Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.
Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.
O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain’s bowl
After the air of summer.
Do you laugh or cry when you hear the poet sing?
“Out of the first warmth of the spring, and out
Of the shine of the hemlocks…” It’s the hemlocks, then,
Swaying above the grasses in the cemetery,
That encourage us in our affair with the world,
We have secret meetings with moss at night.
When the night-singer sang, did you notice the mice
Going by? They leave tracks like the setting stars.
Haven’t you heard the grunting of the hollyhocks,
Bringing forth their hairy life by the widow’s door?
Gravestones gather up stray tufts of time
That wind would otherwise scatter in the fields.
You and I have been in love with the moon
Rising for a long time, ever since the day
Our mothers took our hands in the spring field.
That was the day we heard the cry of the hemlocks.
We became lovers then; and our road was decided.
We laughed and cried over the warmth of the spring.
I
The wind through the box-elder trees
Is like rides at dusk on a white horse,
Wars for your country, and fighting the British.
II
I winder if Washington listened to the trees.
All morning I have been sitting in grass,
Higher than my eyes, beneath the trees,
And listening upward, to the wind in the leaves.
Suddenly I realize there is one thing more:
There is also the wind through the high grass.
III
There are palaces, boats, silence among white buildings,
Iced drinks on marble tops, among cool rooms;
It is good also to be poor, and listen to the wind.
The Irish sunshine is lovely but a Belfast man
last night made a pass at my wife. Henry, who had passed out,
was horrified
to hear this news when he woke. The Irish sunshine
is lovely as it comes and goes. The country is full of con-men
as well as the lovely good.
Saints throng these shores, & ancient practices
continue in the dolmens, ruined castles
are standard.
The whole place is ghostly: no wonder Yeats believed in fairies
& personal survival. A trim suburban villa
also is haunted, by me.
Heaven made this place, also, assisted by men,
great men & weird. I see their shades move past
in full daylight.
The holy saints make the trees’ tops shiver,
in the all-enclosing wind. And will love last
further than tonight?
* * *
“A trim suburban villa / also is haunted, by me.” Doesn’t that just give you the chills? I love it. Fun fact about John Berryman: if you have a copy of my first book City of Cold Ribcages, you see that bridge on the cover? John Berryman killed himself by jumping off that bridge. Yikes. You could say that bridge has Berryman’s ghost in it too, a ghost of poetry, haunting it like the suburban villa. Ain’t poetry grand?
Hello! I’m taking some time off of work this week to spend some time with my friends in the San Francisco bay area. It was my birthday on Friday and everyone has been treating me to an incredible BirthWeek so far. We had a great dinner Friday night, and Saturday we went down to Santa Cruz to see the ocean! The waves were HUGE (seriously) and the surfers were out in force. Walking up and down the beach and along the promenade we saw lots of interesting people! Sunday morning we went to the Farmer’s Market in downtown Mountain View and got some great food for lunch. Then we “hiked the dish” at Stanford – lots of colorful people there too! The hike was quite a workout and the views were gorgeous. Yesterday we played some board games, including an epic game of Killer Bunnies. Good thing we didn’t let the game get to us and we all still loved each other at the end! Tonight the girls have invited me to their book club, where we will discuss The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It was a pretty good book! On Thursday I’m heading into the foothills near Sacramento to visit even more of my favorite people! Then I return to the beautiful winter wonderland of Minnesota (this photo showed up when I googled “lutherans”) and my lovely job. Thanks California buddies for such a great week.
People. Stop using the word “literally” all the time. Just stop. It literally makes me want to hit my head with a brick. If you can’t be trusted to use the word properly then I, as a duly appointed English Major and Protector of the Language, do hereby revoke all privileges to the word.
There is really only one way to use the word, which is in making a verb and its subject less ambiguous. “When I said misuse of the word ‘literally’ makes me want to hit my head with a brick, I meant it literally.” See? Defining the meaning of an uncertain action. I will, on occasion, accept the ironic meaning of the word: “I will literally kill the next person who says ‘literally’ to me.”
But now the word is used to describe actions that are certain, apparently as a form of exaggeration, which makes no sense, since the word itself affirms the action, it doesn’t emphasize or heighten the description. “On my roadtrip I literally drove all the way to California.” Did you in fact drive to California as you stated? You did? Then you don’t need to say “literally.” It means nothing. If you want to put some descriptive muscle in your story, use words that are descriptive and make sense. “I drove to California on my roadtrip, it took 72 hours and I was stuck in a snowstorm in Colorado where I almost died. What an incredible drive.” Or something.
Rant over, Jackson out.
Over my head i see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk flies over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
* * *
James Wright has a way with an ending – creating this startlingly crisp twist that is sudden, confusing, and yet understood (see one of my all-time favorite poems). This is certainly one of his finest turns – taking what is otherwise a rather commonplace, lyrical, pastoral poem and bursting the magic of it with even more magic. A lesser poet might have ended on the chicken hawk line and called it a nice little poem. James Wright went straight for the gut and that’s why he’s one of the best.
Endless train on the rails.
The heartbeat singing cla-shunk cla-shunk,
cla-shunk cla-shunk
across the shifting prairie,
down the pass and into the outstretched West
north of Laramie.
My mind goes out of focus,
the daydream meets the world.
The beat of the collar against my neck
in the merciless wind,
the forever prairie, the infinite cla-shunk,
the towering sky,
incomprehensible.
I bet there are places where the endless ends
and things even god doesn’t know
when he stands and looks from the side of the road
at the same cold vastness.
I feel helpless, and so small.
I wonder if he ever feels the same.
Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it,
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still,
one with the earth
again, and let the world go.
J.D. Salinger. What can I say? He has meant more to me than any author, except maybe Jack Kerouac on his good days. I owe my literary “career,” such as it is (not to mention a certain long-winded writing style), to Catcher In the Rye and Buddy Glass. I know I’m not the only crumby author in this world to say it, but still it should be said. The chorus is loud and millions-strong. I owe a definite part of my worldview to the Glass family. My penchant for quote-collecting I owe to Buddy and Seymour. Let’s just say it: I owe my love of books, reading, and writing to Salinger, and I really can’t picture my life without those loves in it. This is what the man means to me.
Like a lot of people I read Salinger first in high school – which is actually pretty funny, a curriculum based on that book – but then I kept reading Salinger. Granted the volume of work isn’t staggeringly large – a whole four books – but its depth, belied by its simplicity, is nearly limitless. Since reading Catcher that first time, I’ve read it (and Franny and Zooey) nearly every winter, missing only a couple years here and there. Actually I’m reading it right now, which is weird. It isn’t that I empathize with Holden or the Glass family – though I do see much of myself in all of them. In fact, I find myself less and less like Holden every year, which is understandable, but I love the book more and more each time (though it’s hard to beat that first time through). With Franny and Zooey, I fall in and out of love with them every other year it seems – one year Franny will seem an insufferable phony, and then one year (as happened this year) her whole mind will just open up to me and I will love her dearly. It’s the fact that I can love or hate them, the fact that their characters – though when compared to, say, Anna Karenina, are barely sketches – they just seem so real. So full of life. It’s hard to imagine walking down the street and bumping into Anna Karenina. It’s easy, though, to run into a Holden, or a Zooey, or a Seymour. In fact, it’s impossible not to. It’s the difference between a Rembrandt and a Monet – yes, the Rembrandt is more realistic – like a photograph, almost - but, the Monet, full of color and pure abstract emotion, feels more real.
You could say the element that defines all Salinger characters is the search for Real, for Truth, simultaneous with a distrust of all things Real and Truthful. I think a great many people can identify with that paradoxical quest/curse, and this is why Salinger’s stories will endure.
It will be interesting in the coming days and years to see what happens with the supposed vault of stories and books that he has written but never published. Maybe they’re real, maybe apocryphal, maybe he ordered them burned at his death (“don’t ever tell anybody anything…”). A part of me would like to read those stories, a part of me wants his family and estate to abide by his wishes, should he have chosen to never reveal the works. And if the books don’t exist, if he just ended up an eccentric old hermit in the woods, that would be fine too. The four books we already have are, for me, enough for a lifetime of reading and rereading.
