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…