Number 267: Carl Sandburg "They All Want To Play Hamlet"

They All Want To Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers—O flowers,
flowers slung by a dancing girl—in the saddest play the inkfish,
Shakespeare, ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad
and to stand by an open grave with a joker’s skull in the hand and then to
say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking a
heart that’s breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

-- Carl Sandburg

Hap Notes: Sandburg is cleverly doing several things here with his casual sounding narrative. First of all, he's poking a bit of fun at actors and Shakespeare (the "inkfish" which is also slang for a squid and implies a writer who shoots out a lot of ink.). He's also giving the play a somewhat backhanded compliment through the actors who want to speak its verses and situations so full of drama and wisdom and beauty. So, sure, he's saying that actors who cannot possibly have gone through the travails and disappointments of Hamlet are eager to set their acting teeth in such a meaty role. Sandburg obviously admires Shakespeare.

As you can see from the masthead today there are a variety of actors who have all played the role. Paul Gross may have played the role but he also played an actor/director who played the role and then went mad (a parallel of Hamlet himself) in Slings And Arrows (which I could do a whole blog on- a wonderful Canadian television series that is far too complex, funny, moving and wonderful to talk about here.) Each of these actors brought something wonderful to the role (although in the case of Gibson it was mostly good costumes and great scenery) but each of them lacked one little edge of Hamlet. Auden claims in an essay that it is an unplayable role and he may have a point. But Shakespeare filled it with dialog that appeals to actors in their teens, middle years and maturity. Amazing.

Now Sandburg is not just poking fun at actors although the tone of his poem, at first, suggests this. No, he's talking about something far deeper in the acting profession. Notice that he says "all actors are sad " and "They are acting when they talk about it " and "they know it is acting to be particular about it."

Why would all actors be sad? What kind of a profession is it that asks you to pretend to be another person and say words written by somebody else? Who would want to do this, and why? Acting is a profession that asks its practitioners to feel like another person whom they are just pretending to be. Not only that, but actors find themselves often "acting" in real life. The profession is one in which its players are constantly honing their skills. It becomes hard to tell what one really feels from what one "acts" as though they feel. And how many of us, as the audience, are also actors in our own lives? Who are we, anyway?

When Sandburg says they want to say "beautiful words masking a heart that’s breaking, breaking," whose heart is he talking about? Hamlet's? The actor's? The audience's? All three?

Now let's go back to our original question: why is it that "all actors are sad"?

Here is where we have talked about Sandburg before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-178-carl-sandburg-happiness.html

and here: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-137-carl-sandburg-electric-sign.html

and here:
happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-15-carl-sandburg-arithmetic.html

The masthead today features actors who have played Hamlet. They are, clockwise, from far left to right: John Barrymore, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Lawrence Olivier, David Tennant, Emile Hirsch, Derek Jacobi, Richard Chamberlain, Paul Gross, Mel Gibson. In the center is Richard Burton.

Number 266:Richard Wilbur 'A Barred Owl"

A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

-- Richard Wilbur

Hap Notes: The Barred Owl has many names but is probably best known popularly as the "hoot owl." You may remember the poem we did earlier this year by Jimmy Carter where he mentions the distinctive "who cooks for you" call of the bird. They also make an alarming assortment of caws and gurgly purrs. They sound like this: www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/sounds which, by the way, could be pretty scary if you are a kid in bed at night hearing it, as Wilbur's daughter is in the poem.

The owls have a wing span which is between 2 and 4 feet and their flight is swift and relatively soundless. Here's a video from the Cornell Ornithology Lab where Science Editor Laura Erickson with pictures by Gerrit Vynn explain how people are awakened by these birds: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5zc-NHIipw&feature=related

The owls are beautiful but Wilbur is also making a point about how we diminish our fears by assigning terms or phrases to our to them which give them a humorous or whimsical quality, like saying that the owl is saying "who cooks for you" or calling bears "cuddly" and turning them into stuffed toys. The reality is that the natural world has a set of checks and balances that we sometimes would find hard to digest (no pun intended). Of course we can also augment our fear with words. They are very powerful in our lives.

This poem is Wilbur at his most Frost-like, Frost being a poet he knew and by whom he was influenced. The poem has a dark humor like Frost as well as the trademark natural observation.

We talked about Richard Wilbur before. You can find it here:happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-131-richard-wilbur-writer.html

Number 265: Alfred, Lord Tennyson "Break, Break, Break"

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Hap Notes: This was written as Tennyson lamented the loss of his best friend and companion, Arthur Hallam. The shy Tennyson met Hallam at Trinity College, Cambridge and the two were inseparable friends. Hallam's death at the age of 22 haunted Tennyson for the rest of his life. He and Hallam had planned to publish a book together featuring both of their verses.

Tennyson's sorrow in today's poem has a bitter and resentful tone which anyone who has lost a loved one can understand. It seems almost impossible and somewhat unbelievable that the world goes on as your life is benighted with mourning. How can those children be so happy? What does anybody have to sing about? How can the regular old world of trade and commerce go on when your world seems to have caved in?

Of course, Tennyson is also pointing out that the sea, which keeps on rolling, the children who are playing (the next generation), the young sailor singing (your life is not their life) and the ships that are sailing (keeping the world working and going along) are all part of the short cycle of life. There is a large universe in this poem contrasting to Tennyson's grief.

Tennyson really cornered the market on sorrow in his poetry. Even his poem "Ulysses", written shortly after Hallam's death, is full of shadings of his sadness at his friend's death. Tennyson always acknowledges that the world is huge and mysterious and unfathomable. Here's a little bonus poem that emphasizes this:

Flower In the Crannied Wall

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;—
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

See what I mean? His sorrow is always tinged with the knowledge that not all things can be understood. This is a giant concept, by the way. Disconcerting in its truth, yes?

Here's where we've talked about Tennyson before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/number-73-alfred-lord-tennyson-eagle.html

and here: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-193-tennyson-brook.html

The picture of Tennyson is a detail of the one painted by George Frederic Watts in 1895.

Number 264: Robert Pinsky "ABC"

ABC

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,

Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.

Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:

X=your zenith.

--Robert Pinsky

Hap Notes: Pinsky's clever verse has a deep level in that the alphabet is one of the tools with which we first learn to communicate. It is elemental, a box of spoons (or knives), a set of crayons, a rack of spices for cooking, building blocks, and keys – skeleton, Allen, West, mon, piano, of the Kingdom, of Romulus or Enoch or Solomon and don. What we do with the keys is a very individual process. But, throughout one's life, the "keys" often define the world.

Here is Pinsky reading the poem aloud: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MzM-CJmlRI

Here's where we have talked about Pinskey before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/09/number-258-robert-pinsky-forgetting.html

It's Saturday (yay!) so here are some cartoon bits and songs:

Of course we have the double punch of the Jackson Five in their cartoon with the classic "ABC": www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsxn6fwLEk0

Here they are for Alphabits cereal: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jWY27wt5y4&NR=1

and again: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEvprxTpGMY&feature=related

Here's a charming Sesame Street madrigal-like alphabet: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eLPPxSdwJw&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL41F229CF76200FD5

And a Sesame Street Rube Goldberg-like alphabet: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B17OvPYM040

This is Lowkey with Faith SFX with "Alphabet Assassin": www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToZUIdbgqjE&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=AVGxdCwVVULXePTEqEScmuH50jLcwSZ1Rf

Here's India's famous ZENiTH Dance Troupe performing at a wedding: www.youtube.com/user/zenithdanceinstitute?blend=9&ob=5#p/u/13/pLCEwdvKuAg

Alphabits with "magic sprinkles": www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv6XxS8-5MY

An oldie but a goodie from Letters To Cleo (remember them?): www.youtube.com/watch?v=whr5g88bSAA&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PLD4E010CEDF27BFBD

And finally- this just cracks me up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp22m4PEZUA
(taken from "Family Guy")

Number 263: A.E. Stallings "Fairy-tale Logic"

Fairy-tale Logic

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

-- A.E. Stallings

Hap Notes: Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born 1968) was a classics major and studied at both the University of Georgia and at Oxford. She is described as being part of the contemporary "New Formalists" school of poets. However, I think it is wise to leave the naming of the so called "schools" of poetry to future generations but this "formalist" category will do for now. Formalists usually keep to a metrical style with somewhat traditional rhymes and patterns. (This is a general rule more than a specific one so sometimes these "school" names are somewhat useless, but let it pass for now, eh? I'm often sort of vexed that the word "new" enters into it. They're Formalists. Period. Just sayin'.)

She has written two books of poetry and has translated Lucretius. For such a small output of poetry she has won a plethora of prizes including the James Dickey award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Eunice Tietjens Prize. She lives with her journalist husband in Athens, Greece.

Today's poem starts out talking about the odd tasks the heroes/heroines of fairy tales are given to do in order to find happiness or a fortune or true love or break a spell etc. The poet amusingly adds a few things that would equal these tasks in today's word, like memorizing the phone book. Remember that Stallings is schooled in the classics so she makes a nod to Virgil's Aenied with the leaky boat that takes Aeneas to the underworld. Myths and fairy tales are often in place to teach us valuable lessons about life, are they not?

So there's the whimsy of fairy tales that makes us think that this poem is saying that with the "logic" of a fairy tale you must fight magic with more strange magic. But there is something far darker and more mysterious going on in this poem.

What would it really be like to marry a monster? Who could literally do that? What kind of person could give up a first born child? In fairy tales this happens, to be sure, but in reality what do we call a spouse who is an abusive monster? What sort of real world circumstances would lead a person to give up a child?

We are read fairy tales when we are young but we learn early in our adulthood that marrying a monster will break no evil spells and that giving up a child is painful and difficult. So what is the poet telling us about fairy tales and logic and life and will and magic?

Here's a great Stallings quote: " I always liked the fairy tales—the original, uncut versions, the ones with violent, horrible endings. I think the unexpurgated fairy tales are actually comforting to children. They are a lot more cathartic. I mean something happens to the bad people, and they get put away, so you feel safe when the story is over. I never remember having a nightmare because of a fairy tale, and I liked Hans Christian Anderson's tales. They often have sad endings. The Little Mermaid, for instance, has a very sad ending."

and another: "Form is just a tool, another way to get where you're going, and you should be able to use it any way you want to. Maybe I should feel more reverent about it, but poets in the past pretty much used form however they wanted to. Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a sonnet with a nonce rhyme scheme, so I feel pretty free to do whatever I want."

You can read the whole interview here: www.cortlandreview.com/issue/19/stallings19.html

You can find more Stallings' poetry and prose here: www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ae-stallings

Number 262: Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West"

Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West

Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons
walking their dogs
in Central Park West
(or their cats on leashes—
the cats themselves old highwire artists)
The ballerinas
leap and pirouette
through Columbus Circle
while winos on park benches
(laid back like drunken Goudonovs)
hear the taxis trumpet together
like horsemen of the apocalypse
in the dusk of the gods
It is the final witching hour
when swains are full of swan songs
And all return through the dark dusk
to their bright cells
in glass highrises
or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes
in the Russian Tea Room
or climb four flights to back rooms
in Westside brownstones
where faded playbill photos
fall peeling from their frames
like last year’s autumn leaves

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Hap Notes: Ferlinghetti's word picture of aging ballet dancers is both slightly amusing and deeply moving. Living their faded upper class lives, walking cats on leashes, still spry but old, the ballerinas know that they chose a profession that would and did eject them as they aged. But their lives are still exotic to us – smoking their imported cigarettes, having tea at fashionable spots – they are the divas of the dance and are used to being treated like a hot-house orchid, even if now they have to treat themselves this way.

The Goudenov reference is to Boris Goudenov (the Russian Tsar of the 1600s, also famous opera by Mussorgsky) or possibly Alexander Goudenov, the ballet dancer (although this is unlikely as Goudenov was probably in his 20s or 30s when the poem was written, although it's a possible reference. It does add a special tang to the poem. Sad, too, because Goudenov had a bit of an alcohol problem towards the end of his life (which ended when he was only 45). [Side note: Yes, Boris Badenov in Rocky and Bullwinkle is a pun on the Tsar/opera, if you did not know it already)

A "swain" is a young man from the country or a man who is the lover of a girl or young woman. It's worth noting that ballerinas in their prime are usually pursued by many a swain.

The taxis blare out the final judgment call, the ballerinas return to apartments like "cells" to wait out their final days.

Because of that "autumn leaves" line, this poem really always makes me think of this season, even though it's winter both literally and figuratively for the ballerinas in the poem.

Here is where we have talked about Ferlinghetti before: http://happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/07/number-218-lawrence-ferlinghetti.html

and here: http://happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/number-174-lawrence-ferlinghetti-two.html

The masthead pictures are of the famous Russian Tea Room in the poem. For many years it has been a fashionable place to eat or have tea for the wealthy residents of the Upper East Side in New York.

Number 261: John Magee 'High Flight"

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

-- John Magee

Hap Notes: John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922-1941) was an American flyer who joined up with the Royal Canadian Air Force before the U.S. entered WWII. He was killed at 19 in a collision, an accident over Lincolnshire, England involving his plane and a trainer plane.

Magee wrote poetry all through his high school years (and won prizes for it) and was influenced by the soldier poetry of Rupert Brooke.

I include it for several reasons. First off, its lines are memorable and Magee's description of flight is possibly unsurpassed. Second, it is an amazing work for an 18 year old, and would be for a poet far older. Third, while the last line is strictly metaphoric, it certainly makes one feel the wonder and splendor of soaring through the sky. Fourth, anyone over 40 will probably remember it. Why? Well, because many television stations, back when the broadcast day was rarely longer than 18 hours, signed on or off using this poem.

At one or two in the morning, a film clip of airplanes (sometimes fighter planes or jets) would be shown with a narrator reading the poem. A flag waving in the wind was usually the last shot, then the television would go to what we used to call "snow" or static.

Some stations played footage of a waving flag while ""The Star Spangled Banner" played in the background before "signing off" for the day. Some stations opened their broadcast day with the "banner" and closed with "High Flight" or vice versa. But if you were a night owl or an early riser you would remember today's poem.

Here's one version of what this looked like: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQYd_INSOg
There are many more versions of this, of course.

While Magee was certainly a young poet, I don't know that a better description of gravity exists than the "surly bonds of earth."

Even folks who say they don't know or like poetry, often remember and dig this one.