Nick Virgilio, “heat before the storm”

poetry,

heat before the storm (from Selected Poems)
Nick Virgilio

heat before the storm:
a fly disturbs the quiet
of the empty store

Comment:

I keep forgetting how expressive haiku is. There’s quite a lot going on in this poem.

The scene is completely quiet. Instead of noise or movement, there’s simply a gradual building of heat. Finally a fly from the outside, bothered by nothing but a slight shift for us, “disturbs the quiet.” An empty store is violated. That all-too-human location contrasts starkly with the natural elements composing the rest of the poem.

The empty store feels an afterthought, but without the man-made, the poem falls apart. The fly’s reaction seems insane, but is part of a perfectly natural process. It has been warned of the storm, continues the warning, seeks shelter. But an “empty store” is a peculiar shelter. A store ideally should have everything for all contingencies. It is everything and nothing. It is not meant to react, not meant to be aware of how one situation differs from another. This is the ironic consequence of trying to eliminate emergencies.

“Empty” and “store” reinforce what a blank the shelter is. It’s a human hope that can break because of the slightest occurrence. But for now, the fly is getting something out of it.

Reflections on Close Reading

education, personal

for Laura Garofalo. With thanks to Ricky McAlister & Nathaniel Cochran

1. blah blah blah close reading will change your life you’ll get a real education you’ll think independently you’ll feel like the past is with you always you’ll be stronger and smarter and you’ll know god and morality better as well as the limits of science blah blah blah BLAH BLAH

The humanities are all but dead in our world. This all of us know, as they can never be dead enough. They’re a convenient scapegoat for calling others impractical and deflecting the words “greedy,” “asshole,” or “unimaginative tool,” words that normally stick to the guy saying we throw too much money as a society into the liberal arts. Just point at someone who majored in English and everyone can have a good laugh, as they can’t even get that job at McDonald’s nowadays. Apparently the ultimate sign of our decadence isn’t the money we waste on phones or cars, but time spent reading poetry.

It’s easy to see that something else exists beyond making money, getting the trains to run on time, advancing technology. The problem is creating a positive case for the humanities without talking about that “something else” as the sum total of the universe or human freedom or divine perfection. I know what I like about close reading; Nathaniel, via Nietzsche, really hits the mark for me. His brief comment talks about the back and forth of wondering why any words were written at all. For me, this translates into taking books one line at a time, stopping, talking, talking through each one.

Still, Ricky didn’t hesitate to mention books that mattered to him centering on important themes, whether they portray a world completely throwing books away, or consider what freedom and dignity mean in a world which relishes making people slaves. No one would read if they didn’t get anything out of it, and focusing too much on close reading itself forgets that we tend to be selective about what we read.

I guess what I’m learning through close reading is how to convey the import of things, how to take seriously things I wouldn’t normally think through and communicate them to others. No wonder so much moralizing accompanies careful readers. Even if the humanities weren’t under assault, it’s impossible not to treat a discovery in a book as a revelation. At the very least, you’re stumbling upon someone’s concern; simply by being a discovery it becomes central to you. Shouldn’t it be shared, proclaimed to the world?

I think so, but I also think that points less to the humanities as transformative and more to them as necessary. They are foundational. They’re about how and that we talk to each other. To take one not-so-trivial example: if we can’t engage the past seriously, we will more than likely use some romantic notion of it or rejection of it to hurt others. While the humanities can certainly be about the trivial and encourage a lack of productivity, they have more to do with this “freedom” and “morality” thing than most people today assume. Typically, the ones telling us that reading or formal schooling are wastes of time have a very specific and very mindless agenda.

2. I need to say something about close reading itself. I was asked. This was not prompted by books with titles like “How to Read like a Professor.” No, I’ve been making my notes public for 7-8 years now as I read. Some people actually care and are wondering how this works or doesn’t work.

For myself, it has taken years to learn how to read, and there is this strike against the state of the humanities nowadays. When I miss a detail, it feels like I don’t know how to read at all. Same goes for writing badly. How could I possibly write a bad sentence, given that I work on my writing all the time?

The humanities, as they stand, are far too small, far too exclusive. This is not to excuse my failures, which are legion and well documented in a number of incomprehensible posts on this blog. It is to say that the whole point of the humanities is that we should be working together to make sure more opinions are more thoughtfully expressed, read, and promoted. Instead, the whole culture has become a snobfest, a way for some professors to play pundit and shirk the real duty of educating the body politic. To do their real duty would involve making mistakes publicly and taking the risks that accompany having an important part of the truth and believing one’s profession worthwhile. The ultimate risk seems to be admitting one is wrong and someone else is better. It’s very rare I see people graciously recommend others.

With that in mind, I propose two simple rules for those who want to close read. They are:

  1. “Why is this being said?”
  2. It is far more important and valuable to come up with a serious question or insight about a part of a work than have the whole figured out.

All of you will recognize that 1 is the sum total of close reading. Regarding literature, one posits an internal speaker and internal audience for a given work in order to treat it as a self-contained world. In other words: all the fancy attempts at using a method to read are about finding intention and relevance from another point of view. We are working to be informed, and trying not imposing our assumptions.

2 is much more controversial. Leo Strauss has been an invaluable guide for me, showing me how to think carefully about texts. Strauss is always attentive to the whole, and I always work to get an interpretation that takes it seriously. And I do think good readers will show some respect for the whole no matter what.

But one of the reasons why the humanities is in crisis is that its exclusivity demands too much from thoughtful, serious people who have better things to do than close read thousand page books all the time. A lot of people who don’t really know as much as they should read too much, too fast. Or they close read to absurd degrees, not bothering to ask whether they have good questions or not, or whether one insight may have more weight than another.

I want more people to dare to be wrong. We’ve got too many right answers: everyone knows everything. The best way to get people to be wrong in the right way is to get them talking about what speaks to them, to let themselves find a path where they can discover why the whole text ultimately matters.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is. You’ll notice that my approach to poems is more personal than it has been previously, focusing on the dramatic action of a given poem and considering various ways in which a thing could be said. I want stanzas and lines to sing; I want people to feel the relevance of certain questions or ideas. My gamble is that the twists and turns those questions and ideas take later in the poem are twists and turns others will want to follow. It’s a gamble I know is worth taking. For a while, I thought I was talking to myself.

Hannah Stephenson, “Good Job You Now Know the World’s Secrets”

poetry

Good Job You Now Know the World’s Secrets
Hannah Stephenson

Good Job You Now Know the World’s Secrets

If snow were a message
and it is

it would mean
falling

is the source
of all repair

Comment:

Still staring at Andy Dixon’s “Portrait of a Schoolteacher,” which inspired Stephenson’s poem. The teacher looks like she is composed of several things: children’s colorful scribbling, traditional expectations (note the dress and the hat), and her own humanity (her face is where the most color is concentrated). I get the rough feeling that there’s a hierarchy of things in this painting. The traditional expectations are completely colored over or shaped by what the children imagine. But the teacher’s humanity is the only thing that matters in the end: we’re looking at her face, wondering if she’s fallen apart, stitched together, or even projecting beyond all that.

Onto the poem. I get the feeling that it starts from the notion that the teacher has fallen apart and been reconstructed. But it’s only a start: “snow” gives this poem no color, whereas the portrait is extremely colorful.

The poem, to be sure, begins blunt. You may wonder if snow is a message. Well, it is a message. It means falling “is the source of all repair.”

And yet reading the poem involves a falling motion that is gentler. The second line of each stanza resolves the first and links the next stanza, except for the last. Ok, you say, isn’t that true of every poem? Well, yes, but two things peculiar to this case. First, there is direct import for the theme and drama, as this poem only begins blunt. Moreover, the second line is shorter than the first, as if it was a piece that broke off from the first.

The first stanza wonders if snow is a message and quickly cuts of all debate. But it does resolve that snow “is” something. It softens in the next stanza; “is” turns to “would mean,” and the only thing meant is “falling.” The title of the poem is sarcasm, but it took between 10-15 words to see anger abate a bit, turn into something else.

That abating is a recognition of self. The third stanza gives us a conclusion of sorts. The three words of the first line parallel the three of the second. “The source of all repair” is a grounding. “The” makes way for “all,” and a “source” does not just generate a new being, wholly separate from the one hurt. What are the world’s secrets? Whatever enables it to keep on going, with only temporary materials, and somehow respond and be shaped by what seem to be stronger – maybe even truthful – pains.

Emily Dickinson, “A face devoid of love or grace” (1711)

dickinson, poetry

With thanks to Temperance Dewar & Margaret Mahoney

A face devoid of love or grace (1711)
Emily Dickinson

A face devoid of love or grace,
A hateful, hard, successful face,
A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances —
First time together thrown.

Comment:

The toughest thing to do in discussing a work of art is articulate the problem it introduces and its relevance. When I first read this poem, I thought it was an elaborate way of saying the speaker wanted to throw a stone at someone’s face.

That is, in essence, the drama of the poem. But it is a bit more complicated than that. “A face devoid of love or grace, / A hateful, hard, successful face” – this is all the speaker’s imagination. Nowhere is any particular physical feature mentioned. More importantly, the whole image depends on a rather curious thesis. Devoid of love or grace? Stoking the fire of one’s own hate? That yields hardness and success.

It looks like the speaker is imagining a face for a particular purpose. The face she wants to throw a stone at is most likely her own. The second part of the poem warrants close attention:

A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances —
First time together thrown.

A stone feels “thoroughly at ease” with the face imagined. In fact, it’s like they were “old acquaintances,” those thrown together who realized how similar their souls were. A friendship might be forged between hate and anger! The drama of the poem, in my view: the speaker is putting on what she thinks is a hateful face to achieve something. She is not entirely comfortable with herself doing this.

But why is it relevant? The drama of the poem can only suggest the larger issue. Margaret made some suggestions that got me thinking if the speaker is trying to get herself to break up with someone. Small faults have to be exaggerated even in more reasonable break ups. While there doesn’t have to be hatred, the whole process is hateful. I think that’s the correct line of thought, but the problem is more general. In life, we have to do hateful, cold things against others. Those things don’t have a “love” or “grace” as regards others, but do have a logic and even a kinship of their own. It’s like there’s a set of rules we work ardently to deny, but at times they assert their necessity, and we wonder what we’ve become. The irony is “first time together thrown:” the speaker knows too much for that to be true.

Emily Dickinson, “A lane of Yellow led the eye” (1650)

dickinson, poetry

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Emily Dickinson

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know —

Comment:

For the wanderer, time passed. The day’s yellow became the purple of the wood. Even as one who would rather see for himself – know through experience – there was the distance of seeing and an anticipation. The “soft inhabitants” to be are the darkness of night. Somehow sleep and death connect; that much he knew. But how sleep’s “soft inhabitants,” those who are and will be, relate to death and nothingness – well.

The only hint of the question’s power: the soft inhabitants surpass solitude. This is mysterious, as it unites sleep and death in a whole beyond one’s perception. It makes no sense to talk about a producer of images (sleep) or not-being as the whole. The wanderer recognized what we slowly realize, that the “solitude” surpassed is his own. That sleep and death are an incomprehensible whole is exactly the problem.

He moved away from himself to try and view it, and perhaps himself, better. But the natural world in the face of a dying light is powerless. Every song or shriek of a bird seemed to be absorbed by silence. A flower’s growth and display meant nothing as the sun grew dimmer. One thing stood out for him as he reflected, “the low summer of the West.” Summer can be associated with intense passion, and perhaps none is more intense than that which would lead one to link sleep and death. I’m doing a close read of Macbeth with a friend; it is stunning how many times various characters muse on sleep, death, and the state of their ambition.

Whether bird or flower were explicitly contradicted by day’s end is “impossible to know.” The wanderer’s passion set up the identification of sleep and death. He wanted to know how day’s end might reflect the end of himself and perhaps of all things. But knowledge doesn’t work that way; it does not necessarily come from what’s logical, i.e. that an end in time can inform one’s end or the end of time itself. The eye saw in “Yellow,” “Purple,” then soft inhabitants. It saw in color more than form, metaphor more than fact. The wanderer cannot get a certain knowledge from his sight, but then again, the fundamental issue is not knowledge.

Hannah Stephenson, “Fever”

poetry

Fever (from The Storialist)
Hannah Stephenson

Fever

I have set myself adrift on a river.
I have built the river.

Because I have not slept
I think it is raining
from the upper sky to the middle sky

but never reaching me.

If the self were
symptom,

an inner tube inflated,

where is the mouth
that let the rubber nozzle
drink from its breath.

I wrench something from the ground
but say
look what the world is bringing to me.

Comment:

Hannah Stephenson’s website is composed of “poems inspired by images.” The work she calls “Fever” was originally titled “Good Odds.” I think I understand the visual joke that inspired the artist’s own title. You’ll notice that most sets of shapes in the artwork have a counterpart elsewhere in the work. The triangle that reminds of beams of light at the right corresponds with a small triangle at the center; it looks like there are rays with rounded ends at the upper center and the bottom left that radiate from a central point. It feels like the piece is a sly comment on expectations. If your eyes start at one part, you find something similar later, but it is reduced, fragmented, or enlarged. Of course, one does not know exactly what happened from one shape to the next; the whole is more jumbled than continuous.

Onto the poem. Stephenson sees the art as fevered. “I have set myself adrift on a river. / I have built the river” – if you build, build carefully, end up with a jumble: well, you’re adrift.

At first, building is the problem. It requires every bit of one’s focus (“I have not slept”) and a view of what is completed from above or below (seeing the rain as entirely beyond one). Unfortunately, you’re the one building; nothing’s been fully formed yet. So what does this mean for self-construction? It’s like knowing you’re a river but only seeing the water as rain, knowing it in its partiality and at a distance. You’re doing and making but never growing.

“If the self were symptom:” the speaker tries to change the problem and fails. However, she does make a certain progress. The poem before “if the self were symptom” shows “building” to have a peculiar strength. It unifies cause and effect; the building results in a fevered, fragmented self, but it is still a self. Isolating the self – calling it a symptom – means trying to find another who caused it, another sort of “self.” This is, on its face, a failure. It’s like saying there’s another person within us who’s responsible for free will.

One can attempt recourse to the Other as the breathy cause of an inflated tube, but the progress of this part of the poem is its focus on the counterfactual. We look at the self as a symptom and a cause. Hence, the image of the speaker floating upon the self. She is the river and upon the river. There is no building, but floating. The river is built, and she’s looking at a self.

Can this work? Is the fever broken?

I wrench something from the ground
but say
look what the world is bringing to me.

This last stanza gives us a human being who is not stranded, not floating, but grounded. Complete enough to “wrench something from the ground.” We’re back at the beginning, it seems: didn’t she build a river? Didn’t this lead before to getting divorced from it, lost upon it?

This time, she speaks and marks the action. She doesn’t just expect her building and floating to give visible, accessible testament. The wrenching and the speaking are at a remove from a unity of action and self. They are not the same as the inflating or the floating, either: the self is not a symptom. It is a cause, but a peculiar one. If you emphasize your agency, you exaggerate not just your power but also your understanding of yourself. To say “look what the world is bringing to me” as opposed to “I wrench” is to see yourself as part of a process and see that process as recognizing you. This understanding may also fail. But this poem was about beginnings, and this approach seems a surer bet.

Too Old for Romance

writing

Like seeing sunlight
strike a Greek temple
at a distance, at an angle.
Light and shadow
on and between blank pillars,
the shriek of an eagle
somewhere.

You sparkled in that
evening dress,
held yourself high.
I kept falling
from one stanza
to the next.
Bathing Venus’ modesty,
the jazz pianist’s next phrase,
the lion and the lamb.

Then weeks, months.
I never saw you.
The buzz of a fly on the wall
always broke what was good.
Others came and went,
and I only saw afterward.
When in the supermarket
you answered hello,
when you nearly blushed,
the day and stars were
too grand.
The old dreams are gone,
but I wonder if they’re yours
as well as mine.

Hendrick ter Brugghen, “The Adoration of the Magi” (1619)

media, , ,
Hendrick ter Brugghen, "The Adoration of the Magi" (1619)

Hendrick ter Brugghen, “The Adoration of the Magi” (1619)

If you would like to see this in more detail, this link is very helpful.

The people in the painting gaze in three different ways: looking down, looking away, looking toward. Our attention is focused, like Joseph’s, on the Magi and their age. His eyes are toward, the only person really engaging the persons of the Magi. He, like us, has something in common with them. The white folds of their garments and turbans remind one of sagging flesh. They wear their age, like Joseph. They have come to see new life. The old one kneeling intently stares at the child, trying desperately to understand what he has journeyed for.

Christ does not look back at him, but his wrinkly flesh mirrors their concern. Ter Brugghen understands why Christ in icons was depicted a homunculus – he is the Son of Man, fully Man. He readies himself for the sacrifice in accepting the gifts. The wonder of the Magi is not satisfied; no one wants to see new life end or begin in tragedy.

Still, the bright colors and sunlight of this painting do not exist for irony’s sake. This is a majestic painting, and Christ is not the only one who understands us. Mary beams and focuses on her child. In loving Him, she sees humanity. I wonder if the silver and gold of the canisters is meant to contrast with her. She stands out, perhaps to show that God’s love for man can become man’s love for each other.

Jane Kenyon, “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer”

poetry

Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer (from The Oregonian)
Jane Kenyon

We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done — the unpacking, the mail
and papers; the grass needed mowing …
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass:
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

Comment:

This is a love poem, sure, but I wonder what exactly to do with its overtones of sensuality and indulgence. Is the couple coming back from obligation or vacation?

Their car causes gravel to fly up “like sparks from a fire.” It sounds sensual, but it is also the everyday, the mundane, exaggerated. Kenyon’s joke: gravel like sparks is more exciting to think about than unpacking or tending to the mail or lawn. The reluctance to get out of the car is in both body and mind. Why did the speaker notice the engine tick?

Either way, released from obligation or vacation, to confront the everyday is to wonder why all over again. There’s a really funny idea at play here. One goes from one indulgence in the case of vacation straight into another. And it feels justified. Kenyon brings us to a pear tree, the famous image of St. Augustine’s crimes and guilt. Here, the fruit on it looks good to eat and is easy to take. The couple in action recreates the Fall, stepping away from their domicile and its maintenance, but is grateful. Maybe “indulgence” is the wrong word. Maybe it’s that we can seamlessly move from times we enjoy to the people we love that is important, that we can take pleasure and it is far from wrong, far from neglectful.

David Baker, “Heaven”

poetry

Heaven (from The Atlantic)
David Baker

All afternoon the sprinkler ticks and sprays,
ticks and sprays in lazy rounds, trailing
a feather of mist. When I turn it off,
the cicadas keep up their own dry rain,
passing on high from limb to limb.
I don’t know what has shocked me more,
that you are gone, that I am still here,
that there is music after the end.

Comment:

To keep loving someone, to know you will keep loving someone is small solace immediately after their loss. But eventually it becomes the everyday: you know you remember.

We make machines that tick and release in rhythm, over and over. The sprinkler creates the mist with its streams. Every subsequent stream rises, but only follows the mist of what was before. An upward reaching is done separately and together, both at once.

One might say the machines we make mirror wistful longings more than anything actually in nature. Fair enough. There are insects that release tick-like noises in rhythm. Their clatter communicates to human ears below signs of life, but it also communicates directly to other cicadas in the trees.

“Music after the end” – only rhythms and silences framed with hope. It is quietly beautiful, to know you’ve been given something you will never give up. The hope of following one’s greatest love in that love is made good, simply by persevering. What we needed to know – what they can tell us – is that for all our failings and losses, we still can give and receive.