Number 6: Adrienne Rich "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

--Adrienne Rich

Hap Notes: Adrienne Rich (born 1929) has had a life that both reflects and has influenced the 20th century in a variety of ways. She's gone from gifted scholar to wife to mother to political activist to divorcee' to more activism to lesbian to even more activism to venerated poet in the course of her life so far. She lives in Northern California somewhere and she still writes. Some of her essays from the 90s are, to me, some of her finest work.

This poem is from her first book, A Change of World, which was selected by W.H. Auden in 1951 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She was in her early 20s when she wrote it. Critics often see reverberations in this poem of what she was later to do in life. It's easy to hear the rumblings of that, now, though, since we know her history and ours. I believe it's possibly one of her most famous poems.

One's heart aches for Aunt Jennifer, doesn't it? Here's a woman, using the traditional feminine art of needlepoint or embroidery, stitching a panel of harmless men and sleek tigers. Her hands are fluttering and terrified, more than likely from fear and the dull stresses of her life and Uncle, whose wedding band weighs heavily on her hand. If you wear a wedding band, you know that you don't even think of its weight much, it becomes part of you. Not Aunt Jennifer- it is part of the "ordeals she was mastered by."

Many analysts say her stitched tigers are males and that this makes it a poem of hopelessness because she's still sewing male domination in a male dominated role. I think this is hogwash. Why can't Aunt Jennifer want to be a tiger herself, pulling the thread with that difficult needle made from a tusk of a bull elephant, creating a vibrant coat-of-arms for herself, if, even in her own imagination? Does a tiger have to have a sex to be ferocious, sleek and frightening? If you came across a female tiger do you think she's any the less wild or assertive? Those pacing tigers who fear no men, why can't they be female? And if you don't think they can be female and be chivalrous, now who's being dominated by men? Look up the word "denizen" and read all the definitions. Just throwin' this intepretation out there for some air.

Anyhow, my ranting aside, if she isn't fantasizing about being a tiger (which is something I would do, so I'm projecting) then she is stitching males who are "chivalrous" and "unafraid." One doesn't suppose Uncle to be either of those things. The ivory needle is probably the easiest one to pull, and yet she has trouble with it. Aunt Jennifer is still "ringed" (and embroidery has a ring, too, doesn't it?) even in death, with her ordeals. So, I suppose the interpretation is that the males (tigers) are still in charge, prancing away on the needlepoint panel. And she's trapped in the rings.

I like to think of it in a different way- that her subverted fantasized defiance lives on in her art. And that somebody like you or me or the poet, sees it and won't let it happen any more. Our hearts beat with hers a little as we think on her life. Just as all poets thoughts live on in their poems.

So my interpretation of the poem is a little outside the norm, I guess. Don't use my interpretation if you are writing a term paper. Just warning you. You may see the poem differently. Either way you look at it, it's a fine poem.

Every time I go out on a limb with an interpretation I am reminded of a graduate class I took on Satire. We were reading Jean Genet's The Balcony and none of the students wanted to make a comment on it for fear of being wrong. I, on the other hand, have no fear of stupidity having so much of it as I do, so I stood up and gave my half-baked theory on the play which ran something along the lines of 'the characters are just trapped by their own perceptions of things'. The professor looked at me and said "You are 100% WRONG." I still think the characters in the play are goofs, one and all. And I am comfortable in my wrongness. So it is with this poem, also. Feel happily free to disagree with me.

Here's a great Rich quote (and they are legion): "The woman I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born. "

One more: "Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. "

You can find more Adrienne Rich poetry here:www.americanpoems.com/poets/adrienne_rich

Number 5: Kenneth Koch "To The Roman Forum"

TO THE ROMAN FORUM

After my daughter Katherine was born
I was terribly excited
I think I would have been measured at the twenty-five-espresso mark
We—Janice, now Katherine, and I—were in Rome
(Janice gave birth at the international hospital on top of Trastevere)
I went down and sat and looked at the ruins of you
I gazed at them, gleaming in the half-night
And thought, Oh my, My God, My goodness, a child, a wife.
While I was sitting there, a friend, a sculptor, came by
I just had a baby, I said. I mean Janice did. I'm—
I thought I'd look at some very old great things
To match up with this new one. Oh, Adya said,
I guess you'd like to be alone, then. Congratulations. Goodnight.
Thank you. Goodnight, I said. Adya departed.
Next day I saw Janice and Katherine.
Here they are again and have nothing to do with you
A pure force swept through me another time
I am here, they are here, this has happened.
It is happening now, it happened then.

- Kenneth Koch

Hap Notes: Well, first of all, when you buy a volume of Kenneth Koch's (1925-2002) poems and you open it up and start reading, you may feel as though you've been tossed into an ocean full of LSD-laced Kool-Aid and Pop Rocks. He's so effusive and spontaneous and joyous and thoughtful and it all goes to your head in a dizzying rush. So I've selected an a much shorter poem than is typical of his work.

Koch (pronounced "coke" you may be relieved to know) is part of a loose conglomeration of poets known as the "New York School" of poetry which included Frank O'Hara and John Ashberry. I say, loose, because there's really not much that holds the "school" together save for a certain enthusiasm for life and the arts. They were really more crocheted together than knit. The group was familiar with lots of visual artists (Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan et al) partly thanks to O'Hara's work at Art News and the Museum of Modern Art. They're sort of the poets of abstract expressionism which, when you start really thinking about it, doesn't tell you a hell of a lot.

Koch's writing leaps and bounds with energy. He's everywhere at once, standing on a table shouting, sitting next to you on the couch whispering, up in the attic rummaging around, passing you a secret note under the table, down the street bleating out his joy and sorrows (mostly joy.) His emotions fly along the top of every poem.

Even in these few lines you can hear how energetically moved he is; living in Rome, having a child, meeting a friend, sitting in front of the Roman Forum; he feels like he's had 25 espressos, this rich life is happening now! To him! Remember that the poem is addressed to the oldest and most famous place in the world for people to congregate. He's writing an excited postcard to civilization past and present. In the midst of these ruins he's contemplating new life- not just for the child-- for him, his wife, the world. The baby has already become a part of "we."

His sculptor friend wisely sees that he needs to be alone. But Koch himself is never alone, the parade of life from the past to the future engulfs him as he writes his postcard. There's a tang in this poem of knowing that while he is the father and had something to do with the child (maybe a part of that "pure force") it was his wife who had the baby, they are also separate from him in the midst of his loving joy. And all the people who ever crossed the pavement at the forum got there the same way. There's a loving wonder in the poem that never fails to move me.

Koch was an enthusiastic teacher of poetry and his book Making Your Own Days is a tremendous help for understanding the pure pleasure of reading and writing poetry. His poetry is personal in that he often addresses people in his life but he wants to share it with the page and you. His joyous rantings are often difficult to absorb unless you just let the images flow into you and sort them out later. By the by, as wacky and madcap as he may seem when you read his work, don't forget that he had a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He taught literature there for forty some-odd years. He may seem like a crack-pot jack-in-the-box when you read his stream-of consciousness multi-hued rivers but he knew a ponderous lot about literature.

The best part about Koch, though, is that whatever your interpretation of a poem is, he'd be overjoyed that you saw anything at all. He was never sealed up about interpretation with a set of harsh disciplines with which to judge it. He is always saying yes, you may have a point, yes, I see that, yes you might have something there, yes. Yes.

You can find more of Koch's poems here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kenneth-koch

Here's what he says at the beginning of Making Your Own Days : "Poetry is often regarded as a mystery, and in some respects it is one. No one is quite sure where poetry comes from, no one is quite sure exactly what it is, and no one knows, really, how anyone is able to write it."

Number 4: John Updike "Thoughts While Driving Home"

Thoughts While Driving Home

Was I clever enough? Was I charming?

Did I make at least one good pun?

Was I disconcerting? Disarming?

Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?

Did I answer that girl with white shoulders

Correctly, or should I have said

(Engagingly), “Kierkegaard smolders,

But Eliot’s ashes are dead?”

And did I, while being a smarty,

Yet some wry reserve slyly keep,

So they murmured, when I’d left the party,

“He’s deep. He’s deep. He’s deep”?


Hap Notes: Since it's the weekend, I thought I'd bring you to a party or, at least, the drive home from one.

John Updike (1932-2009) needs no introduction to the literate. I love Updike's poetry and while I'm not a huge fan of his novels, reading the criticisms Harold Bloom and Gore Vidal heap upon his books always put me in the uncomfortable position of feeling defensive for someone I'm not so crazy about. His writing prowess is above reproach. I'm just not fond of his middle-class characters- they wouldn't like me either. You might be surprised to learn that he originally wanted to be an artist or a cartoonist. Updike was also a thoughtful literary critic.

The poem turns in on itself- it is amusingly clever and self conscious. It reeks of a highly literate social gathering in the 50s with cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. In the mind's eye men in suits and women in chic cocktail dresses and spiky heels are all making with the bon mots and hitting on each other surrounded by sleek Raymond Loewy furniture as they listen to a John Coltrane record- maybe "Blue Train." The insecurity that hits one after attending a party full of people you would like to impress is perfectly nailed and also, the amused silliness of wanting to do so. It makes you laugh and feel sheepish. By the way, don't try using that Kierkegaard line now to pick up chicks. Just sayin'. Unless you think they know this poem.

I dug this poem out of my battered and cranky copy of "The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures; Telephone Poles and Other Poems" that I bought with babysitting money when I was a sophomore in high school for 60¢ (the price is on the cover) at a bookstore in downtown St. Paul. I felt as sophisticated as that 50's party when I bought it. Which now strikes me as amusing and self-consciously effete. Which loops us right back to the poem.

One of my favorite short stories,"A&P," is by Updike. You can find it here: www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/

Heres a good Updike quote on aging: " Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency."

And another: "I recently read Vanity Fair at long last. Here I am, 70-odd years old, and I never read Vanity Fair! In a way that is the most enjoyable, when you put yourself to school with an old classic."

And one more: "I did write a lot of light verse, and even some verse that wasn't too light. Even I knew there was no living in being a poet, so fiction was the game."

Number 3: David McCord "This Is My Rock"

This is my rock
And here I run
To steal the secret of the sun.

This is my rock
And here come I
Before the night has swept the sky.

This is my rock
This is the place
I meet the evening face to face.

-David McCord




Hap notes: David Thompson Watson McCord (1897-1997) originally wanted to be a scientist and, as all lovers of poetry know, it's not that great a leap to go from physics and chemistry to poetry. He is known for writing what is often called "children's poetry" which one hopes does not belittle his reputation but it more than likely does and more's the pity.

He's got ump-skumpty-umps honorary degrees (read: 22) and even received Harvard's very first honorary degree in Humane Letters. Harvard should have named the Yard after him. He was a tireless and effective fundraiser for them as director of the Harvard College Fund. He edited many books of "children's" poetry, wrote poetry and essays and, after he retired from fundraising, taught advanced writing classes at Harvard.

He was born in New York but, as a child he lived for a long time with an uncle in Portland, Oregon, and I have always believed that's where the rock in the poem was.

This poem is so special to me I don't know that I can adequately verbalize it. I read it when I was around 8 years old and it kick-started my life-long love affair with poetry. (I read it in the classic Untermeyer collection "The Golden Treasury of Poetry.") The poem gave me that fizziness you feel in the blood that you get when a poem is really good. I still get it when I read it.

Also, I had a rock too- the one you stand on when you're a kid and see the extraordinary colors of a November sunset and you feel the cold wind brushing your face and you know that the world was made just for you and you were going to be lonely a lot of the time and that's okay because the sunset has filled you with a loving bravery.

Here's something else McCord wrote, "One of my teachers told me: 'Never let a day go by without looking at three beautiful things.' I try to do that and find it isn't difficult. The sky, in all its weathers is, for me, the first of these three things."

Here's a good McCord quote, too: " We have to learn that just to live is to acknowledge a kinship with poetry. There are many words for poetry, but the one important word for it is rhythm. The wind in the grass and the leaves of the trees and the flame that rises and falls-- or the waves on the shore, a bird's call, a thunder shower, or anything you care about in nature is full of rhythm. Even an earthquake, for that matter. That's all part of poetry."

Number 2: Gregory Corso "The Mad Yak"

The Mad Yak

I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his--
I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they'll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!



Hap Notes: Gregory Corso (1930-2001) had one of the most horrific childhoods of all time. Abandoned by his mother, ignored by his father, he was shuffled between aunts, uncles and foster homes and often incarcerated throughout his teens. He was terrified in jail. It's said that his first jail-mate when he was put into the notorious "Tombs" in New York, was a freaky psycho killer who stabbed his wife to death with a screwdriver. Corso was 13 at the time. He was, what we now call, a "gifted" student. Now read this poem again and think on that.

Everybody probably knows about his "Beat Poet" street cred. He knew all the guys my generation has come to venerate (Ginsberg, Keroac, Burroughs) and one of the many reasons I love Corso is because he was a great reader of classic Greek and Roman literature (which he started reading in jail) and he adored Keats and Shelley. He wasn't dabbling in poetry--he knew it dead to rights. (If you think this implies that I think a lot of the "beats" were just dabbling, you're a good reader.)

I taught this poem to "English as a Second Language" students years ago. The students were mostly Somalians and they brought up something to me that is so obvious I ignored it. The speaker in the poem is a female Yak. I always think of the "beats" as having a little too much testosterone for their own good. The poem is an interesting contrast, then, to his (probably) most famous work, "Marriage." The poem is especially poignant when you find out that Corso's mother hadn't so much abandoned him as been abused and forced out. Corso was told his mother was in Italy but years later he discovered that his whole motherless life she had been in New Jersey, unable to see him. He reunited with her as an adult and his life came full circle.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT in Austin has a bunch of Corso's papers. One of the things listed in the collection is "123 ink, crayon, and watercolor images created by Corso. A number of the pictures are in two sketchbooks and the subjects of the works include self portraits, landscapes, human figures, nature, animals, and street scenes." They also have letters written to him by Ginsburg and Ferlinghetti. Wish I had half of Corso's talent. I refer you to Corso's poem "I Held a Shelley Manuscript."

When he died in Minneapolis in 2001, hundreds of people sent money for his funeral. Because, of course, he didn't have any. We won't pause too long on why poets die poor. So this Aeneas, this Homer, of our age was sent to rest by Shelley in Rome. It's a nice story-- and it isn't. I refer you back to the "Mad Yak." How many of us use his work like buttons on our own lives? How many of us tie our shoes with Corso laces? Just askin'. And yet, admittedly, it's good to have some function, isn't it?

Here's one more Corso button. He describes his work-- "...It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within."

You can find more Corso here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gregory-corso

Number 1: Amy Lowell "Falling Snow"

Falling Snow

The snow whispers around me
And my wooden clogs
Leave holes behind me in the snow.
But no one will pass this way
Seeking my footsteps,
And when the temple bell rings again
They will be covered and gone.

- Amy Lowell


Hap Notes:
Lowell (1874-1925) isn't usually known for her compression. But I start off this blog with her for several reasons. For one thing I think she's a tad under-rated, possibly because her work is sometimes a bit florid (she called herself an "imagist".)
For another thing I detest the way scraggly old Ezra Pound called her a "Hippopoetess." It's too clever by half and unworthy of a good man which I'm not always sure Pound was, anyhow. Good poet, yes. Man? Not sure. She had some sort of glandular disorder and I find Pound's joke akin to calling a mentally challenged person a "retard" i.e. juvenile. She was from the ultra-rich Bostonian Lowells and was related to James Russell Lowell (and the poet Robert Lowell, who came later, was also related to them both.)
Contemporary collegiate Women's Studies make much of her more-than-likely lesbian relationship with Ada Dwyer Russell. Anything that gets people to reconsider her work is a good thing, I think. I've always been glad she had somebody to love no matter who it was.
She was eccentric, wore suits, smoked little cigars and worked late into the night. Louis Untermeyer said of her work that " To compensate for the lack of inner warmth, Miss Lowell feverishly agitates all she touches; nothing remains quiescent." She's very sensually descriptive.
She was a proponent of free verse. Many critics carped about her chilled emotions but none of them criticized her descriptive powers. Quite frankly, I think much of the coolness in her emotions is due to her upper-class New England upbringing. One doesn't usually expect them to be fireballs of expressed perfervid emotions, especially women at the turn of the century.
I read her "Patterns" when I was 15 and it's always meant something to me, even as I have aged past the point of adolescent love. I've always liked the passion of "Venetian Glass," and I like "The Starling," too.
The poem selected illustrates that she knew who she was; a monk serving at the temple of poetry.

Here's a great Amy Lowell quote: "Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness." Everyone should go out once in a while and drench themselves in the lonliness of the moonlight.

Here's a link to more Lowell: www.americanpoems.com/poets/amylowell/venus.shtml