Working Title

WORKING TITLE

A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

David Bruzina June 2005 This dissertation entitled WORKING TITLE

by DAVID A. BRUZINA

has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Mark Halliday Professor of English

Leslie A. Flemming Dean, College of Arts and Sciences BRUZINA, DAVID A. Ph.D. June 2005. Department of English Working Title (81pp.) Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday

This dissertation is divided into two parts: a discussion of contemporary perspectives on poetic quality and a collection of poems.

Approved: Mark Halliday Professor of English 4

Table of Contents

Abstract...... 3

Part One: The Knowledge of Poetic Goodness...... 6

Part Two: Distance...... 28 The Egg...... 29 The Chemist...... 30 You Had to Bring It Up ...... 31 The First Concession...... 32 First Duckling in the Water...... 33 Furniture of the Mind...... 34 The Flood...... 35 The Label Inside Unsigned ...... 36 The Whale...... 37 Kitchen Prayer One...... 38 Addresses the Evening...... 39 The Museum ...... 40 The Surgeon Speaking ...... 41 The Gift...... 42 The Committee Dissolves...... 43 Hello?...... 44 The Hunter Calls Rabbits...... 45 Wanted: Friendly Streets, Good News, Warm Bed ...... 46 The Cook and the Lady...... 47 Self Butcher and Cook...... 48 With Sandwich...... 50 5

We Feel at Last the Bump of Shore...... 51 From the Log of Lost Cooks...... 52 The Affair...... 53 November...... 54 Jessica Drowning in Irene...... 55 The Gift...... 56 To Rest...... 57 Looking for a Teacher...... 58 The Guest...... 59 Zoned Commercial or Residential ...... 60 Last Duckling to the Water...... 61 Witness...... 62 Fly ...... 63 Kitchen Prayer Two ...... 64 The Cannibals ...... 65 Loyalty ...... 66 Close Quarters...... 67 Step One Is in Any Direction...... 68 Shooting Lessons ...... 69 Boom...... 70 Christmas ...... 71

Works Cited...... 72 Appendix 1: John Ashbery’s These Lacustrine Cities ...... 74 Appendix 2: Robert Frost’s The Exposed Nest...... 75 Appendix 3: John Berryman’s Dream Song 14 ...... 76 Appendix 4: Richard Boyd’s Homeostatic Consequentialism...... 77 Appendix 5: Wendell Berry’s The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer...... 79 Appendix 6: Heather McHugh’s What He Thought ...... 80

Part One: The Knowledge of Poetic Goodness

The Knowledge of Poetic Goodness

Mother: It’s broccoli, dear. Child: I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. --Carl Rose1

1. Introduction: Merwin’s Berryman In his well-known homage to John Berryman,2 a speaker (who I will assume is Merwin)3 recalls Berryman giving him advice, in the years before WWII,

…it was in the days before the beard and the drink but he was deep in tides of his own through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop….(270).

The advice Berryman is giving in the poem is about being a poet,

…as for publishing he advised me to paper my wall with rejection slips his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure you die without knowing

1 A caption for a cartoon by E.B White, as quoted in McPhee. 2 To enance the reader’s experience by making more clear the trajectory of the essay, I use italics whenever returning to, and discussing, this poem. 3 Merwin was a student of Berryman’s at Iowa in 1954, along with Philip Levine and Donald Justice, introduced later in this essay. For the purposes of this essay, the relationship between fictional and “real” Berrymans and Merwins is, I assume, immaterial. 8

whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don’t write.

Merwin’s poem is moving for a number of reasons, not least because, in its retrospective movement, we sense its speaker slowly being reminded, by his recollection of Berryman’s words, of Berryman’s suicide, a memory that lends gravity to both the implied warning in the last line and the permission the poem seems to offer. In the poem, the Sage Berryman seems (at least initially) to give young poets (as symbolized by the naive and unread younger Merwin) an aesthetic or moral carte blanche—don’t worry about whether or not what you write is any good; poetry is passion (not responsibility); if you have to be sure what you’re writing is good, don’t write. And yet, we sense—as the older Merwin, speaking the poem, now understands in retrospect—that Berryman’s vehemence, his insistence in the last stanza, reflects his own deep concern with whether or not what he wrote was any good. A concern with a distinction between right/wrong, good/bad, better/worse practice is entailed by the feeling that that practice is important, and, clearly the Berryman of Merwin’s poem felt the practice of poetry was important and that (therefore) the goodness/badness reflected in his own practice was important….

…as I suspect many reading this essay will. Berryman’s struggle, as depicted in Merwin’s poem, is (I submit) a common one. Despite our general “post-modern” sense that assessments of poetic value are deeply private—deriving as they do from individual tastes, upbringings, and experiences4—we, as poets, tend also to feel the tug of a more transcendent but hazy and ill-defined and frequently suppressed notion of poetic value, one entailed by a persistent feeling that there is a distinction to be drawn between good and bad poetry, a distinction not just reflective of taste or temporary popularity but of quality in some absolute sense—we feel that the world is in some mysterious way

4 In his lectures, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explains one kind of aesthetic “judgment” in terms of facial expressions. In such cases, terms like “grand” or “good” don’t mean anything, rather they serve as “gestures of approval” that lack analyzable cognitive content. While (as Wittgenstein realized) such an account is insufficient to explain all the complex ways in which we use the language of “aesthetic” judgment, it illustrates the postmodern sensibility I’m talking about here (c.f., Rhees et al, 31-35). 9

changed for the better because there are in existence certain poems, that it is that kind of “good” poem we want to write, that it is that kind of “good” poem that gives poetry the importance we feel it has. And, like Berryman, we struggle to convince ourselves that we can’t know whether what we write is any “good,” and that that doesn’t matter….5

Merwin’s poem provides little explanation for the warning Berryman offers in its last line. Thus, bearing it nevertheless in mind, I choose to ignore it and explore why and to what extent we can know whether or not a poem is any “good.”

2. Wendell Berry’s “Standing By Words”: Poetic Goodness as Moral Action We might do worse than begin our investigation of poetic goodness by turning to Wendell Berry’s in/famous essay “Standing by Words.” Untroubled by post-modern concerns about the situatedness of value claims, Berry asserts in this essay (as he has for almost half a century now):

[…T]here are times, according to the only reliable ethics we have, when one is required to tell the truth, whatever the urgings of purpose, audience, and situation. Ethics requires this because, in terms of the practical realities of our lives, the truth is safer than falsehood. To ignore this is simply to put language at the service of purpose—any purpose. It is, in terms of the most urgent realities of our own time, to abet a dangerous confusion between public responsibility and public relations (30).6

For Berry the imperative to tell the truth extends to poetry: a good poem is a truth-telling poem, and a bad-poem is a non-truth-telling poem. If Berry is right, then the Berryman of Merwin’s poem is apparently wrong to insist that we can’t know whether what we

5 And perhaps the competitive environment in which much poetry is currently practiced (a competitiveness that will increase as business interests increasingly control universities and colleges) contributes to the persistence of this question. Insofar as poet’s livelihoods increasingly depend on the “quality” of their poetry, the question will gain in urgency. 6 The trajectory of the discussion in this section will be familiar to anyone with an introductory knowledge of Kant’s ethics. Kant’s categorical imperative demands truth-telling in all circumstances, a demand that has led to innumerable undergraduate philosophy discussions concerning the possibility of moral lying. Generally, it is conceded that in at least some circumstances lying would seem the more morally correct course of action. I take an analogous position in this essay. For a strong opposing argument see Christine M. Korsgaard’s “Two Arguments Against Lying.” 10

write is any good. Insofar as our poems involve truth telling, according to Berry at least, they are good poems. Thus, assuming that we can determine whether or not our poems tell the truth, Merwin’s Berryman’s warning would seem perhaps melodramatic. Understanding what Berry means by “truth-telling,” and by claiming that a failure to tell the truth entails “a dangerous confusion between public responsibility and public relations,” requires looking at some of his examples. Berry’s clearest illustration of a failure of truth-telling is a transcript of a conversation involving members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the crisis of Three Mile Island. In the transcript, two commissioners are working to “engineer a press release” of which “the focus…has to be reassuring” (37). One commissioner, Ahearne, suggests,

I think it would be technically a lot better if you said—something about there’s a possibility—it’s small, but it could lead to serious problems.

Commissioner Kennedy: Well, I understand what you’re saying…You could put a little sentence in right there…to say, were this—in the unlikely event that this occurred, increased temperatures would result and possible further fuel damage (38, emphasis mine).

Berry’s comment on the transcript is as follows:

What is remarkable, and frightening, about this language is its inability to admit what it is talking about. Because these specialists have routinely eliminated themselves, as such and such representatives of human beings, from consideration, according to the prescribed “objectivity” of their discipline, they cannot bring themselves to admit to each other much less the public, that their problem involves an extreme danger to a lot of people (38).

For Berry the transcript exhibits a failure of truth telling because of its “objective” language, language that fails to acknowledge the inter-relationships between the specialists (subjective selves) who are using the language and the larger social (biological and material) worlds in which they are embedded.7 It is this “objectivity” which Berry

7 Berry, though impassioned, is not always clear. I have in this essay attempted to succinctly reconstruct the relevant points of Berry’s view from comments scattered throughout his essay. C.f., for example: 1) “The system of systems [which illustrates the range of human responsibility]…involves three different 11 claims allows a separation of private or subjective and public interest, i.e., allows the specialists to see their own and their company’s concerns as distinct from those of the larger world. And it is this separation, according to Berry, that in turn allows the speakers to sacrifice public interest, endangering people (and the environment), while attempting to protect themselves—even though in fact, claims Berry, their own and their company’s well-being are inextricably related to the public’s (broadly construed) well- being. “Truth-telling,” then, for Berry, is a matter of completeness or accountability, i.e., the exhibition/acknowledgement in language of the interrelationships between individuals and the larger social (biological, etc.) worlds of which individuals are a part. And, according to Berry, a poem can exhibit a failure to tell the truth (in this sense) just as does the Three Mile Island transcript. Berry quotes, in illustration, the section of Paradise Lost in which Satan first sets foot on the dry land of Hell—

[Farewel happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.] The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n, What matter where, if I be still the same….

—and notes (of the unbracketed section),

kinds of interests: a) the ontogenetic. This is self-interest and is at the center. b) The phylogenetic. This is the interest that we would call “humanistic.” It reaches through family and community and into agriculture. But it does not reach far enough into agriculture because, by its own terms, it cannot. c) The ecogenetic. This is the interest of the whole “household” in which life is lived. (I don’t know whether I invented this term or not. If I did, I apologize” (48); 2) “Two epidemic illnesses of our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded—are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons. That these two are related (their private loneliness, for instance, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough. And I take for granted that most people have explored in themselves and their surroundings some of the intricacies of the practical causes and effects…” (24); “If we are to begin to make a reliable account of it, this recent history of milk production must be seen as occurring within a system of nested systems: the individual human within the family within the community within agriculture within nature…” (46); “The connections within the system of systems are practical connections. The practicality consists in the realization that—despite the blandishments of the various short-circuited “professional” languages—you cannot speak or act in your own best interest without espousing and serving a higher interest” (50). 12

I do not know where one could find a better motto for the modernist or technological experiment, which assumes that we can fulfill a high human destiny anywhere, anyway, so long as we can keep up the momentum of innovation; that the mind is “its own place” even within ecological degradation, pollution, poverty, hatred, and violence (57),

As a second illustration, Berry quotes Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples”—

Alas, I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned— Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.

I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me….

—and worries that Shelley here (a) fails to acknowledge “what [Shelley’s] complaining about,” and thus (b) represents Shelley’s emotions, his subjective experience as a user of language, as detached from the larger world of which he is a part. Berry adds,

This failure [of truth-telling] is implicitly conceded by the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature who, felt it necessary to provide the following footnote:

Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, had drowned herself; Clara, his baby daughter by Mary Shelley, had just died; and Shelley himself was plagued, by ill health, pain, financial worries, and the sense that he had failed as a poet (32-33).

For Berry, both poetic passages represent bad poetry for the same reasons the Three Mile Island transcript represents bad language, because each fails to acknowledge the 13

embeddedness of private experience within a larger world. Just as the Three Mile Island specialists use objective language to disguise the real dangers of a particular situation, Satan disguises his own impossible situation8 and Shelly disguises his own pain, by in, a sense, disembodying themselves, i.e., refusing to acknowledge their own relationship with a world external to the subjectively experienced self.9

Unfortunately, Berry leaves unclear how bad/untruthful poetry can pose the same kinds of dangers as, for example, the conversation recorded in the Three-Mile Island transcript. And, insofar as such dangers provide the grounds for his distinction between good and bad language, his lack of clarity undermines his case for that distinction—and hence some of his essay’s usefulness in helping us determine whether or not what we write is any good. Documents like the press release the Three Mile Island specialists are engineering have a clear and conventional use, such that the effects of truth-telling or non-truth-telling language are relatively predictable. Poems, however, seem to have no such clear use. Thus, for example, while Berry implies that Satan’s speech, taken as a motto, could inspire an attitude similar to that exhibited by the specialists at Three Mile Island, we can notice that Satan’s speech can also: a) not be taken as a motto, or b) be taken as a motto under circumstances that would produce results Berry would favor. Harold Bloom, for example, sees in Satan’s speech,

the authentic voice of the ruminative line, the poetry of loss, and the voice also of the strong poet accepting his task, rallying what remains…. These lines, to the C.S. Lewis or Angelic School, represent moral idiocy, and are to be met with

8 Jealous when God favors his own son, Jesus Christ, and overwhelmed by confidence in his own abilities, the arch-angel Satan has dared to lead an army of rebellious angels in an attempted coup of heaven. Defeated, he and his fellows are cast out of paradise and find themselves, former angels, banished to hell. 9 Berry’s own poem, “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” offers a contrasting illustration of a good poem, a truth-telling poem, i.e., a poem that is (sometimes painfully) aware of the interrelationships between self and world. In it, Berry’s Mad Farmer attempts to balance: a) the demands entailed by an inner awareness of a “deep thrumming” (demands that explain the poem’s tone of defiance), and b) the various social demands that the speaker acknowledges by refusing to simply abandon society. This latter set of demands includes the demand for an explanation of his, the speaker’s, “contrariness,” and the demand that one respect difference, implicit in the speaker’s concluding disclaimer, “It is not the only…way to come to the truth.” See Appendix 5. 14

laughter, if we have remembered to start the day with our Good Morning’s Hatred of Satan. If, however, we are not so morally sophisticated, we are likely to be very much moved by these lines. Not that Satan is not mistaken; of course he is. There is a terrible pathos in his “if I be still the same.” But he knows it. He is adopting an heroic dualism, in this conscious farewell to Joy, a dualism upon which all post-Miltonic influence in the language founds itself (33).

This suggests (at least) that, taken as a motto, Satan’s speech could just as easily inspire acts of courage in the face of palpably indomitable adversity, courageous whistle-blowing for example, rather than merely self-and-other-endangering activity. Similarly, we can imagine without difficulty Shelley’s passages, despite their suppression of the external world, providing solace or inspiration for those engaged in various kinds of struggle that we and Berry would approve of. It would seem, then, that we have little grounds for regarding either passage as representing bad poetry on the basis of their ostensible dangerous effects. This is not to deny that both passages could inspire or provoke better (or worse) actions; instead I’m suggesting that their doing so doesn’t seem to have anything to do with truth-telling (as Berry uses the phrase). Rather, insofar as a passage like Milton’s or Shelley’s inspires or fails to inspire desirable actions, those actions would seem to reflect more the circumstances attending the passage’s reading than anything about the passage’s quality per se.10

3. Robinson, Merwin, Perloff: Poetic Goodness as Performative Efficacy Because Berry in “Standing by Words” fails to show how truth-telling in poetry is causally linked to desirable results, he fails to provide convincing criteria by which to evaluate the quality of our poems. This, however, does not mean we gain nothing from visiting his essay. Berry’s view, that there’s something “bad” about language that fails to acknowledge the responsibilities entailed by both speaker’s and writer’s embeddedness in

10 This suggests that one way to control a poem’s anticipated negative impact on its readers is to affect the circumstances of the poem’s reading. Thus, for example those (like Mark Halliday) who read Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought” as permissive of overly obscure language in poetry—such language is sometimes paradoxically claimed to represent private, “unsayable,” experience—might in their teachings, interpretations, criticism, etc. emphasize the way the poem’s apparent thesis (offered in its last sentence) is undercut or complicated by McHugh’s deliberately clear and narrative language. See Appendix 6. 15

a larger world, seems hard to dispute.11 Certainly, in the case of the Three Mile Island transcript—as in the case of any public lying that results in public endangerment or a degradation of the natural world—we feel that the speakers/authors ought (in some sense) to have recognized their own misuse of language. And we believe, correspondingly, that certain uses of language in the service of the public good are recognizably “good” uses of language…12

…all of which suggests at least one way in which we can be certain of a poem’s goodness, namely, insofar as: 1) that goodness consists of a suitableness to a particular task, and 2) that task involves the accomplishing of desirable/good ends. Put another way, insofar as we, as writers, can be familiar with the occasions of our words being translated into action, the audience doing the translating, that audience’s immediate moods, needs, interests, and some of its relevant situation, we can write poems specifically tailored both to those occasions and to that audience, poems that we can be certain are good, i.e., efficacious in serving a good purpose. For example, the late Matt Robinson could know his prose poem, “Uninspired,” was an excellent poem because he’d written it for a specific meeting of the Gathering Place Writing Project, an occasion that allowed Robinson to make reliable predictions about the effects his poem would generate:

As I started to write a poem for this week’s class my mind kept wandering, and I thought how hard this week’s assignment was, since nothing that seemed the least poetic was coming to me, so I just scribbled down a few words, anything, just to say to myself at least I tried to write something, and I could always come back to it later, later today, or tomorrow maybe, but every time I tried to write again, I’d sit, staring at the paper, the few words of nonsense I had flung there, for what

11 What Berry seems to forget is that (a) (even now) audiences are similarly embedded in a larger world, and (b) that the complexity of that embeddedness results in a wide range of needs and wants, rather than a single and simple need for truth-telling. See, for example, Richard Boyd’s homeostatic consequentialism in Appendix 4. 12 C.f. the ethical realism of Richard Boyd’s homeostatic consequentialism, Appendix 4; also Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s similar understanding of situatedness (involving the self situated in a body that impinges both upon inward experience and outward public world and ultimate mystery) in his lectures on aesthetics, published in English as The World of Perception. We needn’t agree with all of the details of Berry’s view to agree with his claim that our presence in the world entails various self-preserving responsibilities to it/ourselves. 16

seemed like an eternity, blank and uninspired, my mind would once again wander away to other meaningless thoughts, so after a week of doing this, I simply gave up, to suffer the consequences of not having my homework done, and having nothing to share with the class (33).

That the poem relies on an understanding of the specific occasion and audience for which it was produced is clear from the way it fails to impact a reader for whom it wasn’t intended. Robinson had been participating in the project for several years when he wrote the poem, as had those individuals who constituted the poem’s audience. In addition, the poem was written in response to an assignment (to write a “one sentence poem”). Thus, Robinson knew not only his audience, and details of their personal likes and dislikes, he knew when they’d be reading his poem and under what circumstances and with what initial expectation or standard in mind. Thus, he could anticipate the effectiveness of the poem’s two part joke: a) it fulfills the assignment while claiming not to, and b) it is really several sentences joined by comma splices. By making his audience laugh, feel at ease, crack jokes of their own, etc., Robinson succeeded in making “the world a [slightly] better place.” And because he could predict that effect (and the absence of undesirable other effects), he could be sure of his poem’s goodness. The same general strategy (I would argue) is displayed by the publication of most poems in literary journals—W.S. Merwin’s “Accompaniment,” published in the eighty- fifth anniversary “special double issue” of Poetry, for example,

Day alone first of December with rain failing lightly again the garden and the dogs sleeping on the dark floorboards day between journeys unpacking from one

then packing for another and reading poems as I go words from another time past light migrants coming from so long ago through the sound of this quiet rain falling (55).

Merwin can count on his audience—primarily poets and academics of a certain class and education level, reading the poem at a time and place of their choosing, under conditions 17

conducive to a particular kind of experience with the poem—to respond to the poem in relatively predictable ways, not by laughing, but by responding with a slight ahh of mental recognition to what-was-oft-felt-but-relatively-infrequently-so-well-expressed, and so go about their day lightened and perhaps lightening others, or at worst by frowning and turning the page…. Even in poetry that seems to operate differently, a similar approach to the question of poetic value is implicit, an approach that allows the poet who values a particular effect to know whether or not his poems are good. According to Marjorie Perloff, for example, the “indeterminacy” of language provides an opportunity for certain poets—like Pound, Stein, Williams, and Becket—to write good poems of a unique sort. According to Perloff,

What happens in Pound’s Cantos, as in Stein’s Tender Buttons, or William’s Spring and All or Beckett’s How It Is or John Cage’s Silence, is that the symbolic evocations generated by words on the page are no longer grounded in a coherent discourse, so that it becomes impossible to decide which of these associations is relevant and which are not. This is the “undecidability” of the text…(18)”

Perloff’s interest in the “‘undecidability’ of the text seems at first to suggest an alternative notion of goodness to the one we’ve been discussing, i.e., which relies on a predictable causal link between poem and effect. Her comments, however, reveal otherwise,

Reading Ashbery’s text is…rather like overhearing a conversation in which one catches an occasional word or phrase but cannot make out what the speakers are talking about. And yet one does keep listening. For the special pleasure of reading a poem like “These Lacustrine Cities” is that disclosure of some special meaning seems perpetually imminent.” (10-11).

For Ashbery to know his poems are good, then, requires only that Ashbery identify, for example, Perloff as his audience, and the “special pleasure” his poems give her as his desired or good effect.13 And insofar as he can reproduce this effect through other poems written for the same audience, he can know they, too, are good.

13 The text of Ashbery’s poem, to which Perloff is referring, is presented in Appendix 1. Public response to Ashbery has been of course divided. 18

There is then, despite Berryman’s warning, an obvious sense in which we can know whether or not what we as poets write is any good. As Robinson, Merwin, and Perloff illustrate, all that’s required for such knowledge is a decision regarding what good effect one wants to generate through his or her poems and the ability to predict or observe whether or not one’s poems generate that effect.

4. Berryman and Poetry that Makes Nothing Happen Defining a good poem, in this way, i.e., in terms of its efficacy in producing a desired result, would seem to make the ending of Merwin’s poem—the one with which I opened this essay—merely melodramatic. From the Sage bestowing wisdom upon the naïve Merwin, Berryman changes into a tragic but pathetic figure vigorously insisting on an error, an error that the older Merwin perhaps senses is implicated in Berryman’s suicide. Berryman (the poem asserts) believes that one cannot both write and have to know whether or not what one writes is good. And yet, Robinson et al. show this needn’t be the case. Why, then, would Merwin’s Berryman insist, when Merwin asks about the possibility of knowing his poem’s goodness, “you can’t you can never be sure/…/ if you have to be sure, don’t write”?

Answering this question requires invoking our own dissatisfaction with defining a poem’s goodness solely in terms of its efficacy in producing a desired effect— which perhaps isn’t very difficult. We demand of the best poems that their quality derive not just from their relationship with a particular audience (an audience we believe can be badly mistaken) but with (in some vague sense) the larger world. Thus, for example, we might tend to fault Robinson, Merwin, and Ashbery, as examined above, for something like a lack of “ambition.” Yet the relationship between good poem and larger world does not, on closer examination, seem to be a causal one. If our concern with a poem’s goodness derived from a concern with causing world-or-at-least-large-scale- transformation, it seems unlikely we would remain poets, knowing that (as Auden put it) 19

“poetry makes nothing happen.”14 Instead, we’d shoot a documentary, run an ad campaign, record a pop album, give a speech before congress (or an inner city high school), publish a carefully researched piece of journalism or scholarship, engage in dedicated community organizing and action, endure medical training and practice, work for a political or popular movement, etc. This is not to say that poems can’t participate in world-transforming actions and events, but that our sense that they’re good poems doesn’t seem to depend on whether or not they bring about large scale material transformation—or real world effects of any kind. Rather, feeling that audiences can and have been mistaken about the quality of any number of poems, we believe that a good poem must merely be something. Perhaps, then, for Berryman, as for us, a poem’s goodness derives from its embodiment of a timeless universal truth or beauty, or from its realization of divinity, or from its expression of the world’s benevolence toward human experience, etc.—all characteristics that needn’t (although they can) have anything to do with a poem’s real effects on any real audience in any real world….

5. Charles Harper Webb and Romantic Dissatisfaction Of course, in the year 2005 (and in the years of Berryman’s working life15), we don’t really believe in Truth, Beauty, etc. anymore. Such concepts strike us, in many ways, as hopelessly naïve and politically dangerous, relics of a past literary era. As the poet Charles Harper Webb describes a widely experienced (and mildly schizophrenic) state of mind,

I’ve done my share of fulminating against aesthetic values which I believe to foster bad writing, alienate readers, and doom poetry to cultural insignificance. I’m convinced my positions are right. I’m also convinced that differences in aesthetics—i.e., taste—arise, in the main, not from reasoned judgment, but from temperament. Some differences are biological: inborn attitudes and tendencies almost impossible to change. Most of the rest are psychological—learned at an

14 Auden, in his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” mourns the political ineffectiveness of Yeats poetry, “…mad Ireland hurt you into poetry./ Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,/ For poetry makes nothing happen…” 15 John Berryman, 1914-1972. 20

early age, and highly resistant to change. Relatively few, I believe, are products of conscious choice. People react, then rationalize their reactions (76).

On the one hand, Webb’s fulminating against certain aesthetic values indicates his commitment to a (at least somewhat) transcendent notion of poetic value. He can’t dispel (though he suppresses) his belief that there is something of (fairly) universal value present or exhibited in good poetry, something that would make its cultural insignificance and declining readership a general worry. On the other hand, his explicit “post-modern” belief that aesthetic commitments merely reflect personal tastes clearly opposes such romanticism. In the same way (as I suggested at the beginning of this essay with a slightly different emphasis), we as poets generally both: a) demand that a good poem embody timeless beauty, or realize divinity, or express the world’s benevolence towards human experience—in a manner independent of any particular audience’s (potentially mistaken) reaction; AND b) know that that demand is merely the relic of a perhaps naïve Romantic faith in the transcendent (teleological) value of Art—at which point our internal struggle begins again to resemble the one we initially identified in Merwin’s Berryman (or vice versa). On the one hand, Berryman has the post-modern knowledge that there is no such thing as a good poem (if a good poem is one that transcends time, space, and human difference in a manner we nostalgically associate with Great Art). On the other hand, Berryman’s love of and passion for poetry demands that it retain its importance, and that, therefore, there must be a difference between its better and worse practice, i.e., that there are Good and Bad poems…. It would seem, then, that Berryman’s nostalgia leaves him feeling that defining poetic goodness in terms of performative efficacy is insufficient. Knowing that a poem is good because (and insofar as) it entertains or otherwise pleases or even inspires a familiar audience is not the kind of knowing Berryman craves in Merwin’s poem. In Philip Levine’s recollections, we find Berryman admiring a line from a sonnet by his student Donald Justice about Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden, “As for the fruit, it had no taste at all,” a line that could be read as expressing Berryman’s 21 dissatisfaction with his knowledge of poetic goodness as efficacy, his sense of that definition’s insufficiency.16 Thus, perhaps it is the discovery of this insufficiency that the last line of Merwin’s poem warns us against, a discovery that the poem implicates in Berryman’s eventual suicide. And thus, perhaps, it is the danger of suicide that, in turn, serves to justify the near carte blache that the poem seems to offer poets.

6. Robert Frost: the Poem as End in Itself If this is the case, I submit that the Berryman in Merwin’s poem forgets (at least) one other option. Namely, that the poet can value poetry both as an end in itself and for its immediate/local effects, which is what the poetry of Robert Frost teaches us. Frost’s poems, like those of all the great modernists, confront essentially the same philosophical and practical problem: in a world apparently stripped of the large illusions that in the past gave our desires both ultimate object and final impetus, what do we do? For Frost the

16 From “Mine Own Berryman,” in Recovering Berryman. Eds. Richard Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop. Donald Justice’s poem, as quoted by Levine, is as follows:

Sonnet

The wall surrounding them they never saw; The angels, often. Angels were as common As birds or butterflies, but looked more human. As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe. Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw In all of Eden: this was the first omen. The second was the dream which woke the woman: She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw. As for the fruit, it had no taste at all. They had been warned of what was bound to happen; They had been told of something called the world; They had been told and told about the wall. They saw it now; the gate was standing open. As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

According to Levine, “After reading the poem aloud, John [Berryman] returned to one line: ‘As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.’ ‘Say that better in a thousand words,’ he said, ‘and you’re a genius’ (15). See also, Berryman’s famous or infamous “Dream Song 14,” Appendix 3. In this poem, motion and invention predicated by desire (the answer to the question) is insufficient to the speaker. The speaker confesses that he has no inner resources, i.e., he lacks the capacity for earnest love that makes possible a satisfaction with the poem/act in itself, and thus, the speaker is left as purposeless as dog’s tail minus the dog, and the poem ends. 22

answer is individual creativity, a kind of will to form: because reality is essentially shapeless, a human life gains significance only insofar as it succeeds in inscribing itself against that shapelessness, i.e., in countering the essential chaos of reality through the construction of a local order. Thus, for example, in his poem “Mowing,” Frost presents woods conspicuously silent except for the noise made by the mower’s scythe. This is a world devoid of the singing and other pastoral accoutrements that in poems of earlier centuries would denote the presence-in-the-world of supernatural and transcendent possibilities. That the mower cannot understand what his scythe whispers to the ground reveals his alienation from any significance his labor might obtain from participation in a greater Natural Order (i.e., the mower is not a figure of pastoral harvest, a symbol of human participation in the cycle of the seasons, rather he is merely a person doing work):

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

As the second half of the poem shows, this strong minded mower disavows any desire for significance beyond the immediate and material effects of his labor. To believe himself to be playing a role in the greater cycle of harvest—and so to live a life bound to (illusory) eternal and transcendent patterns—would seem to him a surrender to untruth, and therefore a betrayal of “the earnest love” he bears for the ever ephemeral/ passing world of experience. The reward for labor (and here labor serves as a metaphor for life, the extended act of giving shape to chaos, i.e., farming what would otherwise be wild) is fact, the material form the mower has left (the rows of drying hay):

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, 23

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Frost’s poem “The Exposed Nest” provides another, more complicated illustration of Frost’s insistence that the immediate product of action, a local form, constitutes an end in and of itself.17 In the poem, the narrator notices (presumably) his son engaged in some activity in the grass. The narrator stops his mowing to join his son’s play, only to discover that his son is building a grass shelter for a nest of baby birds uncovered by the mowing.

You were forever finding some new play. So when I saw you down on hands and knees In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay, Trying, I thought, to set it up on end, I went to show you how to make it stay, If that was your idea, against the breeze, And, if you asked me, even help pretend To make it root again and grow afresh (1-8).

We can imagine Wordsworth or Clare constructing a similar dramatic scene in order to present lessons on the transcendent nature of moral goodness and human beings’ relationship with nature.18 Frost’s poem, however, carefully avoids doing precisely that:

17 The text of this poem is in Appendix 2. 18 Clare’s ‘I Found a Ball of Grass Among the Hay’ offers a clear lesson about how to handle finding a nest in the grass, contra Frost:

I found a ball of grass among the hay And progged it as I passed and went away, And when I looked I fancied something stirred And turned again and hoped to catch the bird, When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat With all her young ones hanging at her teats. She looked so odd and grotesque to me, I ran and wondered what the thing could be And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood, When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood. The young ones squeaked and when I went away She found her nest again among the hay. The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run 24

while narrator and son complete a shelter to protect the nest, their ability to know the ultimate goodness of their actions is undermined by their inability to predict how the mother bird will react to their efforts:

We saw the risk we took in doing good, But dared not spare to do the best we could Though harm should come of it, so built the screen…(27).

Have the narrator and son acted morally? Has their screen served any greater transcendent purpose? The poem continues to re-pose and defer the question of human actions’ moral value until it ends. First, Frost has his narrator emphasize both the practical limitations of human understanding and the impact of the resulting ignorance/innocence on moral action: in the passage above the goal is to do “the best we could” regardless of ultimate outcome, because that outcome is often hard to predict. Similarly, the narrator sees his son’s initial motive, his desire to shield the baby birds, as limited by pragmatic concerns:

You wanted to restore them to their right Of something interposed between their sight And too much world at once—could means be found (17-19).

When the narrator then goes on to suggest that both characters’ actions are motivated less by compassion (i.e., an awareness of the interrelationship of 1st person perspectives and the biological world) than by “the need to prove we cared” (31), this only serves to raise again the question of moral value: “Prove to whom?” (Each other? A higher moral authority?) Emphasizing the impossibility and superfluity of attaching transcendent value to actions and their immediate products, Frost finally has the narrator first ask, “Why is there then/ No more to tell?” and then provide a deliberately ambiguous answer (31). On

And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun (54).

Here when the human intruder leaves, the natural order is restored, the world is at peace again (or perhaps the cesspools linger as a reminder of greater human disruptions; at any rate the moral tone of the poem is clear in contrast to Frost’s). 25

the one hand, the beginning of the narrator’s, “We turned to other things” (32), sounds almost callously dismissive of the birds the narrator and his son so carefully tended earlier, suggesting perhaps the poem’s lesson concerns the cruelty of human nature so easily distracted from its moral impulses. On the other hand, the answer continues (33), “I haven’t any memory [of returning to check on the nest]—have you?” raising the possibilities that (a) the narrator and son might have returned but forgotten doing so or (b) the son might have returned though the narrator didn’t. Depending on how we read this line, the poem takes on a different moral tone. If the son has remembered to return and check the nest though the narrator has forgotten, the poem becomes almost a Dickens-ish tribute to the greater moral alertness of the young son (the poem emphasizes after all that “we…built the screen/ You [the son] had begun” (29-30). If both have returned though the narrator has forgotten, the poem becomes more cynical and its lesson concerns the lightness with which the more worldly narrator must (given his and his son’s human limitations) undertake minor moral acts. The last lines of the poem, “To see if the birds lived the first night through.…” seem less than optimistic. Are narrator and son examples of well-intentioned but fatally limited folk? Or are they calm and practical moral examples for us to follow? The answer, is of course, neither; the poem defers any attempt to attach a specific moral to it. For Frost, the labor of producing the poem is justified by the poem itself (and perhaps the local pleasure it produces), not by its transcendent moral value or meaning— just as the Mower’s labor is justified by the fact it produces; just as the father and son’s efforts result in a screen to which no ultimate value can be attached. (Similarly, Frost’s famous comparison of free verse to tennis without a net suggests that, for Frost, the writing of a poem is a game, an activity engaged in for its own sake and for the sake of the local pleasure it generates, not for the sake of further transcendent value or benefit.) According to Frost’s poetry, then, once a poem or any other human labor is completed, one turns properly—not to asking about its ultimate or transcendent value—but to other things. To do otherwise is to betray fact and surrender to untruth.

7. Epilogue This turning to other things is what we see Merwin’s Berryman urging on his audience and unable to accomplish himself. Berryman’s emphasis on passion, movement and invention suggests the importance to Berryman of turning to other things and/or other poems, of refusing to brood, of staying in motion, of staying perpetually engaged in the creative/generative act, the continual and never finished labor of self-inscription against the chaos of reality. It is the ultimate importance of continually generating that underlies the near carte blanche the poem ultimately offers. And yet, as we know—and as we sense the older speaking Merwin remembering in the poem—ultimately for Berryman other things were insufficient, and the knowledge of poetic goodness (understood in terms of performative efficacy) was insufficient. Figured as Frost’s Mower, Berryman desperately wanted to understand what it was his scythe whispered, the role his poetic labor and his life actions played in a Natural Order of things. He lacked the earnest love that makes fact (not a kind of value that doesn’t exist although we nostalgically long for it) the sweetest dream that labor knows (his love was a more volatile and Petrarchan affair). Figured as the father in Frost’s “The Exposed Nest,” Berryman worried about the ultimate/moral goodness of the products of his actions until that worry yielded paralysis. Unable to turn to other things, he stopped writing (helping the birds) because he had to be sure of his poem’s (the grass screen’s) goodness; he stopped acting because he had to be sure of his own goodness—and because he couldn’t accept the definition of “goodness” (as performative efficacy) available to him. The warning that Merwin’s poem offers is not that needing to know whether or not one’s poems are good will prevent one from writing—nor is it that needing to know whether or not one’s actions are good will prevent one from acting—rather the warning has to do with a particular tragic nostalgia, a longing for a kind of goodness we no longer really believe in: If one can’t accept the local goodness one’s writing of poetry can perceptibly effect and can’t be satisfied with viewing one’s writing of poetry as valuable in itself, then one will stop—unless one decides to surrender to untruth in a manner Frost’s mower refuses. 27

Part Two 28

Distance

When I see my friends in a different field, I wave to them and they wave back, but what we shout is so strange to hear, the wind seems to carry the import of our words to someone somewhere else.

We’re left grinning and waving, then— because we have companions who, impatient, want to go on with the walk and conversation— we have to go on, almost without choosing to, almost without noticing this thing we’re lightly driven to do. We look back—at whom we saw and let walk on in a field in the evening with different companions, remembering (as if seeing old neighborhoods beneath their changes), someone we once knew remaining and remaining, no matter how long we walk and often we look back—until whoever’s walking with us stops and demands we catch up, physically and in thought, and, because that’s what we owe, we do.

The Egg

Meaty, gelatinous bread of the embryo, stolen in the world's first crime, sucked while someone sobbed and wailed and another nursed an impotent pride and, in the trees, predators fought to maintain their composure, drawing maps and inventing pots of boiling water, Salt's Lover,

Pepper's Lover, Crackable Stuffed Stone,

Soul of My Belly, Biscuit of Patience,

Agate of Serenity, Filbert of Unshakable Optimism,

Token of Universal Pre-consciousness, Egg, as I prepare to walk among the opossums, cowbirds and snakes, of this pecking, tooth sown world, I offer you the felicity of my taste buds, the unassailable cradle of my gut, and the promise that tonight while sprinkling parsley on your stewing mother,

I’ll tell What-Has-Hatched of your original, elliptical, architectural body. 30

The Chemist

Because your books can’t make a sufficiently beautiful sense, your neighbor has walked through her house and turned out the lights in each room— the last light the light in her bedroom— and climbed into her bed without you again.

You Had to Bring It Up

Now it’s cold. The sizzle has left the wires feeding the house. Outside everything moves soundlessly.

Inside we feel our insides contract, as if the weather were water or a lover’s bad mood. The house smells like soup, but we’re used to that and couldn’t care less.

We want to emerge from the shells of our bodies and decompress in sunlight, our natural medium, bodies of want with souls of helium.

If it’s natural to feel tight and fragile in weather like this (Where are our patterners? Where are our clowns? Where are our lovers of sights and sounds?), I prefer artifice!

The First Concession

I was standing in the river when I first noticed that your faults were not just exaggerations of my own. They were sharper—rigorous, as if you’d thought (awake at night while overhead a lonely couple made the ceiling tick) about them. And decided they should stay. I disliked how, I then imagined, you’d cultivate them, reading books that linked peculiar diets with genius. It’s lucky too much water kept me from swimming upstream to where you sat building a wall of wet gravel and your elbows looked like apricots. I felt a shift, as if (a dozen miles from where we lounged just outside Athens, Ohio—the sun on pale green mussel shells split open on the muddy bottom and huge heron flapping like blue lizards into the trees) a sleepy driver had veered a load of concrete off an overpass. It was how you asked me did I want you— without coyness or clear intention, because it was a pertinent question and you didn’t know— that made me first think how I’d have to think about did I.

First Duckling in the Water

meanwhile there are those in the distance talking as if they’d never thrown a plate or snarled at the dog and who are wrong to think things happen for reasons and so can be prevented, reasons are what arrive after it’s too late

Furniture of the Mind

The cabinet maker also makes beds, to help the traveler just come home roam more easily in his skull, eyes rolled inward, and he makes bookshelves for books of food, love, or despair, and wardrobes for one’s evening wear, anticipating every need—he thinks.

“Dear sir,” I say, tentatively, admiring the handiwork on display, “In all my reflections, I look for a chair….” He turns, smiling, away.

The Flood

Most of us are fine, but a few have felt the rain as if they were the house (the how many days now continuous tapping?) and are huddled on a dining room table on a roof somewhere in their minds, the flood, having been a real enemy, reminding them of some time else. In the kitchen, we’re calling them Noah’s and—what was his wife’s name?

We’re bringing them pillows and soup. We’re bringing them flashlights and radios. We’re sprawled on couches, reporting to our good few friends through a skylight we’ve opened and stuck an umbrella into. An important football game’s starting. “See, in Pittsburgh it’s still not raining!” We’re passing out hot french-fries, despite the private remembering above us.

The Label Inside Unsigned

Because he loved Mandy and Mandy loved Brad, he thought the words of praise for cooks used up. He thought the kiss used up. He thought the book, the bowling ball, the bar used up.

In all his dreams, he looked ahead and saw a hat (he looked behind and saw a hat). He spoke to the hat. He yelled at the hat. He nudged with his foot, flicked with his finger, peered carefully under the hat. Then came the days of transcendence.

Beyond the hat were flying saucers. Beyond the saucers was next to nothing. And where that finally petered out, God sat feeding her dog eggs. But wait. Soon, (his name was) Martin tired of the halogen heat of the throne.

In a field by a rock that glimmered at night, like a fishbowl of luminous cheese, he found a hat set out as if to catch snowflakes. And picked it up. “God doesn’t wear clothes,” he thought. Who did he know who wore clothes?

The Whale

There is still a spotlight aimed at a paper moon. There is still a young woman reading the classics out loud in a down town park— though the park lights are out and the whale is pulled through the streets in the evening by ten groaning oxen. We are all being swallowed.

Night by night, the avenues empty, the whale hollows, its gut expands. But it is warm in here. There’s plenty to eat.

We’re burning the liver for light by which to sew tents. In the tail, someone is stirring a soup, someone is baking bread.

Kitchen Prayer One

For the sake of my friends, make my enemies fragile and my house on the beach with a porch/pier from which we can fish.

Although I’ll not be fishing initially, with all my delicate enemies squeaking about (stomp!), I’ll want to fish later— in the company of friends who needn’t worry about me and needn’t be wealthy enough to afford their own nice house on the beach.

Addresses the Evening

Why wouldn’t I thaw— for the little black dog that followed me home and ate my chicken and ate my wursts and ate my bowl of hard-boiled eggs— my last block of stroganoff? I believe in forgiveness. I believe in contentment.

I, too, long for what I can’t imagine. Send me my true love. Give me what I want.

When I’m ready to be human again, I’ll say “when.”

The Museum

1/ We believe, in our grief, we will be inconsolable. Strong, beautiful siblings will charge our shoulders so we don’t, sobbing, scoop the body from the coffin and carry it (where?) in our arms (where?).

What kind of thing is modern grief that it can be consoled? That we could say, “Their grief requires more room and time….” and leave them alone for a month or two, instead of having to interfere: “Christ almighty! Hold her back! She’s crazed!”

2/ The thing unstaged, the snap of a strong mind, the shameless, public, face up-lifted crying, and how it spreads, until the hum threatens to pull the nails from the floorboards and coffin— now we know why some of us must wrestle our grief without moving, and let our dead go—or there would be too many. The fasteners in our buildings would loosen. We’d uproot the trees and salt the beds in our cemeteries.

Our kitchens and cars would explode.

The Surgeon Speaking

1/ The whale should be reshaped!

2/ These self-expressive kids in the street so loudly protesting the whale, mistaking it for something else, are failing to take into consideration its delicate and volatile feelings.

Were it a machine, we’d all enjoy its sloppy destruction. A whale, however, oughtn’t be angered or killed. We need something like it, but more beautiful and useful.

The Gift

The miracle of a complete suit fallen from the sky precisely for someone who will have to attend twenty funerals and weddings at least!

Because (as the type that notices collars) I love the shirt’s elegant collar, it takes me a long time to wonder what crime am I wearing the evidence of and call the police.

I unbutton the jacket and sniff the cuffs that hopefully aren’t clues. May somewhere a groom on an airplane, in memory of his almost-best-man, have committed a suit of clothes to the beyond of approximately my size!

The Committee Dissolves

Unable to bear, for example, a red scarf tossed down on a white bed spread (a flash of blood on napkins there in his bedroom!), unable to live near schools where children shrieking on the playground made him crouch in his sleep, he slept between meals or watched the neon tetras in the tank in his living room, feeding them one crumb at a time, taking hours, allowing the school of five to settle before offering another fleck on the tip of a plastic toothpick. He talked to them, until they began to talk back. He grinned, that first occasion, speechless with gratitude, his eyes wet. Soon, he knew them all by voice— his favorite, Ginger, had the clipped upright accent of a fifties female movie star, American and archaic. He began to wonder— because he’d noticed people more frequently saying on TV, “God spoke to me….” (the President was doing it, for example)— how does one know that that is God talking? He liked to think God might be speaking to him through his fish, through Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, or the whole school speaking in chorus, one Voice, participating in the arrangements of things in his living room, in his kitchen, telling him to adjust the blinds because look! there! see? isn’t that nicer light?

That it was was a kind of evidence. Why shouldn’t he be running their errands? Accepting their phone calls? Spending his credit card on-line buying, among other things, barrels of filtered water, tanks of propane, shotguns, slug shells, concrete, Plexiglas, silicon caulking, and a flat-bed truck?

Hello?

Plant your feet and pull with both hands the fat strap of your every resentment back beneath your chin and release.

One Mississippi.

Although from here the impact can sound like someone’s flicked an aspirin at the kitchen window of the house in the mind of your dear- but-not-always-bright companion, some of the people who live in that house are responsible and will respond as soon as they’re able.

The Hunter Calls Rabbits

Love, then, is the name of our desire and pursuit of the Whole, and once, I say, we were one....

Because I was the biggest chunk split off from that original us, I am conscious of the immensity of our collective loss. I remember how we were seized and broken, the pieces scattered and our name lost. I’ve seen what was made of you: quick and furry packages, sent among the thistles and the carrots and chives, each package guarded by a pair of bright eyes. I know how you want to come back, how you’re trapped behind speechless, nibbling tongues. And so I’ve spent the morning lying the tall grass, hiding from the sun, kissing my own arm, reminding you: you belong inside this body, too. 46

Wanted: Friendly Streets, Good News, Warm Bed

The rebel's problem is believing what she's told. Her teachers have been, for a long time, unconvincing. Here and there, glimpses of a something beneath the something that is there bother her into an apprehension of new food, new fabrics. Not the world of sticks and rocks and weather, she can't help but thinking, but a world of souls and sticks and rocks and weather. Although she sees the arrogance in wanting something other than satisfaction in retirement (and loneliness presses her perception as it squeezes thin her sleep (and the something that is there grows and sometimes seems enough (and the something that is glimpsed seems crippled, illusory or a pure hallucination))), still, the rebel knows that if she had a someone, she wouldn't be a rebel. And they'd have friends. Revolutions start, she tells herself (again), with advertisements. Someone will answer. Then. 47

The Cook and the Lady

The cook and the lady must be more than friends. Notice he keeps glancing through the swinging double doors? Notice how his Chicken Curry Special makes her grin?

Later, at her house, he’ll slip off her dress, whispering something in her ear about her complicated breath— for which she’ll credit (in part) him and his spices.

Already, she’s anticipating the thirteen paradises. And how, she’ll sleep at last, beneath the wet silk covers, her body indistinguishable from her lover’s.

If I could, I’d release that cook from his kitchen. I’d let the lady take him home. I’d cook our chicken. But my chicken always lacks that necessary something.

Self-Butcher and Cook

1/ I’ll love this foot and this right hand and throw back the rest: this restless eye.

2/ And the left-handed fingers with ratchety knuckles, the lumpy skull and stupid genitals.

3/ I’ll live in a sack or a tub of intestines. I’ll keep my organs raw. I’ll keep a few tendrils of hair for remembrance.

4/ Give me a long branch for stirring my selfish juices. Give me a small fire on which to bask and stew.

5/ With my right foot, I could be the king of clams (that tight-lipped muddy tribe, coyly licking and eyeing the salt from under their calciferous hoods).

6/ My hand for the hammer, the napkin, the scythe, to cup my phantom ear, to seek my invisible teeth, to moan into when the need arises.

7/ Genuine as the egg that hatched

8/ first. Of the thinking gelatin that is in us, that is keeper.

8/ Seasoned with a belligerent name.

9/ 49

Leave me in the shade to cool, sinking through the stink and wash and screw of my glands, my moods as backyard tides.

12/ My heart a cork for the bobbing.

With Sandwich

To not look fondly (your enemy’s friends might follow your glance), you chew, your lover piling napkins on your head. Don’t smile

(except at the excellent mustard!), you lucky lucky person.

We Feel at Last the Bump of Shore

Our promises leak. Someone’s been plinking mercilessly at our steel washtub, as if with a .22, as if to make a sieve with which to drain a monstrous pot of spaghetti.

Nevertheless, plugging holes with fingers and toes (what the water is nobody knows), here we bob. I suggest we sneeze, simultaneously, in our enemy’s direction (to both show disrespect and achieve a means of propulsion)!

From the Log of Lost Cooks

In the heat and steam, they grew pensive and thin. Pleasure became formulaic: this much salt, this much sherry, this much tripe. When the boat sank, they thanked it.

Still, nobody drowned. They came to and retched. Their ribcages stuttered and heaved. Their windpipes crackled. Red-eyed and vicious, they found a cool stream and lunged at its gritty water.

Two days passed. Two quick nights. They began to eye each other, noticing cheeks and calves, sharpening sticks and hoarding heavy stones, having rediscovered their still enormous appetites.

The Affair

What went by? The house is wobbling. It slowly settles upright again. How have we traveled so far without leaving? Our sleep is not the same sleep. This isn’t our bedroom. The house is not the same house.

November

If I fell in love with a meadow cricket because she was sad, because of her enormous dark eyes, we’d disappoint our families and scandalize the neighbors by meeting every night on the huge rock by Mr. Shepherd’s blue gill pond. The grass would crunch beneath my feet, edged with frost, blond and brittle. I’d offer her a spinach leaf, a drop of my own spittle on a silver coin. She’d drink and nibble, crouched on my palm, explaining autumn in cricket terms: the hollowing cold, the unbearable humility of leaf-less trees. I’d listen, running a finger over her perfect knobs and ridges, stroking her musical knees, while, on the pond, needles of ice formed and clicked.

Jessica Drowning in Irene

There’s little to say about one’s friend Marty, since that aspect of him that interests one is not who he is but what he does and (since what he does results from who he’s with) what Marty seems to you to do will always differ from what he seems to me to do. Which is why (it seems to me) there seems to be very little to say about one’s friend Marty— except when (for whatever purpose) one is assembling a composite portrait of Marty’s actions, which we’re not. Our current project is Marty’s phone number.

Finding it. Calling him. And telling him to bring Irene, whose every aspect interests us.

The Gift

What I’ve been clanging at in the basement (the hydraulics took more time than I’d thought), not merely for your entertainment (but to keep our coupledom pristine)— ta da! (able to throw a medicine-ball twelve miles an hour): your gleaming reset machine!

Darling, never mind how spasmodic the contraption. (Certain antics ensure an efficient distraction.)

The details of its operation are a secret, but I want you to think carefully about what you’d say if I came to, with zero recollection, looking up at you.

To Rest

Because she’d seen Mr. Jones, her enemy, in the sky, tapping stars with a damp forefinger, and heard the squeak as each went dark, she threw parties every night at her house.

To make her forget to stand with her back to the sliding glass door and watch our faces when someone comes in (raising his hat and brushing the toe of one shoe with a handkerchief

(or so she imagines his entrance before— what would we do to him, anyway?)), we drink her wine and eat her chicken and stand around fires in her backyard or dance in her kitchen or lean in her halls, as if the engines of her loneliness could drive the party outside time and we’d have nothing to work for anymore.

Looking for a Teacher

Although it saw nothing, and heard nothing untoward, and smelled only the railroad car’s interior and the straw and the basin and a bit of cold air and, faintly, snow,

because what makes the lion what it is surges sometimes up against the lion’s body, the lion’s body surges up against its cage, rattling the railroad cars and the clowns

undressed and asleep in one another’s arms. It is as such a figure that I picture myself surging against the cage of myself. As if on either side a cliff dropped away into whistling darkness. As if someone—alert for signs of mechanical failure, and filtering out the restless sleepers and the lovers lovingly humping in the narrow but vibrating bunks—could sense (through the quarter mile of coupled cars) something restless with that peculiar and deep restlessness that he or she recognizes as of his or her particular own.

The Guest

The guest, returned, regrets her having left. What was it she was looking for that wasn’t here? A waiter puts his tray of sandwiches down and asks her to dance.

Who is this mysterious waiter— whom no one remembers hiring? who’s nevertheless wearing the requisite white linen shirt and the black and silver pin-striped pants— because that’s not dancing! “Don’t stop!” he implores. Why would she stop? There are no windows. There is no floor. Somewhere on earth, an ambulance is rumbling towards some hurt and needy human, but here humans are slowly becoming irrelevant, in the face of an apparently permanent embrace.

Zoned Commercial or Residential

When I’ve been hungry, I’ve complained bitterly. After I’ve been fed, I’ve praised the cook and told my jokes. At the poker table in my best friend’s basement, I’ve lost everything I had (over the month’s rent) and yelled, “AAAAAUUUUUUGGGHHHHHHHH,” loud enough to wake the baby in her crib behind the closed door upstairs. This is how I’ve always liked to go: pushing my moods into noise, sharing my every opinion, making the most of air. Now, walking past stacks of abandoned concrete pipes in the vacant lot behind the Laundromat I frequent (letting the dog nose the heaps of rabbit turds), I think of how my boisterousness has mostly served my own amusement, how my funniest songs have mostly irritated friends. For a while, I walk on, grief-stricken. “This has been my prayer,” I tell (sobbing almost) a pair of ducks squatting by a puddle, “Dear God, let them appreciate my babble, let me do what I want all my life, and still obtain most favorable results!” Then, I address a gopher snake draped on a rock, “Dear Gopher Snake, how could I have been blind— or deaf, rather—all my life? Let me be a different me, a quieter one, one more attuned to the lives of others!” Then, I address two kids hunting ants, “The fuck you looking at!?” Then, I address a bumble bee, “Dear Bumble Bee, how come what I love best remains ugly?” Then, I’m really pissed and kicking at clods of clay and stomping at the dog when she comes up wagging her tail. Then, I’m struck with tenderness for my location, this vacant lot—I’ve walked here for years, it has rich associations—the prickly weeds, the ditches orange with fluorescent algae, the hollows in the bushes where on August afternoons, the pale young bodies of tenderly humping truant teenagers flash from the shadows (I’ve seen them, driving by, and been moved). I address the lot, “Dear Lot, I’d buy your every inch and keep you as you are, I love you for the integrity of your uselessness.” Who has money for real-estate? I’m lazy and poor. I put a pebble in my pocket and walk back to check the dryers, the dog trailing behind wondering what has she done?

Last Duckling to the Water

Would the stronger person think or stop thinking and rest?

Wait for me. I know I’m slow. Unless you ought not wait, in which case, go.

Witness

Cursing his lawnmower, the enormous slope uncut, so stuck we winced.

No goat falling from the sky. No fence sprouting to keep in said goat.

He pulled the rope. The engine sputtered. We watched him kick, howl, leave, and return, grinning, swinging a double-bitted axe. The turf continued increasing its height, but the clanging clearly eased his heart.

Had he offered, I’d have taken a whack myself, in solidarity.

Fly

I’d like to sink into my life the way a waterlogged leaf eventually sinks— peeling from the underside of the pond’s skin, and turning over, and half-slipping, half-fluttering— out of sight.

I say out loud, by the pond before work, “Leaf, you’re me! And water, you’re my life!” but it won’t be true— when evening arrives, I’m always the fly, buzzing, glued to the surface, flailing my one free wing.

Kitchen Prayer Two

Let the soup seldom be just for myself. Let coats hang on doorknobs and chairs. Let no bowl, glass, plate, or jar remain on a shelf. (We can put the children to sleep upstairs.)

(If need be, in strange kitchens, kind strangers will feed me.) We’ll rise from our sleep and go more easily, each in his or her shoes, to work.

The Cannibals

Our rent is cheap. We can live many to a room.

From what we eat, you wouldn’t know us.

But in our love songs we still sing:

To saw your long bones across my teeth,

I would eat a watermelon, I would eat a peach. 66

Loyalty

Fine. I’ll become smaller, subtracting my faults from the sum of my self-regard

(since they, like bad friends, insist on remaining until I let them stay).

The house diminished by their displacement. I’ll love them because they won’t be driven away.

Close Quarters

Ay, there’s the rub...

1/ Now that the bed has quit thumping in 24B, it must be our turn.

2/ Should we fake it all or just enough to make everyone wonder this time?

3/ I’m reminded of when in the corridor at work I hear somebody whistling a light variation, a song, and find myself whistling (though always a different tune).

4/ And then I think of the one man, the pale bachelor of 44B, rising at last from his bed— having heard the grunting and cooing and screaming traveling from apartment to apartment each Friday night— pulling his slippers on, knotting his robe, taking a smoke from the pack on his night-table, taking the stairs dark and empty and rippling with post-coital quiet.

5/ And then I think of him leaning against the brick wall of the building, smoking, maybe rubbing his face with the hand not holding his cigarette.

6/ And then I think of him standing there, under the high pressure sodium lights, whistling, looking up and down the abandoned avenue, it’s 2 am, it’s drizzling a little, the forecast calls for rain until Monday. He’s grinning and feeling lonely. I’m feeling a little lonely myself, all at once, for no adequate reason. 68

Step One Is In Any Direction

Not that your lessons failed you or that you misstudied them.

It doesn’t care how good a person you are, how useful, how anything.

The whale swallows you on its way home, so it will have something to show for having been gone so long.

Why would you want to go there, too, so deeply away from what you love most, sunlight, dogs, barbeques?

Whale! you demand from inside.

Shooting Lessons

The flinch betrayed more than a fear of noise. There was a laziness that kept the will from keeping flinches of all kinds at bay. Such a son regretfully must be understood as much more likely to betray the father when the father has outgrown his fatherhood and tinkers with a few toys in the garage. Knowing this and, so, smiling—when otherwise, say with a brother, rage would have been his reaction— the father implicates his love in a loving deception. The son recognizes this and thinks he understands what the father has, himself, betrayed. Nevertheless, regardless of how firmly he stands and steadies himself, the flinch won’t go away.

Boom

From the scattergun blinds in the fields, there’s a near constant boom and crackle. Flocks of men in suits in the clouds have been scaring the rain away. Righteous resentment is one thing, but cannibalism’s another! I pity both those without wells and those just trying to fly over, ties fluttering, a little mist beading—before being struck off by the wind— on the bright calf-skin of their briefcases.

Christmas

The wireless connection escapes me. If the Honda starts, I could get rolls. Beeping in reverse, my son crosses the living room carpet, a load of printer cables, for the good people of Memphis, to deliver—where recently he’s met for the first time his mother’s parents.

Not that he’ll remember (not because he’ll be so much more machine than I was at his age (always), but because he’s young and isn’t afraid of time and remembers only vaguely, in urgent moods). 72

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. “Standing by Words.” Standing By Words. San Fransico: North Point Press, 1983.

Berryman, John. The Dream Songs. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Boyd, Richard. “How to Be a Moral Realist.” Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. Eds. Paul K. Moser and J.D. Trout. London: Routledge, 1995.

Clare, John. Selected Poems. Ed. R.K.R. Thornton. London: Everyman, 1997.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1975.

Korsgaard, Christine M. “Two Arguments Against Lying.” Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Levine, Philip. “Mine Own John Berryman.” Recovering Berryman. Eds. Richard Kelly, Alan K Lathrop. Anne Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1993.

McPhee, Nancy. The Book of Insults. New York: Bell Publishing Co., 1978.

Mchugh, Heather. Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. Trans. Oliver Davis. NYC: Routledge, 2004.

Merwin, W.S., “Wanting to See.” Poetry Oct-Nov (1997).

Merwin, W.S. Selected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1988.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981.

Plato. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII. Trans. Walter Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973.

Rhees, Rush, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. L. Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Ed. Cyril Barrett. Los Angeles: U of Ca Press.

Robinson, Mathew. “Uninspired.” The Gathering Place Writing Project. The Gathering Place Writing Project Ser. 1. Athens: The Gathering Place, 2003.

Shue, Henry. Basic Rights. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

Webb, Charles Harper. “Apples and Orangutans: Competing Values in Contemporary Poetry.” The Writer’s Chronicle. 37.2 (2004).

Appendix 1

John Ashbery’s These Lacustrine Cities

These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing Into something forgetful, although angry with history. they are the produce of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance, Though this is only one example.

They emerged until a tower Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back Into the past for swans and tapering branches, Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

Then you are left with an idea of yourself And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others Who fly by you like beacons.

The night is a sentinel. Much of your time has been occupied by creative games Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you. We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,

To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of others be air To you, pressing you back into a startled dream As sea-breezes greet a child’s face. But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.

The worst is not over, yet I know You will be happy here. Because of the logic Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart, Tender and insouciant by turns, you see

You have built a mountain of something, Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument, Whose wind is desire starching a petal, Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.19

19 As quoted in Perloff, p 8-9. 75

Appendix 2

Robert Frost’s The Exposed Nest

1. You were forever finding some new play. 2. So when I saw you down on hands and knees 3. In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay, 4. Trying, I thought, to set it up on end, 5. I went to show you how to make it stay, 6. If that was your idea, against the breeze, 7. And, if you asked me, even pretend 8. To make it root again and grow afresh. 9. But ‘twas no make-believe with you today, 10. Nor was the grass itself your real concern, 11. Though I found your hand full of wilted fern, 12. Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover. 13. ‘Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground 14. The cutter bar had just gone champing over 15. (Miraculously without tasting flesh) 16. And left defenseless to the heat and light. 17. You wanted to restore them to their right 18. Of something interposed between their sight 19. And too much world at once—could means be found. 20. The way the nest-full every time we stirred 21. Stood up to us as to a mother-bird 22. Whose coming home has been too long deferred, 23. Made me ask would the mother-bird return 24. And care for them in such a change of scene, 25. And might our meddling make her more afraid. 26. That was a thing we could not wait to learn. 27. We saw the risk we took in doing good, 28. But dared not spare to do the best we could 29. Though harm should come of it: so built the screen 30. You had begun, and gave them back their shade. 31. All this to prove we cared. Why is there then 32. No more to tell? We turned to other things. 33. I haven’t any memory—have you?— 34. Of ever coming to the place again 35. To see if the birds lived the first night through, 36. And so at last to learn to use their wings.

Appendix 3

John Berryman’s Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no

Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. People bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights and gripes as bad as Achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, and gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag. 77

Appendix 4

Richard Boyd’s Homeostatic Consequentialism

1. There are a number of important human goods, things which satisfy important human needs. Some of these needs are physical or medical. Others are psychological or social; these (probably) include the need for love and friendship, the need to engage in cooperative efforts, the need to exercise control over one’s own life, the need for intellectual and artistic appreciation and expression, the need for physical recreation, etc. The question of just which important human needs there are is a potentially difficult and complex empirical question. 2. Under a wide variety of (actual and possible) circumstances these human goods (or rather instances of the satisfaction of them) are homeostatically clustered. In part they are clustered because goods themselves are—when present in balance and moderation—mutually supporting. There are in addition psychological and social mechanisms which when, and to the extent to which, they are present contribute to the homeostasis. They probably include cultivated attitudes of mutual respect, political democracy, egalitarian social relations, various rituals, customs, and rules of courtesy, ready access to education, information, etc. It is a complex and difficult question in psychology and social theory just what these mechanisms are and how they work. 3. Moral goodness is defined by this cluster of goods and the homeostatic mechanisms which unify them. Actions, policies, character traits, etc. are morally good to the extent to which they tend to foster the realization of these goods or to develop and sustain the homeostatic mechanisms upon which their unity depends. 4. In actual practice, a concern for moral goodness can be a guide to action for the morally concerned because the homeostatic unity of moral goodness tends to mitigate possible conflicts between various individual goods. In part, the possible conflicts are mitigated just because various of the important human goods are mutually 78 reinforcing. Moreover, since the existence of effective homeostatic unity among important human goods is part of the moral good, morally concerned choice is constrained by the imperative to balance potentially competing goods in such a way that homeostasis is maintained or strengthened. Finally, the improvement of psychological and social mechanisms of homeostasis themselves is a moral good whose successful pursuit tends to further mitigate conflicts of the sort in question. In this regard, moral practice resembles good engineering practice in product design. In designing, say, automobiles, there are a number of different desiderata (economy, performance, handling, comfort, durability…) which are potentially conflicting but which enjoy a kind of homeostatic unity if developed in moderation. One feature of good automotive design is that it promotes these desiderata within the limits of homeostasis. The other feature of good automotive design (or, perhaps, of good automotive engineering) is that it produces technological advances which permit that homeostatic unity to be preserved at higher levels of the various individual desiderata. So it is with good moral practice as well (318). 79

Appendix 5

Wendell Berry’s The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor, in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught so often laughing at funerals, that was because I knew the dead were already slipping away, preparing a comeback, and can I help it? And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not be resurrected by a piece of cake. “Dance,” they told me, and I stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. “Pray,” they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth’s brightness, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan. When they said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” I told them, “He’s dead.” And when they told me, “God is dead,” I answered, “He goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.” When they asked me would I like to contribute I said no, and when they had collected more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had. When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t, and then went off by myself and did more than they would have asked. “Well, then,” they said “go and organize the International Brotherhood of Contraries,” and I said, “Did you finish killing everybody who was against the peace?” So be it. Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way. 80

Appendix 6

Heather McHugh’s What He Thought

For Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the Mayor, mulled a couple matters over. The Italian literati seemed bewildered by the language of America: they asked us what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious "cheap date" (no explanation lessened this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib. And there was one administrator (The Conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all he was most politic-- and least poetic-- so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't read Italian either, so I put the book back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, 81 and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make our mark, one of us asked

"What's poetry? Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offence against authority, which was to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government but rather is poured in waves, through all things: all things move. "If God is not the soul itself, he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him. That is how he died, without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry— is what he thought, but did not say.