Sorry I missed this. But I am happy that last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was busy at the Summer Writers Institute put on by the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.
I just recently re-read Brideshead Revisited for a Well Read Moms book club. I love it every time. Then I read the book by Paula Berg, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which I started because I wanted to know more about Waugh's public school days and stayed interested enough to finish it.
For the SWI workshop, I brought fairly polished drafts of two of my poems: Dante's Daft and Holy Love, and Unsex Me Now. As you may know, James Matthew Wilson teaches that meter is essential for poetry. And I knew that even though those two pieces are acceptable as poetry in the eyes of some who are less strict in their definitions, James would probably not find them so since I have an ongoing battle with meter that I won't go into now.
For background, I am kicking around an idea that will probably be seen as almost heretical among Catholic authors (after Flannery O'Connor) that we shouldn't hide our faith, under a bushel so to speak. Why should we be forced to be subtle? Since those in control of the culture have no hesitation about shouting their belief in what I call the myth of sex without consequences, I wonder why we shouldn't shout what we believe. There is a whole generation that has never heard the truth. I think of writers living under communism who steeled themselves to say the culturally unsayable. When I said that to Bernardo Aparicio, Dappled Things founder, in a private conversation, he disagreed with the theory, indirectly, by responding that my memoir pieces are convincing because no one can argue with what I have experienced. Berni agrees with Dana Gioia who has been encouraging me to keep writing memoir pieces. Dana says, "You've had a hellofa life!"
Anyway, I ended my reading of "Unsex Me Now" with "Hat tip to Lady Macbeth," and then I added that as I read I realized I should give a hat tip to the late Allen Ginsberg— who I got to know in the 1960s—because what I was doing was a kind of a rant. If Ginsberg could rant about the poor drug taking sexually untrammeled creatures who were somehow being driven crazy by straight society ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, running through the angry streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix" etc.) and his words affected society, why can't I rant about the way women are expected to unsex themselves to act like the worst of men, brainwashed to think that they will only be happy if they submit to uncommitted sex, contraception, and abortion, and deny their built-in desires to love, to cherish, to have and to hold? And then I told Prof. Wilson I wanted to know how I could turn "Unsex Me Now" into a poem (by his standards). I can't stop being amused about how the topic must have inspired him, because he proceeded not to make suggestions about how to improve the poem, but he started writing a whole other poem without any of my language using some conceits of his own. . . .. (It was consoling that I got a lot of comments that readers loved the language, since I don't want to write in his words, I want to write in my own.)
So that's what I've been writing, aside from Substack posts about the winners of a Dappled Things "Sacred Art about the Sacred Heart contest," with a lot of investigation into what the Church teaches are appropriate depictions of the infinite Divine and Human Love of Jesus's Sacred Heart. Another piece I haven't published yet is about the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that embarked on the Serra route on Pentecost after a newly composed Mass for Eucharistic Revival with a procession carrying the Eucharist into the streets of San Francisco that continued across the Golden Gate Bridge, and ended with Adoration at the vista point on the Marin County side. That thrills the heart of this former hippy who lived in the gritty city during the late sixties and is inspired by thinking of Jesus being taken through the streets and over the bridge where no procession has witnessed so openly to Him before . Even my former cocaine addict Uber driver was intrigued thinking about Jesus on the bridge where so many protests have been staged.
My reading has been wildly eclectic, as in most summers. Just reread *Misquoting Jesus,* a 2007 book about biblical textual criticism. About to start *Senoir Moments,* a memoir by Willard Spiegelman. Have John Heath-Stubbs's collected out of the library, realizing that I know exactly one poem by him and wondering if there are more I might like. Will any of this dredge up a poem idea?
I loved the BBC miniseries with Alec Guinness. I was transfixed. I wish I could find more such shows. Maybe I should look up the name of the screenwriter and try to find other work he's done? But then, nobody could equal Guinness, I'm afraid.
Of the BBC John Le Carre, my favourite is A Perfect Spy, not with Guinness (though the Guinness ones are great too) but with Peter Egan and Ray McAnally.
I'm finally reading Laurus, which some friends of mine adore and some friends of mine do not. I'm about halfway through and honestly not sure which camp I'm in. (But reading very piecemeal because I've been mostly reading the new Letters of Emily Dickinson and Renee Bergland's Natural Magic, on Dickinson and Charles Darwin, for a review . . .).
Sarah, same in regards to appreciating Vodolazkin. Laurus was so very good. I very much enjoyed Brisbane. Loved The Aviator. But History of the Island was only ok.i appreciated the format of medieval chronicle and the satire often made me chuckle, but it wasn’t a novel I could immerse myself in. Still since my friend just finished it and wanted to chat I was inspired to pick it up again.
I like to read the poem first, then learn about it—before I was scrolling to the bottom and back up!
I’m currently reading Acts by Spencer Reece, Dostoevsky’s Demons, and All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfield (the last for an essay I’m trying to write).
I have come to George Herbert’s personal poetry later in life and I have been glad of it. He wrote all his poems to express the arc of his spiritual life and its journey from early on up to his death. No one read any of them until he died. Every time I read his words I am amazed how he somehow read my soul while reading his. I love each of his poems as a treasure.
I recently finished “Works of Mercy” by one Sally Thomas. Wonderful novel, and I loved the blind kitten. I’m now reading the novel “Hold Fast” by Spencer K.M. Brown, with “The Shield of Achilles” by W.H. Auden, a new edition edited by Alan Jacobs, on tap.
This is interesting. I'm not at all at the point of feeling like my technical abilities have o'erleapt my subject matter, but I do find that I have certain technical "tricks" now that I'm lapsing into. I need to find some new technical challenges to push me out of a voice rut, I think...
To be specifically, I have been working on a contemplative, keen-eyed narrative voice for a few years, and now I find that's all I can do (that or the absurd Rabelais voice from my verse plays, but he's his own problem). Now I want to write things that need a sharper edge, and I don't know how. I'm experimenting with syllabic verse, which is a major disruption for me, and I'm moving away from pentameter to tetrameter and even trimeter, just to try to get different notes into my work (anger, malice, resentment, jealousy, not things I've been able to render believably). The current verse drama project is helping because it has a lot of bitter people in it!
I think that's a really good point, about observing your own tics, technical or otherwise. I find that I can lapse into sonnets, for example, and then have to try hard to write anything that isn't a sonnet. Or yes, force myself into some meter out of my comfort zone. Those things tend to be, for me, what crack open new things to say. Playing with Welsh syllabic forms a year or so ago pushed me in a lot of interesting ways. I don't know that my core concerns really changed, but I did find myself saying things in ways that I wouldn't have said them if I'd been writing standard pentameter.
I also don't remotely feel that I have mastered all the technique. I can't actually imagine feeling that way, ever --- and I'm not young! I can't imagine ever arriving at a point where any of it is easy, and I'm not sure I'd want to feel that I had arrived at that point.
I don't think it's a matter of feeling mastery, Sally. The best stylists have a humility about style that comes from knowing it so well. It does, however, have to do with having an instrument and wondering what to do with it.
I’m currently reading through Tennyson’s IN MEMORIAM. I’ve read many of the cantos in other contexts, but the reading them in sequence is far more satisfying - I’m impressed by how insightfully Tennyson maps out the progression of grief over several years.
As for writing, I’ve been working with my Assyriologist sister on a rhyming, metrical translation of a Sumerian poem. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but it’s been a very fun collaboration so far, and I already know far more about Sumerian poetry than I did when we started (not surprising, since I knew absolutely nothing before).
It is! Scholars haven’t identified regular meters in Sumerian poetry, but it does use other poetic techniques like repetition, alliteration, and parallel syntax to create music - similar to the Hebrew psalms. This particular poem is a lullaby, so we want to put it into a form that will feel like a lullaby to English readers, which means regular meter and rhymes. Challenging, but fun!
Yep! My sister is brilliant, although she’d deny it, and she’s already discovering previously unremarked-upon things in the poem, even though this is a side project she’s doing just for fun because I asked her to.
For the daily posts, I think I prefer the poem first in most cases - it allows me to engage with the poem first on my own terms, then read the accompanying commentary.
As a general comment, I just finished listening to a really interesting interview of Shane McCrae on Matthew Buckley Smith's podcast. It was recorded last year, but the full (~3 hr!) interview had been only available to paid subscribers until this week: https://www.matthewbuckleysmith.com/sleerickets
I like many of Anthony Hecht's early and mid poems, but my favorite collection of his is The Darkness and the Light, published at age 78 if I remember correctly. He's another poet with a strong late phase.
This prompted me to buy Anne Stevenson's Completing the Circle, published just months before she died in 2020, at age 87. I'd been meaning to get it, then forgot about it . . . something about "strong late phase" made me think of her, as a poet I've always liked who was writing absolutely to the end.
A lot of the poems in this last book, unsurprisingly, seem to be about death, but then I don't recall that that many of her earlier poems weren't about death. I'll be interested to see what these very late poems are like --- the latest book of hers, I think, that I currently own is Granny Scarecrow, published 20 years earlier, when she was 67, which suddenly does not seem old at all. But she published, I think, five new collections (not counting a couple of "Selecteds") in the last 20 years of her life, which does not seem that much like slowing down or running out of things to say (even if, as is ultimately inevitable, there aren't that many large themes).
Thanks for the column. I am a recent subscriber with a smattering knowledge about the technique of poetry, so I enjoy the poem at the end so I can see the structural points you make. Thanks also for the Wednesday “lighter” poem. I often FaceTime my grandchildren and read it to them. I appreciate the column.
The light Wednesday poem may sometimes be NSFC — Not Safe for Children — as there's comic poetry about more adult themes. But I love the idea of your reading Stevenson to them.
I’m writing a bio of my father whose death by his own hand in 1977, at the age of 51, has remained an event I cannot write away. Meditating on his own brief memoirs, on his choices, and on his upbringing in the mountains of North Carolina in the 30s, has led me to read what he read. There are three favorites—Fred Gipson, "The Hound-Dog Man"; Robert Ruark, "Old Man and the Boy"; and Ralph Moody, The Fields of Home.” All are set in the country and feature the relationship between an older man and a boy, a theme of his own memoirs. There are also surprises, including “Best Loved Poems of the American People” (1936), Napoleon Hill, “Think and Grow Rich,” and especially Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet.” “Best Loved Poems” includes an anonymous newspaper poem, from the late 19th century, purportedly written by a man contemplating suicide. My father underlined a verse and bracketed a stanza. His own note, buried in his memoirs, seems to reflect his reading of this poem. My research has shown the poem was found among the effects of at least two other suicide victims over the years, a sobering reminder of the responsibility of writers.
In "Best Loved Poems," it's called "On the Threshold.." The title was usually “Cause Unknown” or something similar. The earliest publication I have found is from 1891, in "The Buffalo (NY) Enquirer," where it is attributed to “W.T.H.” and first publication is credited to the "Chicago Evening Post." (My source, Newspapers.com, does not have issues for the Chicago paper after 1874.) The headnote to the poem was sometimes reprinted, in full or part, with the poem:
“One day last week a bridgetender and two stalwart police officers fished from the murky waters of the river the body of a well-dressed middle-aged man. The remains were conveyed to the morgue, were never identified, and went finally to the potter’s field or to the dissecting room of some medical college. In the pocket of the coat found on the corpse was a stained and crumpled paper upon which the following [poem] was scrawled in lead pencil.”
Below is my quick transcription, possibly not free from errors. The most treasured parts of the poem, based on the little evidence I have, were the first six lines and the next to last stanza.
I am standing on the threshold of eternity at last,
As reckless of the future as I have been of the past;
I am void of all ambition, I am dead of every hope;
The coil of life is ended; I am letting go the rope.
I have drifted down the stream of life till weary, sore oppressed;
And I'm tired of all the motion and simply want a rest.
I have tasted all the pleasures that life can hold for man.
I have scanned the whole world over till there's nothing left to scan.
I have heard the finest music, I have read the rarest books,
I have drunk the purest vintage, I have tasted all the cooks;
I have run the scale of living and have sounded every tone,
There is nothing left to live for and I long to be alone.
Alone and unmolested where the vultures do not rave,
And the only refuge left me is the quiet, placed grave;
I am judge and jury mingled, and the verdict that I give
Is, that minus friends and money it is foolishness to live.
In a day or two my body will be found out in the lake;
The coroner will get a fee; and the printer get a "take";
The usual verdict--"Suicide, from causes yet unknown."
And Golgotha draws another blank, a mound without a stone.
To change the usual verdict I will give the reasons now,
Before the rigid seal of death is stamped upon my brow.
'Tis the old familiar story of passion, love and crime,
Repeated through the ages since Cleopatra's time.
A woman's lips, a woman's eyes--a siren all in all,
A modern Circe fit to cause the strongest men to fall;
A wedded life, some blissful years, and poverty drops in
With care and doubt and liquor from whiskey down to gin.
The story told by Tolstoy is comparison to mine
Is moonlight unto sunlight, as water unto wine;
The jealous pangs I suffered, the sleepless nights of woe
I pray no other mortal may ever undergo.
But I've said enough, I fancy, to make the reason plain--
Enough to show the causes of a shattered heart and brain;
What wonder then that life holds not a single thread to bind
A wish or hope to live for, an interest in mankind.
Already dead but living, a fact that I regret,
A man without desire excepting to forget;
And since there is denied me one, why should I linger here,
A dead leaf from the frost of a long-forgotten year?
So au revoir, old cronies; if there's a meeting place beyond,
I'll let you know in, and I know you will respond;
I'm going now, old comrades, to heaven or to hell;
I'll you you know which shortly--farewell, a long farewell.
As to your other points, I really like the idea of presenting the poem first, and then giving the commentary. And I find, looking back at my own work that I prefer my more recent work in both form and content.
I have been reading a bit of Renaissance poetry, it having recently been the birthday of Ben Jonson and Barnabe Googe. Googe's Give money me is a fantastic poem in its acerbity, like the record of a confab between the authors of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, on the fickleness of friends, and the greater reliability of hard cash.
At the risk of sounding pompously pious, I am having the opposite experience. With age, I find God making all things remarkably new. Mercies new every morning and practically every afternoon. I am finding grace capacious and often entertaining. So I got lots to write about, making no claims for any
beauty beyond that of intemperate gratitude for this surprise. Finding at the end, it is as we have long suspected: It's all gift. It's all gift.
It *IS* all a gift. I can’t imagine —or perhaps I find it too horrifying to imagine— growing older and not finding everything still new and worthy of writing beautifully about.
In a similar vein, I am thankful that as I grow older, there's still art to discover that I haven't encountered (or simply didn't appreciate before)--not only new works but so many older works, whether simply unavailable to me before or actually rediscovered. For me it's especially true of music. Besides contemporary works (and I'm one of the odd handful who likes a lot of modern concert music, some quite rebarbative), there's all the many recordings always coming out of once-unrecorded music, some only recently rediscovered. As a friend once said about John Sheppard when he introduced me to his music, it's wonderful to live in a time when there's always something new, even if it's old music lost or ignored for almost 500 years.
Sorry I missed this. But I am happy that last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was busy at the Summer Writers Institute put on by the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.
I just recently re-read Brideshead Revisited for a Well Read Moms book club. I love it every time. Then I read the book by Paula Berg, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which I started because I wanted to know more about Waugh's public school days and stayed interested enough to finish it.
For the SWI workshop, I brought fairly polished drafts of two of my poems: Dante's Daft and Holy Love, and Unsex Me Now. As you may know, James Matthew Wilson teaches that meter is essential for poetry. And I knew that even though those two pieces are acceptable as poetry in the eyes of some who are less strict in their definitions, James would probably not find them so since I have an ongoing battle with meter that I won't go into now.
For background, I am kicking around an idea that will probably be seen as almost heretical among Catholic authors (after Flannery O'Connor) that we shouldn't hide our faith, under a bushel so to speak. Why should we be forced to be subtle? Since those in control of the culture have no hesitation about shouting their belief in what I call the myth of sex without consequences, I wonder why we shouldn't shout what we believe. There is a whole generation that has never heard the truth. I think of writers living under communism who steeled themselves to say the culturally unsayable. When I said that to Bernardo Aparicio, Dappled Things founder, in a private conversation, he disagreed with the theory, indirectly, by responding that my memoir pieces are convincing because no one can argue with what I have experienced. Berni agrees with Dana Gioia who has been encouraging me to keep writing memoir pieces. Dana says, "You've had a hellofa life!"
Anyway, I ended my reading of "Unsex Me Now" with "Hat tip to Lady Macbeth," and then I added that as I read I realized I should give a hat tip to the late Allen Ginsberg— who I got to know in the 1960s—because what I was doing was a kind of a rant. If Ginsberg could rant about the poor drug taking sexually untrammeled creatures who were somehow being driven crazy by straight society ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, running through the angry streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix" etc.) and his words affected society, why can't I rant about the way women are expected to unsex themselves to act like the worst of men, brainwashed to think that they will only be happy if they submit to uncommitted sex, contraception, and abortion, and deny their built-in desires to love, to cherish, to have and to hold? And then I told Prof. Wilson I wanted to know how I could turn "Unsex Me Now" into a poem (by his standards). I can't stop being amused about how the topic must have inspired him, because he proceeded not to make suggestions about how to improve the poem, but he started writing a whole other poem without any of my language using some conceits of his own. . . .. (It was consoling that I got a lot of comments that readers loved the language, since I don't want to write in his words, I want to write in my own.)
So that's what I've been writing, aside from Substack posts about the winners of a Dappled Things "Sacred Art about the Sacred Heart contest," with a lot of investigation into what the Church teaches are appropriate depictions of the infinite Divine and Human Love of Jesus's Sacred Heart. Another piece I haven't published yet is about the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that embarked on the Serra route on Pentecost after a newly composed Mass for Eucharistic Revival with a procession carrying the Eucharist into the streets of San Francisco that continued across the Golden Gate Bridge, and ended with Adoration at the vista point on the Marin County side. That thrills the heart of this former hippy who lived in the gritty city during the late sixties and is inspired by thinking of Jesus being taken through the streets and over the bridge where no procession has witnessed so openly to Him before . Even my former cocaine addict Uber driver was intrigued thinking about Jesus on the bridge where so many protests have been staged.
My reading has been wildly eclectic, as in most summers. Just reread *Misquoting Jesus,* a 2007 book about biblical textual criticism. About to start *Senoir Moments,* a memoir by Willard Spiegelman. Have John Heath-Stubbs's collected out of the library, realizing that I know exactly one poem by him and wondering if there are more I might like. Will any of this dredge up a poem idea?
I like the typo in "Senoir Moments." Fitting for those of us aging along.
This week I picked up John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor after a friend mentioned it and posted some quotes on Facebook and I realized I was in the mood.
I’m also dipping into a re-read of Eugene Vodolazkin’s History of the Island.
And I’m continuing my slow read through Kristin Lavransdatter and a biography of St Charles de Foucauld.
No poetry this week except the bits I’ve stumbled across on social media. Last week I was dipping into Philip Larkin a bit.
I loved the pairing of Tinker Tailor with Smiley's People. Alec Guinness did a wonderful BBC mini-series as Smiley.
I loved the BBC miniseries with Alec Guinness. I was transfixed. I wish I could find more such shows. Maybe I should look up the name of the screenwriter and try to find other work he's done? But then, nobody could equal Guinness, I'm afraid.
Of the BBC John Le Carre, my favourite is A Perfect Spy, not with Guinness (though the Guinness ones are great too) but with Peter Egan and Ray McAnally.
Sure, but the old Guinness has Patrick Stewart as Karla, and how can anyone top that?
I'm finally reading Laurus, which some friends of mine adore and some friends of mine do not. I'm about halfway through and honestly not sure which camp I'm in. (But reading very piecemeal because I've been mostly reading the new Letters of Emily Dickinson and Renee Bergland's Natural Magic, on Dickinson and Charles Darwin, for a review . . .).
Renee goes to my church! It’s fun to see her book being read by so many people :).
Oh, that's amazing! It's a fascinating book, and really interesting to read alongside the Letters.
And, I should also say, I adore Laurus and thought Brisbane wonderful, but wasn’t nearly as captivated by A History of the Island.
Sarah, same in regards to appreciating Vodolazkin. Laurus was so very good. I very much enjoyed Brisbane. Loved The Aviator. But History of the Island was only ok.i appreciated the format of medieval chronicle and the satire often made me chuckle, but it wasn’t a novel I could immerse myself in. Still since my friend just finished it and wanted to chat I was inspired to pick it up again.
I like to read the poem first, then learn about it—before I was scrolling to the bottom and back up!
I’m currently reading Acts by Spencer Reece, Dostoevsky’s Demons, and All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfield (the last for an essay I’m trying to write).
I don't know the Rothfield. Any good?
Yes, I’m only a couple of chapters in, but so far it’s well-written and interesting!
I have come to George Herbert’s personal poetry later in life and I have been glad of it. He wrote all his poems to express the arc of his spiritual life and its journey from early on up to his death. No one read any of them until he died. Every time I read his words I am amazed how he somehow read my soul while reading his. I love each of his poems as a treasure.
I have long loved Church Monuments, and The Holy Scriptures II.
Sally Thomas, too, is a Herbert enthusiast — and accepts the idea that Herbert is to be read in bulk, as a flow.
I recently finished “Works of Mercy” by one Sally Thomas. Wonderful novel, and I loved the blind kitten. I’m now reading the novel “Hold Fast” by Spencer K.M. Brown, with “The Shield of Achilles” by W.H. Auden, a new edition edited by Alan Jacobs, on tap.
I reviewed the Auden, but I don't know the Brown. Any good?
It’s the story of a father and adult son living in northern Minnesota, trying to g to work out grief. It’s really good.
I also loved Works of Mercy, and recommended it to my housemate, who finished it and said, “That’s good. As good as Marilynne Robinson, right?”
Thank you both! I'm so grateful for the kind words.
This is interesting. I'm not at all at the point of feeling like my technical abilities have o'erleapt my subject matter, but I do find that I have certain technical "tricks" now that I'm lapsing into. I need to find some new technical challenges to push me out of a voice rut, I think...
To be specifically, I have been working on a contemplative, keen-eyed narrative voice for a few years, and now I find that's all I can do (that or the absurd Rabelais voice from my verse plays, but he's his own problem). Now I want to write things that need a sharper edge, and I don't know how. I'm experimenting with syllabic verse, which is a major disruption for me, and I'm moving away from pentameter to tetrameter and even trimeter, just to try to get different notes into my work (anger, malice, resentment, jealousy, not things I've been able to render believably). The current verse drama project is helping because it has a lot of bitter people in it!
I think that's a really good point, about observing your own tics, technical or otherwise. I find that I can lapse into sonnets, for example, and then have to try hard to write anything that isn't a sonnet. Or yes, force myself into some meter out of my comfort zone. Those things tend to be, for me, what crack open new things to say. Playing with Welsh syllabic forms a year or so ago pushed me in a lot of interesting ways. I don't know that my core concerns really changed, but I did find myself saying things in ways that I wouldn't have said them if I'd been writing standard pentameter.
I also don't remotely feel that I have mastered all the technique. I can't actually imagine feeling that way, ever --- and I'm not young! I can't imagine ever arriving at a point where any of it is easy, and I'm not sure I'd want to feel that I had arrived at that point.
I don't think it's a matter of feeling mastery, Sally. The best stylists have a humility about style that comes from knowing it so well. It does, however, have to do with having an instrument and wondering what to do with it.
I’m currently reading through Tennyson’s IN MEMORIAM. I’ve read many of the cantos in other contexts, but the reading them in sequence is far more satisfying - I’m impressed by how insightfully Tennyson maps out the progression of grief over several years.
As for writing, I’ve been working with my Assyriologist sister on a rhyming, metrical translation of a Sumerian poem. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but it’s been a very fun collaboration so far, and I already know far more about Sumerian poetry than I did when we started (not surprising, since I knew absolutely nothing before).
The Sumerian poem sounds fascinating.
It is! Scholars haven’t identified regular meters in Sumerian poetry, but it does use other poetic techniques like repetition, alliteration, and parallel syntax to create music - similar to the Hebrew psalms. This particular poem is a lullaby, so we want to put it into a form that will feel like a lullaby to English readers, which means regular meter and rhymes. Challenging, but fun!
That sounds like a fascinating project! (also a fascinating sister)
Yep! My sister is brilliant, although she’d deny it, and she’s already discovering previously unremarked-upon things in the poem, even though this is a side project she’s doing just for fun because I asked her to.
Wow. That's amazing. What a marvelous thing to work on together.
For the daily posts, I think I prefer the poem first in most cases - it allows me to engage with the poem first on my own terms, then read the accompanying commentary.
As a general comment, I just finished listening to a really interesting interview of Shane McCrae on Matthew Buckley Smith's podcast. It was recorded last year, but the full (~3 hr!) interview had been only available to paid subscribers until this week: https://www.matthewbuckleysmith.com/sleerickets
I like many of Anthony Hecht's early and mid poems, but my favorite collection of his is The Darkness and the Light, published at age 78 if I remember correctly. He's another poet with a strong late phase.
This prompted me to buy Anne Stevenson's Completing the Circle, published just months before she died in 2020, at age 87. I'd been meaning to get it, then forgot about it . . . something about "strong late phase" made me think of her, as a poet I've always liked who was writing absolutely to the end.
A lot of the poems in this last book, unsurprisingly, seem to be about death, but then I don't recall that that many of her earlier poems weren't about death. I'll be interested to see what these very late poems are like --- the latest book of hers, I think, that I currently own is Granny Scarecrow, published 20 years earlier, when she was 67, which suddenly does not seem old at all. But she published, I think, five new collections (not counting a couple of "Selecteds") in the last 20 years of her life, which does not seem that much like slowing down or running out of things to say (even if, as is ultimately inevitable, there aren't that many large themes).
With increasing age I spend increasing time - stoned.
Thanks for the column. I am a recent subscriber with a smattering knowledge about the technique of poetry, so I enjoy the poem at the end so I can see the structural points you make. Thanks also for the Wednesday “lighter” poem. I often FaceTime my grandchildren and read it to them. I appreciate the column.
The light Wednesday poem may sometimes be NSFC — Not Safe for Children — as there's comic poetry about more adult themes. But I love the idea of your reading Stevenson to them.
I’m writing a bio of my father whose death by his own hand in 1977, at the age of 51, has remained an event I cannot write away. Meditating on his own brief memoirs, on his choices, and on his upbringing in the mountains of North Carolina in the 30s, has led me to read what he read. There are three favorites—Fred Gipson, "The Hound-Dog Man"; Robert Ruark, "Old Man and the Boy"; and Ralph Moody, The Fields of Home.” All are set in the country and feature the relationship between an older man and a boy, a theme of his own memoirs. There are also surprises, including “Best Loved Poems of the American People” (1936), Napoleon Hill, “Think and Grow Rich,” and especially Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet.” “Best Loved Poems” includes an anonymous newspaper poem, from the late 19th century, purportedly written by a man contemplating suicide. My father underlined a verse and bracketed a stanza. His own note, buried in his memoirs, seems to reflect his reading of this poem. My research has shown the poem was found among the effects of at least two other suicide victims over the years, a sobering reminder of the responsibility of writers.
What's the suicide poem?
In "Best Loved Poems," it's called "On the Threshold.." The title was usually “Cause Unknown” or something similar. The earliest publication I have found is from 1891, in "The Buffalo (NY) Enquirer," where it is attributed to “W.T.H.” and first publication is credited to the "Chicago Evening Post." (My source, Newspapers.com, does not have issues for the Chicago paper after 1874.) The headnote to the poem was sometimes reprinted, in full or part, with the poem:
“One day last week a bridgetender and two stalwart police officers fished from the murky waters of the river the body of a well-dressed middle-aged man. The remains were conveyed to the morgue, were never identified, and went finally to the potter’s field or to the dissecting room of some medical college. In the pocket of the coat found on the corpse was a stained and crumpled paper upon which the following [poem] was scrawled in lead pencil.”
Below is my quick transcription, possibly not free from errors. The most treasured parts of the poem, based on the little evidence I have, were the first six lines and the next to last stanza.
I am standing on the threshold of eternity at last,
As reckless of the future as I have been of the past;
I am void of all ambition, I am dead of every hope;
The coil of life is ended; I am letting go the rope.
I have drifted down the stream of life till weary, sore oppressed;
And I'm tired of all the motion and simply want a rest.
I have tasted all the pleasures that life can hold for man.
I have scanned the whole world over till there's nothing left to scan.
I have heard the finest music, I have read the rarest books,
I have drunk the purest vintage, I have tasted all the cooks;
I have run the scale of living and have sounded every tone,
There is nothing left to live for and I long to be alone.
Alone and unmolested where the vultures do not rave,
And the only refuge left me is the quiet, placed grave;
I am judge and jury mingled, and the verdict that I give
Is, that minus friends and money it is foolishness to live.
In a day or two my body will be found out in the lake;
The coroner will get a fee; and the printer get a "take";
The usual verdict--"Suicide, from causes yet unknown."
And Golgotha draws another blank, a mound without a stone.
To change the usual verdict I will give the reasons now,
Before the rigid seal of death is stamped upon my brow.
'Tis the old familiar story of passion, love and crime,
Repeated through the ages since Cleopatra's time.
A woman's lips, a woman's eyes--a siren all in all,
A modern Circe fit to cause the strongest men to fall;
A wedded life, some blissful years, and poverty drops in
With care and doubt and liquor from whiskey down to gin.
The story told by Tolstoy is comparison to mine
Is moonlight unto sunlight, as water unto wine;
The jealous pangs I suffered, the sleepless nights of woe
I pray no other mortal may ever undergo.
But I've said enough, I fancy, to make the reason plain--
Enough to show the causes of a shattered heart and brain;
What wonder then that life holds not a single thread to bind
A wish or hope to live for, an interest in mankind.
Already dead but living, a fact that I regret,
A man without desire excepting to forget;
And since there is denied me one, why should I linger here,
A dead leaf from the frost of a long-forgotten year?
So au revoir, old cronies; if there's a meeting place beyond,
I'll let you know in, and I know you will respond;
I'm going now, old comrades, to heaven or to hell;
I'll you you know which shortly--farewell, a long farewell.
It is written in quatrains, but the format disappeared when I copied above.
As to your other points, I really like the idea of presenting the poem first, and then giving the commentary. And I find, looking back at my own work that I prefer my more recent work in both form and content.
Hah. I always hate my recent work — a moving now that means everything new seems bad.
I have been reading a bit of Renaissance poetry, it having recently been the birthday of Ben Jonson and Barnabe Googe. Googe's Give money me is a fantastic poem in its acerbity, like the record of a confab between the authors of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, on the fickleness of friends, and the greater reliability of hard cash.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A01909.0001.001/1:41?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
Give money me, take friendship whoso list,
For friends are gone, come once adversity,
When money yet remaineth safe in chest,
That quickly can thee bring from misery
Ooh, we haven't written on Barnabe Googe . . . YET.
You should! Also you haven't written on Fulke Greville yet, if I am not mistaken. (Or among the other "Winters poets", Edgar Bowers).
Bowers is too late to be out of copyright, unfortunately. There are so many poets we'd love to write on, but they're not in the public domain.
At the risk of sounding pompously pious, I am having the opposite experience. With age, I find God making all things remarkably new. Mercies new every morning and practically every afternoon. I am finding grace capacious and often entertaining. So I got lots to write about, making no claims for any
beauty beyond that of intemperate gratitude for this surprise. Finding at the end, it is as we have long suspected: It's all gift. It's all gift.
It *IS* all a gift. I can’t imagine —or perhaps I find it too horrifying to imagine— growing older and not finding everything still new and worthy of writing beautifully about.
In a similar vein, I am thankful that as I grow older, there's still art to discover that I haven't encountered (or simply didn't appreciate before)--not only new works but so many older works, whether simply unavailable to me before or actually rediscovered. For me it's especially true of music. Besides contemporary works (and I'm one of the odd handful who likes a lot of modern concert music, some quite rebarbative), there's all the many recordings always coming out of once-unrecorded music, some only recently rediscovered. As a friend once said about John Sheppard when he introduced me to his music, it's wonderful to live in a time when there's always something new, even if it's old music lost or ignored for almost 500 years.