National Poetry Month, 2012, Apollo Addresses The Poetic Nation

Since once again we find ourselves in the midst of celebrating National Poetry Month (Huzzah!) I thought I would appoint myself Apollo for a day, if only to take a break from all of the lilacs, the lambs, the suicides, political speeches, disastrous love affairs, and the endless string of drearily deep thoughts. Today, I am going to give myself over completely to absinthe drinking and total sensory derangement and have a rollicking good time as primus inter pares, the chief unacknowledged legislator of the world.

[Bing!] I am Apollo now.

I am delighted to meet you. I am a Greek god, remember, not a Green Fairy. I am a representative of a Heavenly host that is reckoned in certain places in its billions. We are an older and more experienced race than this half-plastered version of humanity one typically encounters at a poetry reading. We get no kick from champagne. Death makes us yawn. We bore very easily. We like to play games. We can organize ourselves into a pack of wolves with a twirl of a finger. Or the twist of a knife. We take a very different view of the world than most people do.

Though, perhaps, not so very much very different from the poets of old, when you consider the fate of Troy. Or Cassandra. Or the millennia of excruciating patience we gods can show in removing the eyes and arms and legs and wings from the tiniest, most innocent, most irritating Angels. Or flies.


Apollo Speaks

Poetry...survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
-W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I have a feeling open mouths are not
The most propitious places to begin
A work of Art—but I am in a spot—
Your god—Apollo. Can’t I be forgiven?
You work with the materials you’ve got.
And when you have a bunch of gifts from Heaven—
Nice teeth like these, luxurious, long hair
That bounces beautifully—you want to share.

Although I’d never send a guy to Hell
For praising his own features in this way,
Not everyone up here’s so wonderful—
So I’d be careful with that resume.
Among my peers on Mount Olympus—well—
The sad divinities who now hold sway—
A somewhat jealous spirit still prevails.
Venus will extract your fingernails

If you annoy her. All I do is rhyme—
Brain a lazy reader with my lyre.
I used to pass out plagues for a good time.
I lent my son the Chariot of Fire,
He incinerated Persia. I’m
Sorry for that. Kids. Our laws require
Celestial beings to be licensed now,
For all light vehicles—from crane to cow.

Our modes of transport differ. Even here,
In Heaven, we find harmony elusive.
Although each god has been assigned a sphere
Of influence, gods can be reclusive—
Some would prefer we didn’t interfere
In Man’s affairs. Some turn red, abusive,
Chanting, “Blah, blah, blah—not anymore—
Just look what happened with the Trojan War!”

Let Homer dwell upon that dismal plain
Where Troy once stood—that heap of stones and ash—
Her towers toppled, all those horses slain.
Life goes on. Let’s follow Aeneas
From Ilium to Carthage, on again—
To Italy—Virgil’s Aenied. That was fast:
Aeneas left the cinders of his home
And one of his descendants founded Rome.

His wife near death, dad hoisted on his back,
His son, Ascanius, clutching his right hand,
‘Mid smoke and flames—and that spine splintering crack—
I watched Aeneas assembling a band
Of refugees—still reeling from attack—
Astonished, terrified, and angry—and
I was amazed: away these people stole,
With only life—Existence—as a goal.

Now, there’s a man I could work wonders with.
When the moment for departures came,
I joined the Trojan forces. I exist
Now thanks to them: Apollo. Same name, same
Athletic youth I always was—no myth.
Some gods are good at the survival game.
Since Rome was destined to devour Greece,
I felt that Heaven ought to get a piece.

I chose Olympus, naturally, and we
Crowned Jove with victory. And Zeus, poor dear,
Our late, lamented chief has been—you’ll see.
It can be odd to be a god. One year
You’re Lord of Lightning—next you’re History—
A bunny nobody would ever fear,
Banging a drum for better batteries.
As you can tell, I am not one of these.

I am the god of Prophecy. That’s why
I tend to show up on the winning side—
Even when the contest is a tie.
You can’t prevent the turning of the tide—
Although you are at liberty to try.
The last time that I saw the Moon defied,
I heard my sister sigh, and with a shrug,
She crushed this kid’s sandcastle like a bug.

Diana’s rather moody, for a rock,
A maiden prone to madness. Take the rage
She showed Actaeon—that bewildered buck
Who stumbled on a sliver of her image
Floating in a pond. It always struck
Me as severe—given his young age.
She sent a pack of hounds to chat with him.
They ripped the lad apart—limb from limb.

The birds still speak of him, so do the trees,
“O, Actaeon! Transformed from man to deer,
And then—a frightened fragrance on the breeze.”
You may have sympathy—but let’s be clear.
My sister does exactly what she please—
She’s not—what is the phrase—not in your sphere.
We all have boundaries that we must obey.
Perhaps one day we won’t. It’s hard to say.

But when we don’t, I’ll tell you. At Delphi,
Cumae—wherever strange events occur—
I’ll dress up as a lady, for a fee,
And murmur things to kings about your Future—
Things inconsequential, friends, to me—
Since Mars, remember, is our god of War.
I’m Archery, Arts, Medicine, the Sun.
I am in charge of germs. And hydrogen.

Making music is my main concern.
The Fate of you, your pets, your family,
The gases Pompeians give off when they burn,
Their density, volume, toxicity,
How many embers children can inurn,
Are governed by a different Agency.
A different Deity—I should say,
Since we are all Olympians today.

Aren’t we? I do not count that child—
Cupid—mixing milk in with his wine.
“Pray, Bacchus, see his empty skull is filled
With burgundy—with visions so divine
He thinks he’s God Almighty.” Love has killed
More than one mortal trying to combine
The forces which set God and Man apart.
Our differences aren’t subtle. People fart.

We do not. And we look better in
A leopard, dancing, tearing off your head,
Your legs, an arm, whatever is virgin,
Or available. Somewhere I have read
Men taste more like pork than roast chicken.
Not that it really matters. I’m in bed
Most evenings well before ten o’clock—
Long before the clubs begin to rock.

I am an early riser. Homicide
I find a bit disgusting. There’s no rush
In killing for me. And it’s hard to hide
From Jove—The Thunderer. I still will blush
When I remember how I almost died
One morning. Suddenly, no warning—Whoosh!
I happened to be hunting for my sister.
How narrowly that arrow missed her!

T’was then, I think, I entered Medicine.
“First, do no harm,” I say, with emphasis.
You can thank me for aspirin, Ambien,
Peroxide, dentures, and Q-Tips. And this:
This box of Trojans—in gold foil—just in
Case anyone should try to force a kiss.
Humanity will do that. Sometimes,
Men are deaf to Reason. Even rhymes.

You are exceptional. Don’t get me wrong—
I love humanity. I love the lark.
I add a pinch of brilliance to his song
Each dawn—when half your planet’s in the dark—
When Vulcan’s snoring in his forge among
Computer guts and cannons—it’s a perk.
We’ll share a Milky Way on Sunday nights,
Admiring you, and all your satellites.

I had Vulcan make the crystal ball
I gave Cassandra—Cassie. Pretty girl.
She hated my prophetic gift. She’d call
It cursed—called me despicable. She’d hurl
That innocent glass globe against a wall.
The silly thing thought she could change the world
By shattering it! Imagine her despair
When it bounced back and hit her. How unfair!

Going to Bed

Some lines of Auden bouncing in my head,
Before I climb in, I shut off the light.
I become invisible. And my bed
Feels cool and empty—temperature just right.

I like it cold. The emptiness means peace—
No fumbling with faces, no bad breath,
No silent, secret wars for space, for sheets.
The pleasures of oblivion. Death

Is easier to contemplate than life.
Death is the ideal—the perfect State.
Everyone is equal. Man and wife,
Gay and straight, black and white, we mate

Forever. We grow fonder of the food
As time goes by. When dirt is passed around,
We say we love it: how nutritious—good
For bones and teeth. Minerals abound.

If stars are somewhat rarer overhead,
Nobody misses them. Now that they’re gone,
Dark is distributed among the dead
More efficiently. Pack up the sun—

There’s nothing left to see: no cosmic dust,
No cakes with little candles, no Zippos,
No supernovas. Light’s too dangerous
A toy to play with anyway. Shadows

Suggest a world where different rules apply:
Where monsters lurk, where so much is unknown,
Where we could be so happy, we could die
Exploring what is out there. All alone.

September 1st

70 years ago today things changed.



September 1st, 1939

W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

These are the Dog Days

"Under Sirius," by W.H. Auden, is my favorite hot weather poem. I offer it today in honor of the hot weather which has finally arrived in New York.

Having grown up in the arctic suburbs of Buffalo, I welcome the idea of global warming with glee. I pray nightly for palm trees in East Aurora. I long for the day when Caribbean style cabanas (complete with boys) are erected on the shores of Lake on Ontario.

Of course, this will never happen, since anthropogenic global warming, as it is now advertised, is less an established scientific fact than a politically useful tool for keeping ignorance cool. That Man might not have entire dominion over Nature is a revolutionary notion contrary to many scriptures. And nobody needs visions of an impending apocalypse quite like a Medieval ruling class that has run out of ideas for keeping people in line. What could be worse (from their positively priestly point-of-view) than a resurgence of reason forcing us to have another Renaissance? One Leonardo was clearly quite enough.

Personally, I think small variations in solar radiation--the solar magnetic field--affect our environment far more than farting cows or an excess of cars. Walk outside on any sunny day and you can feel on your face the warmth, the enormous power of that bright ball of hydrogen 93,000,000,000 miles away. Stand next to a cow, or Al Gore, or a hippie and what do your senses detect: another kind of gas. One not nearly so pleasant, thin and odorless as hydrogen either.

But then, like Erasmus, my nose is particularly sensitive to emissions of nonsense. I am also an amateur astronomer and biased toward a Heliocentric view of the Heavens. You might also say I am a child of Copernicus, not Ptolemy. In this respect, I am a sun worshiper, a happy renegade, a scientific heretic. And, in my estimation, there is nothing like a little heresy to help your tan along in August. And a little Auden.


Under Sirius
W. H. Auden


Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;
Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,
Vacant the scholar’s brain
Under his great hat,
Drug though She may, the Sybil utters
A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,
Lying in bed till noon,
Your bills unpaid, your much advertised
Epic not yet begun,
Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish
Some earthquake would astonish,
Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing
Unlock the prisons and translate
The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,
The hawthorn hedges in bloom,
When, serene in their ivory vessels,
The three wise Maries come,
Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in
By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:
Ah! how the cannons roar,
How jocular the bells as They
Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe
That all in the end shall be well,
But first of all, remember,
So the Sacred Books foretell,
The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense
If today were that moment of silence,
Before it break and drown,
When the insurrected eagre hangs
Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
Tombs of the sorcerers shatter
And their guardian megalopods
Come after you pitter-patter?
How will you answer when from their qualming spring
The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,
And out of the open sky
The pantocratic riddle breaks -
‘Who are you and why?’

For when in a carol under the apple-trees
The reborn featly dance,
There will also, Fortunatus,
Be those who refused their chance,
Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,
And mawkish in their wits,
To whom these dull dog-days
Between event seemed crowned with olive
And golden with self-praise.

Soggy Saturday

The weather outside is pretty shitty in my corner of Connecticut, so I have decided to stay inside, and skip the gym.

The first two issues of my new subscription to Sky and Telescope showed up and there are some interesting articles on the new Mega telescopes being proposed. One with an astonishing 42 meter mirror! I imagine with a machine of that size cosmologists will move from counting stars to combing them out of the beard of God.

As for me, since the stars are destined to be invisible tonight, I am going to do a little laundry, a little reading, maybe a little writing. I may crank up the Victrola in the dining room. I’ve left two steaks on the counter to thaw, and I have two large celery roots in the fridge, aching to be boiled and turned into celery root mashed potatoes. And then, there is also that bottle of sake that I bought on my way home from Grand Central which needs finishing. I must attend to THAT.

In case you were wondering, I put out the second steak out for you. On a rainy day, feeling a bit cut off from humanity, one is apt to grow a little melancholy. A little lonely.

That's why I'm glad we're going to have dinner.

Until then, in honor of skies and telescopes, here is a little Auden...

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.

S and T

This morning, lounging again in my golden kimono, sipping my second cup of coffee, in front of my computer, I took the fateful step of subscribing to Sky and Telescope. I subscribed to it once before, in my teens, when I was a member of the Astronomy Book Club and attempting to teach myself calculus so I could understand Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars: The Physics of Compact Objects.

I say fateful--not because I am afraid of encountering the back end of a bird when I am looking up, looking backwards into time. I say fateful because, ever since September 11th, 2001, little by little, I have been remembering, or trying to remember things I have not thought about in a long time.

Before that day, things which seemed so vital to me once, had lost some of their life--Ovid's Metamorphoses, Astronomy, Laurel and Hardy, falling in Love. We drift away from so much over time. Or we find coarse or convenient substitutes for the things we once loved, for one reason or another: changing tastes, changing faces, lack of time. Suddenly these much neglected pieces of my past were important to me again.

There is one line of Auden's famous poem, September 1st, 1939, which has been echoing in my head recently:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages...

In the context of the poem, of course, which takes place in a seedy bar on 52nd Street in New York City, these ironic points of light are cigarette butts smoldering in the dark. But as an isolated stanza, we might very well perceive these pointed words as stars.

And if we are to orient ourselves toward the future we must first understand where we stand in relation to these celestial objects and the ancient light they shed on us today.

Knock, knock.

It seems to me that all I do on this blog is apologize for my long absences.

Each time I come back, I feel like a traveling salesman returning to his wife after a long business trip. Please accept this vegetable brush and this bouquet of roses, by way of consolation. And while you are finding forgiveness in your big brunette heart, and an appropriate vase in the kitchen, I will be removing my coat and hat, and a long blonde hair from my cheaply tailored shoulder.

...

The hair would probably belong to the younger Auden, with whom I have been boozing it up alot lately--along with Ovid, Pope, and to a lesser extent Virgil. None of these lads is exactly the party animal he once was, but then none of us really is, or ever was.

After 40 years, I take a kind of comfort in the fact that the person I am and the person I think I would like to be are maybe not so far apart as they once appeared. While I doubt that I will ever meet the mysterious fellow behind my dreams (except, where all things meet, mathematically speaking, at infinity) every now I catch sight of him in the window of the 9:07pm Express: weary, but not worn out.

Life is hard. It is always much harder in the winter--especially when, resting your head against a cool window pane on a crowded train, you try to wring something warm and human out of an icy and dejected looking New England landscape.

But I always like to set aside one or two things for the Future--to look forward to when I get home: a Kurosawa movie waiting from Amazon, Mahler, grilled sausages, Auden, you. A slightly used winter kimono I almost passed on purchasing in Asakusa, for 9,000 yen, two years ago.

A few words about Auden.

This morning as I was standing in the vestibule of the 8:37am MetroNorth express, hurtling towards New York, my eye happened to bounce over a blue-suited shoulder. I noticed the name Auden in the left hand column of section B1 (as in bomber) of the NYT. Now, the Times is not a paper I normally read for news, preferring as I do to get my propaganda free of pretensions, but I have to admit that the name Auden caught my eye, like the face of a beloved old friend suddenly glimpsed in a crowd of strangers.

This year marks the centennial of Auden's birth. I was reading Auden's poem, September 1st, 1939 on the morning of September 11th, 2001. For six years I carried the book, The English Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, around in my backpack wherever I went. A dilapidated copy of The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden, bound discreetly in duct tape, sits on my desk here at work, to my immediate right.

I have spent more time with Auden in the last decade than I have spent with anyone else, even myself. But I haven't been reading much Auden lately, and the fleeting glimpse of Auden's name over a gray column of print reminded me that my life has been emptier for it.

When I arrived at work this morning I gingerly opened the paper and began to read. Half way down the page I encountered the following lines, from "Tell Me the Truth About Love," soon to be appearing in a subway car near you:

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love!

"Will it alter my life altogether?" I think if it is the real thing, it really should. I know that if it is the wrong thing, it certainly will. But how do we distinguish between the real thing and the wrong thing, and avoid ruining our lives?

I have no idea.

Do you?