics.  An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar, the “Live Earth” concerts gave people a reason to watch network television in July, fluorescent bulbs finally became affordable, and the lexicon absorbed a panoply of new buzzwords like “going green,” and “carbon footprint.”  That year some interest group, perhaps intoxicated from bio-diesel fumes, posted ads in the subway which read: “Caught Doing Laundry During Peak Hours!”  Pictured was a thirty-something woman holding a laundry basket—her mouth agape with horror at her misdeed.  I found these ads ridiculous.  Of all the environmental boogey-people to target, they apparently settled on what they thought was the worst of the worst: stay at home moms.  They shouldn’t do their laundry during the day when corporations have non-green-roofed, non-LEED certified office buildings to deep freeze.  They should do such indulgent activities at night.  “I’m sorry, Timmy, Mommy can’t tuck you in tonight.  She has to wash your clothes for tomorrow while the power grid is in low use.”

2009 has brought back another series of irksome ads.  They range from the silly to the irresponsible.  In the former category are the ChooseVeg.ca ads promoting veganism.  As a bloodthirsty carnivore I realize that I’m already biased against their message.  But touting the virtues of the “curious and insightful pig” and the “inquisitive, affectionate, and personable” chicken is too comedic to take seriously.  In the latter category are the MoneyMart ads which promote the fleecing of poor people with 400% APR payday loans (see the Slate article on their shiftiness here.)

But I suggest the worst offender for awful advertisements is Bell.  I’d like you to meet Liam.  Liam is part of Bell’s new “Fab Ten” promotion for cellular phones.  He’s from Toronto and describes his style as “Street Chic.”  In the ad he proudly sports “the perfect Cardi/Hoodie combo.”  Liam “[g]ot it on sale Xmas Eve when I was supposed to be shopping for a friend.”

Let’s get this straight.  Liam is vain aesthete/last-minute shopper who’s so selfish he can’t even do a simple task for a friend without pampering himself with another purchase?  Liam is, in short, a douchebag.  Who on earth would want to be like Liam?  I am, at this moment at least, proud to be a Rogers customer.

I generally like ads.  I’ll sound like Don Draper if I say that they can enrich our experience of everyday products by imbuing them with an aesthetic charm.  Imagine blow drying your hair after a shower without the image of lustrous locks billowing in slow motion.  It seems so regal to do something so quotidian thanks to the folks at Pantine.  But I’m afraid that this Bell ad appeals to a much baser instinct in us.  It doesn’t elevate the notion of style, but celebrates an empty kind of aestheticism that’s solipsistic and sad.  Why care about your friends when you can buy a phone for yourself that matches your hipster wardrobe? 

It’s good we have other arts, like poetry, to remind us that sometimes the world is indeed too much with us.  This poem by Wordsworth implores us to “go green,” but in a way that ads chastising desperate housewives could never do.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God!  I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

                              —William Wordsworth—

On the Poetry of Mad Men

Two nights ago I watched the season three premiere of Mad Men. I’ll confess to being hopelessly addicted to this show, even if I remain conflicted about the series’ message. I can’t think of any other movie or television show which makes anomie look so stylish. The writers are careful to focus on character, but it’s undeniable that the show’s real hook is Danish Modern. It can’t help but glamourize jewel tones, skinny ties, teak furniture, and the Janus-faced lives of those at Sterling Cooper that go along with them.

But of particular importance to this blog: the show also manages to glamourize modern poetry. Season two found Don Draper fascinated with Frank O’Hara’s 1957 collection Meditations in an Emergency after sitting next to a hipster reading it in a bar. He even read the final stanzas of “Mayakovsky” in voiceover at the end of the first episode.

Thanks to this, sales of O’Hara’s book shot up 218%. It’s easy to see why “Mayakovsky” caught Don’s attention. It’s oppressive atomism and melancholia is a gloss on his personality.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

The actual Mayakovsky (Vladimir, not O’Hara’s poem) led a tragic life of denunciations and depression. He shot himself at the age of 37. Perhaps a little too into his art, his suicide note was in the form of a poem. O’Hara himself met a sad end when he was hit by a dune buggy (on a beach on Fire Island, of all places!) Let’s hope Don doesn’t succumb to either of these fates.

Bruce Handy’s recent Vanity Fair piece also revealed another poetic tidbit about a character. Writer Matthew Weiner gave actress January Jones a poem by Sylvia Plath to read at the start of the second season. “Ariel,” written on Plath’s 30th birthday is, according to Handy, “an abstract howl of female rage and despair.” Handy fails to mention that Ariel is also the name of the horse Plath rides in the poem. At last Betty Draper’s hours of riding lessons throughout the second season make sense (and all this time I thought it was just for the sexy equestrian wear!) Plath’s metaphor of shedding the shackles of female domestic captivity (she “unpeels” as she rides) becomes itself a metaphor for Betty’s character arc in season two (as she finally stands up for herself).

White
Godiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And
now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts
in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that
flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the
cauldron of morning.

I wonder if every character in the show has a similar literary pedigree? In celebration of Mad Men’s return, I’m going to suggest a poem each week that relates to a co-worker, family member, or sexual conquest of Don Draper (the latter category of course being the most substantial).

This week I’ll start with my favourite character: Roger Sterling. In Vanity Fair Handy described him as “sybaritic,” which of course means that he is inflicted with a sexual transmitted disease “devoted to excessive luxury” (OED). But since this is a blog post and not a William Makepeace Thackery novel, I’ll simply describe him as a hedonist. But he’s also a charming wit (see Season 3, Episode 1) and a stone cold silver fox. What poet’s work might encapsulate this decadent and libidinous entitlement?

Why Byron of course! Roger’s break-up speech to Joan in Season 1 (“I am so glad I got to roam those hillsides”) reminds me of this ditty. Byron, lecherous at the best of times, sounds downright dirty here. I think most people read it as a wistful elegy, but to me it’s the poetic equivalent of a drunken leer. Crisp and naughty—I bet Roger Sterling would like it just fine.

So, we'll go no more a roving
    So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
    By the light of the moon.

Next week: Peggy Olson.  Your suggestions, dear reader, are heartily welcome.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend…

Just a quick note on my noon hour today. As I sit by my office window, bombarded by the sounds echoing off of the concrete library next door, I feel a sudden sadness for my elm which once stood mighty at my window-side. The old sentry was taken down by a crazy wind last summer. I miss my old friend, so as a tribute I thought I’d share this cute poem by Bishop. She wrote it when she was all of sixteen—which kind of shows but mostly doesn’t.

"To a tree"

Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss

For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out
Admiring infinites’mal leaves

How Can I Keep From Singing?

Two posts ago I paraphrased the first two lines of The Iliad. Well, I paraphrased Wikipedia’s translation of the first two lines. Translation can be a tricky thing. As we found out earlier this week, mistranslation can send a Secretary of State into a bit of a fit. I like Wikipedia’s version, which is a mashup of two famous translations: Richard Lattimore’s 1951 version (long a favourite of academics), and Robert Fagles’ 1990 updating (now the gold standard of the English Iliad). Lattimore’s first line begins with “Sing, goddess, the anger […],” which is the construction I used. It has an incantational flare that I like. Fagles begins more brutally with “Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” which is more striking—it really punches you in the nose. It’s also more faithful to the original Greek. Homer’s first word is μῆνιν (menis: rage). “Sing” (ἄειδε [aeide]) is actually the second word. Fagles version strikes me as more modern, even if it is closer to what Homer wanted. Does that mean we are more like eighth century BCE folk than we were in the 1950s?

From the Greek verb “aiedo” (to sing) we get the work “ode,” which is a familiar and specific poetic form. So, I thought it might be cheery to take a look at some poems that aren’t odes, but talk about the joy of singing. I can’t sing for the life of me, but I’m blessed to have many friends that can, and so this post is for them.

The only kind of singing I can do is the kind Walt Whitman was talking about in his famous poem, “I Hear America Singing.” Here the common man doesn’t actually “sing.” They make music with their labour. We often use musical words to describe the noise of machinery. We talk about the “hum” of this or that. But here Whitman raises the language to an ecstatic level. The very act of work becomes a symphony as players throughout the nation lend their hands make its performance. I love Whitman for his unapologetic romanticization of the working class. I’m sure everyday work like this in the 1860s wasn’t so jolly, but this poem has a great “whistle while you work” ethic, even if you’re not whistling.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 collection, A Children’s Garden of Verses, contains some beautiful and charming nuggets. Whenever I pick it up I get excited about boring my kids to sleep with it (I occasionally have fantasies that they’ll love having me read poetry to them before bed, but, well, let’s be real). In the simply titled “Singing,” Stevenson elides the difference between birdsong, work songs, children’s songs, and busking. The multicultural angle caps of this feel-good take on music and the everyday.

Of speckled eggs the birdie sings
And nests among the trees;
The sailor sings of ropes and things
In ships upon the seas.

The children sing in far Japan,
The children sing in Spain;
The organ with the organ man
Is singing in the rain.

Our last poem is one of my all-time favourites (there are eight trillion reasons this poem is sheer genius, but I’ll restrain myself!) It, again, is not just about singing a song. In e.e. cummings’ “i love you much,” singing is the joyous sound that accompanies the arrival of someone you love. It makes me think of The Mirror Has Two Faces, which I’ve seen more times that I’d care to admit. As you may remember, hearing Puccini in your head when you’re in love plays a prominent role in that movie.

But what really kills me about this poem is the second-last stanza. Here singing still refers to that feeling you get when you see someone you love, but cummings casts a wider net, encouraging the world to get listening. It makes me think about what the beauty singing brings to the world, and about my cool friends that make that happen in my life.

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each nearness)everyone certainly would(my

most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

So whether you hum, whistle, or sing, make sure you take some time to make the world a little more beautiful with your “ode” today. And avoid, if at all possible, going into a “menis.”

On Poems for Birthdays

Occasional poetry is some of my favourite, not only because I have terribly bourgeois tastes, but because it's poetry that's meant to be shared with friends. So many poems are for private reflection, it's nice to have poems that are unapologetically social.

But when it comes to finding poems for birthdays, one has to be resourceful. Many of the best poems have such gloomy takes on getting older. This genre could occupy an entire post, but it's late and I'm going to leave you with only a few short favourites of a happier variety.

Jonathan Swift's wit is legendary. So, it's no surprise to find a birthday poem by him that sparkles with wit. Beginning in 1719 he wrote a birthday poems for "Stella," his mistress. In 1727 he wrote to an older Stella that birthdays were not occasions to

[...] think on our approaching ills
And talk of spectacles and pills.
To-morrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.

I think those lines still sound fresh. I can't imagine what were in pills in 1727, but apparently the daily chore of taking medication has not changed. But Swift is right. Birthdays are about celebrating. That's why I like this gem by Christina Rosetti. Thanks to the arrival of her loved one, it sounds like her birthday is going to be a real smash:

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Birthdays are also about giving thanks. That's why I love this poem by American poet Philip Appleman. Entitled "Birthday Card to My Mother," it pretty much makes every birthday card I've ever written sound like crap. But that's the great thing about poetry: it expresses all the things we can't put words to ourselves. I bet his mom was touched to read this last stanza:

You have survived it all,
come through wreckage and triumph hard
at the center but spreading
gentleness around you--nowhere
by your bright hearth has the dust
of bitterness lain unswept;
today, thinking back, thinking ahead
to other birthdays, I
lean upon your courage
and sign this card, as always,
with love.

So should you find yourself celebrating a birthday soon, forget about your ills, get yourself a silk tablecloth, and imagine getting a card from Philip Appleman. You deserve it!

On the Neo-con Version of History

Every night as I fall asleep I listen to a podcast from iTunes U.  I can’t go on enough about what a magnificent resource this is.  Not only for acquiring knowledge from leading educational institutions, but also for falling asleep.  Let’s be honest: university lectures are more often than not soporific.  Ambien is less effective as a sedative.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been listening to Donald Kagan’s introductory course on Greek history that he gives at Yale.  It’s particularly interesting not so much for the content (which can get a bit snoozy), but because Kagan is perhaps the most conspicuous neoconservative academic working at a reputable university today. 

His introductory lecture is a miniature version of the NEH Jefferson Lecture he gave in 2005 (available here).  To refer to Kagan’s view of history as conservative is to refer to Versailles as a house.  You have to go back all the way to Livy to find a philosophy of history that Kagan agrees with.  Namely, that the virtues of the past can be models for the future, while the vices must be avoided.  This is a view of history that hasn’t held much water since at least the nineteenth century, as Kagan will readily tell you.  In fact, Kagan is happy to tell you all about how history and the humanities have gone awry in the past two centuries with peevish disdain.  However, I suppose he can be forgiven for being a bit crank.  After all, it must be lonely to be a rational neoconservative working among the fey sophists of postmodern academia.

The year before Kagan’s lecture, poetry critic and literature professor Helen Vendler proposed “that the humanities should take as their central object of study not the texts of historians or philosophers, but the products of aesthetic endeavor: architecture, art, dance, music, literature, theater, and so on.”  She thinks this would make history not only more compelling, since art is more interesting than philosophy or political theory, but also give a more well-rounded picture of the past.  This is of course in direct opposition to Kagan, who thinks that only the political machinations of the Peloponnesus can give true insight into human possibility.  Given Vendler’s proposition, and her status of a modern poetry lover, I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of poems that took history as their subject to see what poets thought about this whole deal.

Our first poem is confounding one.  W.B. Yeats had a rather bizarre view of history.  He came up with a cockamamie notion of two “gyres” which intersected in some swirling vortex.  I can only imagine two conical slinkies, so the profundity of this view is beyond me.  In “The Second Coming,” the slinkies are apparently in a bad phase, and Armageddon is at hand.  Yeats eschatological imagery is, I think, scarier than anything in the bible. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Thanks to this poem, I now understand this New Yoker cartoon:

In 1973 Robert Lowell published a collection of poems about history entitled, what else, History.  Given his status as founder of the confessional poem, Lowell’s version of history is intimate and individual.  Though he writes about Leonidas, Cleopatra, Napoleon, and Hitler, his poems are about the powerlessness of human action and the commonality of life experience.  In “History,” Lowell remarks on the sad end we all meet, and the untidy mess we leave behind:

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.

As Jonathan Veitch wrote, Lowell has “a sense of history as rupture, of human action truncated by the imperium of death.”  I’m guessing Kagan isn’t a fan.  Lowell sounds an awful lot like those relativists that neoconservatives can’t stand.

In fact, I can’t think of any poems today that Kagan might like.  I suppose he’ll have to stick to the Homer.

But why should a neoconservative view of history matter?  And what about poetry?  History has always been used to justify the present.  For Kagan, neocon extraordinaire, the ancient Greek political system was the single greatest accomplishment of early civilization.  It is therefore incumbent upon the present generation to gift democratic governments to every nation, by force if necessary, since they don’t have the benefit of an intellectual tradition rooted in ancient Greece.  This is the intellectual ferment that resulted in the Iraq War.  But is it sound reasoning?

When the Iraq war happened, I was youthfully neocon-inclined and was romanced by the notion of spreading democracy about the world.  After the disaster that was the first five years of the War, I regret my enthusiasm.  I’m haunted by Robert Bly’s poem “Call and Answer” from August of 2002.  He wrote:

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
Escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house. 
How come we've listened to the great criers-Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglas-and now
We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

Maybe if we thought more about the uses of history, we might come to better understand how we want to go about making our future.  And maybe, some years from now, a new Homer will have something profound to write about what all went down.

Sing, goddess, the rage of the West, son of Greece, the destructive rage that sent countless ills on the Iraqis…

All in a Day’s Work: Part II

What does work mean? Is it enough to put in a day’s work, or should our labours express some better purpose? As I suggested in Part I, thinking about the meaning of work is inescapable.

It wasn’t something poets did for a long time. Only in the nineteenth century do we find poems explicitly about working lives—and perhaps obviously so. That was an age of both the drudgery of factory work and the rise of a class of people who could choose which work they wanted to do. It’s funny how choice brings about anguish. And with anguish, of course, comes poetry.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about the soul-sucking nature of work without purpose. For him,

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Being a Romantic guy, he contrasted his own inability to do good work with nature's natural humming rhythm of labour: bees stirring, brooks flowing, and birds flying. Nature is always at work, renewing itself. Humans are never so purposeful (at least not all the time). As nineteenth-century architecture critic John Ruskin remarked in “The Nature of Gothic,” “the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers.”

Part of Ruskin’s project was to bring moral purpose to work—to combine morbid thoughts with miserable work. Only through work could one think healthily, and only through thought could one work happily. That’s why he loved Gothic architecture so much. It was the perfect combination of artistic imagination and practical masonry. Flying buttresses not only look great, they hold up the wall!

But even by W.B. Yeats’s time, poets were still caught between the choice of working to get by, or working at what matters. In “The Choice,” Yeats ruefully remarks about concessions required by such a decision:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

Talk about depressing. “Miserable workers” are left scarred, “morbid thinkers” are broke (no surprise there, I suppose), and both are demoralized at the end of it. Can the working life really be so bleak?

A more modern example always makes me feel better. It’s ambivalent, if not downright depressing, but it’s honest. Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” is a terse poem about an aging farmhand. It reads like a journalistic account of his hard-working morning and is capped off with a little folksy first person:

"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

Work life is just like that. It may not be what we want, but it’s what we do. What does it mean? Well, the horses got their hay.

Fun With Intertexts: Mudluscious Edition

Mudluscious is a great word. Portmanteau neologisms aren’t just for techno-geeks and superstar girl groups (remember “bootylicious?”). Mudluscious was of course the doing of e.e. cummings from “In Just-/spring.” But this post is not about “puddle-wonderful” spring (I have to save some material for next spring!).

In my last post I mentioned Marge Piercy’s 1982 poem “To Be of Use.” In it (below) she uses the phrase “the mud and the muck.” Whenever I hear that line I can’t help but hear Trisha Yearwood’s first number one hit, “She’s in Love with the Boy.” It tells the story of Katie and Tommy, “Jack and Diane” wannabees who don’t have the approval of Katie’s dad. That’s because Tommy “got the short of the stick” when it comes to brains and arrives to pick up Katie in his “beat-up Chevy truck” by “laying on the horn / Splashing through the mud and the muck.”

Could the song’s writer have known the Piercy Poem? A quick GoogleBooks search reveals that many authors have used the phrase. Books as diverse as Edward Michael Pavlic’s recent book on modernism in African-American literature, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, a saucy Victorian Romance novel, and Phonics for Dummies all contain that exact line. Of the 208 hits, however, a good number (I’m going to guess 10%) contain Piercy’s poem. These books include a self-help guide and William Ayers’ book on education. The earliest example of an author using the phrase—and the only one to antedate Piercy’s poem—was in a book called Little Mother America by Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, published in 1919.

This brings up an interesting question. Given its ubiquity, is Piercy’s phrase an example of folksy charm or facile alliteration? Is this a phrase everyone uses? Your input, dear reader, is most welcome.

All in a Day’s Work: Part I

Early this morning the City of Toronto finally reached a tentative agreement with striking CUPE workers. Pending union approval, that means that garbage removal may resume as early as Thursday. That’s great news for my ‘hood, which in the last two weeks has developed charming tumbleweeds of KFC buckets and McDonald’s wrappers. It’s also great news for the thousands of striking employees who can now return to doing what they love. Well, that’s the funny thing about work: even though it may not be what you love—I doubt garbage removal is a passion for anyone other than five-year-old kids—there’s still some satisfaction in the doing. Today’s post is the first in a two-part series dedicated to poems about the agony and the ecstasy of work.

Margaret Thatcher hit on something very true when she remarked that a good day was one in which “you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it,” not one in which “you lounge around doing nothing.” Workaholics are bad sources of advice (just ask Carol Thatcher), but I think she’s right that there’s something entirely satisfying about accomplishing what’s put before us. Marge Piercy, one of my favourite living poets, wrote a great work about those people who roll up their sleeves and get it done called “To Be of Use.”

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals bouncing
like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to
move things forward,who do what has to be done, again and again.

The simple joys of manual labour and its charactering-building effects was a theme John Updike wrote about in his aphoristic “Hoeing.” But while he writes about a common activity, his language can’t help but hit at a loftier metaphor.

I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this
simple exercise.

The dry earth like a great scab breaks,
revealing moist-dark loam--
the pea-root's home,
a fertile wound
perpetually healing.

How neatly the green weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never performed
this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.

Why would poets so often write about work that they themselves rarely do? I suspect it’s because the greatest satisfaction is in the completion and not merely the doing. Manual tasks end in something “real,” as Piercy goes on to say. Intellectual work, however, is always partial, tentative, and open to debate. It’s much more like humans are: works in progress. The sage Robert Frost put a haunting image to this idea in “The Wood-Pile.” (Hint: it’s not just a woodpile.) Out for a walk in a “frozen swamp” one winter day (how Frostian!), he comes across this sight:

It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled--and measured, four by four
by eight. And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's
cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

I think that image is incredible. It’s not only so palpable (I swear I can smell the peat with my red nose and feel the damp in my bones), but I think immensely powerful. I can’t help thinking about “God” when I think about that Woodpile. Did he turn to fresh tasks, leaving his creation to warm the forest as best we could? I realize this post has turned heavy fast. But Frost gets to the heart about work. For a while it’s satisfying enough that we do it. But in the end, we all want it to mean something.

Why Don't You Love Me?

Funny how everything old is new again. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s recent seedy email affair lavish epistolary romance was positively a throwback to a Victorian ideal of the surreptitious liaison. I wonder if this episode was brought on by the return of the loveless marriage. As Sandra Tsing Loh recently (and controversially) wrote in the Atlantic, like “fancy schools, tae kwan do lessons, and home-cooked organic food, the two-parent marriage is another impressive—and rare—attainment to bestow on our fragile, gifted children.” Marriage as the noblesse oblige of the upwardly mobile. Bummer. Who would have thought that the meritocracy would destroy marriage (I had my money on the gays). Looks like Stephanie Coontz deserves a revised second edition (see Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage). But if the marriage of social obligation brings back the flowery and furtive exultations of those in love, I’m (kind of) for it.

Until now we’ve mostly had to stumble on with angst ridden poems about unrequited love. In the morass of this much-loved teenage genre, however, lie a few hidden gems. Unlike the pathetic version beloved by the German Romantics, I thought I’d highlight a few more impudent and triumphant examples.

Nikki Giovanni has a great one in her new collection. Dripping with sass, “Why Don’t You Love Me” is a plainspoken, hand-on-your-hip gem from Ms. Giovanni.

Why don’t you
Love me

I am good with dogs
And children.

[...]

I just don’t understand

I say Jambo
When I answer the phone

And Ciao
When I hangup

I really really really
Don’t know

What more
I can do

A short poem by John Keats similarly shows that when it comes to the cool reception of his feelings, he could be a real dude with a ‘tude. “You Say You Love Me” is a bit more bombastic, but equally compelling (I love the word “inurn”).

You say you love; but then your hand
No soft squeeze for squeeze returneth,
It is like a statue's dead -
While mine to passion burneth -
O love me truly!

O breathe a word or two of fire!
Smile, as if those words should burn be,
Squeeze as lovers should - O kiss
And in thy heart inurn me! O love me truly!

One of the greatest poems has to be one by A.E. Housman (Housman conveniently, if unimaginatively, only numbered his poems). Rather than being angry or disconsolate, Housman endures his predicament stoically. Narrating from beyond the grave, he asks his former beloved to take notice of his headstone. The last line would do Marcus Aurelius proud.

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
Goodbye, said you, forget me.
I will, no fear, said I

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you

Was one that kept his word

George Jones narrated a similar story in “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” But then, as I’ve perhaps stated too many times on this blog, Country Music keeps alive some of our best literary traditions. Mark Sanford may yet have a lucrative second career…

Walkers Walks for Walking’s Sake

Walking Man 1, Alberto Giacometti (1960)

I love to go for a run. It’s a great stress reliever. But running is a pretty mindless activity, as evidenced by the fact that one of the world’s great super-long distance runners has no short term memory (see the recent article in the NYTimes). Perhaps it’s because running is a goal-oriented activity, unlike one of my favourite other de-stressors: an evening constitutional.

W.H. Auden, who was known to take long walks with friends, hit on the purposeless nature of this activity in his charming poem (you guessed it), “Walks.”

I choose the road from here to there
When I’ve a scandalous tale to bear,
Tools to return or books to lend
To someone at the other end.

Returning afterwards, although
I meet my footsteps toe to toe,
The road looks altogether new
Now that is done I meant to do.

But I avoid it when I take
A walker’s walk for walking’s sake:
The repetition it involves
Raises a doubt it never solves.

[...]

No, when a fidget of the soul
Or cumulus clouds invite a stroll,
The route I take goes roundabout
To finish where it started out.

The sense of wonder and escape a walk provides was captured by Walt Whitman in his “Song of the Open Road.” The lengthy poem, in typical Whitman fashion, evolves into a rhapsodic metaphor about common purpose. But it starts out simple, the way a walk should.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

While Whitman emphasizes the beauty and possibility of setting out on a walk, Robert Frost emphasizes the walk as a time to contemplate life’s endings. Here, Frost walks through the “headless aftermath” of a mowed field and observes a lonely tree. But this doleful occasion does yield one blossom:

A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

So whether it’s a “walk in the snow” or “walk after midnight, out in the moonlight,” a walk is a great time to savour life’s joy and sadness, and return with at least one aster flower.

On Taking the Subway

Now that I live in "the boonies" (as I affectionately call my East Toronto 'hood) my morning ritual includes a commute downtown. Never much of a fan of commuting, I went in search of poetic depictions of taking the subway to burnish my dull vision of this urban rite. Unfortunately, poets and painters are about as optimistic about taking the subway as they are about taking the greyhound bus.

Mark Rothko's series of subway scenes paints a familar picture (above, 1936). His subway station is banal and industrial. Its occupents are obscure, faceless forms. The scene hovers between listless melancholy and Orphic fantasy. Are these commuters nameless cogs in the mechanics of the modern capitalist machine, or shadowy spirits doomed to wonder the underworld?

The poet Carl Sandburg captures something of the former in his compact "Subway" (1916). Here the subway is a yoke of the modern man, bearing down on him, weighting his shoulders and his soul. It is a bleak picture of the subway as transport of the working man.

DOWN between the walls of shadow
Where the iron laws insist,
The hunger voices mock.

The worn wayfaring men
With the hunched and humble shoulders,
Throw their laughter into toil.

Hart Crane captures something more of the Orphic descent in "The Tunnel," part of his celebrated poem, "The Bridge." In it, Crane contemplates a walk, but instead decides to take the underground because "The subway yawns the quickest promise home." That famous line, I think, makes a much better slogan that the TTC's over-eager "Ride the Rocket." Though, the marketing department would be disappointed with the rest of the poem. Crane's ride is no pleasure trip. In his East River Hades he even runs into Edgar Allan Poe and his "retching flesh." But he does manage to capture something of the hectic plunge into the underworld.

Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.
Thunder is galvothermic here below. . . . The car
Wheels off. The train rounds, bending to a scream,
Taking the final level for the dive
Under the river—
And somewhat emptier than before,
Demented, for a hitching second, humps; then
Lets go. . . . Toward corners of the floor
Newspapers wing, revolve and wing.
Blank windows gargle signals through the roar.

But despite the cramped quarters, blank stares, and irritating use of old pre-H5 subway cars on the Bloor-Danforth line (I love those orange benches!), I still enjoy the commute for one simple moment. My route takes me across the Bloor Viaduct. The windows are suddenly ablaze with the morning sunlight and a valley of green stretches out in either direction. The vision is quickly dashed as we speed underground again. But each day, for $2.75, the subway car is my Charon, ferrying me across the Acheron to my workday and home again each night. I know this image implies that work is hell, but that's for another post...

Notes on "Camp"

Susan Sontag would hate this post. For Northern Ontarians "camp" is not "a certain mode of aestheticism," and certainly not "the triumph of the epicene style." It is what Southern Ontarians might call "the cottage" and what Westerners might call "the cabin." "Camp" is anything from a one room shack to a full fledged summer home. It is, in every case, a sylvan retreat far from the bustle of city life.

Last night I stayed overnight at my camp--a modest and handsome grey-sided saltbox with a split gabled roof and sunny clerestory--on the western shore of the big lake they call Gitchigumi. It was particularly cold for July, but there was a clear sky which made for a splendid sunset.

It reminded me of my favourite Emily Dickinson poem. She writes of "Nature--the Gentlest Mother" who looks over even the tiniest of earth's creatures. The final two stanzas paint a beautiful picture of sundown and twilight:

When all the Children sleep--
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps--
Then bending from the Sky--

With infinite Affection--
And infiniter Care--
Her Golden finger on Her lip--
Wills Silence--Everywhere--

Only Dickinson could possibly get away with making a comparative out of "infinite." But was there ever a more perfect description of this evening ritual?

Saturday Night's Alright for Poetry

Last night I was feeling snacky before heading back to my home in the outlying regions of Toronto (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, I can now proudly declare myself an “outlier” [editor’s note: I think Malcolm Gladwell is a disgraceful mountebank]). Anyways, while I was at the Timmy’s by my office, I had the pleasure of hearing a young woman, surrounded by three friends, recite poetry. She had an extraordinary rich, black voice and spoke with the cadence of an experienced orator. If I were savvy enough to include audio clips on this site I would hire this wonderful woman to read poems aloud.

I didn’t have the courage to either compliment her on her amazing skills or ask her why on earth she was reciting a poem about a “hero” in a Tim Horton’s on a Saturday night. But it did strike me as kind of great that such a thing was going on.

Poems about heroes are not the usual sort we associate with Saturday nights. Such nights are usually about “drunk dialing,” or its ancient equivalent, the paraklausithyron.

Paraklausithyron is just an ancient Greek word for a poem recited beside (para) a locked (claus) door (thyron). They usually involved young male lovers, returning home from symposia, who stop at their at a girl’s house to beg to be let it. Notable examples are Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, and Ovid Amores 1.6 and 2.19. I’m not generally a fan of translations so I’m not going to include any here. You may also recall a somewhat similar situation in a Mia Michaels dance routine from last year’s So You Think You Can Dance with Katee and Twitch (love you, Mia! Photo above).

Our friends the troubadours also wrote such poems. The genre generally fell out of favour in the modern era, however. Drunken begging doesn’t seem to have fit in well with the aesthetics of either classicists or romantics. I’m of the opinion, however, that the paraklausithyron made a roaring come back in one of my favourite genres of music.

Thanks to the invention of the telephone, lovers no longer need to embarrass themselves by prostrating in front of a door. They can now do so metaphorically with a mere seven (or ten) digits.

One of my favourite paraclausithyronic country songs is Jim Reeves’ 1959 hit “He’ll Have to Go.” While there’s no door, the phone substitutes for what I think sounds like a far more intimate medium.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.
Let's pretend that we're together, all alone.
I'll tell the man to turn the juke box way down low,
And you can tell your friend there with you he'll have to go.

A song I’ve recently fallen in love with also fits the topos of a paraklausithyron. It’s Tony Rice’s 1986 song “Hard Love.” I have to thank Alison Krauss for this recommendation, via Nightline (see YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WxpPXGVCHQ). It tells the story of a broken man recalling that the only love he knew growing up was “hard love / when Christmas to my birthday was a million years away.” As the song goes on, you realize that he’s confessing this to a woman he’s alienated from a distance:

Now I’m standing in this phone booth with a dollar and a dime,
Wondering what to say to you to ease your troubled mind.
For the Lord’s cross might redeem us but our own just wastes our time.
And to tell the two apart is always hard love.

So I’ll tell you that I love you even though I’m far away.
I’ll tell you how you’ve changed me as I live from day to day.
How you’ve helped me to accept myself and I won’t forget to say,
Love is never wasted even if it’s hard love.

Well it’s hard love but it’s love all the same.
Not the stuff of fantasy but more than just a game.
And the only kind of miracle that’s worthy of the name
For the love that heals our lives is mostly hard love.

It’s a bit heavier than the froth of the drunken antique paraklausithyron. But it’s still the kind of situation many of us find ourselves in on any given Saturday night.

Crayola, Crayola Rocks!

This week students in Ontario completed their school year. Some graduated onto bigger things (like high school), others moved up another rung in the grade ladder, but most were likely just glad to finally be rid of pencils, books, and “teacher’s dirty looks.”

While I was always glad to see the end of school, endings for me always have a ring of sadness to them in a way that beginnings don’t. So while I loved summer, I loved the first day of school. New jeans, a sharp haircut—possibility. But one of the greatest pleasures of the first day of school was a new box of Crayola pencil crayons. A box of eighteen, twenty-four, or if Zellers had a sale, thirty-six magical hues with snappy and chic names—“vermillion,” “cerulean,” “indigo”—was just the greatest thing. My favourite colour was “ultramarine.”

Ultramarine was one of the most expensive—and therefore admired colours—in the world until 1828, when the French Government awarded a prize to Christian Gmelin for successfully synthesizing an alternative. Until then, ultramarine was derived from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone mined in Afghanistan. Its Latin name denotes its provenance: it had to be shipped in from “beyond the sea.”

Unlike most pigments derived from stone, one couldn’t simply grind lapis into the lustrous colour one wanted. Powdered lapis was dull and grey so alchemists developed a lengthy and intensive regimen of purifying the powder to make the desired pigment.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ultramarine was considered the greater than gold—“most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass”—according to Cennini (15th c.). For this reason, it was reserved for only deserving subjects, like the Virgin Mary. She was often shown in sumptuous ultramarine gowns, like this famous painting by Van Eyck (1434, above). Art historian Daniel Thompson suggests that “the costliness, the permanent intrinsic value of the blue from lapis put it in a class with gems, to be worn proudly or offered humbly as a worthy gift.”

In the premiere production of R. Murray Schafer’s The Children’s Crusade a couple of weeks ago, the Virgin Mary makes an appearance. She appropriately wears a beautiful ultramarine cloak. I’m sure the dye to make it was pretty cheap. But it still looked rich as could be.

Toronto's Quisquilious Mess

Toronto's garbage strike is only in its third day and already the whiff of refuse is in the air downtown. As I tried to put a name to the particular stench that was wafting down Bay Street, I was reminded of Ammon Shea's book from last summer, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. He introduced me to the word "quisquilious." It means either "to be concerned with worthless things," or "of the nature of refuse." Its root is the Latin word for garbage: "quisquiliae."

Shea rhetorically asked why we have ugly words for some beautiful things and beautiful words for some ugly things. Today I feel I'm closer to learning why. Because when your world literally stinks, sometimes a sonorous word makes it just a bit more bearable.

So next time you have to plug your nose when you go outside, don't fret about the "trash," the "swill," and the "slop." Monosyllables are for real problems (like "death"). One needn't concern oneself with something so quisquilious.

Stay

Last month I was painting my new apartment, which for me was a great time to catch up on my top 40 radio. A song I heard endlessly and loved was Kelly Rowland’s “Unity.” The melodic hook for the chorus is just great even if the lyrics are pretty standard:

Stay with me
Two hearts forever
You were the spark that lit the flame
Only if you'd

Stay with me
This love's forever
And in my heart you will remain
Until we meet again

I’m a bit confused about why her lover is away. He seems to have left her because she’s “picking up the pieces of a life [she] once knew.” However, the pre-chorus has this interesting tidbit: “I got your message yesterday.” What did he send her?

This conundrum, I think, makes the song kind of excellent. But it got me thinking about other “Stay” songs. The classic is of course Lorraine Ellison’s 1966 song “Stay With Me,” the song Bette Midler memorably died onstage to in The Rose. There are a million variations on this theme, but I thought I’d concentrate on the subgenre of the poetic aubade.

An aubade is a song sung at sunrise as two lovers must part (and a French lingerie company, as you can see above). The earliest examples come from those medieval tunesmiths, the troubadours. Such a song was called an “alba,” which of course is old Occitan for “cartoonishly attractive actor/eco-vandal” “sunrise.”

But the best examples of the genre come from the metaphysical poets. John Donne wrote a number of aubades. They usually begin innocently enough:

Stay, O sweet and do not rise.
The light that shines comes from thine eyes.
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.

The best thing about Donne’s poems, though, is how he’s always scolding the sun. Sometimes he’s canny and incisive: “light hath no tongue, it is all eye.” Other times he’s just cruel: “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late school-boys and sour prentices.” Them’s fightin’ words.

We all learned about this tradition when we studied Romeo and Juliet in high school. One strangely irritating scene (Act III, scene 5) finds Romeo debating with Juliet about whether “day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.” He of course has to high tail it out of there before he gets caught. I’ll summarize:

Juliet: Come back to bed, it’s still night.
Romeo: Nope, I’m pretty sure the sun’s about to come up. Look.
Juliet: I know daylight when I see it. That isn’t it. Come back to bed.
Romeo: Yes, dear.
Juliet: Wait...no, you’re right. Get the hell out before my Mom sees!

Just imagine elegant metaphors about candles and meteors and such.

Last November I had the good fortune to see Billy Currington perform his new song at the Grand Ole Opry, “Don’t.” It has a catchy retro-soul kind of groove. Its lyrical conceit is likewise a throwback to our now familiar scenario:

Don't you just hate hearing that clock on the wall chiming
Saying it's time and
Don't you just wish we could stay here together all day long,
You know it wouldn't be a crime if we
Crawled back in the bed got as close as we could get
Try to figure out where this thing is going

The clever part of the lyric is the internal rhymes (wall/all; time/crime) and assonance (bed/get), which are stressed with long notes in the musical phrase. The actual line ends don’t rhyme at all.

But the modern aubade par excellence has to be Sugarland’s “Stay” (2007), which they performed at the Grammy’s this past year. The song, like Currington’s, features a “clock on the wall”—a sign of the times. Humans are no longer slave to the sun, answering Donne’s question: “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?”

No, but they still run to phone calls from the wife. Sugarland’s song, unlike any other, isn’t addressed to the either the sun or a lover. It’s an internal dialogue of a woman who imagines begging her lover not to leave when his wife (or girlfriend—the song isn’t specific) calls.

But after an impassioned bridge in which she summons her courage to leave the bastard, the chorus repeats with almost the same lyrics, but this time imagines the wife begging her cheating husband not to leave. This sets up the triumphant repetition of the hook as the former lover suggests: “why don’t you stay.”

Video: Sugarland, "Stay." (YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIyxkZod2cM

The video is superb. Check it out, and if you can, check out Sugarland in Toronto next month!

Dolly Parton, Poetry, and Wacky Wednesday

One of my favourite books when I was a kid was Dr. Suess's classic Wacky Wednesday (1974). In it, a kid wakes up to find everything backwards and out of place. Wednesday is drawing to a close, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about two poems and a great song that use mixed up images as their main conceit.

The first is Nikki Giovanni’s 1983 poem, “I wrote a good omelet.” There are no words for my inexhaustible love of Ms. Giovanni (she has a new collection out this year: buy it!) And this poem is undoubtedly one of her wittiest. The first line gets the premise across easily: “I wrote a good omelet...and ate a hot poem...after loving you.” A Wacky Wednesday-esque list of backwards activities follows—written in Giovanni’s brilliant fleet style. At the last, her day ends as it began:

I rolled my bed...turned down my hair...slightly
confused but...I don't care...
Laid out my teeth...and gargled my gown...then I stood
...and laid me down...
to sleep...
after loving you

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems roll off the tongue with equal ease, but no one would describe her works as witty. I love how so many of her poems end with devastating lines that jolt you hard. In the following poem, “Insomnia,” Bishop imagines the world backwards as seen through her dresser mirror in the middle of the night. Three last words make this slight and somewhat precious poem punch you in the gut:

[...] that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows
are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are
shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Dolly Parton’s 1999 bluegrass album “The Grass is Blue” is brilliant for many reasons (Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent as collaborators!), but foremost is the title track. With the exception of the flora in Kentucky, “blue grass” is a bit of an oxymoron. As is everything in the song, in which Dolly imagines a world backwards in much the same way Bishop did:

There's snow in the tropics
There's ice on the sun
It's hot in the artic
And crying is fun
And I'm happy now and I'm glad we're through
And the sky is green
And the grass is blue

Another genius gem by Dolly. Happy Wednesday!

On Taking the Greyhound

Noreen Malone's recent article in Slate on discount bus lines got me thinking about the innumerable times I've taken the Greyhound. Before I'm about to line up to take the bus from the sooted shed of the Dundas Street terminal, I always get a little feeling of pride at the thought of riding the "proletariat chariot." "The mover of the working people," I think to myself. "Here I'm among kin."

But my Whitmanesque sentiments evaporate very quickly when I peek around at the comrades I'll be spending the next twelve hours with. There's a sadness about everyone one the bus. Allen Ginsberg got it right when he wrote that Greyhound passengers are all:

looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity
where the heart was left and farewell tears
began.

(from, "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," 1956, published posth.)

Josh Wingrove wrote a beautiful article for the Globe & Mail last August after the tragedy that occurred on the TransCanada route (mine). "Terminal Choice" (Aug. 9) details the lives of some passengers aboard that route. Most commute for jobs, some for friends, all because it's the only thing they can afford. Many are like this girl from my hometown:

Angelia Jurich, 17, and her two-year-old toddler, Renee, are heading to Northern Ontario from Fort McMurray, Alta., where they live with her parents. She is riding back to where she would rather be full-time, in their old home of Sault Ste. Marie, where she will see friends and other family and get a new tattoo. It's "the money" that keeps her out west - the cash her parents are earning in the oil boom.

The terminal in the Soo is a thing to behold. It's little more than a door next to the maintenance garage for the local cab company. Malone nails when she writes that greyhound terminals have "an air of poetic despair." Or, as Sandra Hepditch, a traveler on Wingrove’s bus comments, “[t]he stations are like their own weird, bad coffee-table book.” Times have changed since the days they put them on postcards, like the beauty from Dayton, Ohio (above).

If only we had a Whitman alive today to write an encomium to the Greyhound bus. Maybe then I could feel renewed enthusiasm for the experience of being among the multitudes. The best we get is Ginsberg, who ends elegiacally:

“Farewell ye Greyhound, where I suffered so much”

Fun With Intertexts: Inaugural Lulu Edition

Now that Frank Wedekind's scandalous 1906 play Frühlings Erwachen is a crummy piece of Rock theatre schtick Tony award-winning Broadway musical, it's easy to overlook what was once his most popular creation: the sexually voracious bisexual murderess Lulu. He wrote two plays detailing her ascent from poverty and multiple marriages (Erdegeist, 1895) and subsequent descent into prostitution (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1904).

The two plays were reworked into a film in 1929 by the Austrian filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst entitled Pandora's Box. The film starred Louise Brooks (pictured above). It's stunning. Check it out.

A year later, Josef von Sternberg directed Der blaue Engel, starring Marlene Dietrich. While the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, it's hard not to see a bit of Lulu in Lola Lola, Dietrich's sexually alluring cabaret singer (above). And Emmanuel Rath's downfall and eventual death look an awful lot like Schön's in Lulu. The movie is much less a critique of a fossilized educational system (as was Mann's book), so much as it is a showcase for Dietrich's alluring nightclub act.

That brings us to Lili von Shtupp, the saloon singer from Mel Brook's 1974 movie, Blazing Saddles. She's played by the greatest commedienne of the years BC (before Chenoweth), the divine Madeline Kahn (pictured). In it she performs "I'm tired," a parody of Dietrich's number from The Blue Angel, "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss." I love this verse:

I've been with 1000's of men

Again and again

They sing the same tune

They start with Byron and Shelly

And jump on your belly

And bust your ballon

Aye!

But before the German femme fatale became a source of parody, she was the star of an opera by perhaps the greatest composer of the interwar years, Alban Berg. His Lulu, left unfinished at his death in 1935, was a conglomeration of Wedekind's two plays (though more faithful to them than Pabst's film version). The role of Lulu has become a staple of soprano Christine Schäfer's repertory. In the 1995 Glyndebourne production (now available on DVD), the portrait painted by Lulu's second husband is almost identical to a picture of Louise Brooks that the gay pimp gives to the Turkish John that he tries to sell Lulu to.

And there you have it. From German theatrical history to Mel Brooks and back, this has been our inaugural edition of "Fun With Intertexts!"

Feeling Dowdy About Dowd

Two days after Maureen Dowd plagiarized Josh Marshall's blog at Talking Points Memo, she took a (forced?) vacation from her biweekly column. Every Wednesday and Sunday were my Maureen days. She's back this week, but I think I'm going to bid farewell to my Irish vixen. So, if I may (ever-so-slightly) paraphrase John Betjemen's "Irish Unionist's Farewell":

[Iron] haired and [iron] hearted
I would ever have you be,
As you were when last we parted
Smiling slow and sad at me.
Oh! the fighting down of passion!
Oh! the century-seeming pain-
Parting in this off-hand fashion
In Dungarvan in the rain.

Autoerotic Asphyxiation's Musicological Connection

Who would have guessed that David Carradine's sad end would lead me to Stanley Sadie's venerable New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians! Thanks to Christopher Beam's recent article in Slate, I now know that the first person to die from AEA, as those-in-the-know say, was none other than the Czech composer Frantisek Koczwara. Ronald R. Kidd's New Grove entry describes his death thus:

He was reputed to have had unusual vices, and was accidentally hanged while conducting an experiment in a house of ill repute. Susan Hill, his accomplice in the experiment, was tried for murder at the Old Bailey on 16 September 1791 and was acquitted.

That same year, a pamphlet detailing the act was circulated entitled "Modern Propensities; or, an essay on the art of strangling." Dude looks so happy to go that way. While it's always nice to see obscure eighteenth-century composers get mentioned in the popular press, I can't help but wonder if this should give us insight into the artistic temperment, or remind us of humanity's perverse fascination with the sexual habits of others?