Number 30: Gerard Manley Hopkins "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord"

Thou art indeed just, Lord

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum;verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum properatur? etc.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavor end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build--but not I build; no, but strain,

Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.




--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hap Notes: Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest. He converted to Catholicism from the Anglican church while he was a student at Balliol College, Oxford. He was the oldest in a talented family of nine children. There is always talk (whenever anyone is a Catholic priest) of suppressed homosexuality in a few of his poems but I find the talk mostly hearsay (and tiresome, frankly)- and it matters very little since Hopkins was totally disciplined within his faith. His love of the God in three persons reminds me very much of the Sufi Dervish poet Rumi's love of the divine. Hopkins loved God and the natural world created by God with a profound and ecstatic depth.

Hopkins had very few (a couple, maybe) poems published in his lifetime. He was friends with the poet Robert Bridges (they met in college) and it was Bridges who published the poems after Hopkins' death. Hopkins wrote his poems with verve in silence, feeling that publishing them would be an even bigger burden to his vows of humility than writing them was. Thank God he kept writing them!

But I don't want to talk too much about his life since it's his poetry that is so extraordinary. He's possibly my favorite poet and his work is so extraordinary that still no contemporary poet can touch him for sheer use and sound of words and rhythms. It's a bit sad to start us out with Hopkins with one of the last poems he wrote before he died (he was only 45) but I think it's one of the easiest to understand with his "sprung rhythms" and "inscapes" as he called them. The rhythms are almost Welsh-like and the "inscapes" is a word Hopkins used to describe the inner spirit of a thing or place or incident.

The first verse of the above poem (replicated in the Latin in italics) is from the Bible: Jeremiah, 12:1 "Thou indeed, O Lord, art just, if I plead with thee, but yet I will speak what is just to thee: Why doth the way of the wicked prosper: why is it well with all them that transgress, and do wickedly? " Hopkins was a great scholar of Latin and wrote some poetry and translations with it. The speaker (in the poem and in Jeremiah) is obviously frustrated by what appears to be an unjust situation with "sinners" ways prospering.

Hopkins springs off of this and gives us examples, saying the "sots and thralls" of lust, alluding to drinking and sex, probably, but more than that. Anything that makes a person drunk and idle with lust, besotted with something and wanting it more than union with God and the universe. He says those besotted with lust for whatever accomplish their questionable goals more in their spare time than he, who spends every moment of the day in service to God.

Now he goes on to talk about the natural world around him that taunts him with its gorgeous productivity: the river banks, the "brakes" (an area of thickets or undergrowth) full of leaves and growth. Laced with "fretty" chervil (fretty as in fret-work or even as in the word fret-he loves to make descriptive words.) Chervil is an herb sort of like parsley (see picture above.)

It's the staggering of the words, when you read it aloud, that do a lot of the work. In the beginning, notice how the question he asks,"How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/Defeat, thwart me?"- it sounds thwarted, choked and stopped up, doesn't it? Then there's the way he stops the reader to say "look" or "how thick!" in the middle of a sentence. The beauty of the phrase "fresh winds shake them"- can you hear the airy breeze in the bushes there? How dull and thick the "sots and thralls of lust" sound! There's great beauty in his intricate and seemingly effortless rhyming (did you even notice it rhymed?) He shows us all these lush things growing and prospering with life, while he feels like "time's eunuch"- castrated from ever breeding anything with life in it. The almost sassy way he uses the word "sir." And then the humbled last line.

Who has ever mapped creative or spiritual frustration quite so well? He starts out a bit resentful, gives us examples, sees the luxuriant natural world, sees all around him building as he strains, then, humbly implores God for nourishment. Notice how he prefers the lush vegetation of a plant- his "roots."

I don't believe, in the hundreds of times that I've read this poem over the years, that I have ever not had a tear in my eye after reading it. Sometimes it's for me, sometimes it's for Hopkins, sometimes it's for the world but it's always there. Even now.

Here's a good Hopkins quote: "What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. Education is meant for the many, standards are for public use."

We will do much more Hopkins but I wanted to start out with an "easy" one. He's not hard to read but he is very original and, oddly enough, modern. You can find more Hopkins here: www.bartleby.com/122/index2.html

Number 29: Billy Collins "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice"

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice"

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.

-- Billy Collins


Hap Notes: Billy Collins (born 1941) has been called "America's Most Popular Poet," a title which mostly tells you that he sells more poetry than most poets and makes a decent living at it. Have you seen the YouTube video with the three-year-old kid reciting Collins' poem "Litany"? It's charming. And it illustrates a very important thing about Collins' work i.e. it's readable by a variety of age groups and most people have a grip on his work that is about as sophisticated as a three-year-old. I like Collins' poetry but you have to work very hard to see through it.

Yeah, I said it was easy to read, not easy to explicate.

In our example there are major things going on in this poem below the very charming and amusing surface. They're easy to miss because the poem lilts along, telling us this charming random thought process. It's a funny and clever random thought process that comes while chopping parsley (which has its mouse tail similarities-those stems, you see it? So who is really doing the chopping of tails here?) as he's listening to some jazz. Now, if you or I went into a shrink's office and told them this little "mouse tale" (pun intended) was your thought process they would nod, laugh (if they were pretty good shrinks), and start asking you a lot of uncomfortable questions about why you were concerned about fictional mice. It's often called "misplaced affection" and it usually means something else is bothering you.

Did you know, also, that the "mice" in the old English poem are actually a reference to three noblemen who were burnt at the stake by Henry VIII's daughter, Mary I (the "farmers wife")? Did you know that mice have one of the most sensitive olfactory systems in the animal kingdom, in other words, they smell where they are? Mice have very poor eyesight. They detect most things by feel, their whiskers and their sense of smell. When he asks "Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse to locate even one fellow mouse with vision let alone two other blind ones?" the answer is no, it would not. Now tell me what's going on in the poem.

Collins isn't an idiot. Just a general thought process about mice would have you wondering about their other senses. Before he published this poem he could have looked up all this information on the internet about mice- he's a modern guy. So what is the poet upset about? The "cynic" in him who goes to window (a popular place for people to go to hide their emotions-oddly enough) is really unhappy about what? Random cruelty? A failed relationship? The loss of some kind of sight- or maybe the loss of something else?

There's also a whole thread of "chops" and "cuts" in the jazz music, too. Just throwing it out there for you to think about. There are a lot of cuts in this poem, the question is, to whom?

I love the image that the mice have a "tiny darkness" in relationship to their sight in this poem, which, of course, is tiny to us- not them. And darkness is darkness- there's no size to it, is there? So what is the poet's "tiny" darkness? I love the sensory descriptions of the tails in the moist grass. And, yeah, music can make you introspective and sad, too, there is that. Aren't part of the lyrics to Blue Moon "you saw me standing alone?" There's some stuff to think about here and you can't brush it off without making Collins look like a dough-brain which, I'm fairly certain he is not.

Collins was Poet Laureate of the U.S. from 2001-2003 and he has taught Lehman College in the Bronx for more than 30 years. He's an award winning poet who won Poetry magazine's "Poet of the Year" in 1994. He had a best selling CD of his work "The Best Cigarette." He released the CD under a "Creative Commons" license which allows for free, non-commercial distribution.

Here's a good Collins quote: “I think more people should be reading it but maybe fewer people should be writing it, ... there's an abundance of unreadable poetry out there.”

You can find more Collins here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/billy-collins

Number 28: Charles Simic "Fork"

Fork

This strange thing must have crept

Right out of hell.

It resembles a bird’s foot

Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:

Its head which like your fist

Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

-- Charles Simic

Hap Notes: Charles Simic (born 1938) is one of the few poets whose poems you can read by the handful. If, that is, you can bear to hold a handful of the dark, spiky things in your hand. They will be glad to pierce your flesh if you hold too many of them. Well, sometimes just one will do it.

His childhood in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), was a nightmarish progression of moving from town to town to escape the constant bombing of of WWII. It is often said, in Simic biographical notes, that he wasn't a particularly good student when he was a child but I find this to be a strange thing to impart about any child who grew up around that kind of tension and grim reality. Name me a ten-year-old who could be a good student, watching his country literally go to pieces, hearing bits of terse frightened adult conversations, feeling fear and hunger. We broadcast public service announcements on the television/internet telling people that their kids can't study without a decent breakfast! His poetry is marked with the indelible scars of a scattered and shredded childhood landscape.

His poetry is intriguingly bleak with little patches of black humor. Have you ever seen Slavic or (former) Eastern block cartoons with their images of tenderness, grey cities and shockingly cruel events flickering through them? Now mix that with images of Marc Chagall's mythic, folkloric, surreal paintings, a couple of Francis Bacon paintings and throw in a Neil Gaiman book or two and you've got a sort of roadmap of Simic's imagery. It can be delightful in a shadowed grim way-which is a very strange thing to feel as you read a poem. Its charm, by the way, is mostly based on how much easier it is to read it than to live in the brain that wrote it.

Simic's style is not particularly conversational. It's more taut than that. In the above poem, look at the images of a bird that he gives us for a common fork. Aren't birds supposed to be lovely little creatures of the air? It's hard to get the image out of your head of your hand, attached to that fork, as a bald, beakless, mute creature stabbing for dinner. I suppose it's no coincidence that residents of hell are usually depicted with pitchforks, either. Cannibals eat their own kind, do they not? I'll let the rest of the poem drain you by itself.

Simic often writes about familiar common objects and it's interesting to contrast his fork with, say, Oldenburg's "Spoonbridge and Cherry" in the Minneapolis sculpture garden. Even Oldenburg commented that there was a reason he did not use a fork.

Simic's family came to America when he was 16. He served time in the army, got a degree, started getting his poetry published and has taught at the University of New Hampshire for many years. He's won lots of awards. Can't get away with the word "lots" huh? Okay, like the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award and McArthur Fellowships. He was Poet Laureate in the U.S. in 2007 (they call them "consultants" now- which always sounds entirely too much like politics or business but maybe that's just me.)

Simic's poetry is refreshingly easy to read on the surface but will eventually drag you down to the dimly-lit underworld barely hiding beneath the words.

Here's a good Simic quote: "When you start putting words on the page, an associative process takes over. And, all of a sudden, there are surprises. All of a sudden you say to yourself, ‘My God, how did this come into your head? Why is this on the page?’ I just simply go where it takes me."

Here's another: "Little said, much meant, is what poetry is all about."

You can find more Simic here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-simic

Number 27: Ogden Nash "Everybody Tells Me Everything"

Everybody Tells Me Everything

I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,
And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

-- Ogden Nash

Hap Notes: Ogden Nash (1902-1971) did not invent light verse but his distinctive style is often imitated and set the bar for any light versifier (or "worsifier" and Nash called himself). There are people who consider "light" verse to be easier to read and digest but the idea that light verse does not often have a serious intent at the core is to belittle the intelligence of the poet. Shakespeare said the gravest things are said in jest and I do believe that often applies to light verse. Yes, it's amusing and sometimes silly, but it's a rare person who can succeed in solely trying to funny because trying to be funny all the time often brings out incredibly cathartic and telling things about the writer's issues and personality.

We won't go into the philosophy of how humor is a form of aggression but it's certainly in there. Nash made suburban frustrations and concerns slightly rebellious. We could probably use somebody to do that for us now.

Nash often wrote short little rhyming epithets that people remember and he's very witty at that. He invents words to be amusing. You may remember his poem "The Jellyfish" which reads in entirety: "Who wants my Jellyfish?/ I'm not sellyfish." I find his titles to the poems to be particularly sharp and amusing. I'm sure you know the poem that goes "Candy /is Dandy/ But Liquor/ is quicker." It's called "Reflections on Ice-breaking." Other Nash titles include "Just Keep Quiet and Nobody Will Notice," and "So Does Everybody Else Only Not So Much," and "To a Small Boy Standing on My Shoes While I Am Wearing Them," and my particular favorite "Don't Cry, Darling, lt's Blood All Right." (See how the titles make you want to read the poem? There's a genius in that which should not be overlooked. Getting someone to stop and read something based on a title should not be underestimated.)

Nash is in no small way responsible for much of the kind of humor that has come to be identified with The New Yorker. He was also published and lauded in The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review (so sad it's not around anymore), Ladies Home Journal and Life magazine. He is often placed in the company of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and Robert Benchley all of whom wrote with sly comic intelligence. Nash made a living writing verse during the Great Depression. I'm assuming that people needed something cheery and less preachy. We could use that, now, too.

It's not a big shock to learn that he was, before he made a living from poetry, an advertising copywriter. In part of a Christmas poem entitled "I Remember Yule", he grumbles:

"What, five times a week at 8:15 P.M., do the herald angels sing?
That a small deposit now will buy you an option on a genuine diamond ring.
What is the message we receive with Good King Wenceslas?
That if we rush to the corner of Ninth and Main we can get that pink mink
housecoat very inexpensceslaus.
I know what came upon the midnight clear to our backward parents,
but what comes to us?
A choir imploring us to Come all ye faithful and steal a 1939 convertible
at psychoneurotic prices from Grinning Gus."

Once again, it's funny and clever but there are a few daggers in there. One should never confuse Nash's cleverness for mere comedy. Truly amusing stuff always makes you think.

When I was a kid, one of the things I looked forward to with great glee was the Family Circle magazine at Christmas time. They usually had an illustrated light verse poem and very often they were by Nash. "The Unpublished Adventures of Santa Claus" or "What's the Because of Santa Claus" were always a delight to read. Nash's longer poems often read like very sophisticated Dr. Seuss.

Nash lived in Baltimore and he was a fan of the Colts (when they were there) and he loved baseball. He often had poems appear in sports magazines. (You might want to read that last sentence again if the impact escaped you.)

In 2002 the U.S. Postal Service brought out a series of six stamps honoring Nash and a few of his poems. Oh, another interesting fact; he was directly related to the guy for which the city of Nashville, TN, is named.

Now, I'm not saying that Ogden Nash is a writer of totally intellectual and fabulous verse.
But I am saying that when it comes to reading something, poetry in particular, you could do considerably worse.

(That was my first and only imitation of his fun to imitate but hard to equal style.)

A couple of good Ogden Nash quips: "Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else."

"Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long."

You can find more Nash here: www.ogdennash.org/ogden_nash_poems.htm

Number 26: Karl Shapiro "Manhole Covers"

Manhole Covers

The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).
This rustproof artifact of my street,
Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,
Bitten at the edges,
Strong with its cryptic American,
Its dated beauty.


--Karl Shapiro

Hap Notes: Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) started out winning the Pulitzer Prize for his V-Letter and Other Poems in 1945 and ended up becoming a thorn in the side of the established aesthetics of poetry by not falling into line behind T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. When a group of poets got together in 1948 and hoped to give Ezra Pound the first Bollingen Prize- an award sponsored by the Library of Congress- in the hopes that Pound could be released from prison if he won an award, Shapiro, who was on the board for the prize, voted against it. It darkened his reputation for years.

Let me rewind just a bit. Pound was in prison for treason. He was a supporter of the Nazi Party while he lived in Italy during WWII. He called Hitler a "saint." He did propaganda radio broadcasts under the sponsorship of Mussolini. Pound wrote vile things about Jews (called them "Kikes" and that was the nicest thing he said), blamed them for everything bad in Europe and called Mussolini "the boss." Now, there's no doubt Pound was a few screwdrivers short of a tool kit and, as such, it's hard to determine how much of Pound's stupidity was just mental illness. He was not treated well in prison and that was a sad shame.

Shapiro, however, was a Jew. I cannot imagine having a conscience of any kind and wanting to award Pound anything in 1948. Poets who lined up behind Pound included T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, e.e. cummings, Allen Tate, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren and the writer Katherine Anne Porter. Shapiro was pretty much ignored after his "no" vote.“I was suddenly forced into a conscious decision to stand up and be counted as a Jew,” he said. The prize was awarded to Pound. It didn't make him any the less disturbed and he continued to be anti-semitic and also associated with people from the KKK. No kidding.

The Bollingen Prize, not surprisingly, was taken away from the Library of Congress after this and the prize has since that time been awarded by the Yale University Library. Shapiro actually won the Bollingen in 1969 along with John Berryman.

In 1959 Shapiro wrote an article in the New York Times Book Review saying that poetry was a "diseased art" and took aim at the Eliot/Pound "high Modernism" and "New Criticism" as one of the reasons why. This, at the time, was like saying the pope wears a funny hat and smells bad. His outspoken views ostracized him even more.

I love the poetry of most of the people who stood up for Pound and I love some of Pound's work, too. Let's face it The Wasteland would not be the dazzling poem it is if not for Pound's blue pencil. Pound was a brilliant editor.

However, I lean towards Shapiro because he had a hell of a lot of chutzpah. He was not a fan of Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore or William Butler Yeats and I am. However, poetry needed a good dowsing in cold water and Shapiro gave it a tub's worth. Unfortunately, this ended up marginalizing him even more, which is a pity because so many poets owe him so much, most notably Billy Collins, Nikiki Giovanni and even Kenneth Koch and Stanley Kunitz.

Shapiro found an appreciative academic home at the University of California in Davis. Regardless of his irreverence and ire at much of academia, the college gave him a long rope and he needed one. He was full of vinegar but there was honey in him, too, and he had a wonderful sense of humor.

For example, our poem "Manhole Cover," where he compares the iron manhole covers of a street to "medals struck by a savage khan." I think he's referring, since the list goes on more or less archeologically, to a Mongol leader of some type. ( Although it's worth noting that Kahn is the Germanized form of Cohen, as Kaplan is its Russian form and Copeland, too. A cohain (Cohen) is another form of Kohanim- a Jewish religious leader- Aaron was the first in the Old Testament.) I don't think that Shapiro is thinking this but, it's certainly possible.

It's both amusing and a little disconcerting to think of manhole covers as future artifacts in history, as remnants of our iron age. Shapiro had a love/hate thing with cars and wrote poems about them. He even wrote a fictional novel called Edsel. Electrum is a naturally occurring mix of gold and silver that was often used for coins in ancient Rome; see how he takes us down through the ages with the ancient civilizations including the Mayans?

Our artifacts are marked with the companies who made them, Bethlehlem (gentle) or the smile the words "United States" form on the edges of a manhole cover in a "c" shape. The inscriptions, so obvious to us, will not be so after the street has "melted." (nuclear meltdown?) Interesting progression, too: medals, calendars, coins, manhole covers.

I love his appreciation for this everyday thing. And he's saying something about all civilizations isn't he?

Here's a good Shapiro quote: "The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or troublemaker."

And another, "I don’t think there’s anything more satisfying than turning out a good stanza or a good piece of prose."

You can find more Shapiro here: www.poemhunter.com/karl-shapiro/

Number 25: Thomas Hardy "The Darkling Thrush"

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

--Thomas Hardy

Hap Notes: Thomas Hardy again, already? Yes. It just seemed like such a good poem for the new year ahead. In spite of the alarming changes to our planet the birds carry on and still sing for whatever reasons they have. I encourage us all to do likewise. Happy New Year!

A few cursory notes- Coppicing- as in the "coppice gate" is when trees are cut short so that they will regrow with new shoots. It was traditionally done in England to provide more firewood and wood resources. When the coppice is working, it will be surrounded by tall shoots and "tangled bine stems." The original tree, by the way, will never die of old age this way; the word coppice here indicates a small growth of trees that have come up like a small slender forest. So there's meaning in the coppice gate here in the poem- see picture above. Whether it is a gate made of coppice or the coppice itself (to the right in the above picture), next to a gate.

The humans in the poem who "haunt" the deathly area, have sensibly gone home to sit in front of a warm fire. Only the poet remains in the winter gloom and hears the thrush (also pictured above.) He doesn't give us a big thrush, he gives us an old, frail, gaunt, small, wind-blasted one; a thrush who would seemingly have no reason to sing at all. It's interesting to note that he says "all mankind" who, unfortunately, since they went inside for creature comfort, cannot hear the thrush's "happy" song. Thrush song is reputed to be one of the most beautiful by people who rate such things and thrushes usually sing at sunset (most birds do) like the one in the poem.

Hardy may have some bitter thoughts about fate, life, people and the nature of the universe, saying, in the poem, that the day felt as though the world was a corpse in a coffin with its bleak features and gray skies but he cannot fool us with this cynicism. He hears the "ecstatic sound" of a bird's "happy good-night air." Now a bitter man would never describe a bird's song as either happy or an "air"- an old world word for a "tune." Ah, and doesn't this bird's song bring a breath of fresh oxygen (air) to the scene? Even if the trees look like the broken strings of lyres, a song still comes out of the gloom.

We will keep Hardy's little secret: he loves the earth and has a wild hope for it in spite of his grousing.

To refresh your memory on what we've already said about Hardy, and to find a link to more Hardy visit here: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-19-thomas-hardy-christmas-ghost.html

Number 24: Tony Harrison "Long Distance II"

Long Distance II

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

--Tony Harrison

Hap Notes: Tony Harrison (Born 1937) has certainly had his share of controversy in his lifetime. His poem, "V", raised hackles when it was read and shown as a film on television in Great Britain. The poem describes visiting his parent's grave site in Leeds during the miners' strike in the early 80s. His vivid use of the language of the graffiti on the graves offended some sensibilities. "V" is an acid slash of images and words. You can see this program on YouTube in several parts. Yep, welcome to the 21st century where poets do filmed projects. Harrison has done several of what he calls "Film Poems."

You have to smile a bit that poetry can still rankle politicians and the media. It's a powerful sword that many think has rusted but this proves otherwise. It may not make you a millionaire but don't forget what Kipling said about words being the most powerful drug on earth. Harrison knew this at an early age. He was one of those kids who stayed inside, read classics and Shakespeare and took a bit of razzing for it.

Harrison is on YouTube reading much of his poetry, holding his frayed and splayed book and speaking in that flat gorgeous Yorkshire accent of his. I wish all poets were so gifted with reading their work aloud, but Harrison certainly is. Read the poetry first, then listen to him so you can hear his emphasis compared to your own. He (as Eliot would say) does the "Police" in different voices. (Is that too obscure a reference? In "The Wasteland" T.S. Eliot refers to a person who reads the paper with different voices for the speakers, with the words "He do the "Police" (Police Gazette, I think) in different voices." Harrison uses different voices and tones. Didn't mean to drop the tranny there.)

Harrison read classics at the university which is a very plain British way of saying he majored in them. He's done award-winning translations of Aeschylus's The Oresteia and (great shades of yesterday's blog!) his The Gaze of the Gorgon won the Whitbread Poetry Award.

Three charming and somewhat unrelated bits: I've always thought it amusing that a recurring character on "The Mighty Boosh", a pink brain with tentacles and a grin, is named Tony Harrison. The poet actually wrote the lyrics for the songs in a movie "The Bluebird," a strange children's film I've always sorta liked. And Thom Yorke from the band Radiohead is a huge fan of Harrison.

Let's talk about the poem, yes? First off, did you even notice that it rhymed? His seemingly effortless way with rhyme is miraculous. Must be his native Yorkshire woodnotes mixed with a healthy dose of the Greek and Roman classics. The poem is a marvel of smooth gorgeous effortless verse which, if you'd ever tried to write you'd know is the complete opposite of those words. One little comment and I'll let you enjoy it for yourself. How long was that number virtually disconnected do you think, from his parents, as opposed to literally? It's a lovely poem, ain't it? Such tender words from the furious spirit who wrote "V."

Here's a good Harrison quote: "I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to."

You can find more Tony Harrison poetry here: www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7814