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Another cheerful missive from Franz Wright

Posted in Franz Wright, Untitled, tagged , , , , , , on September 20, 2017| 5 Comments »

poem is on lower center of bulletin board

 

Untitled

by Franz Wright

 

If I think I have problems

I look in the mirror;

I go to the window, or

ponder the future reduced

to more or less

three pounds of haunted meat.

And it’s never

like I always said:

if you don’t want something

wish for it . . .

Lost in the beautiful world

I can no longer perceive

but only, now and then,

imagine

or recall–

First the long sinister youth

and then the dying man

who talks to old friends

teachers, doctors

but they don’t understand

the way we feel.

 

 

I left this poem in the entry to a diner in northern Michigan, where a sign on the door asks patrons not to vape while others eat, and where I watched an old man among other old men steal the waitress’s tip to pay his share of a breakfast bill. She shook her head, resigned. She’d seen it before.

 

So when I think I’ve got problems, to steal Franz Wright’s opening lines . . .

 

That’s a hilarious opener, by the way—

If I think I have problems

I look in the mirror

 

The duality in those lines, the person and his image, is echoed in the speaker’s “we” at the end

and then the dying man

who talks to old friends

teachers, doctors

but they don’t understand

the way we feel.

 

As long as I’m pulling quotes, re-read this great description of what it feels like to be depressed.

 

Lost in the beautiful world

I can no longer perceive

but only, now and then,

imagine

or recall–

 

Now, someone please tell me what “three pounds of haunted meat” means.

 

I’ll re-post a biography of Wright from an earlier post:

 

Franz Wright’s face is his biography. This is what a hard life looks like. But it’s a heroic face too, considering the suffering he lived with: beatings by his father, worse beatings by his stepfather, parental abandonment, manic-depression, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Like writer Mary Karr, his onetime colleague and friend, he overcame addiction and converted to Catholicism, finding some measure of stability in the last sixteen years of his life.

 

Franz Wright (1953-2015) was born in Austria where his father, the famous poet James Wright, was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. The older Wright left the family when Franz was eight, and only stayed in sporadic contact with the family. When Franz was fifteen he sent his father a poem, and his father wrote back, “Well I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”

 

The younger Wright graduated from Oberlin College in 1977. In 1984 he was winning awards and teaching at Emerson College when he was fired for “drinking related activities.” He sunk into a years-long depression, wasn’t able to write, and attempted suicide.

 

In 1999 he married a former student, Elizabeth Oehklers. He converted to Catholicism, got sober and was able to write again.

 

He died earlier this year of lung cancer at age 62.

 

 

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A fortunate misfortune

Posted in Lament, Louise Gluck, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 11, 2017| 4 Comments »

 

Lament

by Louise Gluck

 

Suddenly, after you die, those friends

who never agreed about anything

agree about your character.

They’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing

the same score:

you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.

No harmony. No counterpoint. Except

they’re not performers;

real tears are shed.

 

Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise

you’d be overcome with revulsion.

But when that’s passed,

when the guests begin filing out, wiping their eyes

because, after a day like this,

shut in with orthodoxy,

the sun’s amazingly bright,

though it’s late afternoon, September—

when the exodus begins,

that’s when you’d feel

pangs of envy.

 

Your friends the living embrace one another,

gossip a little on the sidewalk

as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze

ruffles the women’s shawls—

this, this, is the meaning of

“a fortunate life”: it means

to exist in the present.

 

Group of graves for a family named “Quaintance.”

 

Ah, the last of the poems in the Cemetery Series, and just in time. What with the hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes, and today the sixteenth anniversary of 9/11, I don’t like piling on the pervasive sense of death and destruction.

Interesting that Louise Gluck’s poem is called “Lament.” Lamentations are usually expressions of grief by those left behind. We read their thoughts (“Lamentations” in the Book of Jeremiah) or look at pictures of them grieving (Giotto’s Lamentation of Christ) or watch them dance it out (Martha Graham’s iconic Lamentations), so that we can enter into the desolation they feel, to understand or just to witness. Forget about the feelings of the dead person. Depending on your belief system, the dead person is either resting in unconscious peace or has found better digs. We save our sympathies for those who have to sort through the clothing, face an empty breakfast table, sell the baby stroller.

 

Not here. In Gluck’s “Lament,” we’re asked to dismiss the grief of those left behind. After all, they enjoy sunshine, affection and diverting conversation. Instead Gluck asks us to imagine the emotional life of the dead person. By using the conditional tense, the poet assures us the dead don’t have emotions even as she brings those emotions to life–

you’d be overcome with revulsion

 

and later, watching the guests file out into the sunlit afternoon–

that’s when you’d feel

pangs of envy.

 

The “fortunate life” mentioned in the eulogy belongs, in the end, to the living–

 “a fortunate life”: it means

to exist in the present.

 

This is no comfort. I find this poem existentially horrifying. The dead seem stuck in perpetual regret and longing.

Louise Gluck was born in 1943 in New York City, the second of three daughters. Her older sister died before she was born. Her father, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, was instrumental (pun intended) in inventing the X-Acto knife.  At sixteen she suffered from anorexia and almost died and entered psychoanalysis for the next seven years. She attended both Sarah Lawrence and Columbia but graduated from neither.

 

Gluck has published fifteen books of poetry and two books of essays, the second one just out this year. She’s taught at University of Iowa and now Yale University. She’s received the Pulitzer and National Book Award for Poetry among many other awards and was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003.

 

A 2012 New Yorker profile names her “among the most moving poets of our era, even while remaining the most disabusing.”

 

Details on her personal life are difficult to find beyond that she’s been married and divorced twice and has a son.

 

R.I.P. to all victims of 9/11, the dead and the living alike.

 

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My phythisian eye opened

Posted in C.D. Wright, only the crossing counts, tagged , , , , , , , on September 4, 2017| 2 Comments »

 

only the crossing counts

by C.D. Wright

 

It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off

the air. You never know do you. You think you’re ready

for anything; then it happens, and you’re not. You’re really

not. The genesis of an ending, nothing

but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting

of furniture with a remnant of the revenant’s shirt.

Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn

away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.

O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer

will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more

shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.

Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left

the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove

the butterflies home. You must know

how it goes, known all along what to expect,

sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.

Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

 

 

Posts in this series (The Cemetery Series, subset of Clear Out the Jam Jars Series) are not supposed to be long, but I really did not understand this poem the first six times I read it, and so I worked my way through it like a detective to find out what the heck it meant, which I ‘m also not supposed to be doing because A poem should not mean/ But be.

 

So sue me, I discovered some things.

 

I started with the words I didn’t know: phthis, lotharian, brumal. Phthsis is an eye no longer working. Lotharian I take to mean belonging to a Lothario, a man with a roving eye. Unfortunately now with a dead-eye.

 

A portrait of the person who died starts to take shape, a ladies man, a person so alive he scattered light, a person who found life had grown dark, the brumal (having to do with winter) wood of men and women banishing the butterflies. A person who wrote poetry, a person who shot pool and skeet, and died suddenly, unexpectedly—by suicide? By gunshot?

 

Ah, got it. The final line (which the first six times sounded like Rhett Butler popped in the poem on his way out of Atlanta)

 

Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

 

now made sense. “only the crossing counts” is about poet Frank Stanford, C.D. Wright’s old lover. That was probably immediately obvious to anyone faintly familiar with C.D. Wright’s life. Just took me longer.

 

Frank Stanford shot himself in a bedroom while Wright was in the front of the house with Stanford’s wife. The death was sudden, it was horrific (and a crazy story, link here for more details). The first line

 

It’s not how we leave one’s life

 

sounds like someone grieving a suicide who’s trying to forget the circumstances of  the suicide. Later she wonders if at some level she always knew it would happen–

 

the dusting

of furniture with a remnant of the revenant’s shirt.

 

That line just blows me away. This poem blows me away. It’s just so thick. Read it again. Read it six times, seven times. You’ll keep finding more.

 

C.D. Wright passed last year. I’ll reprint her bio from an earlier post.

C.D. Wright was born in 1949 in the southern Ozarks of Arkansas. She and her brother were the children of a judge and a court reporter. So it’s no wonder that after studying French at Memphis State University, she considered becoming a lawyer. Fortunately for the world of poetry, she left law school after a brief stint and went on to get her MFA from University of Arkansas.

 

Poet Frank Stanford’s press, Lost Roads, published her first book of poetry. She took over the press after he killed himself. Strange that Frank Stanford, whom she knew well, was supposed to be the next big thing, but it ended up that she, the less flamboyant one, the steadier person, is now heralded as a true American original, in a “a school of exactly one” (from poet Joel Brouwer, as quoted in the New York Times).

 

Of her original sytle, Wright said this in an interview with Jacket Magazine in 2001:

 

As to my own aesthetic associations / affiliations / sympathies: I have never belonged to a notable element of writers who identified with one another partly because I come from Arkansas, specifically that part of Arkansas known for its resistance-to-joining, a non-urban environment where readily identifiable groups and sub-groups are less likely to form. The last known poetry clan in my part of the country was the Agrarians. I was not of that generation, gender or class.

 

She married poet Forest Gander. Together they had a son Brecht and ran Lost Roads. She taught at Brown University and published over a dozen books, one of them a collaboration with a photographer to document the lives of women in prison.

 

She was awarded a MacArthur Fellow and Guggenheim fellowship.

 

She died January 12 at age 67 in her sleep of a blod clot.

 

 

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An unwelcome guest

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 23, 2017| 1 Comment »

Death Barged In

by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

 

In his Russian greatcoat

slamming open the door

with an unpardonable bang,

and he has been here ever since.

 

He changes everything,

rearranges the furniture,

his hand hovers

by the phone;

he will answer now, he says;

he will be the answer.

 

Tonight he sits down to dinner

at the head of the table

as we eat, mute;

later, he climbs into bed

between us.

Even as I sit here,

he stands behind me

clamping two

colossal hands on my shoulders

and bends down

and whispers to my neck,

From now on,

you write about me.

 

 

This poem is as sad as that famous six-word novel (wrongly attributed to Hemingway):  “For sale:  baby shoes, never worn.”

 

So, a good place for “Death Barged In,” a poem that brings grief to life in a way I can never get out of my head when I hear of someone’s loss. Bonanno’s poem feels like a truer depiction of grief than the quiet one Emily Dickinson paints–

 

The Bustle in a House

The Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted opon Earth –

 

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity –

 

This one is Russian and loud, bullying and threatening. (Sound like another Russian you know?)

 

 

As true and chilling as this poem is, it makes me laugh when I read it because it brings to mind its twin, a poem written by a student of mine years ago. Seventh-grader Martin, tasked with writing an imitation of “Death Barged In,” wrote a version that began, “The Fart barged in.”

 

 

(Sidenote: Only a month before this assignment Martin had lost his darling little sister to a congenital heart disorder. He chose this poem himself out of others that had nothing to do with death.)

 

 

Researching the poet, I discovered that Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno died earlier this summer at age 61. She taught writing for years in a Pennsylvania high school and wrote a best-selling (yes, best-selling) book of poetry about the murder of her daughter. Bonanno’s daughter had just graduated from nursing school when her ex-boyfriend strangled her. The tragedy led Bonanno to become active in domestic violence and victims’ rights issues for which she was honored.

 

 

You can listen to a wonderful interview with Terry Gross here, which begins with the poet reading “Death Barged In.”

 

 

Condolences to the Bonanno family. She sounds like a lovely person.

 

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The grass don’t care

Posted in Carl Sandburg, Grass, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2017| 1 Comment »

 

Grass

by Carl Sandburg

 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

I am the grass; I cover all.

 

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

 

I am the grass.

Let me work.

 

 

This is the third post in my Cemetery Series, poems I left at a peaceful cemetery in northern Michigan a few weeks ago. I’m getting around to them one by one even though I placed all of them on graves on the same day.

 

I don’t even know if I like this poem. A battle for a noble cause (Gettysburg) is side-by-side ones that seem pointless now (Ypres, Verdun, et al), and I left it on the grave of a very young man who died for the great cause of the last century, the fight against tyranny and hate.  But I guess that’s the point. The grass don’t care who’s right and who’s wrong.

 

Sandburg was surely thinking of the bodies of men. I read this and I’m thinking of the body of a beautiful young woman, Heather Heyer, who was fighting evil with peaceful protest instead of a sword, a gun, a grenade.

 

The poem sounds like a protest folk song from the sixties. You can just hear Joan Baez or Judy Collins singing

 

What place is this?

Where are we now?

 

In fact poet Carl Sandburg was also a folk musician. He used to accompany his poem readings with a guitar, and he also sang. You can listen here to one here.

 

Sandburg (1878-1967) goes in an out of fashion, but he’s a quintessentially American poet with a quintessentially American life. Born in Illinois, his parents were Swedish immigrants who worked hard to provide for their seven children. His father was a blacksmith’s helper for a railroad, his mother cleaned rooms at a hotel.

 

Sandburg left school after eighth grade and started working at age 13. His resume reads like a Walt Whitman poem:  shoe shiner, dishwasher, hobo, milk truck driver, porter, house painter, soldier, brick layer, farm laborer, hotel servant, coal heaver. He attended college but never graduated. His long public career included work as a journalist, film reviewer, poet, editor, writer of children’s stories, and most famously, biographer of Abraham Lincoln.

 

He was a favorite of Marily Monroe (a fascinating story), spoke before both houses of Congress, and appeared on What’s My Line?  Take a few minutes to watch him on that show—he’s so charming, disguising his deep voice as a child’s to fool the panelists. (Also charming:  how literate and educated the celebrity panelists are, how elegant and respectful. Sigh.) At the end of the clip there’s a touching tribute to Sandburg’s efforts to build a foundation in honor of journalists who died during World War II.

 

 

In light of the new proposed immigration standards, it’s worth quoting Sandburg’s reflections on one of the themes of his life:

“My father couldn’t sign his name,” wrote Sandburg; “[he] made his ‘mark’ on the CB&Q payroll sheet. My mother was able to read the Scriptures in her native language, but she could not write, and I wrote of Abraham Lincoln whose own mother could not read or write! I guess that somewhere along in this you’ll find a story of America.” 

 

 

 

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Another reason to purge your closet

Posted in Disposal, Uncategorized, W.D. Snodgrass, tagged , , , , , , , on August 3, 2017| Leave a Comment »

 

Disposal

by W.d. Snodgrass

 

The unworn long gown, meant for dances

She would have scarcely dared attend,

Is fobbed off on a friend—

Who can’t help wondering if it’s spoiled

But thinks, well, she can take her chances.

 

We roll her spoons up like old plans

Or failed securities, seal their case,

Then lay them back. One lace

Nightthing lies in the chest, unsoiled

By wear, untouched by human hands.

 

We don’t dare burn those cancelled patterns

And markdowns that she actually wore,

Yet who do we know so poor

They’d take them? Spared all need, all passion,

Saved from loss, she lies boxed in satins

 

Like a pair of party shoes

That seemed to never find a taker;

We send back to its maker

A life somehow gone out of fashion

But still too good to use.

 

 

 

Little Pearl D. Deiwiler, on whose grave I left W.D. Snodgrass’ poem, died at age seven, much too young to have acquired the worldly goods listed in the poem—the dance gowns, spoons, dress patterns, lace underwear, clothes bought on sale. My bad, I didn’t do the math.  I was too taken with the name “Pearl,” such an old-fashioned name and a good match for these lines:

a life somehow gone out of fashion

but still too good to wear.

 

Poor little Pearl, so young. Poor Pearl’s parents.  Like the communal speaker in this poem, they were left with only the worldly goods of the deceased and the painful question of how to dispose of those things that hold memories but not purpose. The unsentimental would toss, but me, I still have doilies from my mother’s linen chest that probably came from her mother or mother-in-law, never used by her, maybe never used by them. I will pass them to my daughters who presumably will have just as much trouble getting rid of items that have outlived their usefulness.

 

The poem makes me wonder what story my possessions will tell about me when I’m dead. Hopefully not as sad a story as “Disposal.”

 

William DeWitt Snodgrass (1926-2009) was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. His father was an accountant, his mother a homemaker with a domineering personality who Snodgrass later blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the death of his sister from an asthma attack.

 

He began his studies at Geneva College but left to enlist in the Navy at the end of World War II. When he got out he went to University of Iowa where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and master of fine arts degrees.

 

He earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his first collection of poetry, Heart’s Needle. The collection was about losing contact with his daughter because of his divorce, and includes these lines, moving in their simplicity:

 

Winter again and it is snowing;

Although you are still three,

You are already growing

Strange to me.

 

Snodgrass taught at several universities, including Wayne State, Syracuse and University of Delaware, seemed to struggle to make a living, and saw his reputation as a poet rise and fall. Married four times, he had two children with two different wives. He died of lung cancer when he was 83.

 

For a longer and more insightful biographical sketch, link here for his obituary in the Independent. Brits always write the best obits.

 

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First of the cemetery poems

Posted in Elegy for Jane, Theodore Roethke, tagged , , , , , , on August 1, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I went to my favorite cemetery (doesn’t everyone have one?), a hilly retreat in northern Michigan, and there I  left a handful of death-related poems. I’ll feature them one by one, beginning with Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane.  I leaned the poem against a stone arm, nestled in some stone greenery.

 

Elegy for Jane

(My student, thrown by a horse)

by Theodore Roethke

 

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

 

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw,

Stirring the clearest water.

 

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

 

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

 

 

 

What lush images of this long-ago Jane, Roethke’s maimed darling, his skittery pigeon. In life and in death she is inseparable from the beauty of nature, and the beauty of this poem lies in those associations.

 

Theodore Roethke (1908- 1963) was born in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of German immigrants. His father ran a floral business, and Roethke spent hours and hours in the greenhouses, which he would later call “my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.” When he was fourteen, his father died of cancer and his uncle committed suicide.

 

He went to University of Michigan where, according to the Poetry Foundation’s biography of him, “he adopted a tough, bear-like image (weighing over 225 pounds) and even developed a fascination with gangsters.” This is one of my favorite details of any poet’s life, ever.

 

Roethke earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree at Michigan, and later briefly studied law and did other graduate work at Harvard. During the Depression he was forced to quit and take a job teaching at Lafayette College.

 

He had manic-depression and had to be hospitalized at times to treat it. Despite his mental illness and heavy drinking, he is known as one of the greatest poetry teachers ever (once climbing out on a window ledge to inspire his students) and one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

 

He married a former student, Beatrice O’Connell, who stayed with him despite not knowing of his mental illness when she married him. He taught at Michigan State, Bennington, and most famously at University of Washington for the last fifteen years of his life. He died of a heart attack in a friend’s swimming pool in 1963, and is buried in Saginaw, where his childhood home has been turned into a museum.

 

You probably read Roetke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” back in high school. It’s still a favorite of mine and a good one to memorize.

 

Link here for Roetke reading “Elegy for Jane.” (The way he says the last two words of the poem confuse and fascinate me.)

 

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