What I'm Reading

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

I read Barnes's short novel in almost one sitting, not because it's a particularly compelling narrative, but almost because it isn't. British novels that begin with recollections of school days and early loves gone wrong are so common that I was impelled by a suspicion that "there must be more to it than this."

There is, of course, or the Booker people wouldn't have given it their prize. But whether there is quite enough to overcome the nagging sense that here is yet another work of fiction undermined by its narrative trickery is still an open question for me. Fairly early in the book, a character quotes a definition that he ascribes to a French historian named Patrick Lagrange (who is fictitious): "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." If you aren't alerted then that the novel is going to center on the distortions and omissions of memory, you haven't been reading enough contemporary fiction.

The crux of the novel is a letter that the narrator, Tony Webster, has forgotten ever writing: one to a friend who had taken up with a girl that Tony had been seeing. The letter, when Tony sees it again, 40-some years later, long after he has been married to and divorced from another woman and has settled into a quiet retirement, is a vicious denunciation of both the friend and his former girlfriend. The letter has had bitter consequences, of which Tony has spent his life unaware.

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I did not recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception. 

He tries to divorce himself from the consequences of the letter -- as he says, he "was not its author now" -- but they have been so devastating that even though he has lived a quiet and satisfactory life, believing himself to be a good man, the letter serves as a bridge between his present self and his earlier one. He reflects,

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does; otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration.

The letter and its consequences cause him to try to view his life as a whole, but the disjunction between the self who wrote the letter and the self he perceives himself to be now remains. (At the same time, Barnes is playing a bit of a game by having a character in a novel reflect on the difference between character in a novel and character in life. As the professor would say: Discuss.)

The moral crux of the novel is evident. Tony tries to escape from one aspect of it, the supernatural:

Of course I don't -- I didn't -- believe in curses. That is to say, in words producing events. But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens -- of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass -- this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. The fact that the young me who cursed and the old me who witnessed the curse's outcome had quite different feelings -- this was monstrously irrelevant. 

But on the other hand, he has to admit, "If life did reward merit, then I deserved shunning."

I value The Sense of an Ending for Barnes's willingness to pose a moral question: How much guilt should we assume for things we never intended to bring about and of which we were unaware? At the same time, I question whether it is less a novel than a fable crafted to serve as a case study in an ethics class.  

Be Good, Sweet Novelist, and Let Who Will Be Clever

Lately I've read two novels by distinguished contemporary writers that left me wondering if it's possible to be too clever for a novelist's own good.

The other day I posted about one of the novels, Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, which has lately established itself firmly on the bestseller lists and on some of the ubiquitous "best novels of 2012" lists compiled by various critics. I observed that although the novel seems to be heading in the conventional direction of first-person narratives with an ironically self-deprecating voice characteristic of some British fiction, McEwan was also using his narrator to score a few points about the recent and contemporary British novel.

It turns out that McEwan is doing precisely that and more. His narrator -- or rather let us say, without giving too much away, his ostensible narrator is Serena Frome ("rhymes with plume," as she remind us and others from time to time), a young woman who, fresh out of Cambridge with a not-very-distinguished degree in mathematics, goes to work for British intelligence." Eventually she is asked to perform a "secret mission," to inform a young writer named Tom Haley that he is the recipient of a lucrative grant from a foundation that supports up-and-coming writers. In fact, the grant is funded by MI5, which has set up a program to support anticommunist artists, in a rather lame and half-hearted attempt at tilting the propaganda war against left-wing Brits. If you remember the scandal in which the British literary magazine Encounter was revealed in 1967 to have been funded by the CIA, leading to the resignation of its editor, the poet Stephen Spender, you know what's at work here.

Haley accepts the grant, and he and Serena fall in love. Since she's a very junior staff member in MI5, usually tasked with typing and filing, she's eager for advancement. But she really is in love with Haley, and is tormented by the fact that she's forced to lie to him not only about the source of the money he's receiving but also about her role in selecting him to receive it.

Now, there are some very obvious ways a novel with a plot like this can go. She can risk losing him and/or her job by telling him the truth. She can keep lying and get found out. And once he learns the truth, he can either break up with her in anger and disillusionment, or he can forgive her and they can live happily with the deception. But although there are plenty of novels that would resort to either the happy lie ending or the painful truth ending, both endings have something phony about them. They're characteristic of popular fiction, not of the kind of keen-edged literary fiction McEwan is known for.

I won't tell you how McEwan resolves his plot, except to say that it's extremely clever. And that it seems like a cheat anyway. He has set up a romantic dilemma and resolved it with a metafictional gimmick. Yes, it's thought-provoking, and when you look back through the novel you can see how carefully McEwan has set it up. At one point, a character tells Serena,

In this work the line between what people imagine and what's actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big gray space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things -- and you can make them come true. The ghosts become real.

The "work" being referred to is Serena's work for MI5. But it can also be taken to refer to the "work" that is McEwan's novel. Double-meanings of this sort abound in Sweet Tooth.

Don't get me wrong: I was entertained and intrigued by the novel. It's a pleasure to see fiction stand itself on its head. But at the same time, I don't read novels to solve puzzles, and something of the heart went out of the book when I discovered what McEwan is doing.

Which brings me to another terribly clever book, Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, also ensconced on bestseller and best-of lists. Here the cleverness is not in the plotting, although Chabon is certainly skillful in that regard. It's a story set in contemporary Oakland and Berkeley, and its major virtue is that, unlike McEwan, Chabon introduces us to a set of vivid characters that we've never met before. It deals with the owners of a used-record store in Oakland whose livelihood is threatened by the arrival of a chain megastore -- the Walmart of used records plus electronics and other goodies -- and with their families and customers and competitors and so on. This is a novel teeming with colorful characters.

But it's also a bit like a party at which there are all sorts of interesting people to meet and talk to, except that it's being thrown by a host who just won't shut up and let you meet them. He (i.e., Chabon) is interesting and fiercely witty himself, but every time you start getting to know one of his guests, he pops in with his own comments and asides. He is also a master of what McEwan's Serena referred to as "a form of naive realism." In Sweet Tooth she says of the novels she reads,"I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car." And Telegraph Avenue is rife with that kind of mentioning: places, people, events, trivia all centered on the Oakland-Berkeley area, particularly the parts adjoining the titular avenue. 

Some of this is gratifying to a Bay Area resident like me, and I was amused when Chabon alluded to the old station breaks on a local TV station, which featured dogs who turned their heads toward someone off-camera when the words "Channel 20" were spoken. It's the sort of in-joke you feel oddly, somewhat smugly pleased at sharing with the author. But it's also irrelevant. It's local color for the sake of being locally colorful. 

There's way too much of that sort of thing in Telegraph Avenue, whose stylistic cleverness is as provoking and distracting as McEwan's cleverness in upending his narrative. 

What I'm Reading

Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

The narrator of McEwan's latest novel is a young woman (in my mind's eye she's played by Romola Garai) who goes to work for British intelligence in the 1970s. I was feeling quite smug about having identified her voice as that familiar one of ironic self-deprecation so characteristic of British first-person narratives.

But then I realized that McEwan is smarter than me, when he homed in on how typical his narrator's voice is, and how his own novel both exemplifies and transcends a particular type of British fiction. His protagonist reads Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, and Iris Murdoch in search of herself, but finds the women in them "too educated or too clever, or not quite lonely enough in the world to be me."

I suppose I would not have been satisfied until I had in my hands a novel about a girl in a Camden bedsit who occupied a lowly position in MI5 and was without a man. 

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could gauge the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and that there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up. So, no tricksy haggling over the limits of their art, no showing disloyalty to the reader by appearing to cross and recross in disguise the borders of the imaginary. No room in the books I liked for the double agent. That year I tried and discarded the authors that sophisticated friends in Cambridge had pressed on me -- Borges and Barth, Pynchon and Cortázar and Gaddis. Not an Englishman among them, I noted, and no women of any race. I was rather like people of my parents' generation who not only disliked the taste and smell of garlic, but distrusted all those who consumed it.

  

What I'm Reading: The Passage

The Passage by Justin Cronin


My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I don't read a lot of bestsellers anymore. I had to, when I was a book section editor, but now I'm surrounded by shelves of books I haven't read and should, or books I've read but don't remember. But when I heard about this novel, it sounded like my kind of book. What that says about me, I leave it to you to surmise.


I can imagine the pitch to the publishers and then to the movie producers: The Hot Zone meets True Blood. And in truth that's what attracted me to it. The idea that vampirism might be a medical condition, even if it's a far-fetched concept, has a lot of appeal to me. If Cronin had stuck more closely to that premise I might have liked the book more, but then it got all muddled up with telepathic communications that don't seem to have much to do with the virus: the whole business of Sister Lacey and her psychic connection with first Amy and then Doyle, for example. I'm willing to admit that a virus might even allow a human being to grow a carapace, to alter its musculature and make it superstrong, maybe even to glow. But the parapsychology is a bit hard to swallow, especially when it's demonstrated by people who aren't even infected.


Still, I'm game for a good yarn, so I stuck with it. And I'll probably be first in line for the sequel, if only because there are so damn many loose ends that I want to see if Cronin ties up. (For example, what about Hastings/Zero, who was infected with the virus in its natural state in Bolivia? Did he become the same kind of Queen Bee that Babcock became? He seems not to have a connection with the Twelve.)


On the whole it's a strong book for what it is: a deft handling of genre conventions, with more than a touch of Tolkien (Peter as Frodo, the virals as orcs). It's more cinematic than literary, but who am I to knock that?


View all my Goodreads reviews

Bard Thou Never Wert

The following review ran, a little shortened for space, in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

By James Shapiro

Simon & Schuster, 324 pp., $26

Let's say you're at a party and you're introduced to a Shakespeare scholar. Please don't ask her or him if Shakespeare really wrote those plays. If you do, you'll get an icy glare, a weary frown, or some other expression that clearly says: Oh, God, not that again.

They've heard it all before, the scholars, and they're sick of it. For them, the matter's settled: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote “Hamlet” and “The Tempest,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Love's Labour's Lost,” “Macbeth” and “All's Well Than Ends Well,” the two parts of “Henry IV,” the three parts of “Henry VI,” and at least 27 other plays, plus narrative poems, lyrics and sonnets.

But the question just won't go away. It doesn't just get asked of Shakespeare scholars at cocktail parties: In 1987, three United States Supreme Court justices participated in a mock trial to adjudicate the evidence for the authorship of either Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare won that one, but in 1989 a TV program on the Public Broadcasting System again treated the question as if it were a serious one. The anti-Stratfordians have succeeded in making people think that there is real reason to doubt the authorship.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, firmly believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but his entertainingly combative “Contested Will” is not just a rebuttal to the doubters. It's a cultural history, an examination of why there were doubts in the first place, and why authorship candidates such as Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford attracted such otherwise sensible people as Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James and Sigmund Freud.

Blame it partly on the Germans, who developed the science of textual study. And particularly on Friedrich August Wolf, whose examination of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” challenged the idea that they were written by a single person named Homer. Today it's generally recognized that “Homer” is a legend – a figure who was attached to the oral tradition that handed down the Greek epics. And after Homer's existence was called into question there came the Higher Criticism, the textual analysis of the Bible which determined that the Pentateuch was probably not written by Moses himself, and then called into question the accuracy of the life of Jesus presented in the Gospels. The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus was translated into English by George Eliot in 1846, and, as Shapiro puts it, skepticism about authorship “soon threatened that lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths.” 

One problem is that the documentary record of Shakespeare's life is that of a man who was all business: We have lots of documents of his existence: legal papers, real estate records, and the will in which he leaves his estate to his daughter and the “second-best bed” to his wife. But the Shakespeare of the records is bourgeois, provincial and dull. Surely a man who wrote in magnificent language about kings and princes couldn't have come from such a commonplace background. Wouldn't it be more likely that the works were those of a philosopher-statesman like Bacon or a playwright, poet and courtier like the Earl of Oxford? The question has sent people on all sides of the authorship question to scour the plays and poems for evidence about their author's life.

Shapiro is eminently fair in his portrayals of both Baconians and Oxfordians. He even comments that although one of the first Oxfordians was a man unfortunately named John Thomas Looney, the name has been “the subject of much unwarranted abuse” and that it “rhymes with bony.”  And he blames some of his colleagues, who agree that Shakespeare really was “the man from Stratford,” for encouraging the anti-Stratfordians by using the poems and plays as biographical material. Shapiro insists, “The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the poems and plays, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays.”

Shapiro demonstrates that if you want to believe that that Bacon, Oxford, or anyone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays you have to ignore copious evidence to the contrary and indulge in intellectual contortions. Moreover, you have to credit the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural establishment with a conspiracy so elaborate and a cover-up so successful it makes Watergate look like hide-and-seek. But in a world in which even the fact of a birth announcement published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1961 won't convince some people that the president of the United States wasn't really born in Kenya, it's not surprising that the “Shakespeare conspiracy” won't disappear.

Poem of the Day: Ezra Pound

A Study in Aesthetics 

The very small children in patched clothing,
Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:
                 
                    Guarda! Ahi, guarda! ch' è be' a!

But three years after this
I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not know --
For there are in Sirmione, twenty-eight young Dantes
     and thirty-four Catulli;
And there had been a great catch of sardines,
And his elders
Were packing them in the great wooden boxes
For the market in Brescia, and he
Leapt about, snatching at the bright fish
And getting in both of their ways;
And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo!
And when they would not let him arrange
The fish in the boxes
He stroked those which were already arranged,
Murmuring for his own satisfaction
This identical phrase:

                                          Ch' è  be' a.

And at this I was mildly abashed.

--Ezra Pound

I think if Pound had written more poems like this one and fewer Cantos, I'd like him a lot more. The Italian says, "Look! Oh, look! How beautiful she is!" and sta fermo means "stand still."          

Poem of the Day: Louis MacNeice

Snow 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was 

Spawning snow and pink roses against it 

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: 

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, 

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion 

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel 

The drunkenness of things being various. 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world 

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes --- 

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -- 

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. 

--Louis MacNeice

Poem of the Day: Theodore Roethke

I Knew a Woman 

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, 

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; 

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: 

The shapes a bright container can contain! 

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, 

Or English poets who grew up on Greek 

(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). 

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, 

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand; 

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin; 

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand; 

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, 

Coming behind her for her pretty sake 

(But what prodigious mowing we did make). 

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: 

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; 

She played it quick, she played it light and loose; 

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; 

Her several parts could keep a pure repose, 

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose 

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved). 

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: 

I'm martyr to a motion not my own; 

What's freedom for? To know eternity. 

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. 

But who would count eternity in days? 

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: 

(I measure time by how a body sways).

--Theodore Roethke 

I don't think any twentieth-century poet caught the spirit of Donne or Marvell or Herrick better than Roethke did in this wonderful, sexy poem. 

Poem of the Day: William Carlos Williams

Poem 

As the cat
climbed over
the top of 

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

--William Carlos Williams

Poem of the Day: W.H. Auden

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position; how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: 

They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

--W.H. Auden 

Auden's wryly observant poem is maybe the most familiar example of poetry as art criticism, and has been widely imitated. Some of the imitations are direct homages to Auden's poem, like Billy Collins's:

Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited 

As far as mental anguish goes, 

the old painters were no fools. 

They understood how the mind, 

the freakiest dungeon in the castle, 

can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest 

or an end table complete with genitals. 

And they knew that the truly monstrous 

lies not so much in the wildly shocking, 

a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say, 

but in the small prosaic touch 

added to a tableau of the hellish, 

the detail at the heart of the horrid.

In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony, 

for instance, how it is not so much 

the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress 

that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries, 

not the hooded corpse in a basket, 

but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch; 

how, what must have driven St. Anthony 

to the mossy brink of despair 

was not the big, angry-looking fish 

in the central panel, 

the one with the two mouse-like creatures 

conferring on its tail, 

but rather what the fish is wearing: 

a kind of pale orange officer's cape 

and, over that, 

a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires, 

a sensible buckled chin strap, 

and, yes, the ultimate test of faith -- 

the tiny sword that hangs from the thing, 

that nightmare carp, 

secure in its brown leather scabbard.

--Billy Collins 

I'm sure William Carlos Williams also knew Auden's poem, but he found a particularly musical way to evoke his chosen painting:

The Dance 

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, 

the dancers go round, they go round and 

around, the squeal and the blare and the 

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles 

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound) 

their hips and their bellies off balance 

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about 

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those 

shanks must be sound to bear up under such 

rollicking measures, prance as they dance 

in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

--William Carlos Williams           

Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind; 

But it was she and not the sea we heard. 

For she was the maker of the song she sang. 

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea 

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. 

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew 

It was the spirit that we sought and knew 

That we should ask this often as she sang. 

It if was only the dark voice of the sea 

That rose, or even colored by many waves; 

If it was only the outer voice of sky 

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, 

However clear, it would have been deep air, 

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound 

Repeated in a summer without end 

And sound alone. But it was more than that, 

More even than her voice, and ours, among 

The meaningless plunges of water and the wind, 

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped 

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres 

Of sky and sea. 

                        It was her voice that made 

The sky acutest at its vanishing. 

She measured to the hour its solitude. 

She was the single artificer of the world 

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, 

Whatever self it had, became the self 

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, 

As we beheld her striding there alone, 

Knew that there never was a world for her 

Except the one she sang and, singing, made. 

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, 

Why, when the singing ended and we turned 

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, 

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, 

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, 

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, 

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. 

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, 

The maker's rage to order words of the sea, 

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, 

And of ourselves and of our origins, 

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. 

--Wallace Stevens

I guess it's worth noting here that the poem's Ramon Fernandez is not the Philippine basketball player, and that Stevens claimed he wasn't the literary critic of the same name, but just a Hispanic name he picked at random. So that's one enigma in this poem you don't have to deal with.

Poem of the Day: William Empson

Missing Dates

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

It is not the effort nor the failure tires.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It s not your system or clear sight that mills

Down small to the consequences a life requires;

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills

Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills

Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.

The complete fire is death. From partial fires

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills

From missing dates, at which the heart expires.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

--William Empson 

Empson's reputation rests largely on his literary criticism, and especially on his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (which, as a professor of mine once remarked, constitutes an eighth type of ambiguity all on its own). But he was a provocative poet, too, as this strangely morbid villanelle should demonstrate.

Poem of the Day: Vernon Watkins

Waterfalls

Always in that valley in Wales I hear the noise 

     Of waters falling. 

                              There is a clump of trees 

          We climbed for nuts; and high in the trees the boys 

               Lost in the rookery's cries 

                    Would cross, and branches cracking under their knees

Would break, and make in the winter wood new gaps. 

    The leafmould covering the ground was almost black, 

          But speckled and striped were the nuts we threw in our caps, 

               Milked from split shells and cups, 

                    Secret as chestnuts when they are tipped from a sack, 

Glossy and new. 

                         Always in that valley in Wales 

     I hear that sound, those voices. They keep fresh 

          What ripens, falls, drops into darkness, fails, 

               Gone when dawn shines on scales, 

                    And glides from village memory, slips through the mesh, 

And is not, when we come again. 

                                                  I look: 

     Voices are under the bridge, and that voice calls, 

          Now late, and answers, 

                                              then, as the light twigs break 

               Back, there is only the brook 

                    Reminding the stones where, under a breath, it falls. 

--Vernon Watkins

Poem of the Day: Robert Frost

Spring Pools 

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to brink dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods --
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

--Robert Frost

This is the Frost I most admire: the observer, not the ironic moralist.

Poem of the Day: Samuel Beckett

what would I do without this world faceless incurious 

where to be lasts but an instant where every instant 

spills in the void the ignorance of having been 

without this wave where in the end 

body and shadow together are engulfed 

what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die 

the paintings the frenzies towards succour towards love 

without this sky that soars 

above its ballast dust 

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before 

peering out of my deadlight looking for another 

wandering like me eddying far from all the living 

in a convulsive space 

among the voices voiceless 

that throng my hiddenness 

--Samuel Beckett

Poem of the Day: Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes --
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
     We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
     We wear the mask!

--Paul Laurence Dunbar

In his day, Dunbar was best known for dialect poems like "When Malindy Sings," which black poets were expected to produce. He wore the mask, but not happily. 

Poem of the Day: Kenneth Rexroth

Proust's Madeleine 

Somebody has given my
Baby daughter a box of
Old poker chips to play with.
Today she hands me one while
I am sitting with my tired
Brain at my desk. It is red.
On it is a picture of
An elk's head and the letters
B.P.O.E. -- a chip from
A small town Elks' Club. I flip
It idly in the air and
Catch it and do a coin trick
To amuse my little girl.
Suddenly everything slips aside.
I see my father
Doing the very same thing,
Whistling "Beautiful Dreamer,"
His breath smelling richly
Of whiskey and cigars. I can
Hear him coming home drunk
From the Elks' Club in Elkhart
Indiana, bumping the
Chairs in the dark. I can see
Him dying of cirrhosis
Of the liver and stomach
Ulcers and pneumonia,
Or, as he said on his deathbed, of
Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.

--Kenneth Rexroth

This poem is in honor of my one hundred and seventieth consecutive day of reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I don't think there were any Elks' Clubs in Combray.

Poem of the Day: Ernest Dowson

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine 

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed 

Upon my soul begtween the kisses and the wine; 

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

     Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head; 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, 

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; 

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; 

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

     When I awoke and found the dawn was gray; 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, 

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, 

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; 

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

     Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine 

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; 

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 

     Yea hungry for the lips of my desire: 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

--Ernest Dowson 

What is there to say about a poet whose two most famous poems are famous for having given titles to works more famous than the poems themselves? In this case, a certain novel by Margaret Mitchell and a song by Cole Porter. The other one is in a poem called "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam." The titles of both poems come from Horace's odes: This one means "I am not what I was under the reign of the good Cynara."        

Poem of the Day: Stanley Kunitz

The War Against the Trees

The man who sold his lawn to standard oil
Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show
While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,
Tested the virtue of the sil
Under the branchy sky
By overthrowing first the privet-row.

Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids
Were but preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfathers of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck and struck againt,
And with each elm a century went down

All day the hireling engines charged the trees,
Subverting them by hacking underground
In grub-dominions, where dark summer's mole
Rampages through his halls,
Till a northern seizure shook
Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.

I saw the ghosts of children at their games
Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,
And while the green world turned its death-foxed page
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts
The club-roots bared their amputated coils,
Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars
Cried Moon! on a corner lot
One witness-moment, caught
In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.

--Stanley Kunitz

There's a poignant and prophetic quality to this poem, more than fifty years old, and it's somehow best evoked for me in Kunitz's decision not to use the capital letters that commercially belonged to Standard Oil. For oil became standard in our way of life, and we have certainly paid the price for it.

Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

Among School Children 

1
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way -- the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

2
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy --
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

3
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age --
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage --
And had that color upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

4
Her present image floats into the mind --
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once -- enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

5
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

6
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

7
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts -- O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolize --
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

8
Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

--William Butler Yeats

Modernism is over. We are now postmodern, whatever that means. And we now approach the landmarks of modernism -- the novels of Proust and Joyce, the poems of Yeats and Eliot -- armed with the tools of exegesis: concordances and glosses, commentaries and footnotes. We illuminate the obscurities and explicate the personal myths. And certainly the snarls and gnarls of a poem like this one need all those external aids if we want to understand them fully. But sometimes the scholarship imposes its considerable bulk between the essence of the poem: the feeling and the emotion, the sheer mystery of a human experience. So it's gratifying to return to this poem having worked it all out, having figured out its allusions and tracked down its personal references and unsnagged its syntax, and just to appreciate it for what it is simply at heart: a meditation on the antagonism between beauty and mortality, a remembrance of things past and an acceptance of things present.