whatnotpoetry

from “Joue et Dors . . .” by René Char

            Qu’entreprendre pour fausser compagnie â ces tyrans . . . ?

            How do we keep tyrants out of business?

https://www.wikipoemes.com/poemes/rene-char/joue-et-dors.php

Kendra Hamilton’s “Southern Living” appears in her 2006 collection The Goddess of Gumbo and in Camille T. Dungy’s excellent anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

If the magazine Southern Living comes to mind when we first encounter the title of Kendra Hamilton “Southern Living,” we might expect that the poem focuses on how one lives a well-managed, comfortable Southern life.  And perhaps Hamilton means to play off the gardening advice from such a magazine as she writes a poem about the speaker’s love for her garden.

But of course “Southern living” has other associations—such as those that flavor Hamilton’s collection The Goddess of Gumbo: like  how New Orleans is a place where the “legend” of passion devolves into a “skinny-dip in a hotel pool no bigger than [a] kitchen sink,” like  how Beale Street has become “retro”—“so bright and yet not tawdry”—and how Charleston has been made “strangely void” by “Urban Renewal.”  And Southern living for Hamilton has other undertones.  She has the memory of finding and returning to the graves of slaves and “Never knowing who they were.”   And, for her, Southern living means imagining—with vivid truth—a slave “at her milking, muscles clenching / then rippling as her fingers /stroked the tensile teats / for this hiss, the thin, blue gruel.”

The poem “Southern Living” celebrates a speaker—a Southern black woman—who has found a fulfilling relationship with her garden.  In creating this love, she is a descendent of slaves and other black women who have worked the land.   And the poem modifies the georgic tradition.

With ironic misdirection, the poem opens with words that call to mind an abusive relationship.  The speaker’s lover is “ungentle” and, though without meaning to, leaves the speaker with bruises and cuts and a scar.  The speaker forgets to attend to her looks.  But this lover is the speaker’s garden and not the “devoted” but stony-hearted man with whom she “fought” in a previous relationship.  While living with this man she struggled to cultivate “barren ground” into the “dim-cramped” garden that produced plants with “blighted stem.”  Her new, more productive garden is her “true lover.”  She feels a passion that she has “never felt . . . for any man.”  Loving her garden means she can be “in love with possibility” and that she can be “ravished by order yet ever open to the wild.”  Her poem is a song of praise to a God, Who—a She—has blessed her “with a love like this before I die.”  The speaker has, in a way, created her own Eden, where the serpent is present as—and no more threatening than—“an adder’s tongue dappling / the shade bed.”  In her garden “azaleas and lilacs” resurrect “from the dead.”  And “on [her] knees, / pouring sweat like a baptism,” she’s known “rapture at last.”  This rapture does not insure an afterlife, for, as a true lover, a garden will not survive its maker, “will die with the one who loved it,” leaving only a chance spray of roses to be noted by “an eye that can read the land.”

Men—Stanley Kunitz comes to mind—can be gardeners.   And, as Andrew Marvell suggests, a man can withdraw into happiness in a garden.   So perhaps I am mistaken to think of the gardening poem as a mode of writing predominantly taken up by women.  And perhaps the feminist thrust of “Southern Living” is something we can expect in a gardening poem.  But, if we include gardening poems as a subset of the georgic mode, we might clarify the force of Hamilton’s having written about a woman’s attachment to her garden.

Hamilton’s admirable celebration of her garden can be read as a georgic that highlights how working the earth can be a woman’s activity, even her central activity.  The speaker’s garden is not a space that she shares with a man.  And the poem is a georgic that steps away from being “cramped” by a tradition—as so often seen in georgic poems—that it is men who work the land.  Wendell Berry’s “Horses” might stand as representative of how the masculine voice predominates in the georgic.  “Horses” is poem about a man returning to using horses to plow his land, an activity he learned to practice from men.   The farmer—Berry—laments how to adoption of tractors caused “The songs of world” to die “in our ears as we went within / the uproar of the long syllable of” the internal combustion engine.  These lost songs where part of an “art,” “an essential discipline / A boy learned” by “following the example / of men.”  The boy learned from “the corrective gaze / of men.”  And, when learning the “terms and tones” to use when speaking to horses, he was learning the technique of men. Women are so absent from “Horses” that their exclusion goes unstated.

In contrast, the speaker of “Southern Living” insists that now she lives in “my house and garden.” It is “my own picket fence”; the steps from the house are “my steps.”  She surveys her creation—“what I have done.”  And “each bed” has been “dug / and planted myself.”  It is on “my knees” that she realizes the delight of cultivating her own garden.    She shares with us her own “meditative music.”  To use Berry’s word, she sets the “terms” of her endeavor.  And, with “the corrective gaze” of a woman, she writes her own georgic

—Bill

The speaker of  Eamon Grennan’s “The Cave Painters” imagines how the early—original?— painters and those who assisted them created their images.  He speculates about how they  “left the world of weather and panic / behind them” and, using “rushlight,”  crouched their way into a “rock chamber.”  He considers how their painting was able to capture such “intangible” qualities in the animals they depicted as “speed,” “fear,” and “gentleness.”  He further wonders if they worked in silence—as did the monks at work on illuminated manuscripts—or if they were as noisy—gossipy—as a flock of birds.

As artists the “intent and human” cave painters resembled medieval monks doing their glorifying “lace” work, just as they resembled the speaker using the tools of poetry to “come to terms” with possibly sharing a motive with earlier people.  In part, the speaker makes (or finds) his argument above this motive with intermittently spaced repetitions of the word one: the cave painters push “as one pulse” into the caverns; (in what for me are the lines I have most trouble following because I am not sure what the speaker means by “unbroken line” or what he sees “everything” to include) “they attach / the mineral, vegetable, animal / realms to themselves, inscribing / the one unbroken line / everything depends on.”  Playing out this notion of the line, the speaker continues, “On this one line they leave / a beak-headed human figure of sticks / and one small, chalky, human hand.”  After discussing the silence or noise of the cave painter’s practice, the speaker returns to the one pulse that informed their work—a pulse the poem claims we later humans recognize and share: “one desire / we’d recognize”: to “leave something / upright and bright behind them in the dark.”

The speaker’s argument is underscored by the words the poem.  After describing a group lighting their way into the cave, “The Cave Painters” focuses on the materials and then on the stony cave walls they used as their surfaces:

The pigments mixed in big shells

are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries

and the binding juices oozed

out of chosen barks. The beasts

begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts

(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)

stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours

mould those forms from chance, coaxing

rigid dips and folds and bulges

to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,

a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes

curling to a crazy gallop.

This passage is typical of how lushly sonorous the poem is.  Just as the “dips and folds and bulges” of the cave surface play their parts in shaping what the painters depicted, the sounds of the words—particularly as picked up in assonance and alliteration—help the words swell.  One of the pleasures of the poem is how its meditation is informed by—molded by—the sonority available in the poet’s material.  He produces the aural equivalent of “shapes of radiance.”   (My own favorite glint of radiance is the line that builds on the repetition of short I’s—“labyrinth of lit affinities.”)  The poem seems to have been composed out loud; the repeated sounds within the words seem to help the speaker (and his readers) move ahead; at the same time those sounds unite us—ground us—in a shared, and, because we can savor the echoings, enjoyable creation.  The poem feels molded by the “dips, folds and bulges” of sound.  Like the cave painters working with the materials and surfaces they have available, the speaker uses what the words give him to shape a “bright and upright” poem to leave behind.

–Jack

Bernadette Mayer’s Works and Days is a likable book—if you have the patience (and we would urge you to cultivate such patience) for writing that conveys a suspicion of syntax and a fondness for words that often stop conveying their meanings.  For us, the book reminds us some of the quiet joy we feel while reading Kenneth Koch or James Schuler—the joy experienced when the ramble of words suddenly becomes dead-on in ways that cannot be paraphrased.  Now,  we are happy to follow an “experimental” poet  down “A path where no man thought,” but we wonder ,if sometimes we are left wondering  whether what appears on the page is only inconsequential, as in “Yield to Opposing Traffic”:

Let’s start over begin again now who could

Ever meet me there then?  You think so

I doubt it’s yes it’s your eighth thought out

Of a humanity of utopian giggles humming

In the background of the empire city which is

Nowhere you would ever go without my relatives

And all their belongings on top of a truck

When the mountains turn blue the beer is cold

Yes it’s 8 it must be 8 it is number 8

A path where no man thought

Part of our response to such passages is to turn to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and try to figure out why Stein usually interests us more. Sometimes, as in the above, Mayer seems to “write to kill time.”  “Geology Night Sky” seems merely a jumble, a too-lengthy stretch that demands patience rather than rewarding it.  Sometimes lines have the fun of whimsy, as when poison-is gets called a “ménage-a-trois”; but sometimes they don’t, as with “Grackles are Donald Trump.”

Nonetheless, we were drawn into the fun of what the “Author’s Note” calls interspersed “seemingly random agglomerations of letters of a daily word game.”  These occur in pieces that are dated as diary entries, the first appearing at the end of the April 20 entry:

seora     mpost     preetx     starig     trecp     suymh

hmyus    tidfet     cucusa     slatb     cleri     wrinye

We made out “mushy” and “blast” immediately (supposing that the game entails rearranging scrambled letters into words) and were hooked by trying to puzzle out the other clusters.  Sometimes the agglomerations appear easy to “solve,” as in one of three offered in the May 30 entry:   “walfed      dewfal      flawed”—but the possible solution appearing among the scrambles makes us wonder if we understand the rules (of if the rules change from time to time).  Anyway, we were drawn into the often perplexing game.  We enjoyed, among other moments, being prompted to see the “sin” in “casino.”  IF you like letter/word games, you’ll enjoy much of your time with this book.

Jack remains most drawn to the ekphrastic poem Mayer has written for a show of Futurefamers at the Guggenheim—“Soule Sermon.”   We did not see the show but Jack nonetheless enjoys the questions raised about the differences between going around in bare feet and being shoeless because one has no shoes.  The punning is obvious but we enjoy the provocative playfulness:  “What does it mean for a soul to have no shoes?  / Does it mean my soul lacks support?”

The reason we bought the book is that Bill noticed that Mayer borrows Hesiod’s title—Works and Days—so he wanted to see how the book stood up as an example of the georgic mode.

Mayer’s poems, which offer themselves as reporting the experiences of a sometime gardener who lives in the suburbs, focus little on the work involved in growing food, but there the collection at least has overlap with georgic concerns.  The April 15 to June 21 chronology of the dated entries (which have other pieces interspersed among them) gives the book the feel of an almanac:  In the May 14 entry, Mayer writes, for example, “I’ve been told you can securely plant plants now.”  In the wording of that sentence, in the deft “securely” (with the sense that one wants a sure return), we can sense a georgic concern with how the growing of plants fits into the economic.  Fittingly, then, Mayer’s collection has a version of the georgic fall: “rich people / Duped everyone into thinking everything isn’t free.”   (Halfway into the collection, there is a short straightforward description of life “Prehistorically in Prehistoric times, when “People had memory of all things / Their tribe had ever done.”) The book opens with a list of the commodities offered the Mohicans for the area where the poet resides.  In a prose entry (April 25) she notes that late April is “the season of temptation”  because,  “Before it’s warm enough to grows plants here, the stores tell sell you plants and flowers to inspire you,” and because seed catalogues have gardeners wanting things they cannot yet touch.  An occasional character in the collection is GBF—“guy who bought the field” or, as he is also called, “gubofi,” (to give the abbreviation the vowels we expect in acronyms).  The poet questions GBF’s “right” to the field, worries about how he will develop it, and reports in the May 18 entry that he has “decided to let the lawn go back to field.”   The poem that most directly worries about the lives of farmers is a straightforward account of “The Rent Strike of 1848,” the strike being an attempt of farmers in five New York counties to try “to end the system where the patroons / (The 1%) rented their land to the 99%.”  The concern about the inappropriateness of property as a life-distorting idea:  The collection reiterates that “Property is robbery” and in the June 15 entry the poet returns to the notion that there is “a conspiracy to pay for something!  Or maybe, if you like earth, you can’t like it because capitalism will come and stop you.”

There are moments of closure to the georgic element in the book.  There’s the worry that “When people can’t mow because they mowed yesterday, or cut down trees, they chainsaw.”  There’s the worry that the rich just get richer: an elderly neighbor is “leaving her vast property to the Catholic Church.”  And then there is the slight georgic counter-current that another neighbor is “sharing his garden.”

We put the book down half pleased and half wondering—can someone who prefers the experimental tradition write a compelling book in the georgic tradition?   (There is an accompanying question–Should we assume that in the georgic mode—as opposed to the experimental mode—words will stay related to their usual meanings?)  Given what has happened to rural communities as suburbanization and industrial agriculture have replaced viable family farms, perhaps such questions are pointless.  The last page of Works and Days” is a “whirlwind” of words reminiscent of but different from Lewis Carroll.  But these words are set in a world where maple syrup seems less available than meth.

—Jack and Bill

Henry David Thoreau may be best known as the guy who disliked society so much that he went to live in the woods.  Well, also to squat.  As he writes, he improved the portion of woods by squatting on it, a crude,  ornery joke that has a pungency that Nancy Isenberg’s discussion of squatters in her chapter on class in the Jackson era helps make clear (see White Trash, 102-177).  But, mocking critic of society that he was, Thoreau was not anti-social.  He was a well-read explorer of thinking who went to woods to engage in social enterprises, to write a book—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—and to keep the journal that would become the anything but private Walden.  Walden is a book by a bookish man.  If readers haven’t caught on to that aspect of the writer during the first two chapters, Thoreau tells them in the third chapter—“Reading”—that taking in the kind of book Thoreau writes requires one to be literate—in the sense being both widely read and alert to the possibilities of meanings contained in words, an alertness gathered by being both widely read and concerned about social dealings.

One particularly bookish chapter is Thoreau’s prose version of the georgic, “The Bean-Field,” which, among other works, quotes from Virgil’s Georgics.   The chapter is playful.   It opens with Thoreau’s reporting his weeding of his bean field as if, in doing the chore, he were fighting an epic battle (Virgil anticipates him in describing weeding as battle).  Besides weeds, among his enemies, Thoreau tells us, are the “woodchucks,” which have, he complains, “nibbled . . . a quarter of an acre clean.”  The chapter is full of allusions, the allusions allowing Thoreau to incorporate traditional thinking that helps him question practices based on current dominant thinking.  And in the final paragraph of his georgic he seems to surprise himself with an emergent thought, a thought so seemingly emergent that it has yet—in 2016— to become widely shared.   (I borrow the notions of traditional, dominant, and emergent thought from the Marxist critic Raymond Williams; Williams’ term for what I call traditional thought is residual thinking.)

Thoreau alludes to the georgic tradition when he points out that “husbandry was once a sacred art”; cultivators of the earth once led “pious and useful lives.”  This notion—that farming was sacred—helps him complain about how farming has come to be “pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness.” “By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding soil as property or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature as a robber.”  The emphasis of this passage is that people live their lives in ways that are—in contrast to earlier, tradition-based lives—demeaned.  But what we need to notice here is a strain of thought that is not much present in the rest of Walden.  Thoreau usually focuses on the vitality and resilience of the natural world, but in this passage he implies he is worried about how people, their activities informed by notions such as property, harm the earth they cultivate.   He worries that the meanness of farmers deforms the landscape and turns them into people whose way of making a living is tantamount to theft.

Remarkably, Thoreau doesn’t stop with these suggestions.  Instead, with a shift in perspective, new thoughts dawn on him.  It is as if he asked himself, can I possibly move beyond this contrast between traditional and dominant thinking to pay closer attention, more generous attention to how the world works?   Here is the paragraph in full, a paragraph that leads Lawrence Buell to the notion that a possible environmental stance is one in which a person adopts an “aesthetic of relinquishment”:

We are wont to forget [Thoreau writes] that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly?  . . .  How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

Thoreau is being facetious here—or, as he would say, “extravagant,” out of bounds.  What husbandmen, be they gardeners, farmers, or agricultural corporations, will ever “cease from anxiety”? When, while we still live, will humans relinquish “all claim”?  But he is asking readers to attend to the world as it actually is.  He is prompting us to focus more closely on the actualities of our experience. He echoes and plays against the Romantic notion of the imagination by noting that it is, of course, the sun (rather than the potency of an inspired poet) that makes the earth “glorious.”  Thoreau is having a good time, but he wants us to correct such thinking as that which led earlier Romantic writers like Coleridge to suggest that Nature does not have a life outside human perception.  He imagines the world from the point of view of a trusting, magnanimous sun.  He imagines the world from the point of view of woodchucks, of squirrels.  He asks us to imagine relinquishing all claim, to entertain the needs of weeds and pests.  Thoreau is working his way toward trying to view the world accurately.   He sees clearly that “This broad field  . . .  looks not to me as the principal cultivator.”  He is discovering a new way to think of the human relationship to the world.  Biocentric did not enter the English language until sometime around 1885, (and my Microsoft spell check keeps telling me I am making a spelling mistake whenever I type biocentric), but here in  1854 in Thoreau’s georgic chapter we can see an instance of biocentric thought emerging.

But does this paragraph actually express an emergent thought—or is it a thought that comes out of the tradition of the georgic mode?  One of Thoreau’s hopes in writing Walden is that he will instill the notion that creation is always ongoing—that spring is always coming to change things, that our institutions are plastic and not fixed, that all practices are questionable.  With Virgil’s first georgic in mind, we can see that, in a way, Thoreau’s hoeing puts him in touch not just with the tools—the arrowheads—or earlier cultures—but also takes him back and forward to a time before people recognized the need for agriculture.  Dryden translates Virgil’s description of the time before agriculture with these words:

. . . no peasant vexed the peaceful ground,

Which only turfs and greens for altars, found:

No fences parted fields, nor marks nor bounds

Distinguished acres of litigious grounds;

But all was common, and the fruitful earth

Was free to give her unexacted birth.

And at least for a moment Thoreau seems to call for such an openhanded husbandry. We might take him to be suggesting that the way to be make the georgic mode—and farming— as generous to the world/planet as it needs to be is to imagine oneself in a world where the activities that the georgic focuses on are not (are no longer/have never actually been) necessary.

–Bill

Looking at the right hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Temptation of Saint Anthony, we might ask  ourselves what was it that so filled the painter’s mind with a (we can guess) a delighted but disgusted eagerness  to depict so many manifestations of sin.  Is there something stimulating to the imagination about seeing living beings as repulsive?  Do appetites (necessarily) transform humans into monsters?  Is the world so full of sinning or does the presumably holy book in Anthony’s lap focus his and his painter’s visions on such activities?  Are souls so good that bodies must be depicted as so bad?

Or, as the speaker in Thylias Moss’s “Ode on a Cat-Headed Consort in a Painting by Bosch” suggests, does studying the panel lead one to conclude that it is particularly a man—Anthony—who sees the world as devilish temptation?  To think of the panel with that focus leads the speaker, who is as ready with words as Bosch was with paint, to write a flow (a hymn?) of pointed, joyous, misandrist language—a sustained, aghast giggle.

According to the speaker  of “Ode” men suffer from “the disease for which there is no cure, just mercy.”  And the Anthony in Bosch’s  triptych seems unable to cure his lechery.  On the right hand panel, directly before him (if he could turn his eyes from staring out at us, his—I take it—sinful observers) is “a white whore masturbating in a hollow tree,” the hollow looking like “the labia majora of a giantess.”  In an italicized voice that seems to capture Anthony’s thinking, we confront the sights directly before him:

                                                         The harlot stands in water

too murky to consecrate, the only water in which immersion won’t redeem

for it is too full of desire whose diaphanous crystallizing filaments reach up    

from the pool to her thighs and hindquarters, extending from there to a glutinous devil

whose head rests in a devilish horned flower, whose right hand  holds a bowl

into which flows iniquity from a chalice that does not pour, but seems to bleed

its liquid.  The canopy is red although advent is white, red for those profane nuptials

in which sin couples with everything.  The whore white as perfection’s aspiration

is of swollen belly for her sin incubates, and her cat-headed consort catches for her

a fish ruined for having to depend on water she controls; why semen evacuates its

                gills and

travels the thin tubing of the web, the snare to enter where she  guides it.  Fish

and whore carry a like number of eggs.

 In a world where a whore can be “white as perfection’s aspiration,” a partridge—a bird prone to tiring “frequent intercourse”—might disguise itself as a woodpecker.  Or someone in “gracious turquoise” dispenses “communion to one it intoxicates.”

Confronted with the profligate, perturbing detailing we find in Bosch’s painting, Moss’s speaker writes a poem in which the dominant, framing voice (the one not in italics) expresses sympathy for Anthony’s plight but doubts he—or any other man—can escape sexual appetite.  (The last two weeks of American political discourse perhaps bare this worry out.)  Men are (to point up the fun Moss has with some of the breaks between her verse paragraphs are susceptible to “Pure // physical attraction”: priapic men have a “commitment // to manhood”;  they go around with untamable penises  that are so often  “fully prepared // to mate.”  From Anthony’s point of view this readiness for copulating means men are “not” ready “to meet the Lord.”  For Anthony, as Bosch paints him—holy book in hand, his judgment glaring out at us—it is nearly impossible to be “a good man.”  There is nothing else to do but for Anthony to “beg God to cauterize him with an electrifying heavenly burst / that incinerates all evidence of balls and phallus.”

From the point of view of Moss’s speaker, whom I believe we can take to be a woman (though it is not necessary we do so), Anthony’s vision suggests that “it is best not to be a man at all,” that “men can’t be any better / than they are right now.”  Their “roots” are beastly and men are “no better than “pigs” or “dogs.”  At least, the speaker concludes, given the incorrigible state of men, there is some “chance for humility.”

–Jack

One of the more memorable longish (nine-page) poems of the late twentieth century is Philip Hodgins’s “Second Thoughts on The Georgics”  (Animal Warmth [North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1990]. Aware both in the title and throughout the poem of Virgil,  Hodgins* considers how well the georgic mode reflects the agricultural practices in Australia before the millennium.

Hodgins poem is very much a georgic.  It is full of the “best” recommendations, advice that come out of the sense that “There’s a kind of satisfaction from doing  things   . . . thoroughly.”  There are thoughts on how to grow wheat,  on how to start a vineyard, on how to maintain a herd of cows,  on how to break a horse,  on how to train dogs, and on how to keep pigs healthy.  The didactic voice gives bit of advice after bit of advice:

Use of neighbor’s chisel and plow [to cultivate the ground] —

they’re too expensive to buy you own

. . .

don’t buy pre-grown vines from a nursery—

you can easily pick up the cuttings

when someone else is pruning theirs.

. . . be careful

not to leave loose bailing-twine in the paddock.

Certainly never rake hay on a windy day.

. . . the best thing is to get in early

and spray your pasture with black oil.

Make sure the [pig] pens have a concrete floor

with good gutters and a decent fall

so they can be washed out easily.

Some of this advice stresses what should be done during certain months of the year.  There are the moments of practiced attentiveness we would expect from someone concerned with a livelihood dependent upon the interaction of plants and weather; a jocular instance suggest that a farmer can tell when seasonal change occurs by attending to television advertisements. And there are cautionary tales.  When a wheat farmer brought his kid along when delivering a harvest to a silo, the kid fell into the silo and the wheat “swallowed him like quicksand.” When a pig owner did not attend to the cleanliness of his pigs, the pigs “came down with a dose of leptopsosis.  And the speaker recounts how once got “drenched to the bone with DDT” and “felt sick as a dog later on.”

Mixed with the advice—and to an extent shaping the advice—is complaint.  The poem opens by saying “You’d have to be out of your mind / to want to run a farm these days.”  Satisfying as the work—along with the mastery entailed in developing the sense of “fine-tuning” required—is, “there’s bugger-all money in it.”  There may be “tax write-offs,” but crops do not go for “a fair price.”   Moreover, “There’d hardly be a farmer in Australia / who hasn’t got something wrong with his health.”

With the complaints come the second thoughts about the georgic.  One second thought has to do with whether the georgic is a nostalgic mode.  Farming, the poem contends, is a vocation that, after one has left it to live in “a rented room in a city,” one “might remember” for its good moments and accordingly “feel . . . drawn back there/ to those wet paddocks imbued with light.”  Here the poem acknowledges how, like the pastoral, the georgic can have a nostalgic feel.  But the remembered glow of radiance—along with, perhaps, the reminder “of home”—is not what a farmer focuses on while he works; he focuses on the value of the work, on doing it well.  Another second thought concerns whether the georgic—a mode that gives useful advice—is itself useful.  Is the mode still meaningful?  Hodgins worries that it is not:

They might be useful for writing down

a bit of didactic pastoral stuff

in a language that reminds  you of home

but that’s about where it ends.

If Virgil were here I reckon he’d agree.

The georgic, Hodgins worries, is no more than artful language, no more than an aesthetic form that contains words and advice that—given what has happened to farming as an economic activity—make little sense.

–Bill

*For a biography on Philip Hodgins:  http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/hodgins-philip

The formatting of W. D. Snodgrass’ poem “Manet: ‘The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian’” creates an interplay between two voices.  One  voice speaks In brief, short-lined verse paragraphs that open and close the poem as well as being interspersed between the longer stanzas of the main voice.  This framing voice provides a mix of deadpan reporting and wry speculation about the life, execution, and context of the man who ruled as emperor of Mexico from 1864 1to 1867.  The voice suggests we have an accurate record of the highlights of Maximillian’s life and death.  The other, more predominant voice examines and responds to Edouard Manet’s painting of the execution.   Like the aim of the executioners, Manet’s depiction of the scene seems “not quite right.”  And much of the pleasure of the poem is in the informed uncertainty of the main voice trying to come to terms with a work that depicts the event but leaves a viewer wondering  about Manet’s technique.  This voice gives a thoughtful, well-informed response to a painting that, though compelling, seems unassured.

The main speaker helps the reader see portions of the painting while expressing his doubts about what “we” see.  He expresses himself so conversationally that readers might not at first notice that the opening stanzas (as do most of the ones that follow) is constructed on 4 quatrains of often heavily assonated iambic pentameter.   “Dear good God” are this speaker’s first words, these words of invocation actually words of good-humored confusion.  The speaker suggests that coming upon the painting is like blundering “into some musical / Comedy,” the executioners looking dressed up like a ballet troop.   The speaker gets distracted in speculation about what the role and “purpose” of a seemingly late arrival whose uniform differs slightly from that of the other soldiers.  The skillfully rendered verse gives us a voice that asks “Who knows[?]” and responds “no one knows.”

The speaker turns attention to the people—the “peons”—looking over the wall the men being executed stand against.  Again his focus leads him to uncertainty:  “we can’t say / What they [the peons] are doing here.  This late, who will ever know?”  But puzzled as he is by what he sees, he knows a lot about what he is seeing—or at least he recognizes certain gestures in the painting as having been borrowed from earlier paintings.  The peons “look like angels bored with one more martyrdom.”  One in particular looks like “an old friend from Daumier’s study / of a mob rioting.”  A woman looks like a “high class lady straight out of Goya.”  The speaker will avoid pointing out the obvious—that Manet’s work derives not just from the historical event but from Goya’s Third of May.  But, as the poem goes on, the speaker keeps showing that he has an eye for noting influences, often with a jocular effect.    The  man the speaker takes to be Maximillian  wears a “sombrero” that resembles a “halo.”  To the extent that the painting suggests a crucifixion it is “some child’s two-penny crucifixion.”

The speaker responds to Manet’s technique—the execution of the painting—as if the artists has been so seemingly negligent as to seem careless and impertinent.  The peons heads are “scrumbly, half-formed.”  The expected focus of the painting—the Emperor—is “Stuck in a corner,” there being “no perspective or convention / To lead us in a way that we ought to turn our sight.”   This painting, based on a significant event—the prefiguration of the general downfall of the Hapsburgs—and informed by a knowing reliance on previous masterpieces” seems a “tasteless parody” of the “passion,” a parody that leads to speaker to the flip irreverence that “Even gods must keep their heads and think of fashion.”

In his final stanza, the speaker worries that  “Maximillian might well have yielded up the center” and that Manet might be depicting the deposed emperor as one of the other two victims—the one “back of the others” or “him, / in front, with legs spread, who hand flaps up like a doll.” Attentive to the painting, the speaker leads us, as the poem closes, to wonder about what Manet saw as the aim of his painting.  The speaker’s voice—learned, mystified, a bit mischievous—leads me to wonder if Manet intended that his handling of the execution of Macmillan to suggest something like the savvy, playful tone that surfaces in the speaker’s voice.  Manet certainly brought a master’s sense of his predecessors to the painting.   And he certainly had a command of how to compose a painting, of how to vary brushwork, of how to work with color and drawing.  But in painting The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian Manet perhaps wanted to question whether mastery was applicable to what his painting depicts?  Maximillian’s face—even if is the face of the man between the other two—does not “command / The central spot of its own execution. / Or the surest brush work.”   Our eye, the speaker suggests, wanders from the emperor’s face because we do not find in it “the firm conviction / That we demand.”  The main speaker of Snodgrass’s poem asks us to ponder if Manet was exploring how one paints when part of the impetus behind the painting is one’s own lack of conviction.

–Jack

Early in Gain Laura Bodey goes grocery shopping.  Whether Richard Powers intends the possible allusion or not, Laura’s trip to  “the Bounty Mart” echoes the opening of Hesiod’s Works and Days.  Hesiod’s concern is that his brother has foolishly overinvolved himself in the market:  “A person hasn’t any business / Wasting time at the market unless he’s got a year’s supply / Of food put by . . . ”  (Stanley Lombardo’s translation). A concern about how farming relates to the market has been with georgic poets since they started writing about how to raise crops properly.

While still in the check-out line,  Laura finds herself behind two men  who “must be farmers.”  Her thoughts about the two men show that Laura’s thinking is informed by the georgic mode.  She reads them—in contrast to herself—as noble.  The irony of the brief passage (26-28) is that we overhear the farmers’ conversation, which shows them to be embroiled in the market.

As a gardener, Laura sees herself as a lesser being than the farmers:  “She, an amateur gardener, a dabbler in drippy slipperworts and lilies, a potterer whose useful crop is chives.”  From her point of view—a point of view that the georgic mode tends to share—the farmers are “the only people on earth whose work is indispensable.”

She wonders—brining up a central question of the georgic mode—“How do they live?”  Laura is a real estate agent so her own response to the question is informed by her knowledge of changes in property values.  “Irreplaceable” homesteads have become attractive to the faculty who teach at a local college.  The farmers themselves tend to be “selling out to inevitable Agribiz.”

Feeling she could not talk to these men, Laura focuses on the how the marketing of food products has established a distance between her consumption and the work of the men who are standing so close to her:  “All she can do is take from them.  These boxes of multigrain cereal. The corndog that [her son] Tim eats unheated, right out of the pouch.  [Her daughter] Ellen’s tubes of fat-free whole wheat chips.  The nonstick polyunsaturated  maize oil spray. . . .  The endangered-species animal  crackers.  Everything in her cart, however enhanced and entangled its way here.”

Three central questions of the georgic mode inform Laura’s thinking—that farming is somehow more noble than other activities, that how farmers live is significant to the rest of the culture, and that the famer-consumer relationship is distorted—both “enhanced and entangled”—by the market.

The narrator shifts his focus from Laura’s thinking to relating the conversation between the two farmers—who prove not to be as ideal as Laura imagines them.  Their entanglement in the market is signaled by their wearing caps with corporate names.  Their jocular quips display “The usual, resigned abiding that people who make their own way reserve for the weather, collective idiocy, and other things beyond their control.”  But, if these farmers “make their own way,” they do so with an informed involvement in marketing trends.   One plants grains for “gasohol”; the other shows he’s influenced by “the big gluten push.”  They leave the store, “chatting about futures pricing.”

So we can add another worry that is a focus of the georgic mode—the worry about how much the market influences what farmers produce.  Will they grow food or fuel?  Will they grow the indispensable or the fashionable?

At present, the georgic mode (along with the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, which will need addressing in a future post) may seem to have a questionable relevance to the world we now live in.  In his book on the natural history of New York City, Mannahatta, Eric W. Sanderson imagines that in 2409  the agriculture will have returned to agrarian perfection, the areas around the city  flourishing as “[b]right patchworks of small farms” producing “a diversity of crops year-round” (242).  But historians of agriculture* suggest that, since farming began, the tendency has been for those with wealth to out-produce smaller land holders and to buy up their land.   More food gets produced, but fewer people farm.  In many places pasture and farm land has become the “used-to-be-country” (the phrase is Anne Stevenson’s).  To be successful as a farmer one seems to need to adopt industrial methods, go corporate and make the farm an agribusiness.    As a result, poems (and prose passages) in the georgic mode now often feel as nostalgic as pastoral poems.

Nevertheless, somehow georgic thinking tends to produce, as it does in Laura, a sense of “shame”—a feeling that food production needs to be carried out in a way different from current practices.  And one impetus that prompts these posts on this blog is to explore the contradictory feelings that those who choose to write in the georgic  often seem correct in their criticisms of current agricultural practices but that the often good advice such writers give seems inadequate for solving the identified problems.  The georgic mode establishes standards that clarify how things keep going wrong but “collective idiocy” has left us in a world where georgic standards fare not as helpful as they might be in correcting what has gone wrong.

*  I have read the following histories of agriculture:

Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture (translated by

James H. Membrez, 2006)

Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American

Agriculture since 1929 (2008)

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (2009)

Mark B. Tauger, Agriculture in World Hisotry (2011)

–Bill

Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” is a masterful blend of a number of ekphrastic strategies, although one word toward the end seems a touch off.

One strategy employed is a tellingly selective detailing. This detailing helps “Poem” succeed even if a reader has no familiarity with the image that prompts the poem.  For some time after I first read the poem—back in the 1970s—I took it as brining an imaginary painting into existence.    (Not until a few years ago did I come across a reproduction of the image, George Hutchinson’s Great Village, Nova Scotia, in John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth?–a book of insightful commentaries on environmental poems that I recommended to those interested in ecopoetry).   In the poem’s second verse paragraph, the speaker helps readers visualize what the landscape depicts—gabled brown and white houses, elms, a steeple, cows, geese in “blue water,”  irises, and “blue sky / below steel-gray storm clouds.”  An ekphrastic poem need not detail the look of a well-known masterpiece, but Bishop ‘s “Poem” suggests something of the clarity that can be gained with attention to the particulars in the observed image.  Even if not blended with other strategies, thoughtfully focused detailing can stand alone as a poem .

In “Poem” another strategy overlaps with the detailing—the speaker’s noting and commenting upon the painter’s technique.   The speaker foregrounds the technique of George Hutchinson:   the “sketch” was painted on “Bristol board” “in an hour, ‘in a breath’”; “some tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes each”; the “wild iris” appears “fresh-squiggled from the tube.”  The speaker comments that ”the artist’s specialty” is “clouds and wonders if a “specklike bird” is not actually a “flyspeck.”  As with detailing, this strategy—focusing on technique—might serve as the basis for a poem in itself.

The poem also highlights the painting’s provenance and, along with that discussion, a brief biography of the painter.  In “Poem” these are strategies that help the poem move toward its conclusion about sharing looks, narrating how the painting has come into the speaker’s possession, establishing the speaker’s family relationship with the painter, and clarifying the painter’s familiarity with Nova Scotia. Each strategy can serve more prominently in an ekphrastic  poem than it does in “Poem.”   A still image exists over time, appearing to different people—the artist, the owners, others who look at the image—and a poem might focus on the differing takes of different people. And, of course, a poem might focus on how a painting relates to or derives from the concerns of the painter’s life (a technique employed by Steve Gehrke in Michelangelo’s Seizure, a collection I hope to discuss in later posts).

Though an ekphrastic poem may not need to suggest how the speaker or readers may relate to the image that prompts the poem, in “Poem” the speaker’s relationship to the image and the place depicted help make the poem “touching.”  The controlling strategy employed by the speaker is to record the viewing of the image as an encounter that moves toward recognition and insight.  Why, the speaker seems to ask herself, is the image worth looking at?  Rather than the know-it-all docent W. H. Auden gives us in “Musee des Beux Arts,” Bishops gives her speaker the voice of someone who is unsure of the value of the “family relic” a downsizing aunt has passed along to her.  If she has seen it hanging in her aunt’s home, she seems not to have looked at it closely; the “little painting” is not, after all, a Bruegel, not does it have the mythological or religious weight one finds in the works of the “old masters”; it is only a “sketch.”  Why “bother” to look, the speaker seems to ask herself.   Noting the old-fashioned “dollar” size of the painting, she stresses words that help her think in words that suggest a concern with value—monetary and otherwise.  And what she records is a narrative of recognition—that the place is one she remembers, knew well.  Then she move to insight—that, even though the village continues to change, it is has been and, though the image, can continue to be a place that is “still loved,” a place the speaker finds worthy of a lyric poem.

“Poem” builds past a recognition of how the painter and speaker share coinciding “visions” or, as the speaker suggests as a more apt word, “looks.” In bothering to study the paining, the speaker has found that “life and memory” of a place can get “compressed,” “turned into each other.”  She goes on to conclude:

Life, and the memory of it cramped,

dim, but how live, how touching in detail—

the little that we get for free,

the little of our earthly trust.  Not much.

About the size of our abidance,

along with theirs: the munching cows,

the iris, crisp and shivering, the water

still standing from spring freshets,

the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

Let me add one other remark, one that is as much about me as a reader as it is about Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem.”   In this otherwise flawless work,  the one word I do not fully trust is “abidance.”  Admittedly, with its long i echoing neatly with the i in “size,” “abidance” conveys the meaning needed; the speaker’s thoughts have moved her to make a claim about shared attachments to a place can abide.  And the context—the phrase “About the size” and the list of passing things listed in the final lines— suggests that any abidance is tenuous,  But is the word “abidance” itself apt, the best word for expressing the speaker’s  meaning?  I am not sure, though I fumble for reasons for being troubled.  Do I find the word a bit of pretentious heightening because of the (in my experience) rarity of its use? Would I prefer “abiding,” so that the word seemed less an abstraction?  Do I wish to see the speaker more pointedly hesitate over the word, as she does with “visions” and suggest the more concrete “hold”?   If so, why am I not as distrustful of “trust”—because of its meaning both “faith” and “inheritance” at once?     Am I troubled that “abidance” might be taken as synonymous with “compliance”?  If so, why am I troubled by the suggestion of dutifulness?   Whatever the reason, “abidance” seems not quite right, a touch that distracts me as much as it fits the argument of Bishop’s admirable poem.

—Jack