~ ~ ~

Ernest Hemingway – poet?!

Alive and violated
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to the coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

~ ~ ~

Seamus Heaney, isn’t he just the best? Incredible. From his book Field Work.

Blackberry-Picking

for Philip Hobsbraum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

~ ~ ~

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched or broughamed,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

~ ~ ~

I really like seeing these two poems together. Both Heaney and Kinnell have a love for earthy, thick prose, full of wordplay and wonder. I love that both have taken this un-color, black, and given it a whole rainbow of emotion and flavor. “Thickened wine,” Heaney says, and “icy, black blackberries” Kinnell says. “Summer’s blood,” Heaney says, two simple words overflowing with drama and poetry. I also see Kinnell’s poem as something of a resolution to Heaney’s. The childlike narrator of “Blackberry-Picking” is all joy and energy in the first stanza; he is pained by nature’s joke of rot and death in the second. Kinnell’s poem represents the fulfillment he was searching for, the sweet, delicious moment when he could eat the blackberries he had so diligently picked. Heaney denied him that pleasure, and in Kinnell’s alternate universe the pleasure was finally granted to him.

The last two posts here have been a bit too Serious-shirt Poesy, with my ranting on Hemingway and yammering about Indo-European root words which probably no one cares about anyway. So to counter act that, I dare you to look at this picture of a Bhutanese woman grinning ear to ear and not smile. Seriously. Don’t smile. Don’t you dare.

Haaaaa you can’t even do it can you. You’re smiling your ass off right now I can see it. That’s OK I guess, I am too. I mean, is this picture not the pure image of happiness?

By the way, this comes from an article in National Geographic Traveler, which is mostly a vehicle for cheesy ads trying to get you to visit random destinations (Dear Nevada: It doesn’t matter how pretty your full-page spread is, I’m not planning a vacation to your state. Silly Nevada.), but does have a nugget of travel advice or intrigue occasionally. The article by Boyd Matson is about Bhutan’s commitment to increasing the country’s “Gross National Happiness.” The article also features this awesome quote, about the tiny nation’s position wedged between two huge superpowers: “If India sneezes or China farts, we get blown away.” Enough said, I think!

Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he’s easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t. I hate conciseness — it’s too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.
-Tom Wolfe

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
-Vladimir Nabokov

I’m pointing out a couple of the common insults flung at Hemingway not to say they’re false – they’re true to a point – but to illustrate what one is up against when one tries to defend Hemingway and make a case for his writing. The author has become so polarizing that American readers have basically split into two camps:

1) Those who agree that Hemingway, along with his ex-pat pals like Fitzgerald, had in the 20s, 30s, and 40s brought about a refreshing change to literature, exchanging the over-wrought and ungainly prose of turn-of-the-century America, Britain, and France (looking at you Proust, Henry James) for a modern, precise, descriptive and quietly poetic style that has carried us forward into the current era of literature.

2) Those who believe as Wolfe and Nabokov do, that Hemingway was basically a chauvinist with a conjunction fetish. Once he was six feet under the Sawtooth Mountains, in 1961, it seems this second group dominated Hemingway discussions; that is, everybody just seems to make fun of him now. Between mocking his declarative style and bemoaning his macho pursuits (“bells, balls, and bulls” as Nabokov so awesomely put it), it seems a Hemingway appreciator – or one totally new to the man’s language – has a hard mountain to climb, and may just prefer to sit it out in the end.

It hasn’t helped that these days most peoples’ exposure to Hemingway begins and ends with The Old Man and the Sea. It’s a great story, of course, and one very much worth reading, but it’s a different kind of story from his others. It’s a story of simplicity, frailty, and failure, ultimately. Without a ton of insight into the minds of teachers and school administrators, I think you might be able to say that the reason this book is picked as the intro to Hemingway in many high schools is that it’s very short. So many authors, so little time. The problem is The Old Man and the Sea is probably too…mature, I guess, for most high schoolers to really appreciate. There’s a time to mature, and a time to be immature. It’s hard to comprehend and relate to old age and impending death when you’re still in the prime of your life, and in reality have barely lived yet. You have nothing to look back on so far. So kids read their Old Man, get the talk about The Hemingway Style, and move on to The Great Gatsby or whatever, probably never giving Hemingway a second glance. I know I didn’t.

Since reading Hemingway in high school, I’ve been completely uninterested in reading anything else by him until just a couple months ago. I have taken in a number of his short stories – “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the Nick Adams fishing stories, etc., but have shied away from anything substantial by him. That was until my English Major Guilt got the better of me, and forced me to pick up a novel of his and try it on. Remember this is the same guilt that got me into that trouble with Proust a few months back, so I was reluctant. In the end I picked For Whom the Bell Tolls off the used bookstore shelf and got reading.

I’ll skip the plot summary, but instead talk about the book this way: if you want kids (er, young adults) to enjoy and appreciate Hemingway, and possibly return to his bibliography again and again instead of reading one single novella and calling it good, this is the book they should read. I mean, the novel has it all: war, violence, guns (and yes a bit of bullfighting), passionate romance, high adventure, suspense, lessons on sacrifice for your beliefs, the pure poetry of Spanish obscenities, and even a few civics lessons on communism, fascism, revolution, civil war, and World War II. Add to that an intense psychological drama, both within the main character Robert Jordan and in his interactions with the other characters, and then add to that the poetic narrative and gloriously detailed description of the Spanish countryside, and you have yourself a nearly perfect novel. I say “nearly” because yes, Ernest can get a little “and” happy here and there, and the descriptive sections can sometimes drag the narrative to a crawl, as can the interior monologues of Robert Jordan. Also, the dialogue can take some getting used to, as he “translates” Spanish dialect into English, resulting in odd phrases like “what passes with thee?” (literally que paso contigo?) instead of “what’s going on with you?” or something more Englishy. However after awhile this starts to take on a certain charm and it becomes very enjoyable to read people talking this way. No novel is perfectly written from beginning to end, but this is just about as perfect as they come.

Circling back to my original point, what teenager would not love a novel like this? Robert Jordan, a young professor in his twenties, acts as a proxy for any young person who has ever wanted to run off and do something great and important in the world. He falls in love with Maria, another young character, hurt and twisted by war, and their whirlwind romance is the type of thing one dreams about nearly constantly as a teenager.

So why does nobody read this book? Why hasn’t everyone read it by age 18? I really just don’t know. Is it the cursing? Because Hemingway, in another funny twist, censors himself as if writing a newspaper article, resulting again in odd phrases like “I obscentity in the milk of thy mother.” Pretty tame. Is it the violence? You can see and hear worse on the news. Is it the length? It is four times as long as The Old Man, and contains many more thematic elements, and god forbid a language arts teacher should be allowed to spend any more time than required with any particular author. Is it too masculine? It should be noted, that for those who might complain about Hemingway’s machismo, and the heroics of his characters, that our protagonists in this story, for all their passion and revolutionary vigor, ended up on the losing side of history. It’s no secret that the fascists won the Spanish Civil War, not the republicans and communists. Those complainers must not be actually reading his books. And just in case the feminists want to have a go at him, the strongest character in the book (and one of the most well-rounded) is almost certainly Pilar, with her penchant for swearing and her flair for command, who balances nicely with the fairly meek Maria.

I think it’s this: The Old Man’s tale is easily broken down and digested; its morals, though well told, are fairly simple. The story here – especially when describing the horrific violence carried out by both sides, leaving no group morally superior – is not so easily defined. It doesn’t lend itself to tidy discussion and small-group exercises, which is exactly why it should be read by everyone. It is expansive and difficult, but rewarding on so many levels. I hope that if you’ve never read Hemingway before, or never read anything more than just a couple short stories, that you’ll give this book a try.

In many retellings of the Wild Hunt myth, the charge is led by Norse/Germanic god Woden, essentially the Zeus of Northern European paganism, and whose name includes the rood wod meaning “violence” or “fury.” It may be just coincidence that the wodwo, or wild-man, and Woden, God of Fury, share the heteronym wod at their root, but then again it may be less then coincidental that ancient words for “wild” and “violence” have similar sounds and origins. By the way, we celebrate this ancient god every midweek, unwittingly, as we wake up, stretch our arms, and greet Woden’s day – Wednesday.

Anyway, with this collection of wild thoughts lurking around in my brain, I thought I’d take out my old Shipley book, The Origins of English Words, and have a look at where wild came from. The Indo-European root of wild is uelt, which means, perhaps a bit obviously, “open field.” OK, makes sense. Our wodwo is the man of the field. In Germanic the word is weald, which often is brought over to English as part of an ancient place-name, or by a fantasy writer looking for a bit of authenticity. To wilder is to lose one’s way, to become lost in the wild; to bewilder is to cause someone to do this. The noun wilder means a wild animal (with der coming from the root deor (deer) or dheu, meaning animal). Thus a wilderness is a place where wild animals live: wild + der + ness, with -ness coming from the same root as gather or together. Shipley also points out that the representative assembly of the Isle of Man in Great Britain is the Tygwald, the assembly of the field.

The word wild has come to have many subtle meanings, which we interpret variously as freedom, spontaneity, violence, revelry, fear, and an untamed nature which we sometimes cherish, sometimes revile. They all point back to this original root word, a simple expression of openness. At certain points in our lives we desire the wild life, salivate for it; we freak out and make for the woods (another word with wild at its root) to commune with our past. At other points we see wildness as something to be shunned, the opposite of civilization which we use to define civilization, as if we have completely forgotten where we came from.

~ ~ ~

From his Selected and New Poems. I have been reading Harrison’s memoir Off to the Side; the beauty with which he writes is overshadowed only by the force with which he lives his life.