[lit-ideas] Re: another really old poem
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:04:23 EDT
I've wondered myself at what the common thread is that ties together the
poetry that compels me. Usually it's contemporary, but not always. Usually
it's edgy, but not always. What commonality do Sharon Olds, Naomi Shiab Nye
(god, I'd forgotten about her!), James Wright, Paz, Neruda, Cummings, Sexton
(NOT Plath!), Eliot, Rilke, Celan have? Somehow I think all my poets manage
to
communicate the spiritual, sometimes entirely abstractly, and sometimes via
the entirely quotidian and mundane. Btw, would anyone here consider Edmund
Jabes to be a poet? There is certainly poetry in some of his books ....
Levinas? I do know that I have an aversion to the Robert Frostian poets.
They
strike me as saccharine and soft, pablum. Does that make me cynical? Jaded?
Simply ignorant? Probably all three.
Julie Krueger
always trying to quantify & organize and it doesn't work ....there ain't no
unified field theory.
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: another really
old poem Date: 4/11/05 12:50:45 A.M. Central Daylight Time From:
_atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) To:
_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on:
Old poems by a young poet. Poetry as documentary. That's what I'd like to
investigate. Picking up any collected work, I'm always intrigued whether
I'll like the young passionate poet (sometimes the young pretentious poet),
the ironic middleaged one (sometimes the besotted one) or the old, crochety,
dispassionate, wise one (sometimes the passionate one). I wish I had kept
better notes. But in fact, I've kept none at all. I'm guessing that my
preferences probably varied with my own stage of life at the moment. But I
don't know that. I know that much of the very early Merwin I dislike -- I
think he was trying to prove he could write what everyone else was writing
at the time, but then he suddenly went his own way, nevertheless, his way
has continued to change. How he writes now is very different from pieces
like Departure's Girlfriend, which I posted earlier. I love that poem and
chose it because the images are so vivid but the theme and its emotional
content are not so readily analyzable, you're not exactly sure what's going
on. Even the title itself is more complex than I like to get on an average
day. I wish I had the time to sit down and really go through his works and
trace the aesthetic and psychological development in him -- but who would
take care of all these air conditioning problems if I did that? Choices,
choices, choices. Err on the side of comfort, I always say. And no doubt,
some day some dissertation-hungry English major will pick up the collected
works of Eric Yost and do just such a tracing out of his life. And perhaps
in his research he'll uncover this post wherein I confess to much
fellow-feeliing and kinship with these two poems. Remembering how I too
once would release bugs back into the world where they belonged -- which
sure as hell wasn't my world! -- rather than annihilate them. They have as
much right to be here as I do, after all. But now, I'm more like William
Stafford:
Travelling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
the road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason --
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I coud hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
***
And though your soul screams No! in thunder, there you are, always the
prisonier of choices. So Eric like I, like so many lovers of life saved
countless millipedes for the epicurean delight of shrews, frogs, lizards,
bettles and birds. But our hearts were in the right place. I'm sure of
that. Spiders though, I'll kill without thinking.
Twenty years ago I used to love to watch The Young Ones -- a BBC comedy
series if you're not familiar with it. Four college guys living together
(in England). A hippy, a lady's man, an anarchist and a punk rocker. It
was quite absurd and hopelessly silly, but I loved it wildly. Nevermind
that I was 42 years old then and cracking up like a teenager. I should have
been embarrassed. Arrested development and all that. But I wasn't. I
chose to believe that when something comes alive in you, it's its own
justification -- there's no need to explain anything. You just go with it,
goddamnit. That's what poetry can be, I think. You can love a poem that
you know you don't understand, but still feel it speaking to you at some
level, rhythm, euphony, perhaps only in an image that grabs you by the shirt
front and shakes you, something there in the language that shouts Listen up.
The late Victorians thought that poetry would one day replace religion.
What a terrible thing that would be. There's no claim of truth in poetry,
no grounding, no ethical/moral prescriptions, just fascination and wonder
and fun and enormous sorrow.
OK, Sunday's over now. No more sermonizing. Sorry.
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Yost" <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2005 10:31 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] another really old poem
> One Idea
>
> No ideas but in things like ideas;
> no things but in ideas of things.
> The millipede climbing a lemon peel
> on a dusty red carpet is a thing
> without ideas, but an idea
> of a thing gives me the idea
> to crush the thing, outlined,
> as it is, by the soft white pulp
> of the lemon peel, outlined as
> the idea of something out of place,
> its legs flexing, eyelash thin, reckoning
> between yellow rind and white pulp.
> The idea of the millipede touches
> my idea of myself. I grab lemon peel
> and millipede with a paper towel,
> carry it outside into a night of crickets
> and stars. I place them on a flower bed
> and go back inside. My idea was
> to be a person who returned both things
> to their proper place with respect.
> I see the lemon peel next morning.
> I never understand the millipede.
> Has it found a home? Have I?
>
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