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R.I.P.
WALT WHITMAN
May
31, 1819 - 26 March 1892
He
wooed his Muse but couldn’t metre,
And
so he thought he’d try to cheat her
By
stifling her till she was smitten
By the prose of Walter
Whitman.
Published originally in Per
Contra Spring 2009 Light Verse
Supplement at www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm
R.I.P. COUNTEE CULLEN
May 30, 1903 -
January 9, 1946
As soon as he was born
he was bereft
Of folks who took one
look before they left.
When he got famous his
mom shook off her sullen
And got in touch with her
honey Countee Cullen.
Published originally in Per
Contra Spring 2009 Light Verse
Supplement at www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm
R.I.P. MAY SWENSON
May 28, 1919 –
December 4, 1989
May Swenson
Sang the hen song.
R.I.P. RALPH WALDO EMERSON
May 25, 1803 – April
27, 1882
Here lies Waldo Emerson
Who wished to write for
everyone
But not in verse, for
Heaven knows
That one can say so much
in prose.
R.I.P. THEODORE ROETHKE
May 25, 1908 – August
1, 1963
Nurtured in a greenhouse
up in Michigan,
A hothouse flower himself,
he came to wish again
And yet again that he were
a frog or fish again
Whenever he gave himself
to poetry,
So swimming took the
life of Theodore Roethke.
R.I.P. THOMAS HOOD
May 23, 1799 – May 3,
1845
He loved a joke, in
particular the pun,
For he was born in
London’s “Poultry” where,
Perhaps, he first had lots
of childhood fun,
And he was introduced to
poetry there.
R.I.P. ALEXANDER POPE
May 21, 1688 – 30 May 30,
1744
De DUMP de DUMP de DUMP de
DUMP de DUMP,
Ka BUMP ka BUMP ka BUMP ka
BUMP ka BUMP:
One never needs to flail
about or grope
To take the measure of
Alexander Pope.
Published originally in Per
Contra Spring 2009 Light Verse Supplement
at www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm
R.I.P. ROBERT CREELEY
May 21, 1926 – March
30, 2005
He was supposed to be a
fountain
Of tough new stuff out of
Black Mountain,
But what it came down to
was really
A touchy-feely Robert
Creeley.
R.I.P.
ADRIENNE RICH
May
16, 1929 -
When she was young she
caught the itch
To versify and rhyme, the
which
She lost when she began to
switch
To the lesbofeministic
pitch,
And this became her
lifelong niche.
Loren Eiseley, to my mind one of the great essayists and natural philosophers of the twentieth century, told a story in his book, The Firmament of Time (1960):
“In the more obscure scientific circles which I frequent,” he began, “there is a legend circulating about a late distinguished physicist who, in his declining years, persisted in wearing enormous padded boots much too large for him. He had developed, it seems, what to his fellows was a wholly irrational fear of falling through the interstices of that largely empty molecular space which common men in their folly speak of as the world. A stroll across his living-room floor had become, for him, something as dizzily horrendous as the activities of a window washer on the Empire State Building. Indeed, with equal reason he could have passed a ghostly hand through his own ribs.
“The quivering network of his nerves, the awe-inspiring movement of his thought had become a vague cloud of electrons interspersed with the light-year distances that obtain between us and the farther galaxies. This was the natural world which he had helped to create, and in which, at last, he had found himself a lonely and imprisoned occupant. All around him the ignorant rushed on the way over the illusion of substantial floors, leaping, though they did not see it, from particle to particle, over a bottomless abyss. There was even a question as to the reality of the particles which bore them up. It did not, however, keep insubstantial newspapers from being sold, or insubstantial love from being made.”
This is a frightening and forbidding world Mr. Eiseley was telling us about, not at all like the one we are used to of bombs, Fords, lima beans with butter and new clothes for college. Yet it is a world in many ways fitter for contemplation than the one the technician has invented, because at least there is the beginning of perspective again. Mankind is not indispensable, he is only here. There is no guarantee for how long we will survive, nor is our existence very important to the universe, which got along without us for unimaginable periods of “time” (another invention of human beings). The existence of our species is important to nothing but ourselves:
THE UNIVERSAL LEAF
The universe requires that we be born.
As soon as that's been done, it's out to get us.
We become Peter Rabbit in the lettuce
Trying to hide away from Farmer Brown.
Hopelessly we hope we won't be torn
Away, apart. We pray he will forget us,
That he will have some pity once he's met us,
But all such self-delusion is forlorn.
Our hopes and dreams must come at last to grief
If they're not wrecked already, partway through
This span of years. We're well aware that worse
Must come to worst. We cower beneath this leaf
Which we turn over to find what we always knew:
No one cares. Not even the universe.
(Wesli Court in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems;
originally published in the Per Contra Light Verse Supplement 2009.)
Mr. Eiseley continued elsewhere in his prophetic book, “We who are engaged in the life of thought are likely to assume that the key to an understanding of the world is knowledge, both of the past and of the future — that if we had that knowledge we would also have wisdom. It is not my intention to decry learnng. It is only to say that we must come to understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual, and are all the more horrified at those mass movements of terror which have so typified the first half of this [the twentieth] century.”
And what has changed in the twenty-first century?
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem,
"Herb Plays with the Blues"
Wednesday, 12 September 2001
Alas, my buddy Herb has got the blues,
My poor old buddy Herb's deep in the blues.
But it's an exercise, it's not the news
That's got him in the dumps. It's not the dust
That's covered New York City deep in dust
And rubble ¾ no, it's not the boom and bust
Of terror from the skies on a summer day,
A brilliant, clear and sunny summer day
Buried in suffocating clouds of gray
Smoke and soot and scattered body parts
Of once whole people merely body parts
That now must be removed in trucks and carts
From the streets of Old New York. Our world is changed
Forever now by monsters, forever changed,
And we who live in it have been estranged
From what was real. The solid earth we knew,
That solid sod that once we walked and knew
Is now surreal ¾ planes dropping from the blue
Into towers falling onto streets
That are no longer avenues and streets
But silent canyons. Herb, this form repeats,
This form called blues, but so too does despair,
These images of death and of despair
That sunder us beyond hope of repair.
Wesli Court in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems; originally published in The Formalist.
Both poems are included in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, to be published on September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.
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