Poet Jake Adam York died unexpectedly on Sunday. He was 40. He taught at the University of Colorado. He was an undergraduate at Auburn. I was never his teacher at Auburn, at least, not exactly: he was in no class of mine. But we spent a lot of time together and many of his friends were students of mine. And we all talked a lot about poetry and about writing and about living. It is strange to think of him no longer out there (waving westward), writing. –Memory eternal!
Category Archives: poetry
Reading Poetry Out? A Question
I’m scheduled to read some of my poetry–in public–next month. Since I have never done so before, and since I have attended relatively few poetry readings, I’m curious about what would be the best approach. My current plan, the one that feels natural to me right now, anyway, is just to stand up, thank the folks for letting me share some poems, read some poems, and then sit down. I’ve also thought about perhaps reading a poem or two by other writers between some of mine. But I don’t know. I wonder too about how to read the poems out. I don’t want to read like Pound, but I also do not want to be glacial or monotonic. Thoughts?
Christmas in the Wilderness (Poem)
1. It was Christmas in the wilderness
The men between grey sea and grey sky
Sat forward on the ship talking low
A faint tinge of orange warmed the grey
As the sun set
The ship somewhere between
The Admiralty Islands and the Phillipines,
1946
One of the men began to sing–to sing
the songs of men in their position
And it was Christmas in the wilderness
2. Mother, son and daughter gather around the tree
And sing the songs of families in their position
The tree smells of pine, the air of father’s pipe
And the tree lights tinge the grey dawn
Somewhere in Alabama,
1999
It was Christmas in the wilderness
3. Virgin, father and Son bed down in a cave,
And God enters the grey world small
His cries tinge the sounds of the animals
Stirring in the shelter around Him
And no one has ever been in their position,
Kings approach,
It is the year of the Lord.
And it was Christmas in the wilderness
((1) based on a passage from Henry Bugbee’s Inward Morning.)
Out of the Past (Poem)
Out of the Past
1. Jane Greer looks frankly into the camera
Wearing a black negligee, 1946
Laced about with smoke
From her cigarette
Looking from out of the past
And you wonder where you come from
Even though you know
And you wonder where you come from
Everywhere you go
Robert Mitchum in a raincoat
In a darkened city
Enshadowed by longing
And all his regret
Longing from out of the past
And you wonder where you come from
How can the days all be the same?
And you wonder where you come from
And why your name’s your name.
2. Build my gallows high, babe
Dangle me from an ebon tree
I hang from all I’ve done
Or I hang for all I’ve done
No one is righteous, no
Not once have I sat
In a South American cantina
Wrapped in a brown study
Waiting for a woman,
For Jane Greer,
Who would have been worth it all,
Even the bullet in the gut,
Even the car crash at the end
But I want to make a break
To pass on the past
“What has history to do with me?
Mine is the first and only world.”
3. Because the past is not always
A mode of access to what’s real
And the things you felt in childhood
Need not thematize what you feel
Running from, running out of the past
Looking, longing, running
And you wonder where you came from
Footpath and Runway (Poem)
When we walk with the Lord
stumbling
along, words lightening my feet
pondering their path
rainy Chicago
airport tarmac baptized iridescent black
delayed from 1:43 to 2:08pm
stewardess gesticulates
her boredom
oxygen is flowing even if
the plastic bag does not inflate.
Who knew that following footsteps would lead
me here?
other men, smarter and more solidly educated
talk to me but I know my place
even if bootless ambition makes it pinch.
I resolve to turn my back on old goals
even if my hankering after them makes me
crane ’round,
Lot’s wife, to see my past destinations shrink
reversing their direction as I reorient myself.
What a glory He sheds on our way
I have chosen the sheep’s life by choosing
the Shepherd
but I have not chosen unreason
I choose to be a Logical sheep
a sheep of the Logos.
plane stalled on the runway almost to take-off
yellow signs order drivers to yield to aircraft,
wings matter now, having them,
or not.
Reliquaria–T. Crunk (Poem)
1. Found Hand-Painted on a Tin Flue Cover
Ribbon of black crepe
draped on a door knob
like broken strings
hanging from a loom
with the words: Weep not.
What do I need of this world?
2. S. P. Dinsmoor Describes His Tomb
I have made myself a coffin with a glass lid.
By the door of my grave house
I have set a cement angel and a stone jug.
When I see the hose coming down, the lid will fly open
and I will sail out into the air like a locust.
If I am called above, the angel will help me on my way.
If I have to go below, I will grab my jug
and fill it with water somewhere on the road down.
Meantime, every day I pray–O Lord
teach me that I am but earth,
a hollow vessel of clay,
only a wisp of breath against my emptiness.
3.
They have yet to figure out
the name of the church
two men driving in Barkley Lake
around Cain’s Mill a few years ago
found the whole steeple of
cross and all
half-buried in the mud shallows.
Gass on Philosophy as a Vocation
There are a few vocations (like the practice of poetry or the profession of philosophy) that are so uncalled for by the world, so unremunerative by any ordinary standards, so inherently difficult, so undefined, that to choose them suggests that more lies behind the choice than a little encouraging talent and a few romantic ideals. To persevere in such a severe and unrewarding course requires the mobilization of the entire personality–each weakness as well as each strength, each quirk as well as every normality. For any one of the reasons that a philosopher offers to support that principle he has taken in to feed and fatten, there will be in action alongside it, sometime in the shade of the great notion itself, coarse and brutal causes in frequently stunning numbers, causes with a notable lack of altruism and nobility, causes with shameful aims and antecedents. This has to be understood and accepted. Valery’s belief that every philosophy is an important piece of its author’s autobiography need not be rejected as reductive; for whatever the subliminal causes and their kind are like, the principle must stand and defend itself like a tree against the wind; it must make its own way out into who knows what other fields of intelligence, to fall or flourish there. –“At Death’s Door: Wittgenstein”
Ezra Pound–A Virginal (Poem and Reading)
Emerson and Montaigne 2
I find it natural to parcel out my reflections on Emerson by addressing first Emersonian sentences, then paragraphs, then essays. (This is more or less Firkins’ approach.) Emerson uniquely composes each. Although I have had a go once at Emerson’s sentences, I want to try to say something about them again.
I reckon that Firkin’s is right to claim that the obscurity of Emerson’s sentences has more to do with strangeness than dimness. But I judge the strangeness more strangeness of form than of content, although content is strange too. Emerson does something strange with sentences, he puts them together in his own peculiar way. Part of what Emerson is doing is striving for aphoristic integrity, a cut-from-diamond hardness and perfection, for sentences that can withstand judgment simultaneously literary and philosophical, and severe. He plays for high sentential stakes: No sentence may be mere filler, or only a very few, at most. Virtually every sentence has to be such as to retain perfect integrity even if isolated from its particular paragraph and particular essay. Wittgenstein in TLP accounts for sentences so as to render the sense of any one independent of the truth of any other. Emerson tries to write sentences such that the understanding of one is, in some sense, independent of the understanding of any other. Sentential self-sufficiency.
But, even so, Emerson writes these sentences into paragraphs and these paragraphs into essays. How? How can these aphoristic atoms become molecular? How can sentential self-sufficiency be retained in a paragraph in which sentences stand in mutual relation, perhaps even in some sort of mutual dependence?
I will let the questions hang for now. –Back to sentences.
Emerson is also handles his lexicon strangely. He so words sentences that often the words in them mean more, and mean it differently, than the words do in the sentences of others. But assigning that differently meant different meaning cannot be done unless the word is left where it is. It does what it does there, in that sentences, flanked by just those other words. (The phenomenon is most familiar in poetry. Emerson manages it in prose–and not in prose-poetry, in prose.) These words play something analogous to the role that technical terms play in other writers, although they are not technical terms in Emerson. (There are no technical terms in Emerson.) Instead, they are carefully managed flections (inflections or deflections or reflections) of the meaning of the word, fully contextually bound, but carrying forward much of what is most completely his own in Emerson’s writing. (Consider: ‘aversion’.) Sentences featuring his truly characteristic lexicon cannot be paraphrased.
Psalm 36 (Mother Maria, trans.)
An oracle for the impious
Is the sin in the deep of his heart.
He regards himself
With an eye too flattering
To discover his guilt
And hate his transgression.
Perfidy and misdeed
He plots upon his bed,
He sets his steps
Upon an evil course,
Heedless of his sin.
The words of his mouth
Are fraud and deceit,
He can no more act
Wisely or well.
…
There, see how the wicked are fallen,
They can rise no more.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 