Poetics and Ruminations

Richard Eberhart, the Grand Old Man

  

         Richard Eberhart was born on April 5, 1904 in Austin, Minnesota, and died in New Hampshire on June 9, 2005 and the great age of 101. He was educated at the University of Minnesota and at Dartmouth, where he took his B.A. in 1926; at St. John's College, Cambridge, England, where he took a second bachelor's degree in 1929; and at Harvard University.  He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a Commander teaching gunnery from 1942-46.  He was a private tutor and a teacher, a businessman, and finally an academic, teaching in a number of institutions including the University of Connecticut, Dartmouth, and the University of Washington.  His first book of poems, A Bravery of Earth, appeared in 1930, and his fourth book, Poems, New and Selected, appeared in 1944, a year before the war ended.

         In 1967, at the height of the anti-academic and anti-formalist reaction that began to transform American literature by the late 1950's, Eberhart chose to publish a book of poems he had written when he was a young man.  His Thirty-one Sonnets, he said in a preface, "were written about thirty-five years ago [that is, about 1932, two years after his first book had appeared].  ...I put them away as being too personal, too youthful, and too imitative...one or two were published in little magazines.  The older I grew the more I recognized the uniqueness of their energy and passionate flow....  I wish to publish the sonnets now...work of an early, formative period, a backward glance for those who might be interested to have them in relation to my later work, or to enjoy them for themselves as early poetic realizations."  In other words, in the middle of the antiformal decade of the 1960s, a poet of the first post-Modernist generation chose to look back at his formalist youth and to revive it by publishing a book he had written then.  In the same year another poet of that generation, John Berryman, did exactly the same thing.

         Both Eberhart's and Berryman's sonnet sequences were examples of another kind of split-mindedness common to many members of the post-Modernist generation — the poems themselves were formalist, but their content was personal, and personal poetry had become popular during the years since the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies and W.D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, both in 1959.  In Eberhart's sonnets, looking back as the poet suggests, the reader can discern, perhaps, the beginnings of that philosophical insight and fresh metaphor that are the hallmark of an important poet.

In many of Eberhart's poems — those written in his middle years particularly — the elements of intellect and rationality tended to govern his work through abstractions that undercut the conflict of the flesh and the spirit, of life and death, which were the central concerns of this poet.  As Ralph J. Mills wrote in his monograph Richard Eberhart (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1966), "Eberhart's poems set themselves in a curiously singular relationship to established canons of modern poetic practice, which they seldom heed.  These poems treat philosophic themes abstractly; their method is frequently deductive rather than inductive...they rely much of the time on inspiration, in the poet's own words, 'burst into life spontaneously,' during a period in which critical opinion emphasizes careful craftsmanship, the poem as a discovered but also a made object; as a final impertinence they are apt to level undisguised moral judgments while still fighting shy of dogma and firmly insisting on the ultimate mysteriousness of existence, the impenetrable heart of reality.”

         One of his most famous pieces, "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," shows clearly this tendency toward over-intellectuality and abstraction, but in this case the poem turns rhetoric into tragedy by means of a simple catalog of names of dead soldiers and concrete detail in the last stanza.  As Bernard F. Engel wrote in his introduction to The Achievement of Richard Eberhart (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1968), "Richard Eberhart is a neo-romantic poet who demonstrates a willingness to assert generalizations and an interest in the exotic, melodic, and vers d'occasion.  But, being a modern poet, Eberhart stresses...belief in the importance of the experiences and objects of life in the phenomenal world and, perhaps consequently, the need for precision in expression.  Although he is confident that moments of illumination can give us knowledge the senses along cannot reveal, he is always equally aware of the realm of the sensory."

         Perhaps not "always," but "The Groundhog" achieves the synthesis of mystery and reality: "In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead."  This is the personal voice, the egopoetic viewpoint that would shortly dominate American poetry.  The poet is shaken, "And mind outshot our naked frailty."  The process of decay begins, and the poet returns in Autumn "to see the sap gone out of the groundhog," but the process has not yet been completed.  Three years later "There is no sign of the groundhog."  The poet is struck at last with the full implications of man's mortality, the fact of eternal mutability, which is the only thing that is unchanging:

 

I stood there in the whirling summer,

My hand capped a withered heart,

And thought of China and of Greece,

Of Alexander in his tent;

Of Montaigne in his tower,

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

 

Eberhart's technique was generally neither traditional nor experimental, but colloquially elegiac.  When he wrote at the peak of his powers his poems confronted powerfully nature and man's dilemma as a conscious creature caught in the toils of mortality, as in "The Cancer Cells,"

 

...a virulent laughing gang.

They looked like art itself, like the artist's mind,

Powerful shaker, and the taker of new forms.

 

         If the tendency to over-philosophize was Eberhart's main problem, minor ones were an overuse of large words and sometimes carelessness to detail.  As an example of the latter, one might point to "Opposition," the first poem in Eberhart's Florida Poems (1981) in which he contrasted Florida with New England (where he lived most of his life).  The first stanza talked about Florida; the second and concluding stanza said of New England that the Puritans "thought life could be better, Prayed to God not to do anything wrong, Held back their passion, aimed to kill, \ Burned as witches free life-loving girls."  But no witches were ever burned in North America, they were hanged; and it was not the girls who were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) in 1692, it was the girls, the famous "witch-bitches of Salem," who were the accusers of the "witches," most of whom were older women.  Anyone who knows these historical facts must realize that the poem self-destructed through erroneous detail.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

R.I.P. KARL SHAPIRO

November 10, 1913 – May 14, 2000

 

He wrote an ode upon “The Fly”

And hoped his opus would not die,

For if it did there would be zero

Posthumous buzz on Karl Shapiro.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Monday, November 9th, 2009

R.I.P. ANNE SEXTON

November 9, 1928-October 4, 1974

 

Diagnosed a Narcissist

By her psychotherapist,

She studied verse on his advice.

He didn’t have to tell her twice —

She had the theme to write her text on:

The mental illness of Anne Sexton.

Radcliffe Squires and the Poetry of Abstraction

         Radcliffe Squires was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1925, and he attended  college,  the University of Utah,  in his home town, taking his B.A. there in 1940.  During the war, from 1941 to 1945,  he served in the U.S. Navy.  Upon his discharge he attended the University of Chicago, where he took his A.M. in 1945, and Harvard University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1952. His academic career began at Dartmouth College where he taught for two years, from 1946-48. In 1952 he went to the University of Michigan where he taught for the rest of  his life and for part of that time edited The Michigan Quarterly Review. Squires self-published Cornar, his first book of poems — juvenilia — in 1940 at the age of fifteen. Where the Compass Spins, which appeared in 1951, was the first book of his mature poems; his second would not appear for another  fourteen  years, however, and those were years of swift change in the world of American poetry.  Squires spent them developing and maturing as a poet.

         The dust jacket of Squires' second collection, Where the Compass Spins, characterized his verse as clear and astringent. Beside Fingers of Hermes (1965), however, the first book seems not so much astringent as forcibly pared down.  It was the work of an essentially romantic poet early in his career attempting to write in a more or less "classical" manner with few frills, few variations in diction or syntax, some annoying mannerisms,  and some general awkwardness and uncertainly, rather like a would-be organist practicing the harpsichord. In Fingers of Hermes all that disappeared. There was a great deepening of talent. It is remarkable how many things had changed in Squires' methods of composition and ways of seeing. The jacket of the book quoted Richard Eberhart to the effect that Squires was "almost Keatsean" and sometimes "reminiscent of Hart Crane," but his work more nearly resembled that of a latter-day Shelley, not Keats, and it was reminiscent of two other American poets — the 19th-century Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Wallace Stevens.

In Tracy Chevalier’s Contemporary Poets, Fifth Edition (St. James Press, 1991). Squires is quoted as saying, "Technically my verse tends to fall into blank verse with occasional or accidental rhyme. I am not a formalist, but I should feel sheepish to turn out a  poem  with  less  metrical  discipline than iambics provide.  Even so, if I should have to choose between meter and metaphor, I should take metaphor, for metaphor seems to me the essence of poetry, the poem within a poem.  Luckily, poetry never insists on  taking one thing or the other.  I believe there are colorings in my verse that come from Thomas Hardy, Robinson Jeffers, T.  S.  Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, and C. P. Cavafy.  At any rate, I have admired these poets very deeply" (950).

         Thus, in his own words, Squires made the connection between Stevens and himself, and in his foreword to Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's The Complete Poems (Oxford, 1965), Yvor Winters made  the  connection between Tuckerman and Stevens (xiv). There is the same sort of relationship between Stevens and Squires who was a late exemplar of a specific abstract tradition in American poetry.  This tradition has several sources, and some of them are the Romantic poetry of Shelley via New England and Tuckerman; through Stevens, who reinforced the latent, rather French, symbolist influence in the genre — "latent, rather French" because, as Winters pointed out, Tuckerman's mystique was of the kind that motivated Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others, though the American poet wrote in isolation from Continental influences. What this means is that Squires in his second book was concerned with abstraction and lush language.  As in Stevens, the reader's interest centers on the language.  As illustration, here are two poems, only one of them by Squires:

 

As one turned around on some high mountain top

Views all things as they are, but out of place,

Reversing recognition, so I trace

Dimly those dreams of youth and love and stop

Blindly; for in such mood landmarks and ways

That we have trodden all our lives and know

We seem not to have known and cannot guess:

Like one who told his footsteps over to me

In the opposite world and where he wandered through

Whilst the hot wind blew from the sultry north —

Forests that give no shade, and bottomless

Sands where the plummet sinks as in the sea,

Saw the sky struck by lightning from the earth,

Rain salt like blood, and flights of fiery snow.

 

And the second:

 

Granite has a face of mere memory, and so insanely pure

Is the memory that at times the world seems to humor it

With long summer rains that swell the meadows to a dour        

Tundra.  Through boreal mists, tufts of coptis float

As a languid announcement that the ice-age is here.

 

These storms repent as slowly as ideas.  Blue starfish may

Appear in clouds, and saffron lines of light

Take soundings, but the rains return, and angrily.

Even when the sky breaks and the ice-age retreats,

Shadows of clouds brush dusk across the nervous day.

 

The cloud shadows!  Birds drowse and fall to wan

Night twitters.   White moths stir  up  from  nowhere  to churn

The dusk.  And you wait until you feel the day come on

Again.  Then as if you were the soldiers in Xenophon,

Who did not gain the sea, you whisper blankly, "The Sun."

 

         It is tempting to ask, who wrote which? — the twentieth-century Squires,  or the nineteenth-century Tuckerman.  Taken out of context this way, the question is unfair, and the intimation might be that Squires, who wrote "Summer Storms," the second poem, is merely imitating Tuckerman, whose "Sonnet VIII  (Third Series)" appears first.  But this is not the case.  It is merely that both men saw and spoke in similar ways.    Squires perhaps knew little or nothing of Tuckerman who has dwelt in historical obscurity for nearly a century. If one were to read all the poetry of the two men one would find differences enough.  What is illustrated here is that Squires is not unique, that his beauties and graces have a tradition and a history in American letters, interesting ones.

         The reader can find things both in these poems and in their tradition to which he or she might object: When and if one manages to get beneath the surface of the language there is vagueness, not merely abstraction; a cloying quality; a lack of range and depth, as in almost all of Stevens, and a humorless sincerity, as in Hart Crane.

         In  his later poems Squires tended to move farther away from traditional forms, even from his bedrock iambics, but he did no differently than many of his contemporaries of the period.  And he tended, also, further toward abstraction, as in "A Letter from Crete to Delphi" which begins, "Three simple schemata  /  Three elegant models / Three configurations. // The carob trees are the form  / of the wind.  Like iron filings / Dusted on paper over a magnet / they translate a daimon."The third strophe of the poem reads,

 

The far hill village is a form.

Like the absurdity of our skeletons,

Its geometry enjoys

Its carelessness.  The whitewashed cubes

Ascend beyond any meridian, bemusing the sun,

Ascend and give themselves what

No geometry can give itself: a name.

 

         In a letter to Lewis Turco dated 8 July 1966 Squires  wrote, "As  to  this abstract business....  I don't pretend to speak for anyone else, particularly Stevens, but in my own case, it begins oddly enough in  the  most  concrete kind of experience.  But because the experience seems alluring and suggestive I keep surrounding it with words in the hopes that something of its intrinsic mystery or difficulty will finally come through.   That I don't consciously begin with abstract notions makes all this at least ironical...."

         A tradition in poetry is not necessarily identical with a school of poetry; however, and in the "Preface" to their An Anthology of New  York Poets (Random House, 1970), the editors Ron Padgett and David Shapiro protested a great deal against the idea that there was an abstractionist "New York School of Poets." In the first paragraph they wrote, "We happen to know almost all the poets in this book (there is one we have still to meet), and most of these poets know each other as well.  Obviously, as editors we're going on the assumption that these acquaintances and friendships, these sharings of tastes and affections, are going to go a long way toward giving this book a sense of solidarity.  It would be facile as well as misleading to see these poets as forming a 'School,' to pass them off as a literary movement" (xxix). A bit later on they said, "Perhaps we do protest too much, but this is to prepare ourselves for the gruesome possibility of the 'New York School of Poets' label, one which has been spewed forth from time to time by some reviewers, critics and writers either sustained by provincial jealousy or the bent to translate everything into a manageable textbookese" (xxx). They pointed out that few of the contributors had been born in New York City, though many lived there and it "remained for all of them a fulcrum they continue to use in order to get as much leverage as possible in literature,..."  The editors continued, "And, although the New York School tag is an alarmingly useless one, it does remind one that many of these poets met in schools, at Harvard, Columbia, N. Y. U. or the New School, sometimes as undergraduates taught by Delmore Schwartz or in poetry workshops taught by Kenneth Koch, Bill Berkson or Frank O'Hara. The crisscrossing   of friendships is surprising and inspiring."

         Rather than heading off critics and scholars at the pass, the editors  of the anthology appeared to be expending words at a great rate to define categorically what a "school  of  poets" in fact is. Padgett and Shapiro did not blink, either, at providing a document, "Personism: A Manifesto," written by one of the pillars of the movement, Frank O'Hara (xxxi-xxxiv).  Among many personal observations and remarks, O'Hara focused on the central idea of the New York School: "Abstraction in poetry...is intriguing," he remarked.  "Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet.  For instance, the decision involved in the choice between 'the nostalgia of the infinite' and 'the nostalgia for the infinite' defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction.  The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).  Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry.  Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poesie pure was to Beranger" (xxxiii).

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Thursday, November 5th, 2009

R.I.P. ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

November 5, 1850 – October 30, 1919

 

Her husband said that when he died

He’d come and visit, but he lied.

Emma in her baffled grief

Felt he’d betrayed their shared belief

And she could never understand

Why he hid his head beneath the sand.

The Brotherhood of Man

When I was in high school in the early 1950s one of my heroes, as unlikely as it may seem, was the early American poet William Cullen Bryant who, at the age of seventeen, had written America’s first truly great poem — and, sadly for Bryant, the greatest poem he himself would ever write —  “Thanatopsis.”

When he was so young Bryant could look at the fields and woods of his native New England and say, after a brave start, that one would have much company in death, for earth is “one mighty sepulcher.”

 

                                             The golden sun,

The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,

Through the still lapse of ages.

 

In no sense are these the immortal heavenly hosts that Christians looked forward to with “a sure and certain hope” (even when I was myself young I thought that this phrase was one of the most ironically ridiculous I had ever heard). No, they are the cold, flaming stars lost in dwindling space.

 

                                    All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes

That slumber in its bosom.

 

Mother Nature seems distinctly unmatronly among such lines as these: “…the dead are there: / And millions in those solitudes, since first / The flight of years began, have laid them down / In their last sleep — the dead reign there alone, / So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw / In silence from the living, and no friend / Take note of thy departure? All that breathe / Will share thy destiny.”

The dead are alone, but not lonely; if there is loneliness in being alive, and in dying alone, take comfort, Bryant says, in the knowledge that everyone is in the same boat. “Plod on, and each one as before will chase / His favorite phantom.” His favorite phantom — we live alone with our illusions, with our romantic solace which, finally, does not cover the bleaching bone.

Though each of us is “a brother to the insensible rock,” Bryant could say in the same poem — say with a straight face and not be thought a fool by his contemporaries — “sustained and soothed / By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, / Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.” An unfaltering trust in what? Bryant doesn’t say, he merely suggests that we be Sybarites of darkness. Walk on your lonely grave by day, and by night pull your Turkish winding sheet about you. Lie down, dust, with your brother stone, beneath the stars like sand in the glass of ages.

Thoroughly un-American, if you think about it. If you don’t, if your conscious mind hears only the uplift while your unconscious mind goes its own irrational way, how thoroughly American. If Bryant had lived in the twentieth century, his name would have been Wallace Stevens.

Well, but still, even if when I was myself seventeen years of age, I could have articulated all these thoughts and been able to say, “How ridiculous!” — I admired Bryant for having seen what I did know even then: that this life is all there is, and I would have liked to be able to say that I, too, had written a great poem even though it was full of anomalies, paradoxes and contradictions and published it before I turned eighteen. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but I did take a good hard look at “Thanatopsis” in a poem of my own:

 

THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

...to be a brother to the insensible rock....

from "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant

 

To be a brother to the insensible rock

Is what we wear for.  Like the hairy man

Knocking flint from canyons, living his span

By granite, never noticing life's wreck,

 

We come at last to bludgeon dust and find

A home of gravel.  Hills beyond this fog

Would indicate the bluff of years.  Agog,

We hear Zephyrus say we're of the mind,

 

Never of clay.  Therefore our dunes sift through

The hourglass, their insidious abrasions

Undermining all our stately mansions,

Till brotherhood is heaped on us anew.

 

"The Brotherhood of Man" was originally published in The University of Kansas City Review, xxv:2, 1958; first collected in First Poems, Francestown: Golden Quill Press, 1960, and re-collected in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, cloth; ISBN 1932842012, paper.

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

R.I.P. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878

 

When he was seventeen he wrote

The greatest of his poems of note.

“Thanatopsis” was a giant,

But not so William Cullen Bryant.

Pumpkinode

For Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nurseries in Kensington, Connecticut, who didn't know what a "stook" was; remembering our young days in his father's fields, and for Frances Sinderwahl, whose e-mail message yesterday made me think of this.

 

         I have always wanted to write

                           a poem about a

                  pumpkin.  It is one of those

         impossible subjects.  You know

the feeling, left over from childhood's

 

         fantasies of what childhood is

                           like.  Come the Indian

                  summer of any year, 'mums

         and trees burning their clean colors

into the air, one thinks of

 

         all seasons, past and future, but

                           particularly of

                  the pumpkin, Ceres' good Jack,

         grinning his candlepower in-

to the scarecrow's menace.  Northern spies

 

         engage in autumnal intrigue;

                           winesaps hit the local

                  cider mills, and there's a witch

         in every stook.

                                        Cozy, but the

real spice lies with that vandal made of

 

         air, the empty ghost our scarecrows

                           cannot frighten.  August:

                  the field is a tangle of

         sunlight wound in vines, covered with

pillows of foliage.  Blossoms flare

 

         briefly, then fall.  Green nodes take their

                           place, begin to swell.  Then,

                  the infant pumpkins seem to

         disappear.  The patch is a great

green whirligig of tendril and vine.

 

         One night, only the moon watching,

                           magic occurs.  The dawn

                  finds the bright globes lying in

         windrows, clinging to tangles of

brown twine.  Next, even the vines crumble

 

         into film.  We take October's

                           flesh and make it grin.  We

                  set it in our window to

         frighten shadows with a hollow shell,

but wind seeps in, and the flame wavers. 

Originally published in The Quest, iiL2, Summer 1967 and collected in Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968, and in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2007, copyright Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Originally published in The Quest, ii:2, Summer 1967

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Saturday, October 31st, 2009

R.I.P. JOHN KEATS

 October 31, 1795-February 23, 1821

 

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water"

Is all he asked to be scribed upon his marker,

Yet his best friends — friends but not aesthetes —

Ascribed his death-wish to critics, not John Keats.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, October 30th, 2009

R.I.P. EZRA POUND

October 30, 1885-November 1, 1972

 

He was a young expatriate,

A poet and ex-patriot

Who, like some old disloyal hound,

Was put in the cage of Ezra Pound.

A Well As Deep As the World

For Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound

 

"It is not now as it was then,"

it is broken and far off,

"but it is like a sea on ebb,"

like the sound of someone being tortured

"and only pools here and there"

at the end of a long corridor

"left among the rocks."

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, 2004; originally published in Innerspring Quarterly, I:2, Fall 1971. 

R. I. P. Morton Marcus

         I heard today from my friend and former student Dennis Morton in Santa Cruz that his fellow townsman, and my former Iowa Workshop classmate, the poet Morton Marcus, died today. Dennis and I had been corresponding over the past few days about Mort, so this was in the air between us.

         We’d last seen each other in April 2006 when Dennis put together a reunion of Mort, Vern Rutsala, and me in Santa Cruz: the three of us older people had not been together since we’d been schoolmates in Iowa City in 1959-60, the best of friends, as we remained ever after, until now. This picture, below, is of Joan Rutsala, Mort Marcus, and the docent of Robinson Jeffers’ home, Tor House, in Monterey, California, during that reunion (click on the picture to see it entire):

R.I.P. MORTON MARCUS

1936 – October 28, 2009

 

Here lies the offbeat Dreamer

Whose beard wound round his nose.

His rage, created by the world,

Was vented on a rose.

 

Our deepest sympathies to Donna, and to Mort himself, goodbye, old friend.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

R.I.P. SYLVIA PLATH

October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

 

Her father died, and then her spouse

Turned out to be an English louse,

She thought, therefore, she’d show her wrath

By turning off the beaten Plath.

R.I.P. DYLAN THOMAS

October 27, 1914-November 9, 1953

 

Some poets don’t know how to live;

Their lives seep out as through a sieve,

Leaving behind mostly promise —

Here lies the Welshman Dylan Thomas.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Sunday, October 25th, 2009

R.I.P. JOHN BERRYMAN

October 25, 1914-January 7, 1972

 

His father was a suicide

When John was twelve; therefore, he died

By jumping off a campus span,

Another fated Berryman.

Attic, Shed, and Barn

          For anyone who cares to take a look at it, my free new downloadable on-line e-chapbook of poems titled Attic, Shed, and Barn is now available at

http://www.ahadadabooks.com/content/view/190/43/

It’s about the farm in Maine where my family has spent our summers, sabbatical leaves, and where my wife Jean and I have been retired since 1996.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, October 23rd, 2009

R.I.P. ROBERT BRIDGES

October 23, 1844 – April 21, 1930

 

He thought that poets ought to reach

For levels of ordinary speech,

Not overflow the averages

That run beneath the span of Bridges.

HEALTH ALERT!

 

 Marcel Proust

Dresden, Maine, October 21, 2009. Exclusive to the Dresden Mills Gazette. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, today released an urgent appeal to the medical community and to the nation at large regarding an impending health emergency.

According to Dr. Horace S. Asce, M. D., seminal assistant director of reproductive assets at the Centers, bird flu has crossed with swine flu to coalesce into a major epidemic threat indigenous to the United States and potentially a danger to everyone world-wide.

“This could cause a pandemic,” said Dr. Asce when asked why he and not someone from the department of infectious diseases was spokesman for the Centers on this issue.

“Because,” Dr. Asce replied, “this disease is spread by unfertilized eggs. Anyone who has eggs for breakfast is in danger of infection.”

“Why breakfast?” he was asked by reporters present, in particular Wesli Court, chief influenza correspondent of the Dresden Mills Gazette.

“Sorry,” the doctor said, “I did not mean to imply one could catch this new strain of flu only at breakfast. One is at risk at any meal where eggs are served, in any form.”

“Is eating eggs the only way somebody can become infected?” Court asked in a follow-up question.

“No,” said the doctor. “One can also catch this disease by reading a particlar novel written by the French author Marcel Proust.”

“What novel is that?” Court asked.

“Swann’s Way,” he was told.

“How so?”

“Because,” Dr. Asce explained, “This cross between swine flu and bird flu is called Swann flue,” said the Doctor.

“You can get sick from a novel?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Asce. “I speak from experience. Many novels have made me sick.”

“Is this novel flu a single strain?” Court rejoined.

“No,” Dr. Asce said. “There are two strains. The more lethal has a capital S and a double n, as in ‘Swann.’ The other strain is simple swan flu, and you can avoid it if you duck or are goosed in time.”

“That would be a good thing,” opined the reporter, which the doctor confirmed. “Not only good, but eggcellent,” he agreed.

“Has anyone died of swan flu?” Court asked.

“Only readers of Proust so far,” was the reply. “The best defense against this deadly disease is to refrain from reading French novels. In fact, to be perfectly certain that one will not be infected at any stage, in my opinion one should reman at a distance from French literature entirely for an extended period,” said Dr. Asce. 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

R.I.P. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

October 21, 1772-July 25, 1834

 

In Nether Stowey Coleridge

An “Ancient Mariner” decreed

Which there was some need to abridge

Before at last he went to seed.

Sestina in Indian Summer

"Everything is good in its season."

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

 

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

  

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages. Originally published in The Southern Review, xxvi:1, January 1990; reprinted in Heartbeat of New England, An Anthology of Contemporary Nature Poetry, edited by James Fowler, Charlestown: Tiger Moon Productions, 2000 and in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2000. 

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Monday, October 19th, 2009

R.I.P. LEIGH HUNT

October 19, 1784 – August 28, 1859

 

His lifelong strife with penury

Lasted half a century

But nothing that he tried could blunt

The scythe of the stalker of Leigh Hunt.