Number 54: Allen Ginsburg " A Strange New Cottage in Berkley"

A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley

All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering
brown fence
under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous
under the leaves,
fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;
found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a
big tire out of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;
wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each,
returning for godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;
three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:
my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the
form of a small tree in the corner,
an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and love-
lorn tongue.

-- Allen Ginsburg

Hap Notes: This poem is from Ginsburg's (1928-1997) book Reality Sandwiches and it was written sometime in the late 50s. Ginsburg moved from the East coast to the San Francisco area in 1954 and the poem delights in the natural beauty he probably did not see in New York much. Even the flotsam and jetsam of the industrial society he held in contempt, a coffee pot and an old tire, seem more tolerable and gift-like. The Bay Area in the 50s is a very different place now than it was then and it certainly must have seemed more wholesome and "strange" compared to the stacks of apartment buildings and slabs of parking lots in the east. He seems almost contented and contemplative in this poem.

Ginsburg is known, of course, for his quick-witted, sexually frank, enthusiastic, and often angry verses which have spawned countless poetry throw-downs and rants. One is always glad that people have outlets to unburden their souls and give an outlet to their anger, so it's not particularly necessary to criticize poetry like this, since, if they really wanted to write poetry they would study the form more and write it less.

Ginsburg was influenced by William Carlos Williams, whom he corresponded with, and William Blake, whom he had some sort of transcendent religious experience about, and Walt Whitman, whom he read and somewhat copied. Let's not forget that Ginsburg went to Columbia University where he wrote conventional verse that won him school prizes. It was Williams who wrote a letter to poet Kenneth Rexroth, introducing Ginsburg to the San Francisco poetry scene.

Ginsburg is one of the few poets that need little introduction since his antics, readings, beliefs and poetry have been lionized and copied for the last 40 years. He started writing in an explosive time for literature and the arts, a time when industrialization seemed to be forming people into mindless automatons. (Sometimes, on darker days, it seems as though the transformation is complete, doesn't it?)

He was an avid pacifist, a practicing Buddhist and a devout admirer of much of Hindu philosophy. Much has been made of him also being an avid drug user (mostly LSD and weed.) He felt they brought people to a deeper understanding of themselves and God. Early proponents of drug use, like Ginsburg and Timothy Leary, were under the impression that drugs would make people more conscious and spiritual. One doesn't know how to comment on this except to say that our contemporary drug problem is more a symptom of a greater societal problem than anything else. This is not what the "Beats" had in mind with their espousal of drugs. They didn't want to cause more misery, they were looking for enlightenment. Unfortunately, drugs turned out to be another band-aid to patch over the yearning soul. Until we repair the way we treat and educate people, we can look forward to drugs and alcohol to always be the duct-tape that will do a portion of the patching up on some people. (Oops- I wandered away from Ginsburg- sorry.)

Ginsburg and his confreres (Jack Keroac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Lew Welch) were committed to free expression and freedom of speech in their work. Ginsburg helped found Beatitudes magazine, a poetry publication that gave the "Beats" their name. They were full of joyful sexuality (hetero, bi, and gay), sensual awareness and social consciousness.

Ginsburg suffers from the same trouble that Charles Bukowski suffered from i.e. when you get an adoring public forum you are allowed to do most anything you want and they will call it genius. They both sorely needed loving editors to sort out the bullshit, or at least craft it a bit. I'll point out, once again, that they wanted to be published. They thought enough of their work to want it to see permanent print. They wrote it out- it may have come spontaneously but there's a process of getting it from your head to your hand that automatically implies some thoughtfulness. Ranting and raving is what you do at your mom when you are 15. Just sayin'.

This poem isn't a rant at all, anyway. It's Ginsburg doing yard work. Enjoying a few plums. Feeling the bounty of a new place. Thinking of angels.

Here's a Ginsburg quote: "I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence."

You can find more Ginsburg here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/allen-ginsberg

Number 53: D.H. Lawrence "Mystic"

Mystic

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience is
considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down I call the feeding of corpses.

--D. H. Lawrence

Hap Notes: There are so many things in contemporary culture for which David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) is responsible it's hard to know where to start pointing. I suppose his greatest impact is how we view sex and love, although Lawrence would blanch at the casualness with which we regard these subjects when he felt they were supremely holy. Those looking for prurient titillation by reading his banned book, Lady Chatterly's Lover, are usually astonished to find out that so mild a book was ever considered pornographic, especially when every cheap pulp romance novel one can now buy at the grocery store contains more sexually explicit details.

Lawrence also had great interest in Pagan rituals, Buddhist philosophies and mysticism. He was interested in anything that evoked the sacred sensual passions. He was brought up in a mining town in Nottinghamshire in a working class family, though, and he always considered himself a Christian and was not a hedonist. The mores of the 60s were precipitated by Lawrence, hence all the literature that came from it, but he was a fairly constrained man who was trying to balance, theoretically, the sensual with the intellectual.

If nothing else, Lawrence's life and his novel Sons and Lovers is the template for the (now cliched) scenario of the intelligent working class son who doesn't want to work in the mines with his brutal blunt father. The theme has been done to death, now, but Sons and Lovers was a revelation when it was published in 1913. Lawrence is one of the first writers, also, who felt that industrial society was draining the souls of men and he rails against this often. Much of "Chatterly" is about this, as well.

Lawrence's critical work, Studies in Classic American Literature, almost single-handedly revived the reputation of Herman Melville which is why you were probably asked to read Moby Dick for some class in either high school or college. (I have rarely met anyone who has read Melville's classic, although they were certainly assigned to the task. I do wish more people would read it all the way through- it's a wonderful book.)

I actually think Lawrence's poetry comes in a poor third with his novels and critical works coming first and his poetry and travel books neck-and-neck in the third spot. One thing about Lawrence that runs through each these things, though, is his extraordinary talent for description. He understands plants, animals, histories, colors, clothing, art and architecture and describes them with loving detailed strokes.

In the poem "Mystic" Lawrence is not just showing us that his tastebuds are refined enough to tell the differences in the flavor of apples. He's using the apple (an iconic symbol of the "fall" of man) to stand for all experiences. The one great thing that comes from Eve's tasting of that apple (regardless of the arguably questionable intent of the story), is our ability to appreciate the earth we have been consigned to live upon. Lawrence's era was not so different from own our in that any sort of deviation from the status quo was looked on with suspicion. Mysticism was a flaky lie, a fake thing. No matter how open-minded we say we are currently, there is no doubt that the "mystic" experience is still regarded with some contempt. Lawrence isn't giving "foodies" more criteria for tasting things. He is telling us to taste everything with the same awareness and that awareness will bring revelations to you. He wants you to experience all of life's flavors. The experience may be transcendent for you.

My personal experience with Lawrence's books are intensely mystic in nature. I was pretty sure that he wrote Women in Love expressly for me when I first read it at 15. All of his writing speaks to me from a spiritual place that hits to my core, as if I know him somehow. While his work often has the tang of adolescent ardor and passions, he never outgrew their depths and it's hard to fault him for this when one considers what passes for passion now. Lawrence is always wrestling with the concepts of love, our animal nature and the spiritual life. He confusedly blends them into one unified theory, sort of like science trying to find a theory that will unite Einstein and particle physics. I've always been impressed with Lawrence's efforts even if I don't always appreciate his conclusions.

What is beyond all his theories is his descriptive powers which are almost incomparable. He manages to describe flowers and clothing so perfectly that you see the colors and know that they mean something- they aren't just hues, they're statements. Like the apple he's tasting in the poem. Those who say his work and experiences are a lie, just have never been to the place in the soul he is describing.

Lawrence was prone to pneumonia and eventually succumbed to tuberculosis when he was only 45. He, at that point, had been well-traveled, widely condemned and incredibly prolific. This isn't his best poem, but it certainly hints at all the troubles he'd been through in one neat little round red package.

Heres a good Lawrence quote: "Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”

and another: “I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."

Okay, one more: “This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.”

( The graphic at the top today (1/30/11) is part of a painting done by Lawrence, who also loved to paint.)

You can find more of Lawrence's poetry here: www.poetryconnection.net/poets/D.H._Lawrence
("Snake" is too long for us to do here but I highly recommend it.)

Number 52: Mary Oliver "Wild Geese"

Wild Geese 



You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on. 

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain 

are moving across the landscapes, 

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again. 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

-- Mary Oliver

Hap Notes: If Mary Oliver's (born 1935) poetry is looked on as missives she is writing to us as she takes her daily walk, who, I wonder, could not see them as love letters? And who can resist falling in love with her when she courts us with such dazzling descriptions and bright pronouncements? Of course, she is not in love with us, or at least, just us, but the natural world in all its remarkable beauty and mystery. She's sending fan mail to the earth.

Nature is the muse of Oliver like art was for Rilke. Her descriptions are lush and intricate (as when she describes the features of the bird in "The Swan") and never seem overly-sentimental or trite. I tire of the observance of both the literary critics and her fans that she uses "plain speaking" and "effortless language." Get real. You try to write with "plain English" like this and see how you fare. Her words are carefully selected and juxtaposed. "Plain English" doesn't sound like this. One of the hardest things to do in poetry is to write with this kind of beauty and not come off like a Hallmark greeting card that you would send to your grandma.

The call of wild geese is exactly "harsh and exciting"-- it's very a precise and well thought description. But she's not just reeling off description, she's telling you something harsh and exciting about the natural real world we live in- the one on which we build skyscrapers and parking lots and roads. She wants to bring you back to your body on the deep good dirt of the earth. You get the bounties of the earth just because you live- you don't have to be good or repentant to get this reward. What an extraordinary thing that is. Her poetry often exclaims this in amazement. The calls of the geese are not just the vague honking of birds but a wake-up call, reminding you of who your family really is, with all its harshness, beauty and excitement. The earth is sending you a love letter, too.

And doesn't "clear pebbles of the rain" strike you (no pun intended) as a wonderful way of describing it? The earth turns while we rejoice or despair, patiently reeling out strange beauty and sometimes harsh truths. What can compare to the wonders of the earth? No video game or movie or YouTube moment is as complex.

I don't know that the Rilke comparison is always so apt for Oliver but if he'd been born just outside of Cleveland instead of Prague, who knows? Oliver went to upstate New York and worked on Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers with Millay's sister Norma. Rilke worked with Rodin. The parallels have some little merit; they both describe the world through the filter of their muse. They both come up with startling statements. And Oliver actually uses a Rilke line from his breathtaking poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" in her poem "Invitation." You must change your life.

Oliver went for a time to both Ohio State and Vassar but took no degree. She's been a poet or writer "in-residence" at several colleges. She's won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award among many other honors. She is notoriously reticent about public appearances and prefers to let her work speak for itself. I suppose it's pretty obvious in her work, but she likes to take long walks around her home in Provincetown, MA. She calls the town a " marvelous convergence of land and water."

Here's a wonderful Oliver quote: “Whenever I would leave home, I would say ‘I’m going in. Whenever I would go back in the house, I would say ‘I’m going out.’”

You can find more Oliver here: www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Mary_Oliver

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/