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.
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.
The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, disheveling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.
Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, That heavy bear who sleeps with me, Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp, Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath. —The strutting show-off is terrified, Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants, Trembles to think that his quivering meat Must finally wince to nothing at all.
That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown, Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear, Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, Amid the hundred million of his kind, The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
Orpheus, the son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village with his ballads. He loved literature and intellectual conversation and argument, loved the history of thought. A big gentle handsome boy he put together his own combination of symbolism and street language. Into this mixture went Yeats, Apollinaire, Lenin, Freud, Morris R. Cohen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip. He brought Coney Island into the Aegean and united Buffalo Bill with Rasputin. He was going to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers. Born (as he insisted) on a subway platform at Columbus Circle, his mother going into labor on the IRT, he intended to be a divine artist, a man of visionary states and enchantments, Platonic possession. He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires were contradictory. He wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say anything; he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and bless humankind. (p. 120)
O Love, dark animal, With your strangeness go Like any freak or clown: Appease the child in her Because she is alone Many years ago Terrified by a look Which was not meant for her. Brush your heavy fur Against her, long and slow Stare at her like a book, Her interests being such No one can look too much. Tell her how you know Nothing can be taken Which has not been given: For you time is forgiven: Informed by hell and heaven You are not mistaken
Delmore Schwartz must have spent more time thinking about Finnegans Wake than almost anybody else. Yet it's a shame he wrote very little about the book. I've found just one essay, 'The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World', written in 1951, in which he talks about what the Wake meant to him:
'Joyce had completed his last and probably his best book, the stupendous Finnegans Wake, a book which would itself provide sufficient evidence and illustration of the vocation of the modern poet in modern life. All that has been observed in Eliot's work is all the more true of Finnegans Wake – the attention to colloquial speech, the awareness of the variety of ways that languages can be degraded, and how that degradation can be the base for a new originality and exactitude, the sense of an involvement with theinternational scene and all history. But more than that, the radio and even televisionplay a part in this wonderful book, as indeed they played a part in the writing of it. Joyce had a short wave radio with which he was able to hear London, Moscow, Dublin – and New York! In Finnegans Wake, I was perplexed for a time by echoes of American radio comedy and Yiddish humor until I learned about Joyce's radio and about his daily reading of the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune.' The most important point of all, however, is that Finnegans Wake exhibits in the smallest detail and in the entire scope of the work the internationality of the modern poet, his involvement in all history, and his consciousness of the impingement of any foreign language from Hebrew to Esperanto upon the poet's use of the English language.....'
As I have come into a room, and touch The lamp's button, and the light blooms with such Certainty where the darkness loomed before,
As I care for what I do not know, and care Knowing for little she might not have been, And for how little she would be unseen, The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.
Where the light is, and each thing clear, separate from all others, standing in its place, I drink the time and touch whatever's near,
And hope for day when the whole world has that face: For what assures her present every year? In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.
In The Early Morning Rain To my family & friends “Hello” And money. With something inside us we float up On this electric chair each breath nearer the last Now is spinning Seven thousand feet over / The American Midwest Gus walks up under the arb-light as far as the first person The part that goes over the fence last And down in a green forest ravine near to “her” Winds in the stratosphere Apologize to the malcontents Downstairs. The black bag & the wise man may be found in the brain-room. what sky out there Take it away & it’s off one foot is expressing itself as continuum the other, sock
2.
Tomorrow. I need to kill Blank mind part Confusions of the cloth White snow whirls everywhere. Across the fields in the sky the Soft, loose stars swarm. Nature makes my teeth “to hurt” shivering now on 32nd street in my face & in my head does Bobby Dylan ever come around here? listen it’s alive where exposed nerve jangles & I looming over Jap’s American flag In Public, In Private The Sky Pilot In No-Man’s-Land The World Number 14 is tipsy as pinballs on the ocean We are bored through......through......through with our professionalism Outside her Windows
I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, Sour the boiling honey; The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; There in the sun the frigid threads Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers Split up the brawned womb's weathers, Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; There in the deep with quartered shades Of sun and moon they paint their dams As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its hearts; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse Of love and light bursts in their throats. O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter Into a chiming quarter Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars; There, in his night, the black-tongued bells The sleepy man of winter pulls, Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark deniers, let us summon Death from a summer woman, A muscling life from lovers in their cramp, From the fair dead who flush the sea The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp, And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning, Green of the seaweed's iron, Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds, Pick the world's ball of wave and froth To choke the deserts with her tides, And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly, Heigh ho the blood and berry, And nail the merry squires to the trees; Here love's damp muscle dries and dies, Here break a kiss in no love's quarry. O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see the boys of summer in their ruin. Man in his maggot's barren. And boys are full and foreign in the pouch. I am the man your father was. We are the sons of flint and pitch. O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
THE FORCE THAT DRIVES THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head; Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
I. DIDO
The body’s products become
Fatal to it. Our spit
Would kill us, but we
Die of our heat.
Though I say the things I wish to say
They are needless, their own flame conceives it.
So I am cheated of perfection.
II. THE IDIOT
O how this sullen, careless world
Ignorant of me is! These rocks, those homes
Know not the touch of my flesh, now is there one tree
Whose shade has known me for a friend.
I’ve wandered the wide world over.
No man I’ve known, no friendly beast
Has come and put its nose into my hands.
No maid has welcomed my face with a kiss.
Yet once, as I took passage
From Gibraltar to Cape Horn
I met some friendly mariners on the boat
And as we struggled to keep the ship from sinking
The very waves seemed friendly, and the sound
The pray made as it hit the front of the boat.
Here is a transcription of Ashbery’s remarks:
“The picture on the jacket was supplied by Wesleyan. It seems to be a contemporary print of the event at Versailles. I had hoped they would use drawings from Jacques-Louis David for his vast painting ‘The Tennis Court Oath.’ It was apparently his practice to draw figures without clothes first and add them later. These drawings show naked men leaping joyfully in the air, waving their hats, which creates a bizarre effect.
I had very little input into the production and I suspect the press wasn’t at all happy with it (though it has remained continuously in print since 1962). I had submitted it at the urgent request of John Hollander, who was a longtime supporter of my work and (just guessing here) managed to get it accepted over the objections of the other jurors. I only met John some time later when he was passing through Paris, and would like to take this occasion to mention what a lovely human being he was, totally devoted to poetry.”
In addition to the Ashbery, there are lots of other fascinating books to check out here (although there seem to be only two volumes of poems included, a book by Rita Dove and Ashbery’s).
And, if any of you are in the market for a very special first edition of the Tennis Court Oath or many other wonderful books, be sure to head to Christie’s on December 2, wallet in hand!
Joseph Conrad gave a reading at the London Library. A red-haired woman came up afterward. He had seen her circling earlier, taking a chair at the back, but he had not troubled about it. “I knew you in the Congo,” she said now. “I knew your wife.” My wife? he thought, but, as always after a reading, in the retreating roar of his own soul he could barely hear her or remember how English worked. Had she said “life,” not “wife”? Her voice, that of a crow, thrust at him—some weekend they’d “all spent together” and he’d sent her a letter the next day, a poem. Dread rose at the back of his mind; a parcel broke. He turned away, busied himself. He blamed, abhorred the touch of a past time; it surprised him how much. She followed him to the dinner that Charles (the London Librarian) had arranged at a nearby bistro, hurrying along behind everyone else, and, with the touch of his wife or his life burning like a toxin on his inside skin, Joseph Conrad could not meet her eyes or let pathos come clouding into him. When she seated herself at the foot of the table and was speaking loudly to anyone who listened, he felt the pluck of it on the side of his head but did not turn, he had to continue, now he’d begun, it was a long dinner. It was unjust. In other contexts, he admired perseverance. She was drowning. He did not turn. The light of pure reason, Joseph Conrad liked to say, resembles electricity in being cold. Proud statements like this came to him now and again when he was swimming but afterward seemed a bit off. No, it was a little nightmare, it was a rescue he could not carry out (and he was a rescuer).
But eventually the dinner ended. It was still 1907. No one had drowned. Shrugging into coats, they said hearty farewell things. He did not catch her eye. All left together to walk back toward the Library and go their ways. It was an early winter night. He began to feel fundamentally impatient with himself, hot with cowardice. He dropped back to walk beside her. His heartbeat was too fast. She did not seem surprised. An unknownness enveloped them, as if they were playing a game, as if they were draped in cloth or lost in old rooms. How they got to talking about white bread he could not remember afterward, but it shone in his mind, this conversation, as the bread had shone, and he was trying to tell her all that. Maybe she had mentioned lining up for bread in the early-morning dusk, sent out by her mother, running home with a loaf as heavy as two schoolbooks. When one dreamed of bread even now, Joseph Conrad agreed with her, it was not the rough black bread of childhood. Dream bread, mythic bread, was as white as a freshly laundered cuff.
Here war is simple like a monument: A telephone is speaking to a man; Flags on a map assert that troops were sent; A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives, Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, And can be lost and are, and miss their wives, And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.
But ideas can be true although men die, And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking. Dachau.
I don’t know where they come from. I can summon them (sometimes I can) into my mind, into my fingers, I don’t know why. Or I’ll suddenly hear them walking, sometimes waking— they don’t often come when I need them. When I need them most terribly, never.
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift! If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed By the fine, fine wind that takes its course though the chaos of the world Like a fine, and exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted; If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Diven by invisible split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul, I would be a good fountain, a good well-head, Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It's somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
