A Good Chord on a Bad Piano

The fissures in the studio grow large.
Transplantings from the Rivoli, no doubt.
Such latter-day disfigurements leave out
All mention of those older scars that merge
On any riddled surfaces about.

Disgusting to be sure. On days like these,
A good chord on a bad piano serves
As well as shimmering harp-runs for the nerves.
F minor, with the added sixth. The keys
Are like old yellow teeth; the pedal swerves;

The treble wires vibrate, break, and bend;
The padded mallets fly apart.
Both instrument and room have made a start.
Piano and scene are double to the end,
Like all the smashed-up baggage of the heart.

“I try so hard to be just the way I am
But everybody want’s you to be just like them
They say ‘Sing while you slave,’ but I just get bored
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”

I always hear the line as ’sing while you SING’ not ’sing while you SLAVE’. I defer to the people who write these things down; my hearing’s not so good and I always hear what I want to hear anyway. Singing and Slaving might go hand in hand, but they aren’t the same thing, despite what many say. The whole point of art is to create something essential and individual. All art requires rule, but the first calling of an artist is to create his or her own rules and defy convention. I am not saying convention plays no part in the game, but its part is subordinate. Convention says Dylan has a bad voice. Dylan has a great voice.

When he wrote this song he was saying a lot of things, as he always does. Mostly he was saying he would write and sing songs he wanted to write and sing. He didn’t write to please any particular crowd or to fulfill others’ expectations. Dylan writes and sings because he feels compelled to and besides, he can’t do anything else. In the Scorsese documentary he is quoted as saying that he got quite lucky. They opened the door a crack and let him in and once he was there they couldn’t get rid of him. They being the ‘individuals’ of the record industry. All but one of whom said he couldn’t sing. John  Hammond’s folly.

Maggie’s Farm

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
Well, I wake in the morning,
Fold my hands and pray for rain.
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane.
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.
Well, he hands you a nickel,
He hands you a dime,
He asks you with a grin
If you’re havin’ a good time,
Then he fines you every time you slam the door.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.
Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face just for kicks.
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks.
The National Guard stands around his door.
Ah, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more.
Well, she talks to all the servants
About man and God and law.
Everybody says
She’s the brains behind pa.
She’s sixty-eight, but she says she’s fifty-four.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more.

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

A Stick of Incense

Whence did all that fury come,
From empty tomb or Virgin womb?
St Joseph thought the world would melt
But liked the way his finger smelt.

Le Ventre de Ma Mere: Blaise Cendrars

My Mother’s Belly

It was my first residence

It was quite round

Often I imagine

What I must have been like…

My feet on your heart mama

My knees tight against your liver

My hand grasping the canal

That ended at your belly

My back twisted into a spiral

My ears filled my eyes empty

Tightly curled up

My head almost out of your body

My skull at your cervix

I delighted in your health

In the warmth of your blood

In papa’s embraces

Often a mongrel fire

Electrified my darkness

A shock to my skull relaxed me

And I kicked against your heart

The big muscle of your vagina

Tightened fiercely

Sadly I gave in

And you flooded me with your blood

My forehead is still dented

From my father’s thrusts

Why must one let himself be thus

Half-strangled?

If I could have opened my mouth

I would have bitten you

If I could have spoken then

I would have said:

Shit, I don’t want to live!

-Blaise Cendrars

In many ways Shelley is the most difficult of the Romantic poets. Blake also wrote long difficult works of personal mythology, is apocalyptic in sensibility and can be read as a weird sort of Platonist. Both poets are capable of sustained surreal and grotesque imagery and both were exercised by the similar manias. But Blake comes from the world of working class London and his education is far less formal than Shelley’s, and far more eccentric. For all that Blake is also the more systematic thinker. Blake built a system, by necessity, and he employed bold poetic outlines as he did pictorial ones. Reading Shelley I always feel like I’m reading a poet who is taking a stab afresh with each poem at probing the abyss or at naming the unnameable. Blake is paradoxical but absolutely certain of reality. Shelley is riven with doubt, and every time he raids the inarticulate it is his own skepticism he runs up against. He goes till he can go no longer, propelled by an impulse towards the All that takes him so far that he nearly dies. His absolute can be different things though, as the occasion demands. It might be political liberty, or it might be a woman. Another difference with Blake is the mellifluous music of Shelley’s rhymes and the sensuous feel of his line, as well as the counter current in some poems of a pile-up of stressed syllables. “An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king…” Blake is archaic and rough, as well as bold. His Old Testament roots take you back to the 17^th Century, to Bunyan as well as Milton, but his revival of the fourteener goes deeper into the 16^th century, and eventually merges
with an English biblical tradition, which the English invented for themselves and which gives the illusion of an English antiquity. Part of that is the myth of Joseph of Arimathea bringing the Holy Grail to England after the crucifixion, or of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel landing there, or of the Irish Bardic tradition, which dates itself to a diaspora following the fall of the Tower of Babel. Shelley, under the same influences of Milton and Spenser, is more Greek, to Blake’s Hebrew. That said, The Triumph of Life is more in the biblical strain than his other works. He refers to the Charioteer at one point as having four faces, which suggests to me Ezekial’s Chariot.

I have not read all of Shelley’s poems, not even all of his best work, so my view of him is necessarily partial. Yet I have loved few works of poetry more than Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion or Adonais. And then there is that magnificent late work, The Triumph of Life. This was a different sort of poem for Shelley, one in which he turns from Milton to Dante, and signals thereby the future shift of the Modernists. Eliot and Pound may not have liked him, but Browning, Yeats, Stevens and Crane are unimaginable without him.

The Triumph of Life is a dream vision written in terza rima. In it Shelley sees a procession of the dead, led by a figure in a chariot. His guide is Rousseau. He never finished the poem, it ends in mid-line. I will only quote from the beginning, because that is all I have time to transcribe. I begin the quote after the starting matter, when Shelley falls into a swevene or swoon, as with other dream visions, Piers Plowman, The Temple of Glas, The House of Fame, The Divine Comedy, The Four Zoas, etc, when “…a vision on my brain was rolled.”

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay
This was the tenour of my waking dream:
Methought I sate beside a public way

Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, yet so

Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer’s bier–
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,
Some flying from the thing they feared and some
Seeking the object of another’s fear,

And others with steps towards the tomb
Pored on thee trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom

Of their own shadow walked, and called it death…
And some fled from it as it were a ghost,
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.

But more, with motions of each other crossed,
Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw
Of birds within the noonday ether lost,

Upon that path where flowers never grew;
And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst
Heard not the fountains whose melodious dew

Out of their mossy cells forever burst,
Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told
Of grassy paths, and wood lawns interspersed

With overarching elms and caverns cold,
And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old…

And as I gazed, methought that in the way
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June
When the south wind shakes the extinguished day—

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon
But icy cold, obscured the blinding light
The sun as he the stars. Like the young moon

When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might

Doth, as a herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of her dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant’s chair,–

So came a chariot on the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendor, and a Shape
So sate within as one whom years deform

Beneath a dusky hood and double cape
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,
And o’er what seemed the head, a cloud like crape

Was bent, a dun and faint etherial gloom
Tempering the light, upon the chariot’s beam
A Janus-visaged shadow did assume

The guidance of that wonder winged team.
The shapes which drew it in thick lightnings
Were lost: I heard alone on the air’s soft stream

The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that charioteer
Had their eyes banded…little profit bring

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,
Nor then avail the beams that quenched the Sun,
Or that these banded eyes could pierce the sphere

Of all that is, or has been, or will be done.
So ill was the car guided, but it passed
With solemn speed majestically on…

The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw like clouds upon the thunder-blast

The million with fierce song and maniac dance
Raging around; such seemed the jubilee
As when to meet some conqueror’s advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate-house and prison and theatre,
When Freedom left those who upon the free

Had bound a yoke which soon they stopped to bear.
Nor wanted here the true similitude
Of a triumphal pageant, for where’er

The chariot rolled a captive multitude
Was driven; all those who had grown old in power
Or misery, all who have their age subdued,

By action or by suffering, and whose hour
Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,
So that the trunk survived by fruit and flower;

All those whose fame or infamy must grow
Till that great winter lay the form and name
Of their green earth with them forever low;

All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touched the living world with living flame

Fled back like eagle to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems, till the last one

Were there; for they of Athens and Jerusalem
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen,
Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them

Or fled before…Now swift, fierce and obscene
The wild dance maddens in the van, and those
Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green,

Outspeed the chariot without repose
Mixed with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music…Wilder as it grows,

They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed, and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure

Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,
Throw back their heads and loose their streaming heair,
And in their dance round her who dims the Sun

Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now
Bending within each other’s atmosphere

Kindle invisibly; and as they glow,
Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to their bright destruction come and go,

Till—like two clouds into one vale impelled
That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle
And die in rain, the fiery band which held

Their natures, snaps…ere the shock ceases to tingle
One falls and then another in the path
Senseless, nor is the desolations single,

Yet ere I can say where, the chariot hath
Passed over them; nor other trace I find
But as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath

Is spent upon the shore.

Francoise Villon
The testament 1014-1021
Gallway Kinnell, trans.

Herrick is a poet I have loved since my early twenties, but I’m not sure how I found him. Perhaps in a Norton Anthology? Or Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading? Who knows. He’s often crossed with his emotional opposite, austere old Herbert. I admire Herbert as a poet, but I love Herrick. Herrick is delightfully perverse. It is easy to miss his genuine artfulness. His rhymes, like his poems, are perfectly simple. Every biographicall notice I have read about him insists that he was a quiet country parson and that his poems are art, not autobiography. There is no real Julia unlacing herself, no Julia whose nipples are like strawberries drowned in cream.

His dates put him at the tail-end of the great efflorescence of English letters initiated by Sydney and Spenser. His poems are indeed diverse, and I accept that they are Roman inspired epigrammes and lyrics about a varietie of country folk, many of whom he would have known. But still, his obsessions can’t possibly be out of books. He wants to kiss that instep. He wants to continue up to her knee. If Donne would have gone farther so be it, Herrick took what he could get. I suppose it is an argument against the reality of his nymphs when one considers what an actual woman smells like unlacing herself (and I mean this as no insult! I can think of no more glorious aroma….) until you see the list of odours released into the air by her fragrant skin: Musks and Ambers. Musk is the secretion of the anal gland of the civet cat. I realize Herrick would be horrified at the comparison of his nymph Julia to the anal gland of a civet cat, but he wrote the words. And I suppose if we, er, ahem, I, were to update these poems it might prove necessary to entitle one, Upon Julia’s Anal Gland, or at least her Bartholin Gland, weeping pearls of perfume. Well, I can see this has gone on altogether too long. As a side bar I want to mention that I read a Herrick poem (for another post) at my wedding.

Love Perfumes All Parts

If I kisse Anthea’s brest,
There I smell the Phenix nest:
If her lip, the most sincere
Altar of Incense, I smell there.
Hands, and thighs, and legs, are all
Richly Aromaticall.
Goddesse Isis cann’t transfer
Musks and Ambers more from her:
Nor can Juno sweeter be,
When she lyes with Jove, then she.

The Shooe Tying

Anthea bid me tye her shooe;
I did; I kist the instep too:
And would have kist unto her knee,
Had not her Blush rebuked me.

Clothes Do But Cheat And Cousen Us

Away with silks, away with Lawn,
Ile have no Sceans, or Curtains drawn:
Give me my mistresse, as she is,
Drest in her nak’t simplicities:
For as my Heart. ene so mine Eye
Is wone with flesh, not Drapery.

Upon A Black Twist, Rounding Her Arm

I saw about her spotlesse wrist,
Of blackest silk, a curious twist;
Which, circumvolving gently, there
Enthrall’s her Arme as Prisoner.
Dark was the Jayle, but as if light
Had met t’engender with the night;
Or so, as Darknesse made a stay
To shew at once, both night and day.
One fancie more! but if there be
Such Freedome in Captivity;
I beg of Love, that ever I
May in like Chains of Darknesse lie.

Upon Julia’s Breasts

Display thy breasts, my Julia, there let me
Behold that circummortall purity:
Betweene whose glories, there my lips Ile lay,
Ravisht, in that faire Via Lactea.

Upon Julia’s Washing Her Self In The River

How fierce was I, when I did see
My Julia wash her self in thee!
So Lillies thorough Christall look:
So purest pebbles in the brook:
As in the river Julia did,
Halfe with a Lawne of water hid,
Into thy streames my self I threw,
And struggling there, I kist thee too;
And more had done (it is confest)
Had not thy waves forbad the rest.

Upon Julia’s Unlacing Herself

Tell, if thou canst, (and truly) whence doth come
This Camphor, Storax, Spiknard, Galbanum:
These Musks, these Ambers, and those other smells
(Sweet as the Vestrie of the Oracles.)
Ile tell thee; while my Julia did unlace
Her silken bodies, but a breathing space:
The passive Aire such odour then assum’d,
As when to Jove Great Juno goes perfum’d.
Whose pure-Immortall body doth transmit
A scent, that fills both Heaven and Earth with it.

These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, to Him poems, which I hear in Adam’s Curse, and When You Are Old (When you are old and grey and full of sleep…). He is as austere as Herbert, but in an unsavioured dark where even pagan monuments are mouldy and the stones of old cathedrals wiggle free and drop, crushing lovers with a godless, unrequited love.

REVULSION

Though I waste watches framing words to fetter
Some unknown spirit to mine in clasp and kiss,
Out of the night there looms a sense ‘twere better
To fail obtaining whom one fails to miss.

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one’s life were riven;
It cuts like contumely and keen ill-using
To cede what was superfluously given.

Let me then never feel the fateful thrilling
That devastates the love-worn wooer’s frame,
The hot ado of fevered hopes, the chilling
That agonizes disappointed aim!
So may I live no junctive law fulfilling,
And my heart’s table bear no woman’s name.
1866

SHE, TO HIM

I

When you shall see me in the toils of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;

When, in your being, heart concedes to mind,
And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so:

Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same—
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!—
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim
The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?

II

Perhaps, long hence, when I have passed away,
Some other’s feature, accent, thought like mine,
Will carry you back to what I used to say,
And bring some memory of your love’s decline.

Then you may pause awhile and think, “Poor Jade!”
And yield a sigh to me—as ample do,
Not as the tittle of a debt unpaid
To one who could resign her all to you—

And thus reflecting, you will never see
That your thin thought, in two small words conveyed,
Was no such fleeting phantom-thought to me,
But the Whole Life wherein my part was played;
And you amid its fitful masquerade
A thought, as I in your life seem to be!

III

I will be faithful to thee; aye, I will!
And death shall choose me with a wondering eye
That he did not discern and domicile
One his by right ever since that last Good-bye!

I have no care for friends, or kin, or prime
Of manhood who deal gently with me here;
Amid the happy people of my time
Who work their love’s fulfillment, I appear

Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere that canker came:
Despised by souls of Now, who would disjoint
The mind from memory, making Life all aim,

My old dexterities in witchery gone
And nothing left for love to look upon.

IV

This love puts all humanity to me;
I can but maledict her, pray her dead,
For giving love and getting love of thee—
Feeding a heart that else my own had fed!

How much I love I know not, life not known,
Save as one unit I would add love by;
But this I know, my being is but thine own—
Fused from its separateness by ecstasy.

And thus I grasp my amplitudes, of her
Ungrasped, though helped by nigh-regarding eyes;
Canst thou then hate me as an envier
Who see unrecked what I so dearly prize?
Believe me, Lost One, Love is lovelier
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise.
1866

Tim sent me this in February of 2008. I will miss him. He ‘tore through the iron gates of time’. My love to Zach, who lost a father. The rest of us lost a poet and a sort of human wolverine who refused to concede to disease or reality one quark more than they took by necessity. Every time he showed up in Ithaca, his bald chemo-head wrapped in a bandana, his eyes complicated by pain, I was stunned. ‘Still out walking, Congdon?’ Oh yes, and up for whatever he was up for. The last time it was smoking a joint in the parking lot before reading poems for the NOLA relief fund.

Kent. Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer
Edg. He is gone indeed.
Kent. The wonder is, he hath endured so long:
He but usurp’d his life.

Be well Tim. Wear out the rack of heaven.

concrete parachute (by Tim Congdon)

first time
I drove past the hospital
saw the start of a long cemetery.
it stretched out for blocks and blocks then
over a mile, just as deep
as long.
frederick douglas and susan b anthony and
a whole whole lot of others buried there.
but here, from the 8th floor
in the bone
marrow transplant unit
atop the medical center
I spend the days
on more drugs now than I ever was
even at the height
of the psychedelic
wars.

the doctor
gave me a 20% chance
shook my hand.
I asked him
with that big ass cemetery out there and
after a month or more of looking out at the stones
has anyone ever jumped?

this morning
a day after my first
infusion of stem cells
I walk the long corridors
past intensive care and surgery,
the family waiting room
to the end of the building that
looks out over the expanse of the cemetery.
through rain drops
held in place on the window
defying gravity
I take in the rows of graves
and before turning back for my room I
say out loud:

fuck
you.

While the red-stained mouths of machine guns ring
Across the infinite expanse of day;
While red or green, before their posturing king,
The massed battalions break and melt away;

And while a monstrous frenzy runs a course
that makes of a thousand men a smoking pile–
Poor fools!–dead, in summer, in the grass,
On Nature’s breast, who meant these men to smile;

There is a God, who smiles upon us through
The gleam of gold, the incense-laden air,
Who drowses in a cloud of murmured prayer,

And only wakes when weeping mothers bow
Themselves in anguish, wrapped in old black shawls–
And their last small coin into his coffer falls.

Arthur Rimbaud
Schmidt Translation