Number 51: Robert Frost "Choose Something Like A Star"

Choose Something Like a Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight), 

We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night, 

Since dark is what brings out your light. 

Some mystery becomes the proud.

But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn 

By heart and when alone repeat. 

Say something! And it says "I burn." 

But say with what degree of heat. 

Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. 

Use language we can comprehend. 

Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid, 

But does tell something in the end. 

And steadfast as Keats' Eremite, 

Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height, 

So when at times the mob is swayed 

To carry praise or blame too far, 

We may choose something like a star 

To stay our minds on and be staid.
-- Robert Frost

Hap Notes: Since we just had Auden's "star poem" here's Frost's take on the star, which in some ways is very similar to Auden. Except in the case of Frost, he's telling us that this distance between us and a star is what gives it the qualities we most enjoy. A case could be made like this for Auden's poem, too, really. Auden, though, is not afraid of the dark.

Frost rarely pulls his punches with his symbols, i.e. they seem to be fairly simple to sort. Light is good, dark is not-so-good (although in "Design" that's not exactly true.) That sort of thing. So people often mistakenly figure they "get" the poem. This is Frost's craftiness at its best because just "getting" the top two layers of the poem leaves the reader with the idea that Frost's simple statements are well-worn, charmingly expressed homilies. Go deeper into Frost, always, after the first few readings. He's got some time bombs in the poem and this one is no exception.

Already in the first verses we get a whiff of what's to come. "Some mystery becomes the proud," implies that the star is above us both literally and figuratively. Who else is thought to be above and over humans, we wonder. God, maybe? It's amusing to hear Frost yelling at this star- speak up, tell us something! Why will you not speak to us in language we can understand? It's frustrating. No need to point out the god-like reference there, eh?

The reference to "Keats' eremite" is to the poem "Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast" where Keats compares a star to a Christian recluse or hermit, one who has taken vows to be contemplative. Keats says in his poem that stars are steadfast, faithful, immovable.

In the end Frost says we need to choose "something" like a star to keep us steady. People need their gods-- it's good to have "something" over us to keep us on the mark. Sure, the poem says that.

But look deeper. Just for a minute. You can look away, then. Frost wants you to look away- he lets us back out of this one fact: it does tell us something by telling us nothing. Yikes! Let's go back to those first two layers quickly before we get too freaked out. Because we're just looking at this "thing" that comes out in times of darkness. We see it then only. It says nothing back to us except "I burn" and "I'm up higher than you." Hmmm, that's not much of a god, is it?

The sun is a star isn't it? Why do we not choose to stay our minds with it? Because it's not a time of darkness. We don't need it. We pick the "fairest one in site" whatever or whomever your god may be. It may be slightly difficult to understand (obscured by clouds) and that's okay. But we need its light in the darkness. Frost is sort of telling us that we choose "something" to steady us that is "above" us when we need to get away from the "sway" (not steadfast or steady) of the mob- whether they are praising or blaming. We purposefully choose an indifferent mysterious "thing" we can look on with safety. Then we can interpret this proud, burning, indifferent thing anyway we need when it's dark for us.

And it certainly doesn't say much for people who are a part of that "mob." Sometimes it's almost as if Frost is saying "Look at the shiny thing!" as though dangling a set of keys in front of a baby. Choose "something" like a star, not someONE.

And remember he says, "it will not do to say of night," i.e. how did we get to the darkness in our lives so that we needed the star? Why are we in the dark-- so that we will go to the star? Kinda sadistic, ain't it?

Once, again. Not much of a god. You can go back to the top two layers of this poem, if you like. It's still a very good poem that way.

Always good to remember that Frost said he had a "lover's quarrel" with the world. Feel a little better now? He's a lover.

Here's where we've talked about Frost before if you want to review: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-7-robert-frost-design_14.html

Number 50: W.H. Auden "The More Loving One"

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

--W.H. Auden

Hap Notes: I've always thought that Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was America's trade with Great Britain for T.S. Eliot, Auden having been born in England and taking American citizenship in 1946 and Eliot, born in St. Louis, MO, taking British citizenship in the 1930s. The difference being (sort of sad really) that we didn't protest much when Eliot left but Britain was horrified at Auden's leaving. In terms of poetic prowess, I might add, we got the better deal since we got Eliot's influence on Auden as well as the poet himself.

Auden was a brilliant, erudite and clever man skilled in all the forms of poetry and was so good at writing it that he can often reel them off a bit glibly. Whenever one reads criticisms of Auden the issues are never a question of his skill as a poet, it's about whether he genuinely meant it or not. Was he feeling it or was he just showing you his sharp expertise? He's got a good poem for every style in the field, really. He is stylistically and technically a virtuoso at playing the piano of poetry. He also wrote critical essays and I think his book The Dyer's Hand, a collection of his lectures, is essential reading for students of literature.

You may know Auden for his poem "Funeral Blues" from its inclusion in the movie "Four Weddings and A Funeral" and one of his finest poems "September 1, 1939" has been excerpted and truncated for many a poetry reading (especially post 9/11) and is famous for the line "We must love one another or die." One hates to see this used too freely but one loves to see it used. Auden later rejected the poem from inclusion in collections of his work but I believe it was mostly because the line was becoming an old shoe like Maya Angelou's "more alike than unalike" thing that gets rolled out all too frequently.

Regardless of opinions about his work, Auden's shadow looms large. He influenced countless poets and it is often remarked that the "Beats" were a reaction against the kind of poetry he wrote and inspired. His greatness as a poet is often disputed but, good grief, it's not hard to see that modern poetry would not exist the way it does and continues to do without Auden. His footprint is so massive that we don't always see that we are standing in it.

"The More Loving One" is a case in point about his work. First off, it's brilliantly casual. Then, one begins to see it as a parallel to other affections besides the one the poet feels for stars. The third stanza is a bit of bravado and the fourth, an admission of some vulnerability. This is pretty tight stuff, here. And of course, only the more loving one would write a poem, wouldn't they? The stars write no poems to us. And yet, Auden is a sly fox because if this is written to a person rather than a star, it certainly shows the poet to be capable of enjoying life without the loved one even if it would take some time. Hmmm. Stuff to wrestle with.

I often think of this poem in contrast with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is Not All:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Now, who do you think is the "more loving one" and why? What are the chances the poet will ever have an opportunity to "trade" her memories for peace or even food?

Auden's poem may be colder but is he more of a realist?

Here's a good Auden quote: "The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident."

You can find more Auden here: www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120

Number 49: John Ashbery "Sleepers Awake"

Sleepers Awake

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.
Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.
Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.
Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.
Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick.
Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,
but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.
Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.
No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.
Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben-Hur.
Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst.
When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed.
Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t.
Maugham snored on the Riviera.
Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part.
I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving.

I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much.
Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water.
Birds make poor role models.
A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it.
Slaves make good servants.
Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance.
Store clean rags in old pillow cases.
Feed a dog only when he barks.
Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink.
Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a wordless implosion of sleep

--John Ashbery


Hap Notes: John Ashbery (born 1927) has won every award you can win for poetry in the U.S. His eccentric mix of metaphor and memory and art is easily read but not so easily explicated. One of the things I'll say about his work that may or may not help you is this: stop making sense. Some of his poetry will puzzle you and it's purposeful. Some of it will hit you as just right and you'll not be able to explain why. Some of it will miss you; just let it go. Enjoy the ride.

Whenever you get too tangled up in the lives of men and women of letters, it's a good idea to read this poem. Ashbery is poking fun at our preoccupation with the lives of writers and their works. He's poking a little at them, too. Even if you wrote the greatest book of all time, you still have to sleep, you're still human, you still function pretty much like every other human being on the planet. Poets, to paraphrase everybody's grandpa, put their pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else. By the way, it's worth noting that sometimes these authors could put themselves to sleep with their work, let alone the reader.

While he's at it, Ashbery gives us a surreal litany, in the last nine lines of the poem, of self-help instructions. We read warnings and instructions like this all the time on the sides of aspirin bottles, in instruction manuals for power tools, in magazines, in recipes. We sleep-walk through a lot of this reading, just as we often sleepwalk through "the classics." The odd list is crafted to be familiar but with surprising twists. He's trying to wake you up.

Of course, I don't want to belittle how truly funny the poem is, either. One suspects a nervous Kafka never slept and who hasn't fallen asleep over a few of the whaling descriptions in Moby Dick or another long description in Proust? The Emily Dickinson line sums up, amusingly, the fairy magic of her work, and its often too-precious conclusions. These one sentence lines are hilarious, purposely glib, summations of the author's works. It's a fun poem to read. This alone, makes it wonderful.

Ashbery had the same kind of connections Frank O'Hara had to the art world and, at first, he wanted to be an artist. After he graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1949, he wrote art criticism for New York magazine and Newsweek and edited and wrote for many short-lived art and literature magazines. He's translated the work of several French poets (Jean Perrault, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Ramond Roussell) and had a teaching career starting at Brooklyn College. He retired from Bard in 2008 but he still does packed-house readings all over the country.

Ashbery is certainly a major American poet. He has almost single-handedly dragged poetry with him into the late 20th and early 21st century when everyone else was flailing for a "voice." His voice has been strong and influential. I often think of Ashbery's fantastic and surreal poetry is him unwinding a Wallace Stevens poem and putting it back together as a Grace Hartigan painting. Sometimes his poems are more like spin-art and they're a bit harder to sift through. Just don't get too worried if you don't understand everything- who ever understands every little thing in every poem? And if someone does, or think they do; that doesn't mean they're right.

I suppose it's also worth noting that "Sleepers Awake!" is a well-known Lutheran hymn by Phillip Nicolai which is infused to a Bach cantata. The hymn is always scheduled in the lectionary for pre-Easter. It tells the story of the sleepy ten virgins with the lamps, five of whom had oil to light the way for the bridegroom (a Christ analogy), five of whom did not. So at midnight, when the bridegroom finally showed up (late, I might add), the women were sleeping and had to run out with their lamps to light his way. Sort of a "be prepared story." The Sleeper Awakened is an Arabian tale, also. There's something in that for the poem too.

Another thing to consider is where you are when you sleep. You may be writing yourself anonymous letters which take the form of dreams. What exactly is sleep? And isn't that list of instructions somewhat like an anonymous letter from the culture, which is often asleep at the wheel? Also, there is something to be said for the idea that much of writing is as inspired as a sleeper's dream. Who hasn't used some permutation of the phrase "they could do that in their sleep" to signify someone's easy talent? Just some suggestions.

Here's a good Ashbery quote: “I think I’m a rather funny person. I like my poems to include as many things in them as possible. Humor, tragedy, love, time, all the things that are traditional in poetry—I like having them happening all at once.”

You can find more Ashbery here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-ashbery

Number 48: Percy Bysshe Shelley "Ozymandias"

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land 

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear: 

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

---Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hap Notes: Shelley (1792-1822) is one of those poets you read in school, see his picture and think of him as being one of those pallid, "sensitive" types who lived in velvet breeches. He may have been that, too, I suppose, but he was mostly a free-thinking firebrand. He was an atheist who was kicked out of Oxford for writing his radical views. It is said when he attended Oxford he may have gone to one class once, but read 16 hours a day on his own. His father interceded to get him back into Oxford and if Shelley would have recanted his views in some atheist political pamphlet he wrote, he would have been allowed to be reinstated. He would not. He was 19 years old at the time.

He was never famous as a poet during his lifetime and wasn't even published much. He was, however, somewhat infamous as a political trouble-maker. He was a believer in the rights of the lower class and women, vegetarianism, non-violent protest (both Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi were influenced by Shelley's views), Irish independence and atheism. He was not afraid to write about this or argue about it.

Let's not make him into a sinewy hero, though. He was picked on and bullied at school when he was a boy. He had a high pitched voice and curly locks. But he had the heart of a lion to defend his idealistic beliefs (which were influenced by Thomas Paine, remember him?) I think Shelley got a pretty good whitewash job over the years as many have tried to depict him as only a gentle poet. His radical views have gotten a better airing over the last century but there are still too many that think of him as ethereal and quiet. Shelley was enthusiastically opinionated.

When he drowned in a boating accident in Italy (he was not quite 30), some snarky paper wrote "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is God or no." Nice, huh? Shelley was cremated on the beach (his remains were so eaten away Byron had to walk away from them) and his heart was snatched from the fire and given to Mary Shelley who kept it in a little silver box. The heart was buried many years later with Shelley's son.

Shelley, Keats and Byron were all friends but Byron was the popular hero, Keats was a sensitive and somewhat sickly man and Shelley was a hot-headed radical. I've often thought that Byron would have been the most fun to hang out with, Keats would have made a wonderful and brilliant friend and kindly Shelley would have set you aflame with ideas. I lean towards Shelley.

This poem is probably his most anthologized and famous work but did you know that it was part of a contest between Shelley and the writer Horace Smith? Poets from this era enjoyed competing with one another in a test of skill. We'll do another one of these contests soon that feature Keats, Shelley and Leigh Hunt. But" Ozymandias" was a duel with Smith. Here's Smith's poem:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
--Horace Smith

Please tell me you can see how Shelley's poem is far superior and not just because Smith titled his poem with the encumbering "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below." Do you see how Shelley lets you draw your own conclusions and Smith feels it's necessary to explain what you should be thinking and thereby narrows his poem into a sliver of an idea? Contrast the phrases "Egypt's sandy silence" with "lone and level sands." What the hell is sandy silence compared with other silences? Is it different from dirt-y silence? And doesn't just the sound of the phrase alone make you think of the winds over the sands which are not silent at all? It sounds good, it just means the opposite of what it sounds like. In Shelley's poem we meet a traveler, in Smith's we get a judgmental narrator. Shelly shows us the face and the sculptor, Smith shows us a giant leg. Both poems have some merit. But Shelley is both beautiful and profound while Smith is merely thoughtful.

Here's an extraordinary Shelley quote: "Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being. ... The only use of government is to repress the vices of man. If man were to day sinless, to-morrow he would have a right to demand that government and all its evils should cease."

You can find more Shelley here: www.poemhunter.com/percy-bysshe-shelley/

Number 47: Edwin Arlington Robinson "Reuben Bright"

Reuben Bright

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Hap Notes: Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) spent the first part of his life as sort of an ink-stained wretch. He wrote poetry taking odd jobs to keep alive and lived in poverty. He went to Harvard for a couple of years but could not afford to keep going. Besides, he already knew he wanted to write since he was 11 years old. His first (revised) book of poetry Children of the Night met with little success and he just kept on plugging away despite some family tragedies.

For instance (and very relevant to Reuben Bright, actually) his mother died of "black diphtheria" and because no mortician would touch the body, Robinson and his two brothers had to lay her out, dig the grave and bury her (his father was already dead.) Her death came just a few days after publishing his first book of poetry. One of his brothers, Dean, overdosed on morphine and his other brother, Herman, married the girl Edwin loved but rejected because he wanted to write. Robinson decided to marry his work (although later in life he had lots of ladies who doted on him.)

He was a pretty dejected unknown until Teddy Roosevelt. I mean that literally.

Roosevelt, when he became president, requested Robinson to come to the White House. Teddy loved Children of the Night (his son showed it to him) and was stunned that Robinson was so poor and so unknown. He arranged for Robinson to have a job with the Custom House in New York. Robinson's job there was to come in, open his roll-top desk, read the daily paper and then leave, placing the paper on his chair to signify he'd been there. When Taft was elected, the job pretty much dried up, but Roosevelt tried to help Robinson by talking Scribner's into republishing Children of the Night and writing articles praising Robinson's poetry. The effect of the articles was somewhat like being part of Oprah's book club only without as much clout as Winfrey. Established literary critics didn't think TR was the best judge of literary quality. Robinson sold a few more books and that was about it.

Robinson's most enduring poems are ones like Reuben Bright; psychological character studies of people. He did eventually win a whopping three Pulitzer Prizes. So TR was right. Maybe Oprah is, too, who knows? Robinson was probably the most famous poet in America when he died.

Anyone who has been around the death of a loved one, especially from a protracted illness, knows the sick hollow feeling Bright has in the poem. The idea of butchering creatures would certainly not feel right after watching death take someone. Remember, too, that this probably isn't a clean white hospital death- his weeping made the women cry- women who were probably at his home to help him care for her, neighbors and the like. She more than likely died at home.

It's a heartbreaking portrait of a man's grief.

Robinson's technically clean, thoughtful poetry was influential to a variety of poets, notably Frost. Frost said,"His theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful." Robinson's vocabulary is usually clear and quite modern. His work is shamefully undervalued today although he has contemporary champions in W.S. Merwin and James Dickey.

One of the most important qualities of Robinson's work, I think, is his compassion for his subjects- the people he creates. He doesn't judge- he tells you a story. The stories are about love and longing and laughter and grief. Life.

Here's a good Robinson quote: ""I don't expect recognition while I live but if I thought I could write something that would go on living after I'm gone, I'd be satisfied with an attic and a crust all my life."

You can find more Robinson here: www.sonnets.org/robinson.htm

Number 46: Pablo Neruda"We Are Many"

We Are Many

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?

All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

--Pablo Neruda

Hap Notes: Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was born Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Chile. His dad, a railway employee, didn't think much of his son's interest in poetry and literature so the boy changed his name to Pablo Neruda. ("Neruda" is in tribute to Czech poet Jan Neruda and "Pablo" possibly from Paul Verlaine.) He published his first book of verse when he was only 19. At 20 he published one of his most famous works, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"). It probably won't surprise you that, at this age, it was a book of (somewhat controversial) sensuous and erotic love poems. The book has sold millions of copies since its original publication. (In one poem he says "I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees"- whoever said THAT better?)

Neruda was an ardent communist due to a lot of political factors, one of which was Franco's domination of Spain. I can't possibly do justice to politics in South America but let's just say that he was deeply involved in politics throughout his career. Suffice it to say he started out liking Stalin and Lenin and, like many of their supporters, grew to dislike them for various reasons. (Khrushchev (remember Nikita?) called this "the cult of personality"- idolizing these political figures) While Neruda grew to dislike his former communist idols (thinking of them as heroic Nazi-crushers at first) he never lost faith in the theories of communism. Neruda served in various political and diplomatic posts throughout his career and then had to been hidden away when various regimes toppled in that whole South/Central American game of political musical chairs. Politics were important to him- that's the condensed version of this paragraph.

Neruda won lots of awards for his work and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. He has been called the "greatest poet of his generation" all over the world.

Here's my favorite story about Neruda. He was giving a reading to about 600 people in Venezuela (he gave hundreds of readings all over South America and they were very popular, by the way.) After the reading was done- the audience was allowed to make requests. The first request was for "Poem XX" (#20) from "Twenty Love Poems" which starts out "Tonight I can write the saddest lines..." Neruda apologized, he had not brought that poem with him. At which point 400 people in the audience stood up and recited it to him. How awesome is that?

"We Are Many" is a great poem but don't take it solely as the confession of a man who has has been chagrined by his lapses in times of stress. He's saying something about the geography of where you are at each moment- when you are reading this where are you? Not the self-conscious reader but YOU- the real you. And by the way, who is that? And how are you different from anyone else's "you"? And where are they all? Are you the sum of your influences? Are you what you want to be? Do you will yourself to be someone you are or are not? Who, as the caterpillar so famously asked Alice, ARE YOU?

Neruda writes poems that are full of luscious and juicy metaphors. He writes poems to tomatoes and lemons and a tuna sitting in the fish market. He uses every color, flavor and fragrance in the lush world that surrounds us. No subject escapes his scrutiny- old shoes to beautiful women to sea creatures to plump squash. Because of his extensive use of so many words, phrases and idoms which are common to Spanish but unknown to English (other languages often have words we don't have. You knew that, right?) Neruda is notoriously hard to translate. But what has been translated is a revelation- an amazing technicolor dream of beauty, despair, loneliness and ardor.

We will do a lot more Neruda this year, I think.

Here's a good (and relevant to the poem) Neruda quote: "Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life"

You can find more Neruda here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pablo-neruda

Number 45: Philip Levine "They Feed They Lion"

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

--Philip Levine

Hap Notes: Philip Levine (born 1928) grew up in a working class home in Detroit, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He often speaks in his poetry of his jobs in the auto industry or his brother's job at the ice plant (his poem "You Can Have It" addresses this.) But this poem is about the distilling anger of the working man and, most specifically, the African-American working/lower class.

Levine said he wrote this poem in response to the 1967 Detroit Riot. The riot started after a police raid of an after-hours bar, street slang called an establishment like this a "blind pig." Confrontations with patrons and observers evolved into a 5-day riot that left 43 dead, 467 injured and resulted in 7,200 arrests and 2,000 buildings destroyed. LBJ sent in army troups to quell the disturbance. The only riot that exceeds this one is the 1992 L.A. Riot after the Rodney King verdicts. Levine calls the poem a "celebration of anger."

The poem smolders like tinder from the open stanzas- a litany of the oppressed, the poor, the over-worked working man living in the detritus of an industrial society. The poem builds as the refrain repeats, "They lion grow." The loose prosody of the poem allows you to think of the phrase as "their lion grows" and "They, lion, grow." Levine's use of what some would call Ebonics is from poetic admiration. He's not making fun of this clause, he's honoring it for its meaning, scansion and force.

By the end of the poem the smoldering is about to flare out into explosions of flame and pent-up anger. The narrator is revealed as a white man who understands the reasons for the impending flow of anger and violence.

Breaking off briefly to say here that Ebonics and the various other phonological American English dialect varieties are a wonderful and spirited expression of our melting pot culture. Our language has so many foreign words and expressions in it we come closer to being Esperanto all the time. Have you ever read the Gullah New Testament? It's a powerful and wondrous thing. I am 14th generation American, both my grandmother's and my grandfather's people were here in the late 1600s from England (that's right- we probably were stupid with the Native Americans-it's shameful)- you are more than likely my distant cousin if your family has been here longer than one generation. I am doubtful that your original American ancestors spoke English. I love the way America takes in every culture and enjoys and celebrates it- yours, too, but not only yours. I am happily amazed by the varieties of words and slang and accents we have- it's world treasure chest of phrases and words and sounds. If you want to speak and read strictly the King's English I suggest you move to England. Do it soon. Please. (Will now get off soapbox.)

Levine got his degree by taking night school at Wayne State while he worked at an auto plant. He later studied poetry at the University of Iowa with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Levine said Berryman was a brilliant teacher. Levine also admitted in an interview several years ago that he never paid for the class, he couldn't afford it, he just showed up every day. Berryman often commented on how Levine was left off the roles and Levine usually made some comment about bureaucratic snafus at the college and Berryman accepted this answer. Levine has won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Levine was strongly influenced by the work of Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams. Levine is somewhat of a storyteller in his poems and while some of his poetry is autobiographical be aware that he is telling you a story and it's not always actually about him. For example, in the poems where he talks about his sister- he didn't have a sister. His many characters speak but they are not all personally confessional in nature.

Here's a Levine quote which may help you with the poem a bit:

"I was working alongside a guy in Detroit -- a black guy named Eugene -- when I was probably about twenty-four. He was a somewhat older guy, and we were sorting universal joints, which are part of the drive-shaft of a car. The guy who owned the place had bought used ones, and we were supposed to sort the ones that could be rebuilt and made into usable replacement parts from the ones that were too badly damaged. So we spread them out on the concrete floor, and we were looking at them carefully, because we were the guys who'd then do the job of rebuilding them. We had two sacks that we were putting them in -- burlap sacks -- and at one point Eugene held up a sack, and on it were the words "Detroit Municipal Zoo." And he laughed, and said, "They feed they lion they meal in they sacks." That's exactly what he said! And I thought, This guy's a genius with language. He laughed when he said it, because he knew that he was speaking an English that I didn't speak, but that I would understand, of course. He was almost parodying it, even though he appreciated the loveliness of it. It stuck in my mind, and then one night just after the riots in Detroit -- I'd gone back to the city to see what had happened -- somehow I thought of that line. "There's a poem there," I said. "But I don't know what it is. And I'm just going to walk around for a couple of days and see what accumulates."

You can find more Levine here: www.poemhunter.com/philip-levine/poems/page-1/