Number 206: Robert Frost "Fire And Ice"

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-- Robert Frost

Hap Notes: It may be an odd choice for the Fourth of July but I honestly could not decide whether to go with Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie" or Jeffers' "Shine Perishing Republic" or Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" or Sandberg's "The People, Yes" or Langston Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America" and on and on....all have their merits. I even had a brief thought of using a speech by Tecumseh: "Sell a country?! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?" So, instead I give you this poem by Frost because it's so very pertinent for any culture at any time.

Happy Fourth of July! The world's going to hell in a hand basket, as my dad used to say. (Sometimes he said "hatbox" which I always thought was charming and pretty. Sometimes he said "rowboat" and sometimes he said "on a bicycle." My dad had a touch of weird poetry in him.)

Again, do not take Frost's cleverness and seeming glibness at face value. He's saying something very dark here about greed and calculated indifference. He's also saying something very dark about the way desire and hatred can destroy your inner world as well as the physical world in which we live.

Hate is ice because it is cold, mean and as it ages, becomes premeditated and rationalized. Desire's flames start to consume and burn up all rational thinking-- we make rash decisions in the heat of the moment. So Frost isn't talking just about wanting and then rejecting love here, although you can certainly look at it that way if you've a mind to. Seems to me that the love and hatred one feels for another human is really all fire. The ice Frost is talking about is something far crueler and more despicable.

Remember that in Dante's Inferno, Satan, in the center of hell, is stuck in ice. Both fire and ice are featured in Dante's hell. The road to perdition and eternal damnation is through desire and hate. Frost was most certainly familiar with Dante. (I love reading Dante's Divine Comedy but I have to admit it's the "Inferno" that always takes the imagination most grippingly. Although, Dante admits in the Paradiso that his description of heaven is all that human eyes are actually allowed to see whereas hell he gets to see in all its vileness, i.e. fire and ice.)

It is slightly amusing that the author of "Fire and Ice" is named Frost, too, eh? I never think of him as paying this much mind as he wrote the poem, though. (One hardly ever thinks of their name as a word, even when it is one. How many times do you think of a guy making horseshoes when you hear the name "Smith" or how many times do you think of cupcakes and bread when you hear the name "Baker"? Just a thought.)

Here is where we have talked about Frost before:

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-95-robert-frost-spring-pools.html

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-90-robert-frost-fragmentary-blue.html

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-128-robert-frost-silken-tent.html

happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/05/number-144-robert-frost-maple.html

Number 205: Joy Harjo "She Had Some Horses"

She Had Some Horses

She had some horses.
She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. 

She had horses who were skins of ocean water. 

She had horses who were the blue air of sky.

She had horses who were fur and teeth.

She had horses who were clay and would break. 

She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.

She had horses with full, brown thighs. 

She had horses who laughed too much. 

She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses. 

She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms. 

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.

She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.

She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.

She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.

She had horses who said they weren't afraid.

She had horses who lied. 

She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse." 

She had horses who called themselves, "spirit." and kept their voices secret and to themselves.

She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.

She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.

She had horses who waited for destruction.

She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.

She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.

She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

-- Joy Harjo

Hap Notes: This is probably one of Joy Harjo's (born 1951) most anthologized poems. You know, I saw her read her poetry somewhere and for the longest time I thought I had dreamed her up and this poem. I can't recall where I saw her but I remember what she was wearing and how she sounded and the podium and the lights. I remembered this poem. For several years I thought I had dreamed it up by myself. Harjo's work is often like that; it's familiar, yet dreamlike; a chanting, mythic and enchanting. (I also thought I had dreamed the David Lynch film "Eraserhead" after I saw it in a theater. I have odd dreams, obviously.)

There's a good reason to think this poem has a dreamlike, or at least, day-dreamy, quality. It's a litany of what a person is, what other people are, what the various threads are that make up the tapestry of our lives. When you think on who and what you are, lists like this can arise, although perhaps not as eloquently as Harjo's is here.

Her Native American roots are deeply planted in this poem. The poem begs to be read aloud, as most of her poems do, and they have that in common with Homer and the earliest poets and the great oral traditions of storytelling with Native American tribes. There's a rhythm in her work, like the lapping of water on the shore of some dream river. Her poetry is often an expression of compassion and joy.

Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her heritage is Muskogee Creek and I've always wondered if she was any relation to Chitto Harjo, a noted Muskogee representative who worked for the autonomous government of the tribe in the late 1800s. She went to the University of New Mexico and received her Masters degree from the University of Iowa's writers workshop program. She has taught at Arizona State, the University of Colorado, University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico. She's won many awards and has received National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. She also had a band she performed with called Poetic Justice and she plays the saxophone (she learned it at age 40) and still performs a blend of poetry and music in her readings.

Here's a good Joy Harjo quote: "I am driven to explore the depths of creation and the depths of meaning. Being native, female, a global citizen in these times is the root, even the palette. I mean, look at the context: human spirit versus the spirits of the earth, sky, and universe. We are part of a much larger force of sense and knowledge. Western society is human-centric. We're paying the price of foolish arrogance, of forgetfulness."

and another

“I agree with Gide that most of what is created is beyond us, is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but also co-creators. I’m still amazed."

and one more:

"The artists: the poets, musicians, painters, dancers make art from truth. Art that forges new paths, new insight, inspiration comes from the raw stuff floating in the connections between humans, animals, plants, stars, all life. Poets are the talk-singers, we find our art in the space between the words. There is where the truth lies."

Every time I read this poem I think of Franz Marc's horse paintings; "The Blue Horses," "The Yellow Horses," "The Red Horses," so that's what is on the masthead today.

Here's Harjo reading the poem aloud: http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/harjo_reads_she_had_some_horses/

Here's her website: /www.joyharjo.com/Home.html

Number 204: Amy Lowell "Fireworks"

Fireworks

You hate me and I hate you
And we are so polite, we two!

But whenever I see you, I burst apart
And scatter the sky with my blazing heart.
It spits and sparkles in stars and balls,
Buds into roses – and flares, and falls.

Scarlet buttons, and pale green disks,
Silver spirals and asterisks,
Shoot and tremble in a mist
Peppered with mauve and amethyst.

I shine in the windows and light up the trees,
And all because I hate you, if you please.

And when you meet me, you rend asunder
And go up in a flaming wonder
Of saffron cubes, and crimson moons,
And wheels all amaranths and maroons.

Golden lozenges and spades
Arrows of malachites and jades,
Patens of copper, azure sheaves.
As you mount, you flash in the glossy leaves.

Such fireworks as we make, we two!
Because you hate me and I hate you.

-- Amy Lowell

Hap Notes: This seemed an appropriate poem for the upcoming holiday but I suppose it's really just because I live in an area suffering with drought right now so all the traditional fireworks for the Fourth of July have been canceled or postponed.

In the poem, Lowell's relationship with someone creates a lot of flashing and flaming and spitting and bursting. Her anger is big and gorgeous and intense. I'm reminded of Buddha's advice: "Beware of anger with its honeyed crest and poison root." There is something somewhat addictive about anger and its full expression, isn't there? It's hard to come down from its adrenaline. And how often is anger mixed with a certain amount of desire or attraction?

A "paten" is a charger, a plate, usually silver or gold. Amaranth is a flower- pictured above.

Lowell's descriptions of fireworks are some of the best I've ever read. One can almost see the display, the reflections of it in the windows of houses and the shine on the leaves of the trees. And of course it is the politeness the poet mentions in the first lines that make this anger so pent and explosive. Her anger is intense, eh?

Here's a Saturday treat- the fireworks competition in Malaysia in 2007. It's amazing:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbvzMESWhMg&playnext=1&list=PLDAFE01148AABE1F7
and part two:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=whLPK3mKazg

The delightful PES' take on fireworks with CANDY!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bmpFCwZbwM

and his fabulous spaghetti:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBjLW5_dGAM

No day would be complete without a visit from annoying orange (well, of course it would, it's just a segue):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN5PoW7_kdA&feature=fvwrel


Here's where we've talked about Lowell before (she was our first poet of the series!):
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-1-amy-lowell-falling-snow.html

Number 203: Delmore Schwartz "Tired And Unhappy, You Think Of Houses"

Tired And Unhappy, You Think Of Houses

Tired and unhappy, you think of houses
Soft-carpeted and warm in the December evening,
While snow’s white pieces fall past the window,
And the orange firelight leaps.
A young girl sings
That song of Gluck where Orpheus pleads with Death;
Her elders watch, nodding their happiness
To see time fresh again in her self-conscious eyes:
The servants bring in the coffee, the children go to bed,
Elder and younger yawn and go to bed,
The coals fade and glow, rose and ashen,
It is time to shake yourself! and break this
Banal dream, and turn your head
Where the underground is charged, where the weight
Of the lean building is seen,
Where close in the subway rush, anonymous
In the audience, well-dressed or mean,
So many surround you, ringing your fate,
Caught in an anger exact as a machine!

--Delmore Schwartz

Hap Notes: Well we've been talking around him and about him and now we get to him. Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) as we have seen from our previous three poems, had an enormous influence on most everyone who met him. Saul Bellow based his Pulitzer Prize winning Humbolt's Gift on his relationship with Schwartz. Singer-songwriter Lou Reed studied under Schwartz at Syracuse University and has written various tribute songs to him. He was a larger than life talent but life doesn't like you to be too much larger than it is and it can quickly diminish your size. So it was with the extraordinary gifts of Schwartz.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, his parents were ill-suited to each other and fought constantly, often in public, until they divorced when Schwartz was nine. His experience of his parent's relationship is reflected in the short story that catapulted him to fame, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (the story retains its brilliance and is well worth your reading.) Schwartz went to the University of Wisconsin and Columbia before getting his degree at New York University. He then went to Harvard and did graduate work studying philosophy with Alfred North Whitehead, which is kind of a "wow."

After that famous short story was published, the critical acclaim for it was overwhelming. He was hired as a lecturer at Harvard and edited The Partisan Review and The New Republic. He was hailed as a new Stendahl or Chekov as a writer and as a new voice to compare with Pound and Eliot in his verse. He was brilliant and it was well-deserved but this kind of thing is bound to go to a person's head and also be the source of a great deal of pressure to constantly perform with brilliance. His philosophy background gave his work remarkable depth and yet Schwartz often argued that poetry should be understandable and not too willfully obscure. Of course, what Schwartz found understandable and what an average reader found understandable are two very different things and the rift is made more so with the passing years and what passes for education these days (when did education become a place for vocational training and not a place for learning how to think? Okay, I'll put away the soapbox.)

Part of Schwartz's failure to keep up with his brilliant start was due to mental illness, part of it to alcoholism (which often is how people with mental illness try to cure themselves or, at least, make them feel better. This, however, rarely works and it certainly did not with Schwartz.)

Towards the end of his life Schwartz "held court" at the White Horse Tavern in New York City where he would regale his listeners with passages read aloud from Finnegan's Wake. He was a great fan of James Joyce. He isolated himself in seedy hotels, wrote a little, drank much and he died of a heart attack in an elevator in the Columbia Hotel. I believe I've mentioned before that he was so isolated that it took a couple of days for his body to be claimed at the morgue.

The critic Alfred Kazin wrote for the New Republic with Schwartz and recalled his animated face, his early brilliance, his anguish, his belief in the works of culture- of philosophers and poets. He was both introspective and effuse. He was a bright flame who turned inevitably into a dying ember. He was ever a brilliant conversationalist but became bitter and as Koch says, "rueful." Kazin said that when one visited him later in his life, "You could not leave him without hating yourself."

In today's poem we see Schwartz contrasting the old world culture with the modern world. The poet envisions a time that was at once somewhat cultured and yet he realizes his vision of it is a bit trite. There is youth in the room and satisfaction. He contrasts this with the contemporary world. It's a vivid dream. There is much more to the poem than this. Think, also, of what the poet is saying about the world in relationship to himself. What kind of person thinks of houses like this one? You remember we talked about Orpheus, yes? We will talk about Schwartz more this year, I'm sure.

I could not find the Gluck aria he mentions but I'm almost sure he means this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCLFGRY5EeQ
The old record is particularly effective for conveying the mood of the poem.
But of course, here's the great Maria Callas doing the same piece: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF5FhF_t5i4&feature=related
which I add just because Callas is a favorite of mine. She always brings tears to my eyes.

Here's a good Schwartz quote: "There is no genuine place for the poet in modern life."

You can find more Schwartz here: www.poemhunter.com/delmore-schwartz/

As an added treat, here is his translation of "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rilke which we talked about last week. He calls it

Archaic Bust of Apollo

(After Rilke)

We cannot know the indescribable face
Where the eyes like apples ripened. Even so,
His torso has a candelabra's glow,
His gaze, contained as in a mirror's grace,

Shines within it. Otherwise his breast
Would not be dazzling. Nor would you recognize
The smile that moves along his curving thighs,
There where love's strength is caught within its nest.

This stone would not be broken, but intact
Beneath the shoulders' flowing cataract,
Nor would it glisten like a stallion's hide,

Brimming with radiance from every side
As a star sparkles. Now it is dawn once more.
All places scrutinize you. You must be reborn.

-- Ranier Maria Rilke (translated by Delmore Schwartz)

Number 202: Robert Lowell "To Delmore Schwartz"

To Delmore Schwartz

(Cambridge 1946)

We couldn't even keep the furnace lit!
Even when we had disconnected it,
the antiquated
refrigerator gurgled mustard gas
through your mustard-yellow house,
and spoiled our long maneuvered visit
from T.S. Eliot's brother, Henry Ware...

Your stuffed duck craned toward Harvard from my trunk:
its bill was a black whistle, and its brow
was high and thinner than a baby's thumb;
its webs were tough as toenails on its bough.
It was your first kill: you had rushed it home,
pickled in a tin wastebasket of rum–
it looked through us, as if it'd died dead drunk.
You must have propped its eyelids with a nail,
and yet it lived with us and met our stare,
Rabelaisian, lubricious, drugged. And there,
perched on my trunk and typing-table,
it cooled our universal
Angst a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed
the chicken-hearted shadows of the world.
Underseas fellows, nobly mad,
we talked away our friends. "Let Joyce and Freud
the Masters of Joy,
be our guests here," you said. The room was filled
with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid,
inert gaze of Coleridge, back
from Malta – his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black.
Your tiger kitten, Oranges,
cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls.
You said:
"We poets in our youth begin in sadness;
thereof in the end come despondency and madness;
Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!"
The Charles
River was turning silver. In the ebb-
light of morning, we stuck
the duck
-'s web-
foot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we'd killed.

-- Robert Lowell

Hap Notes: Here we have Lowell reminiscing about his days with Schwartz at Harvard. Schwartz and Lowell had a "falling out" of sorts and were not close after their year or so in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and Lowell refers to this many times with rue in his personal letters to friends throughout his life. But, in this poem, written and published while Schwartz was still alive, Lowell fondly remembers their friendship and even possibly hopes to mend it.

The Wordsworth that Schwartz quotes in the poem is given a mournful twist by Schwartz. The verse in the poem, "Resolution and Independence", is actually "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; /But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." Remember how Koch called Schwartz "that rueful man"?

Stalin had his cerebral hemorrhages in 1953, nine years after the experiences detailed in the poem. Not sure if Lowell is confused on the dates or making a point here. Remember that almost everything you unearth in Lowell's poetry was purposefully placed there. Of course, he was human, had own troubles with mental illness, and it could be a lapse of memory. Possible.

Lowell said that Schwartz introduced him to Freud and talked incessantly about him. We know from previous poems this week how attached Schwartz was to James Joyce.

The Coleridge picture, staring at the two poets, I cannot figure. I've put a few on the masthead. Coleridge went to Malta in 1804 for his health, he returned to England in 1806 (he took a side trip to Italy, too, but had a diplomatic position in Malta after he got there) sicker than when he'd left and completely addicted to opium (laudanum). Notice the duck's black beak and Coleridge's "baked" black lips.

Lowell's stanza structure (especially the second to last "-'s web-") is fascinating. I think he's making us pause as we read stuck/ the duck/-'s web-"/foot. It certainly slows it down, especially if you read it aloud. It's meant to be slightly amusing, especially the duck's almost lurid leer. It is stuck in his memory, this dead duck with the lubricious stare.

Lowell often associates "mustard yellow" with Schwartz and makes reference to a suit coat that Delmore owned in that color in a letter Lowell wrote later in life. Mustard gas was a weapon used on the soldiers in WWI. There are a few nails in this poem to consider, too.

Even Berryman commented on the charming kitten/cat, Oranges, that Delmore had with him. The poets liked the name. And there is the thought that nothing much really rhymes with "oranges," a literary joke of sorts.

It's a loony picture, this stuffed duck and Coleridge staring at these two brilliant, slightly mad, drinking poets. There's a good deal of symbolism going on with the career of Schwartz and the dead duck, too, pickled as Schwartz often was in his later years, in alcohol.

Lowell is saying something about, in addition to everything else, poets and their lives in this poem.

Here's where we've mentioned Lowell before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/05/number-171-robert-lowell-for-union-dead.html

and here: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-33-robert-lowell-dolphin.html

Number 201: John Berryman: "Dream Song 149" and "Dream Song 150"

Dream Song 149

The world is gradually becoming a place 

where I do not care to be anymore. Can Delmore die?

I don't suppose

in all them years a day went ever by

without a loving thought for him. Welladay.

In the brightness of his promise, 



unstained, I saw him thro' the mist of the actual

blazing with insight, warm with gossip

thro' all our Harvard years 

when both of us were just becoming known

I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref

and grief too astray for tears. 



I imagine you have heard the terrible news, 

that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,

in New York: he sang me a song 
'I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz 

Harms & the child I sing, two parents' torts' 

when he was young & gift-strong.

-- John Berryman

DREAM SONG 150

He had followers but they could not find him;
friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift
in the center of Manhattan,
without a girl, in cheap hotels,
so disturbed on the street friends avoided him
Where did he come by his lift

which all we must or we would rapidly die:
did he remember the more beautiful & fresh poems
of early manhood now?
or did his subtle & strict standards allow
them nothing, baffled? What then did self-love show
of the weaker later, somehow?

I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved
but it is not so. He painfully removed
himself from the ordinary contracts
and shook with resentment. What final thought
solaced his fall to the hotel carpet, if any,
& the New York Times’s facts?

-- John Berryman

Hap Notes: It's really not fair to make our first exposure here to John Berryman (1914-1972) as a precursor to an upcoming Schwartz poem but I don't think Berryman himself would mind it so much because he loved him so deeply. These poems today about Schwartz were in his second book of dream songs, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Berryman adored Schwartz and saw him as a learned mentor in addition to being a treasured friend.

I studied literature at the University of Minnesota, where Berryman spent a large part of his teaching career, and I was forever pestering the office staff at Lind Hall with questions about him: was his office here? (yes) Where did he teach? (often in the old "barracks") Do you remember him? (yes. He was odd.) They sent me to a few professors who'd known him. A lot of adjectives were haltingly used to describe him; erratic, charming, loud, effusive, difficult, strange, unstable. But to a man, the one word everyone used to describe him was "brilliant." I never set foot on that Washington Avenue bridge (which I did on a daily basis) without thinking of him.

His dream songs (there are 365 of them) were originally published in two volumes, the first of which, 77 Dream Songs, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. The dream songs were a revelation of mixed syntax, language and images. Their structure, as you can see, is three stanzas of 6 lines each and each of them carries a charge, whether of dynamite or electricity or a sword flourish.

The dream song poems follow Henry, a sometimes Berryman alter-ego, a sometimes fictional character, and deal with a variety of subjects many of which are dark and odd. Berryman one time wrote, jokingly, that the songs were "meant to terrify and comfort." I would remind you that the gravest things are said in jest. (He chose the name "Henry" because Berryman and his second wife, Ann, once had a discussion about names they hated. She chose "Mabel" and he chose "Henry." They often affectionately referred to each other with these names.)

Berryman was born in Oklahoma and grew up for a while in Florida and New York, all of which would belie his cultured accent. You can hear his sonorous voice here (slightly inebriated and eventually reading "Life, Friends is Boring" one of the dream songs ): www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YUu3L-qGMI&feature=related (Even inebriated he gives a stunning interview and you can hear for yourself his highly literate brilliance.)

Berryman's biological father, John Smith, committed suicide (he shot himself just outside of the young poet's window) and Berryman took his stepfather's name, with whom he got along well. Berryman graduated from Columbia and also studied at Clare College, Cambridge in England on scholarship. He felt that poetry was his vocation but was forced, like most poets, to supplement his income by teaching. In Berryman's case this was very distracting because he was a scholar and worked hard to make his classes worth the taking. He taught at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop and Harvard in addition to his years at the University of Minnesota.

He was an extraordinary teacher when he was not in the hospital for treatment for manic-depression or drunk (even then he was erudite.) He often got permission to leave the hospital to teach and then return after the class. He took the teaching, like he took his poetry writing, seriously.

Berryman committed suicide by jumping off the Washington Avenue bridge into the Mississippi on the campus of the University of Minnesota in January of 1972. It is said that he waved to onlookers before making the leap. I don't think he drowned, I believe he hit the frozen bank of the river. He was 57.

In today's poems "Henry" talks about Delmore Schwartz and the poet laments at the gradual diminution of Schwartz's prowess as a poet: "I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved/but it is not so." The word "tref" (pronounced Trafe) is a Yiddish/Hebrew derivative and means "unclean, unfit to consume." It is a derogatory term often used to describe something vile. The expression "harms and the child" is, for one thing, a derivative of the first line of Virgil's Aeneid: "Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate/And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,/Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore." (Dryden translation.)

Eileen Simpson, Berryman's second wife, wrote a very interesting book on the poets and their wives that she and Berryman hung with, Poets In Their Youth. It's well worth reading for insights.

Here's a good Berryman quote: "This business about geniuses in neglected garrets is for the birds. The idea that a man is somehow no good just because he becomes very popular, like Frost, is nonsense, also. There are exceptions—Chatterton, Hopkins, of course, Rimbaud, you can think of various cases—but on the whole, men of genius were judged by their contemporaries very much as posterity judges them. So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers."

You can find more Berryman here: famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems

The masthead today is the young Berryman studying at Cambridge (left) and the young Delmore Schwartz (right.)

Number 200: Kenneth Koch "A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead"

A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead

Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.

-- Kenneth Koch

Hap Notes: Koch is one of my favorite poets, although his poems are not particularly favorites of mine. I know that's an odd thing to say. Koch lived and breathed poetry, saw the poetry in the cadences of everyday life, encouraged all people (especially children and the elderly) to write poetry and felt deeply about literature and friends and his wife and his children. He felt deeply and he knew how to describe it. Is there anything more brilliantly put than "crazier than shirt tales in the wind" or "the minuet of stars"?

His poems ARE him in some sense and as you read his work with its "unsyntactical beauty" you become part of his life, part of his story and you cannot help but love him, his brilliant asides, funny comments and beautiful images. He makes you laugh and cry. As he so aptly put it, ""The truth is that one can be funny and serious at the same time."

In today's poem he is talking about the poet Delmore Schwartz whom he studied under at Harvard. Schwartz was a literary skyrocket when he first started writing. He was bathed with praise, was the youngest poet to receive the Bollingen Prize in 1959 and was hailed as a fresh new literary voice. He started at the top and you know what that means: he had nowhere to go but down and down he went into mental hospitals and heavy drinking.

Koch was so excited to be studying under Schwartz, whose poems he'd read in the New Directions anthologies. "I was so star-struck!" Koch said. Now, I know that Koch sounds like Yoda when he says about Schwartz's desk "There did he write? I am wondering." It's a delightful thought to me that Yoda could be patterned after Koch (or Schwartz, for that matter) but I highly doubt it. The stirred up grammar is due to an emotion coming through in his reverie as he's thinking of his late mentor.

"Do as I say, not as I do" was not as well-used when Schwartz said it to Koch in the late 40s so it was clever, self-deprecating and not cliche then. Pogo is a comic strip by Walt Kelly known for its brilliant literary references, highly charged political commentary and South Georgia "Swamp-speakin" animal population. (Pogo, the main character is a possum. The masthead is the poster Kelly did for the first Earth Day in 1971. I think I've mentioned before that this country used to be flecked with litter everywhere one went. Kelly's cartoon is barely an exaggeration.) Here's a quick refresher on Kelly: www.bpib.com/kelly.htm

The Coney Island photograph shows us many things but one of them is a reflection on Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," the short story that launched him to prominence which we shall talk about more when we get to him.

Schwartz, by the way (oh, yeah, you know his work is coming this week sometime, yes?) was famous for sitting at a tavern in New York with his well-thumbed copy of Finnegan's Wake, which he read aloud to his circle of admirers. He lived like a nomad, traveling from one seedy hotel desert to another. When he died, his body was not identified for three days at the morgue. He lived the weary sad life of an alcoholic whose fame came too soon, maybe, and pessimism was his daily bread.

Schwartz was a mesmerizing talker and he was vital and brilliant when Koch studied under him and Koch said, "Most of all, he gave me the image of a real poet."

One more thing I want to mention about Koch. Back in the late 60s there was a "revolutionary" group called "Back Against The Wall Motherfuckers." Their name was based on a poem "Black People!" by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and they had some foggy idea about revolutionary art which was somewhat interesting and somewhat ill-conceived. At one point, as a stunt, they "assassinated" Kenneth Koch while he was giving a reading at St. Mark's Church in New York. A member of the group pointed a handgun at the podium, shouted "Koch!" and fired a round of blanks at Koch. Koch responded, "Grow up."

Here's a wonderful 20 minute treat– Koch reading his own poetry at the Library of Congress: www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/1866 (The last two poems he reads, "The History of Jazz" and "The Circus" are two of my (and many others') favorite poems by him. Hearing him read them in his smooth voice is addictive. He's magical.

Here is where we have talked about Koch before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-5-kenneth-koch-to-roman-forum_11.html (this poem has gotten the second most hits on this blog- it's wonderful!)