Poetry Friday: The Bard and Children

It’s been a quiet month here at FP—I really ought to blog farther with Upton Sinclair, comment on the new Pulitzer winner (yet another book in the way of finishing my quest!), and of course share poetry more regularly.  Among my many excuses (some of them valid) is the fact that we’ve learned we’re expecting a child, and the prospect of parenthood has consumed some time that would otherwise have been devoted to the blog.  Exciting and busy times, as you can imagine!  But it was William Shakespeare’s birthday this last week (we presume) and I can’t let it go by without a poetic nod to the Bard of Stratford—fittingly, of course, I’ll post his 2nd sonnet, with a few comments to follow, given that it follows along the lines of my news.  All my best to everybody out there in the blogosphere: here’s Bill—

“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tottered weed of small worth held.
Then, being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer, ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.”

W. S. has a lot of famous lines, of course, and I couldn’t rank them if I tried, but this makes one of the volumes of his greatest hits, I think—it starts so nicely with a clear image that is both concrete (the weight of those winters, the furrows in the forehead) and yet abstract (winters don’t “besiege” anything, after all, and “beauty’s field” is a lovely turn of phrase but obvious metaphor: this isn’t about a farmer).  Yet Shakespeare’s sonneteering—a word I’ve just invented—is, truth be told, not at the very top of his game in this one.  It’s so straight-forward: unlike many of the best sonnets, #2 doesn’t shock us at the “turn” where the octet gives way to the sestet, nor does it say anything to us we might be shocked by.  “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” is a bold move, a poet who wants to startle us a little and see something new.  This “forty winters” fellow is a bit simpler, a bit less artful.

But that’s also the poem’s strength, I think.  It acknowledges age—not just in the fair youth being addressed, of course, but also implicitly in the speaker, who we can imagine is speaking from experience when he ponders deep-sunken eyes and tottered weeds.  It sets aside self-regard.  It’s one of the purest possible poetic ideas, I think—the reality that nothing physical about us lasts, and that we have therefore to invest ourselves in something else in order to be who we are.  Billy tells us that this, in fact, is how to become young again, not by chasing some phantom of a youth that will not return (ah, Hollywood, how you need this verse), but by passing it on.

There’s a quiet bigotry here, of course, in the poem’s broad generalizations—it suggests pretty strongly that child-bearing and rearing are more or less the only paths to this kind of immortality, and it implies, I think, the idea that someone who chooses not to procreate is someone clinging to their “proud livery”.  I think Will, if we could corner him tonight in some dim corner at the back of a Southwark pub, would acknowledge that there are plenty of other ways to invest in the future and accept our own mortality.  So, while there’s a lovely literal message in this poem for a parent (or prospective parent) to take to heart, I feel like there’s a broader truth here for anyone to ponder.  We need an answer, when time begins to lay us low—what did we make of all our beauty, and where now is the treasure of our salad days?  It cannot be, and must not be, simply ourselves.  To be human is to be more than that.  It gives me something to think about today, in part as I begin to confront the reality of becoming a parent, and in part because I recognize that simply to bring a child into the world is not enough to “sum my count and make my old excuse”.  Whatever I owe that child, and the future, that work is not ending—it is only begun.

Poetry Friday: Good Friday 2013

Apologies to regular visitors to the blog, which has lain fallow much of March.  I find these brief unplanned breaks from blogging are good for me, but I’ve missed sharing reflections and poetry (and hopefully at least a few of you have missed it too).  I return, though, because Good Friday is one of my favorite (and most challenging) annual traditions—tackling an explicitly Christian poem in a way that tries to make it accessible or meaningful on some level to people of all faith traditions and levels of interest in spirituality.  I’ve gone with more modern poets on recent Good Fridays, but this year I feel like reaching back a little to one of my all-time favorite poets, a writer so devout that he nearly gave up his gift for God’s sake and it’s only by happy chance that much of his work survived to be shared and read.  The whole story of Gerard Manley Hopkins is a fascinating one, but one I won’t belabor now.  For this solemn holiday (for me, at least), I just want to settle into the poem right away, and see what thoughts I have that may resonate with any of you.  This is “As kingfishers catch fire”, written in 1882 but not published until 1918, well after Hopkins’ death:

“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.“

Another sonnet, of course, and a carefully crafted one: Hopkins begins with a world on the edge of something inexplicable and almost explosive, with a nimbus of flames wreathed around these tense, alive bodies and even the inanimate stones seeming to jostle actively.  This is the kind of theme he likes—he explores in a couple of his more famous poems, “God’s Grandeur” and “The Windhover“, the idea that just beneath or hidden among the physical world is this bright, fiery reality we can see if we attend to it—and his care with sounds is remarkable.  Hopkins’ best poems are, for me, better aloud than almost anyone else’s (except maybe Dylan Thomas, but this is no accident: the Welsh Whitman was definitely influenced by Hopkins’ style), and here the patterns are incredibly well crafted.  The kingfishers and dragonflies hide inside themselves the bursting “f” sounds that immediately catch “fire” or “flame”, the alliteration acting almost like sparks flying out from the hidden insides of these creatures and kindling Hopkins’ imagination.  The sequence of “r” and “o/ow” sounds in “over rim in roundy wells stones ring” rattling and echoing like real stones clattering down the sides of a deep well.  In the music of these sounds, Hopkins builds a world in the first half/octet of the sonnet, and one that expresses a simple and essentially secular message: the earth, he says, is full of things, all of which are at their best and almost startlingly alive when we let them be themselves.  There isn’t a division here between spirit and body so much as an important fusion, where those deep truths held inside everything, animate and inanimate, are meant to be expressed somehow.  Hopkins isn’t writing us a prescription here, of course, so much of this is shrouded a little by the poetic language—what does it mean that the birds and insects are catching fire in the opening line?  Is the bell singing out its “name” really a “mortal thing”?  He pushes past this, though, to conclude the octet with another characteristic flourish, verbing a noun in an unusual and thought-provoking way: in this case, the word “self” becomes a verb, “to selve”, to speak and spell what and who we are because this is what we were meant to do.  There’s something lovely and old-fashioned in the idea, and if the poem ended there that’s not a bad stretch to have walked: again, I think this isn’t particularly religious of him, and I feel like a lot of folks can identify with something there—the call to discover who we truly are and live that out unashamedly, as secure and confident in being us as a bird or stone or bell is in being and doing what it is.

The Christian turn, then, and the added layer I want to ponder on Good Friday, is the sestet, the final lines that make a sonnet a sonnet by upsetting the coziness of the poem’s opening 8 lines and showing us the man behind the curtain.  In this case, that “man behind the curtain” is almost a literal one: Hopkins is almost artless, plain-spoken, in urging us onward with that child-like statement “I say more”, as though we were about to turn away from him with his thought only half-completed.  It’s not enough to be human and to “selve” out that humanity.  We dig deep and find these extraordinary qualities within us that go beyond mere humanity—the thirst for justice that makes us “verb” it into the world (“the just man justices” — what does it mean to us to justice? What can or should we justice today?), the way that the grace we feel in our life can become a force that sustains all our journeys in the world.  They too go out of us into the wide earth.  And, here the explicit theological idea underpinning all of this, ultimately Hopkins sees us as people who have put on the form of God, who are dwelled in by God, and thus somehow we must break that into the world the way a bell rings out its name.  There’s a danger to this kind of thinking, of course—the man on the street corner who thinks he speaks for God when he lists off the hated, the judged, the ones who will be excluded from glory (in his mind)—and one I don’t want to minimize.  But I’ve also seen the beauty that Hopkins’ way of seeing the world can inspire, the way that people afraid of the earth’s great agonies and sorrows, people certain they are too small to really make a difference, put on that Christ cloak that urges them to be God’s hands in the world to heal, to help, to shield and to save.  Ultimately one of the most powerful messages in Hopkins’ poem is that message that is fully encapsulated by Good Friday: the notion at the core of Christian theology that to be human is to share an identity with the divine power underpinning the universe, and that to live out humanity fully in imitation of the divine example means to risk all for the sake of the world.  To risk pain and death, even, for the sake of love; to reject violence as a means of “solving” a problem even to the point of suffering violence with patient forgiveness in our hearts.  This is the theological core that inspired and steadied the civil rights movement, that helped Gandhi (who famously lacked much sympathy for Christianity, but who said that no one had done more for humanity than Jesus) articulate the ideas of non-violent protest and soul force that continue to change the world.

I recognize that not everyone will respond to this poem as I do, any more than that all of you will feel the same mix of emotions and reflections that I do on Good Friday.  What I hope does resonate, and move you on some level, is the reminder that the kind of self-expression Hopkins explores in the opening half of the sonnet isn’t meant to be self-indulgent or self-absorbed.  He’s opening us up to the beauty of that kind of surrender to live out our true purpose because he wants to then push us to find our truest purposes in service to that ideal of love, of grace for those who need it, of justice for those who have no one else to stand by them.  The selves we are, in Hopkins’ eye, are made for that kind of work.  If these Christian holidays are a part of your life this weekend, I hope they help center you (and me) on that true purpose, and the knowledge that love and hope are not alien to us, not strange clothing that ill fits us, but rather are the deep identity locked inside of us that we have always been meant to open up and bring into the world.  And if the holidays mean little or nothing to you, I hope at least that this season of spring, with the return of warmth and life and growth, of kingfishers and dragonflies soaring over nearby waterways, turns your mind to that kind of “selving” that reaches beyond ourselves and into the lives of those you can meaningfully bring help to.

Poetry Friday: 1943, part 3

In perusing the books of poetry issued in 1943 that grace the shelves of my library—librarianship has its advantages, especially for the literary blogger—I stumbled into an unfamiliar title and poet.  After skimming it, I thought the project interesting enough, and revealing enough about life in that year, to select a poem from the work to share today.  Richard Church was a minor English poet of the mid-20th Century, a man who wrote as a hobby until his late 30s and then dove into journalism, poetry, novel writing, and even a little autobiography to pay the bills from there on out.  In 1943, he brought out a small collection of poetry called Twentieth Century Psalter.  Modeled after the psalters of the Middle Ages, and structured as though these were poems to be used liturgically, like in the daily office at a monastery, the poems speak as bluntly and humanly as the Hebrew poetry preserved in the Tanakh’s book of Psalms.  After a dedicatory preface, acknowledging King David (the traditionally credited author of much of the Psalms) and suggesting that he was a “modern man”, Church simply presents pairs of poems assigned to each day of a thirty-day month—”The First Day: Morning” and “The First Day: Evening”—implicitly offering them as a reading to be added to Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (service maybe still most widely known by their ancient names of Matins and Vespers).  The poems are not particularly sacred, though, or at least they are certainly not mild little pieties, as they turn their attention instead to the grim realities of life in an embattled England, a landscape of bomb craters and evacuated children and a resilient people enduring a modern war.  I thought that it might be best, here on the first day of the month of March, to just take what he’s assigned us this evening.  So, this is a poem by Richard Church, entitled “The First Day: Evening”:

“The instruments of death throughout the world;
They are the child’s desire, the young man’s training.
Women are forging them, by night and day.
Civilization cowers; bombs are raining
Upon the ripening corn; cities are hurled
Into the past, the Babylonian clay.

Some ancient god of wrath might look on this,
And, mumbling in his beard of human folly,
Call down a dozen plagues for punishment.
To-day, only a critical melancholy,
Self-conscious from the very soul’s abyss,
Warns us what follows when our rage is spent.

There have been many gods; there has been one.
All gods, and one, by many a name and token,
Are living still, are gathered in my brain,
A memory of duty, of vows broken,
A quiet conviction of what must be done
To build the broken cities up again.

The city and the cornfield; these are set
At history’s extremes. Between them lies
The story of the gods. Our art and science
No longer feature hell and paradise.
But still the ancient longing and regret
Govern our actions; still the old defiance.

The old defiance! It was this that first
Snatched at the fire and let destruction loose.
Defiance dealt the unpolitical blow,
Blundered in strength, mistook the best for worst,
And shattered adoration with abuse.
Defiance of what? Ah, still we do not know.”

Church—and yes, it occurs to me to that, consciously or unconsciously, his name may play a role in his desire to deal with psalms and liturgy—offers a poem that strikes me as very 1943, and movingly so.  The war is beginning to turn again the Axis powers, but no confidence can really be there yet for a man who’s heard the crump of bombs from an underground shelter, or seen the boys straggle back from Dunkirk.  So he opens the poem with the image of weaponry and how these “instruments of death” are ubiquitous—children imagine them as toys, soldiers train, women toil in factories to build them.  Do you think this is England or Germany he’s thinking of?  Is he envisioning the machine-like society that raises up these lethal tools to threaten his nation, or the machine-like society his nation must become to defend itself?  Both seem plausible readings to me.  There’s something very moving about the end of that stanza—we often use phrases like “bomb them back to the Stone Age”, but I can see it happening in Church’s words.  The debris in some parts of London must have seemed like a Near Eastern tel, the great heaps of pot-sherds on which a new city would rise—but whose city?

There’s something like Thomas Hardy inserted into in the second stanza—a poet wishing he could believe in a vengeful god—although in this case it’s not Hardy’s depression, but Church’s righteous anger and desire for justice and retribution, that fuels the dream.  The stanza, honestly, feels very allusive here, since he’s building in some ways on the work of English poets from a previous generation or two, like Matthew Arnold‘s “Dover Beach” which laments the loss of faith and hope in a world given over to these new scientific ideas.  And something about the final phrase “when our rage is spent” reminds me of John Milton’s famous sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent” that meditates on his blindness and his willingness to serve God.  There are layers here of three centuries of English poets struggling with belief, with the question of whether God is there above the clouds somewhere, and with the question of what we all will do if we have only ourselves and our world for consolation.

That’s what makes the third stanza really interesting to me—the way Church surprises us a few times as he turns it one way and then the other.  He brings up the images of polytheism and monotheism, seemingly acknowledges their validity, and then steps back a little—these gods live, but only in his brain.  And what resides there beside them?  Are these the modern gods—our sense of duty (to ourselves? to each other?), vows we know we have broken and will break?  What is that quiet conviction that Church has, and what does he think must be done to rebuild?  It’s hard for me to see whether that conviction is as ephemeral and imaginary to him as this panoply of gods are, or whether he really believes it….I think he does have that conviction, but hasn’t the poem undermined any reason for him to feel that confidence?  Maybe conviction and duty are all someone can turn to (other than madness) in the face of these broken cities.

And then the camera pans back again and the view sweeps out to all of human civilization—something that, in the 1940s, probably did look very simply like a march from the cornfield to the city, from one end of history to the other.  “Between them lies the story of the gods.”  But it’s our story also.  So Church is telling us something about ourselves—in part it’s really clear to me, because he’s so direct about how the “old defiance” survives even if talk of Heaven and Hell, of reward and judgment, has more or less passed out of “polite society”.  But in part it’s not clear, simply because I don’t think Heaven and Hell have totally walked off the stage (for one thing, how could he know then that in 3 years the world would learn of Auschwitz, of Treblinka, of Chelmno, these scars left in the wake of war, so abhorrent that we would revive an old word, “holocaust”, to capture the magnitude of the evils done).  And I think the stanza anyway is asking us to see more than that: he’s given us a very visual metaphor to work with, the city and the cornfield extended out in front of us, and the space between, and I think we’re meant to look at it and ask ourselves what we see.  What is all this for, and what has it gotten us?  A fair question any day, but maybe especially fair from the perspective of London during the Blitz.

And that ambivalence, that uneasiness, persists in the final stanza—the “old defiance” lingers on here, and now I wonder what it really signifies.  Fire, that critical human invention, here is a result of this defiance, and yet its only purpose seems hostile and violent.  Defiance brings harm where it could have brought health, breaks the old icons without understanding the new world it makes, deals “the unpolitical blow” (a phrase I confess I do not entirely understand in context).  And what, he asks us, are we defying anyway?  We do not know.  But what does he mean by that?  Is it that human defiance is rejecting the old faiths, but that we don’t understand them?  Or simply that, because a lot of people now doubt God’s existence, it’s hard for them to “defy” someone they don’t believe is there?  There’s not much old about that kind of defiance anyway—it’s a modern impulse—so maybe I’m misreading it entirely, and really he’s talking about something else….the “original sin” of ambition or pride, perhaps?  I am unsure.

What I do like about all this is that it does operate just like a psalm ought to—challenging, heartfelt, obscure.  If it was read in a real prayer service, a priest or minister could really chew on it for a while: who are humans, really, and where is God in England in 1943?  What are we doing with our lives and what will it mean?  How can we (Can we?) ever escape these old patterns, the circle of defiance and destruction that more or less characterizes a lot of human endeavor?  I may possibly come back to Church if I’m still reading 1943′s Pulitzer novel at the end of the month: I wonder if this poem is intended to raise questions that he really means to wrestle with himself by the last few days of the month, or if he’s just opening doors he has no intention of closing.  In any case, the anthology is an interesting idea—one another poet could easily steal here in the 21st Century, and maybe someone should—and if it’s in a library near you, I suggest you pick it up and give it a look.

The 85th Academy Awards

Once again, another year has come around and I take a little time here on my otherwise very book-focused blog to talk about another art form I enjoy—the movies.  My wife and I are bringing our “Oscar-obsession season” to a close tonight by catching Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “The Master” at the Music Box, which will project it in the beautiful (and rare) 70mm version that PTA filmed it in.  Looking back over a year where I was particularly successful in getting out to the nominated films—I’ve seen 27 feature-length nominated films this year, as well as all 15 nominated short films, a grand total of 42 movies that includes all 9 Best Picture nominees and a majority of the nominees from every category except Best Foreign Film (only 2 of 5)—I feel as I always do like noting a few titles that may have missed you in their trip through the theaters, and maybe saying a little about what I love about movies in general.

For the second straight year, the best film I’ve seen (and the best Oscar-nominated film I’ve seen) is not from the United States: last year it was the brilliant (and sometimes devastating) “A Separation” from Iran, and this year it is the equally brilliant (and even more devastating) “Amour“, a film shot in French with French actors, but directed by the acclaimed Austrian director Michael Haneke, and therefore Austria’s nominee this year for Best Foreign Film.  “Amour” is one of those films that reminds me why my wife and I bother with our bizarre Academy Award fever: it’s a film that didn’t appeal to me when I read about it (“Really, a long, depressing film about elderly shut-ins? In French? Yeah, that’s how I want to spend my Friday night.”) and which I would never have gone to see if we didn’t need to “check off” the film as a nominee in multiple categories.  What it actually is, is a really moving exploration of love at the end of life, centered around two incredibly brave and powerful performances by two actors who deserve awards for their work—Emmanuelle Riva is absolutely the best of the five Lead Actress nominees (no offense to the other four) and I hope she takes home the prize, and it’s one of the gravest errors in the nominations this year that Jean-Louis Trintignant is not even one of the five Lead Actor nominees.  I’ve seen all five of those performances, and Trintignant would be my choice above all five of them (yes, that’s right, over Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, who was totally wonderful….that’s how incredible this film is).  The film draws you in to their world totally—the cameras never leave the apartment and the hall outside it—and you almost immediately forget that this is fiction.  You’re watching two people who love each other, and the strength it takes for one of them to slowly lose the other.  My wife went back and saw the film a second time, and thought it only grew in power with the repeat viewing.  “Amour” will almost certainly take home an Oscar for Best Foreign Film this year, and maybe a couple more—if it’s hanging around a theater anywhere near you, go see it.

There are a lot of justly praised films this year that I won’t belabor too much—”Lincoln” is a wonderful historical drama, and more three-dimensional than I think a lot of people give it credit for being; “Les Miserables” is not like seeing the stage show, but as its own work on film I found it powerfully successful; “Argo” is a well-constructed thriller by a director (Ben Affleck) who definitely gets better each time out—but there are a few little gems in the corners of the nominations that I’d call your attention to.  “Anna Karenina” was much better than I’d anticipated—a really daring interpretation (via screenwriter Tom Stoppard) of the novel that places much of the action on a physical theatrical stage, and which for that reason invited me (I felt) to think about the larger symbolism the story plays with, the ways in which Moscow and St. Petersburg, for instance, are like stages on which people feel they must play certain roles.  The acting was strong, including really lovely and underappreciated turns by Jude Law and Matthew Macfadyen, as well as a nice supporting performance by Alicia Vikander, who was also a lead in Denmark’s foreign film nominee, “A Royal Affair”, and who is definitely a talent to keep an eye on.  “Moonrise Kingdom” didn’t get its due—Wes Anderson’s most successful film yet for me, and the first time (other than the animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox”, which I really liked) that I felt his artifice had really found the right setting and story to match it.  The fact that it only garnered a single nomination for Best Original Screenplay is really a travesty.  All of the feature documentaries I’ve seen have been worthwhile, though I think of the three I saw (all of them available on Netflix streaming, for you subscribers out there), “The Invisible War” was the best made film—”How to Survive a Plague” and “5 Broken Cameras” were important stories to tell, but I felt like in both cases the filmmakers stumbled a little in constructing the story, perhaps because in each case they had so much fascinating amateur footage to work from that they got a little lost in it.  But it’s probably also worth remarking on the fact that “The Invisible War” isn’t good by accident—one of the co-directors is Kirby Dick, whose skill as a documentary film-maker is really evident in all his stuff.  I should probably just make a note to myself to see any of his documentaries that come out in the future.

And as I do each year, I really want to emphasize the beautiful work done with short films.  These are the categories that nobody at the average Oscar party has seen or knows how to pick, but I really think more folks should take the time to find them.  In our modern age, we don’t even have to wish we lived in one of the cities where they can be seen theatrically (although many of us do, and I’ve been fortunate to live in two of them, Seattle and Chicago)—wherever you are, Shorts International makes it possible to view the short film nominees in any category for a reasonable fee on iTunes, and often cable on demand gives you the option of paying $5 to see it on your TV screen.  You can go to Shorts TV’s website for the Oscar nominees here to find out more.  And why bother doing this?  Here are a few of my favorites from this year’s nominees: from the animated shorts, “Head Over Heels” tells the story of a married couple who share a house but not a law of gravity—up for him is down for her, and vice versa.  How they learn to live with each other in a house that literally has two floors and no ceiling is charming and moving.  All the animated shorts were good this year (and the likely winner, Disney’s “Paperman”, really was wonderful, and reminiscent of the beautiful animation work of the classic Disney era), but that’s the one I’ll remember longest.  From the live-action shorts, I think the one I loved most was a magical realism piece called “Death of a Shadow”—in a vaguely steampunk universe, a soldier who died in World War I gets a second chance at life and love through the mechanism of a truly remarkable camera (and the powers of a strange and unearthly man)—although “Curfew”, a film set in New York City that gives us a man who is called literally in the middle of a suicide attempt to come babysit his precocious and quirky niece while his sister goes through a crisis, was both funny and tragic in a really appealing way.  The best slate of short films this year, though, was definitely the documentaries: a close second for me was “Mondays at Racine”, which tells the stories of women who have two things in common—they are fighting breast cancer, and they come together at the Racine beauty salon where the co-owners offer free service to all cancer patients and cancer survivors on Mondays.  It’s heart-breaking and it fills you with hope and it makes you laugh awkwardly—they found just the right people for the film, and they drew some real honesty out of them.  But even better, I think, was a film called “Inocente”, named for its focal point, a homeless teenager who is both an undocumented immigrant and a talented artist.  The way this short film weaves together her art (and what it means to her) and her family background—an abusive father, a strained relationship with her mother, etc.—was really skillfully done, and the photography is gorgeous.  I really think taking the time to watch any of these films, though, is worth it—even the weakest entries in each category was a film I’d watch again.

Movies are, obviously, a really different experience from a book—intense and constrained by time, they can feel less deep to me than the best novels, but they also have the power to mesmerize me totally.  I’m glad that, once a year for a couple of months, we take the time to really immerse ourselves in films: are they “the best” films of that year?  I can’t know for certain.  I don’t have any higher esteem for the Academy than I do for the Pulitzer Board…well, maybe a little higher esteem, since I have yet to see a Best Picture winner as bad as the worst Pulitzer winners I’ve read.  Still, though, I don’t think that statuette is somehow magical.  I just like being pushed to watch films I wouldn’t otherwise see, and to encounter stories that would otherwise pass me by.  I hope that you got to see some of the films I mentioned, and that sometime soon you’ll take the opportunity to catch a couple more of them—this is a strong year for the Academy Awards, and it’s a good one to sample widely from.

Poetry Friday: 1943, part 2

One of the nice things about inching my forward through 20th Century poetry is that I get to keep revisiting old favorites, poets who gain maturity each time I find them (this aids some, and works against others).  Here in 1943, I get to jump into a slim little volume called New Poems, a brief collection of what Dylan Thomas, the Welsh genius, had been working on in the early 1940s.  This is Dylan’s 4th appearance here on a Poetry Friday, and so it’s time to delve just a little deeper, I think, than the man’s most famous poems.  I’ll admit at the outset that what makes him a genius also makes him sometimes challenging to read, but I’ve selected a poem that I, at least, feel I can wrestle with somewhat successfully, and I hope you find a lot to like about it.  This is a poem entitled “Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged One Hundred”:

“When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire
When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.

Dig no more for the chains of his grey haired heart.
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from that common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.”

Dylan brings the realities of war in a besieged Britain to the surface here, in a poem that’s as bluntly and plainly titled as his perhaps-more-famous “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” which I’ve reflected on before.  Unlike a lot of his work, then, we get to begin with our bearings well in hand—we know the situation, and we have no need to ask who the “he” is who appears almost immediately.  This is where I think Dylan’s power is most effective—when he restrains his wild menagerie of images just enough to turn these lines out that are direct enough to land a blow.  The morning comes to the city, seemingly an indication of hope and survival, and then out of nowhere this aged man “put on his clothes and stepped out and he died”.  And then the rest of the poem is Dylan urging the poem on at the highest speed he can risk, letting the horses run a little wild in places (and unloading phrases that are almost impossible to make rational sense of) and then raining them in enough to keep us aware of the situation and what he means to say.

There are images that almost seem to possess Dylan Thomas at times—they surface again and again in poems written one after the other, as though he cannot quite capture the image in his head, or else the image is taking over his art.  The use of keys and locks is one of those images in New Poems, and so I wonder what the presence of that image means here: I get the impression, in this context, of our defenselessness against this kind of raw violence.  No locked front door could protect him; indeed, the locks themselves, these sturdy metal structures that are symbolic of security, fly apart in the urgent power of the blast.  The image swarms up to and surrounds that sad image of the old man dying “where he loved on the burst pavement stone”, the whole familiar scene of his home and his block turning into an altar, or a tomb.  And there, packed in among these images, is another of Dylan’s favorite images—the association of death and the dead with “grains” (something he does also in the poem about the child killed by fire in London), these seeds that lie in wait for some kind of rebirth.  And then there’s something lovely about the way Dylan weaves these images together in the next few lines, as that familiar old pavement, broken under the blast, becomes personified—we should tell the street, he says, of the old man’s glorious end.  Because it does seem suddenly glorious, as that aging body “stopped a sun”, a power that seems almost divine, and out of that shattered form the shoots of spring, the grains that will grow, come bursting along with that fire that consumes.

And then he executes the turn (yes, once again, we are inside a sonnet with another old master), the shift in tone from the octet that established our scene to the sestet that will change the poem somehow (teach us? surprise us?).  And what are we told?  Do not seek the old man out—let him go, it seems to say, because the moment his blood struck the ground, it called out to Heaven.  There is an assembly gathered now invisible, waiting for the ring of the spade and the fall of earth that will release him from these chains.  And what is “that common cart” we are to protect him from?  I’m not quite sure—there are associations there for me with the carts of the dead from plague-infected villages, or the dismal poverty of medieval serfs or squalid Victorian street merchants.  I can’t quite tell why Dylan wants him protected from whatever this is.  It seems to me though that, on some level, if we can protect the old man here at the last, that will allow this startling beauty to emerge at the end of the poem.  The morning is soaring now on “the wings of his age”—in dying, he has given something back to the world that animates it, surges the dawn’s light onwards.  Who are those hundred storks, then?  Emblematic of the children entering the world to renew it?  Or simply the years of his life, flown now to some more wondrous realm?  Whatever it is, it strikes me as optimistic and confident—a poem about death that is determined to end in hope.

I’ll admit, as much as I find a lot of beauty in the poem, I think it’s ultimately a little ambiguous, or at least I’m not totally sure I know how we’re supposed to take it.  The old man’s rebirth may be a more personal assurance—Dylan Thomas’s obsession with the ideas of resurrection and reincarnation (which reappear in other poems of his) taking this one death and calming us with the certainty that the 100 years of life ended in that bomb’s blast are not all there is for the man (and, by extension, for us).  But I see at least some indications that this may be a larger statement about societal survival, something important to all of Great Britain at the time: the old man passes and the block is destroyed, but the street survives and it is time for us to turn our thoughts to the living and to the future (again, possibly as symbolized by the storks?).  Regardless, it’s a poem that reminds me of Dylan Thomas’s power as a writer, and as I weave these images in with images I see elsewhere in his poetry, I think I get closer to an understanding of what all his art may have been driving at.  I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of him here on the blog.

“Lanny Budd was the only occupant of a small-sized reception-room.”

So begins Dragon’s Teeth by Upton Sinclair, the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1943.  Upton Sinclair, of course, is a famous name—the kind of name that folks who don’t read literature may remember from a high school class, the kind of name that creeps into Trivial Pursuit questions and Jeopardy answers.  But most of us, of course, haven’t read any of his stuff: his magnum opus is 1906′s The Jungle, a look at the Chicago stockyards that’s so famously harrowing that most of us don’t have the stomach for reading it.  I myself have only ever read excerpts, and generally haven’t wanted a hot dog for days afterwards.  Maybe a very select few of us have encountered 1927′s Oil!, although I’ll admit I’ve never even picked it up once, and might never have heard of the novel (or that Sinclair wrote it) had Paul Thomas Anderson not chosen to adapt it (loosely) in an Oscar-nominated film called There Will Be Blood a couple years ago.  Dragon’s Teeth, then, feels to me a little like one of those consolation prizes coming in—the author that the Pulitzers never got the chance to recognize (or felt like recognizing) before, winning a little too late in his career, perhaps?  Certainly another Sinclair (Lewis, that is) got one of those pity prizes for Arrowsmith, anyway.  The novel is the third in an eleven novel series (yes, eleven) that arcs through most of 20th Century American history up to that point, following along with the life and career of a man named Lanny Budd (a reference to Melville’s Billy? I kind of doubt it, but you tell me).

Lanny is the bright, cosmopolitan son of an American arms manufacturer, and as the novel opens, he is waiting for the news that his wife has given birth. The initial story we get is a bit outlandish: we are apparently in Europe (France, I’m pretty sure) and Lanny’s wife is someone who married him at the drop of a hat.  Literally, we are expected to believe that she was a debutante who got into trouble in Italy, asked the advice of an American reporter there whose advice she trusted, and when he told her “ditch the guy you’re with, get on a train, find Lanny Budd and marry him”, she did, despite the fact that she’d never met Lanny before.  They married within 24 hours of her stepping off the train.  So now, here he is, a fish out of water as an American overseas, waiting for some nurse to stick her head into the reception room and let him know he’s a father.  That’s as much as I’ve read so far, and it’s a little too far-fetched for me so far.  Maybe all of this will settle down soon, but for now it’s hard to see how I’ll identify much with these characters, or take an interest in them.  I wonder (as I always do when the Pulitzers award a sequel) whether or not I’m just out of luck picking up characters who were really introduced elsewhere, and who I won’t ever really understand.

Upton Sinclair in 1934—a guy spoiling for a fight in defense of California’s poor. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sinclair, though, is a fascinating guy, and it’s possible that this novel (which seems to be starting out around the late 1920s) will explore some of the political landscape of America in a meaningful way.  Sinclair wasn’t just the muckraker who exposed contaminated food in the stockyards—he remained active in politics throughout the first half of the century, backing socialist candidates, founding ACLU chapters, ultimately running for Governor of California on the EPIC platform (End Poverty in California) unsuccessfully.  He remained a little marginalized by all sides—a man too capitalist for the real radicals but too radical for the mainstream—and for that reason is interesting to me.  I learned a little about the leftist movements on the West Coast in the 1920s and 1930s when I was working on digitizing labor history documents at the University of Washington, reading the letters of folks like Anna Louise Strong and Lincoln Steffens and occasionally encountering mentions of Upton Sinclair and his work, and it makes me curious to see what his fiction is like.  I think right now my expectations of him as a novelist are not very high, but that I’m trying to make myself ready to be satisfied with a work that’s historically and politically interesting even if it’s not very successful as prose.  But I also don’t want to draw too many conclusions just yet: Lanny may yet win me over!  Onward and upward.

Poetry Friday: 1943

As I prepare to embark on a new Pulitzer novel—1943′s Dragon’s Teeth, by Upton Sinclair—it’s time to embark on 1943′s poetry, as well.  We’ll start with a short one this week, and a poem written under unusual circumstances.  Leo Marks was a young British cryptographer working on encryption as a part of the war effort: he missed the cut to get into Britain’s now-famous (then, of course, top secret and unknown) Bletchley Park code team, but found work elsewhere in the military.  Marks was one of the first cryptographers to develop and use the incredibly secure one-time pad cryptographic method: I’ll leave out the details (reading about cryptography is one of my many weird habits), but the long and short of it is that one-time pad cryptography works because the code is created using an encoding document that is unique.  Unique pads, though, are incredibly difficult to generate, so the British were taking a less secure shortcut: they’d have an agent memorize a poem or two, and use the poem as the key to a cipher that would ideally be very difficult to decode.  The Germans, however, learned to crack those simply by looking through poetry anthologies and adopting a “trial-and-error” approach.  So Marks resorted to writing his own poetry for the purpose, sending agents out into occupied Europe with original poetry of his own devising, which would force the Germans to use much slower and more complicated methods of decryption and increase the agent’s chances of operating undetected.

Today’s poem, then, is one Marks wrote for a purpose—a weaponized poem, we might almost call it, and yet it is a strangely personal poem.  Marks could easily have written little ditties about flowers and springtime, since artistic achievement was irrelevant to his purpose, but instead it seems he was willing to be forthcoming about himself…honest in the way that poets are honest.  This is a poem he ended up entrusting to Violette Szabo, a French woman working for the British behind enemy lines who was ultimately captured, tortured, and killed by the Nazis.  He wrote it after the death of his girlfriend, a young woman named Ruth, who had died in a plane crash in Canada, half a world away from Marks.  So here’s a poem that fought the Nazis, a work inspired by a Canadian tragedy, written by a British intelligence officer, and smuggled across the channel into the hands and mind of a French woman who gave her life in defense of her country.  This is “The Life That I Have”:

“The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.”

Marks writes a poem that is not initially all that complicated—simple words, almost the simplest, really.  Not a word of the poem takes up more than one syllable, and there probably isn’t a word here that would be unfamiliar to a first grader.  But the depth of feeling here is real, I think.  At first it seems like a love poem you would write for someone still living: Marks is dedicating his life to her, he is giving himself to her.  It feels like the kind of thing someone might say as a part of their wedding vows, or might whisper on bended knee as a way of preparing to ask for a wedding.  The intimacy is too close, almost, for me—I feel I have opened the door on a moment no one else should witness, I am profaning somehow the sanctity of that pure love by eavesdropping like a village gossip.

The poem opens itself up, I think, as some of the phrases turn out to be more complex than they appear at a distance.  “The life that I have is yours” is easy enough, but what is “the love that I have of the life that I have”?  Is he talking about the love in his life?  The love he feels in his life or the love others feel toward him?  Is it how he loves his life?  And what, in any case, does it mean that this love is “yours and yours and yours”?  There is something so generous about this kind of self-emptying, because it does not feel remotely self-deprecating.  This isn’t the kind of sacrifice someone makes when they feel worthless.  This is the kind of sacrifice we make when we discover something beyond value, something whose worth we could not begin to calculate.

The third stanza is just a little too trite for me—we’ve heard other poets, better craftsmen and craftswomen, tackle the notion that death is only a sleep, that we have the hope of waking in another world, and a better.  But then the fourth stanza breaks over us again with that complexity.  Is “the peace of my years in the long green grass” him talking about his death, his burial in a cemetery?  Or the long life he will have without her, sunny days and picnics in the park, a life lived fully and not cut short like hers was?  And again, in either case, what does it mean for that peace to be “yours and yours and yours”?  I feel I understand him implicitly, and I have absolutely no way of translating it directly.

This is a beautiful little poem, and I don’t want to overanalyze it.  It strikes me not only as a fine start to 1943, but also as a nice poem for Valentine’s Day weekend, if any of us are in the mood for talk of real love in the neighborhood of a holiday that beats us over the head with a prepackaged notion of what it looks like.  Love can come from a pink card, I know—from the dozen roses and the heart-shaped box of chocolates that make their appearance on doorsteps across the nation.  But it also comes from heartbreak and sorrow, from the shaking pen of a 23 year old who has lost a woman he loved and who worries he may yet lose his country, from a poem tucked inside the coat of a woman who will go to her death bravely.  I hope it strikes you as the right poem to ponder this weekend; it’s certainly given me plenty to think about.