June 2018 – Fourteen Lines

And So I Keep My Fancy Still

My Fancy

by Alex Posey (1873 – 1908)

Why do trees along the river
….Lean so far out o’er the tide?
Very wise men tell me why but
….I am never satisfied:
And so I keep my fancy still
….That trees lean out to save
The drowning from the clutches of
….the cold remorseless wave.

Alex Posey may have had a premonition of his own death when he wrote those lines ending in “the cold remorseless wave.” Posey drowned while trying to cross the North Canadian River in Oklahoma, his body washed down stream and wasn’t found until a week later. The lines equally fitting as metaphor to the cold remorseless wave of white settlers sweeping over the Oklahoma territory and stealing the land promised to the Creek Nation.

Posey had a fruitful if relatively short career as a writer. He was a poet, a journalist and a humorist. He founded the first daily Native American newspaper, the Eufaula Indian Journal in 1901. As editor, he published a satirical op/ed under the guise of a fictional elderly Muskogee Creek man, written in his native dialect that became known as the Fus Fixico Letters. The letters were a bitingly funny, satirical commentary about the Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory and the United States during a period of great turmoil and political conflict as both the Federal and State governments reneged on prior treaties with new legislation that stripped native people of their land and their human rights. Posey used poetry and satire to inspire, educate and fight against the tyranny of the Dawes Act, a political hammer to break up tribal lands. The Curtis Act of 1898 dismantled tribal governments and institutions at a time when politically savvy Native leaders were attempting to organize, to prevent the land grab that was occurring in preparation for Oklahoma statehood.

Chitto Harjo was a Muscogee leader who resisted the allotment process and privatizing of tribal lands. He fought on the side of the Union during the civil war, hoping that it would align Creek interests with the Federal government. The pressure of white settlers for state hood meant prior promises made in treaties were to be forgotten. From 1900 to 1909, Chitto Harjo led those Creek who opposed cultural assimilation and allotment. As the United States was trying to extinguish tribal government, Harjo and his followers set up a separate government. They were arrested and convicted in US court and imprisoned briefly. During the next five years, the majority of the tribe accepted the changes and were allotted individual plots of land. Chitto Harjo and other Snakes refused. Harjo remained defiant until his death and added to the lore of his legacy by eluding capture, despite several armed encounters with white militias. Harjo retreated deeper into the safety of what remained of native lands and remained free until his death in 1911.

Here is a short passage of Harjo’s speech to the Special Senate Investigative committee into why the Creek Nation objected to allotments.

“Now, coming down to 1832 and referring to the agreements between the Creek people and the Government of the United States; What has occurred since 1832 until today? It seems that some people forget what has occurred. After all, we are all one blood; we have the one God and we live in the same land. I had always lived back yonder in what is now the State of Alabama. We had our homes back there; my people had their homes back there. We had our troubles back there and we had no one to defend us. At that time when I had these troubles, it was to take my country away from me. I had no other troubles. The troubles were always about taking my country from me. I could live in peace with all else, but they wanted my country and I was in trouble defending it. It was no use. They were bound to take my country away from me. It may have been that my country had to, be taken away from me, but it was not justice. I have always been asking for justice. I have never asked for anything else but justice. I never had justice.”

Chitto Harjo 1906 Senate Testimony

https_s3-us-west-2.amazonaws — Chitto Harjo (1846 – 1911) who was also known as Crazy Snake

On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snakes

by Alex Posey

Down with him! chain him! bind him fast!
…..Slam to the iron door and turn the key.
The one true Creek, perhaps the last
…..To dare declare, “You have wronged me.”
Defiant, stoical, silent,
…..Suffers imprisonment.

Such coarse black hair! such eagle eye!
….Such stately mien! —how arrow straight!
Such will! such courage to defy,
….The powerful makers of his fate!
A traitor outlaw, —what you will
….He is the noble red man still.

Condemn him and his kind to shame!
….I bow to him, exalt his name!

Beyond The Moon My Soaring Hope

DonQuixote_Sancho — Don Quixote and his squire Sancho

Don Belianis of Greece to Don Quixote of the Mancha

by Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616)

I TORE, I hackt, abolish’d, said and did,
More than knight-errant else on earth hath done:
I, dexterous, valiant, and so stout beside,
Have thousand wrongs reveng’d, millons undone.

I have done acts that my fame eternise,
In love I courteous and so peerless was:
Giants, as if but dwarfs, I did despise;
And yet no time of love-plaints I let pass.

I have held fortune prostrate at my feet.
And by my wit seiz’d on Occasion’s top,
Whose wandering steps I led where I thought meet;

And though beyond the moon my soaring hope
Did crown my hap with all felicity,
Yet, great Quixote, do I still envy thee.

Don Belianís De Grecia A Don Quijote De La Mancha

by Miguel de Cervantes

Rompí, corté, abollé, y dije e hice
más que en el orbe caballero andante;
fui diestro, fui valiente y arrogante,
mil agravios vengué, cien mil deshice.

Hazañas di a la fama que eternice;
fui comedido y regalado amante;
fue enano para mí todo gigante,
y al duelo en cualquier punto satisfice.

Tuve a mis pies postrada la Fortuna
y trajo del copete mi cordura
a la calva ocasión al estricote.

Mas, aunque sobre el cuerno de la luna
siempre se vio encumbrada mi ventura,
tus proezas envidio, ¡oh, gran Quijote!

Even When We Are Young

Twilight After Haying

by Jane Kenyon (1947 – 1995)

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed–
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
–sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen. . . . the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses. . .

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

Few poets wrote as much as about death as Donald Hall. He made a career of death, he had plenty of experience from which to draw upon, writing very personally about the loss of his wife Jane Kenyon to cancer. Does a lifetime of writing about death prepare you for your own?

Hall passed away last weekend at the age of 89. He was by his own admission pleased by his ability to earn a living as a writer, calling himself a “bandit” for having such good fortune. Hall was awarded nearly every award and recognition a poet could receive and was by all accounts a writer who wrote hard, nearly every day.

If work is not antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Donald Hall

Affirmation

by Donald Hall (1928 – 2018)

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

Our Wheels No Longer Move

gettyimages-978047820 — We Can Do Better Than This America!

Inauguration Day: January 1953

by Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977)

The snow had buried Stuyvesant.
The subways drummed the vaults. I heard
the El’s green girders charge on Third,
Manhattan’s truss of adamant,
that groaned in ermine, slummed on want….
Cyclonic zero of the word,
God of our armies, who interred
Cold Harbor’s blue immortals, Grant!
Horseman, your sword is in the groove!

Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move.
Look, the fixed stars, all just alike
as lack-land atoms, split apart,
and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.

History has a way of repeating itself. The urban, intellectual liberal democrat candidate for President, Stevenson, lost to the war hawk demagogue conservative, Eisenhower in the 1952 Presidential election. Lowell marked Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration with this sonnet, a satirical sharp-tongued intelligent critique of the icy death of American values while the negativity of McCarthyism held sway over our country in the midst of the Korean war. All of this sounds familiar. But we need not be stuck in our current icy path. Its time to move forward with a simple reminder of our better selves:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Dust In Love

Amor Constante Mas Allá de la Muerte

Francisco de Quevedo (1580 – 1645)

Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
sombra que me llevare el blanco día,
y podrá desatar esta alma mía
hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;
mas no de essotra parte, en la riuera,
dexará la memoria, en donde ardía:
nadar sabe mi llama l’agua fría,
y perder el respeto a lei severa.
Alma qu’a todo un dios prissión ha sido,
venas qu’umor a tanto fuego an dado,
medulas qu’an gloriosamente ardido,
su cuerpo dexarán, no su cuydado;
serán ceniça, mas tendrá sentido;
polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

Love Constant Beyond Death

By Francisco de Quevedo

The final shadow that will close my eyes
will in its darkness take me from white day
and instantly untie the soul from lies
and flattery of death, and find its way
and yet my soul won’t leave its memory
of love there on the shore where it has burned:
my flame can swim cold water and has learned
to lose respect for laws’ severity.
My soul, whom a God made his prison of,
my veins, which a liquid humour fed to fire,
my marrows, which have gloriously flamed,
will leave their body, never their desire;
they will be ash but ash in feeling framed;
they will be dust but will be dust in love.

When I Am Sudden Loss

kunitzstudy — Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006)

“The poem comes in the form of a blessing—‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

Stanley Kunitz

Promise Me

by Stanley Kunitz

Only, when I am sudden loss
Of consequence for mind and stair
Picking my dogged way from us
To whom, recessive in some where
Of recollection, with the cross
Fall, the breast in disrepair:

Only, when loosening clothes, you lean
Out of your window sleepily,
And with luxurious, lidded mien
Sniff at the bitter dark – dear she,
Think somewhat gently of, between
Love ended and beginning, me.

It is difficult to summarize a career that spans so many decades. Stanley Kunitz is one of those rare talents whose writing got stronger as he got older, he never reached a zenith from which to fall. His poetry ranged from metaphorical postcards to autobiographical and deeply personal. He was fearless in his writing, laying bare the most intimate of wounds before the reader, unimpeded by dramatic flourish, only an invitation to witness our shared humanity.

Kunitz was marked from birth by his father’s suicide, leaving a pregnant wife with two daughters to fend for herself. He did not countenance his father’s selfish act as his inheritance for Kunitz would prosper for over a 100 years, wringing every ounce of enjoyment out of life that the human body can provide.

Kunitz was a poet’s poet. His poems carefully constructed, complex and eloquent. His poetry completely accessible, he embraced rhymes and excelled at free verse. Kunitz wrote what he wanted to write throughout his entire life with aplomb. His first book of poetry, Intellectual Things, was green lighted by a young editor at Doubleday, Ogden Nash, and published in 1930. His final book, The Wild Braid, was published in 2005 in his centenary year. Kunitz long career would influence many including such poets as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, James Wright, and Mark Doty. Kunitz has the unique honor of being named Poet Lauraete twice, in 1974 and in 2000 and holds the distinction of being the oldest Poet Laurate in our nation’s history.

Kunitz is one of those poet’s that if I had come to poetry sooner in my life, I think I would have written him fan mail and wished secretly that he would respond. Here’s one of his most personal poem’s and a great example of why poetry is an art form unlike any other in its power to articulate what it is to be human.

PS. An interesting question, what living poet should I write a fan mail letter? What living poet would you write? A good idea to think about and maybe do…

The Portrait

by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

Summer Is Late My Heart

Moment In July

by Elise Asher (1912 – 2004)

I unsheathe a grass blade,
Drag its private sweetness through my teeth.
My limbs float backwards to a day in June,
In the vise of yellow sun and quilted ground
My brain is crushed foliage.
Though on my idling eyes are traced
Ant-trollies in the grasses
And in my drowsing ears resounds
Time’s tick through fleshless spaces
And now slack energies within me faintly stir;
Still, budge budge, I cannot budge –
The air is pitched in nooses around my torso.
The elements of freedom hold me prisoner.

Marriage does not come easily to most. And yet it comes to most of us at least once in our lifetimes. Elise Asher and Stanley Kunitz were married in 1957 and would remain so until her death in 2004. For Elise it was her second marriage and for Stanley it was his third. Kunitz was quoted as saying that relationships got in the way of his writing, but lucky for him Asher just kept getting in his way. Kunitz was the more celebrated of the two in terms of poets, but both were accomplished artists, Elise blending words and images throughout her long career and illustrating some of her husband’s poems on canvas.

Touch Me was published in 1995 when Kunitz was 90 years old. I love the ending of this poem; “Darling do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.”

579036627 — Stanley Kunitz and Elise Asher

Touch Me

by Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006)

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Let Be Be Finale of Seem

“The Truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Oscar Wilde

The Emperor of Ice Cream

by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I don’t know why I love this poem. Maybe it’s the mixture of serious with the silly. It paints a great picture, even if I am not sure I totally understand what its all about. Good poetry has a veil around it that allows the reader to decide and this one leaves plenty for the reader to interpret.

A more interesting question is whether Wallace was intentionally playing with a sonnet concept when he wrote it? At first glance this is obviously not a sonnet, at least to any purist. But when I look closer, I am not so sure. It is 138 syllables in length, shockingly close to our 140 syllable traditional sonnet. It is 16 lines, not 14, but its clever in how the rhyming scheme is incorporated with a 1-2 punch at the end, just like an English sonnet. The final two lines of each stanza is 21 syllables. If you count enough sonnets there are plenty of others that finish with an extra syllable or two when it carries the sonnet to its natural conclusion.

Stevens was consciously moving away from traditional metrical poetry to voice his own unique style throughout his career. But the pull of tradition impacts writers and artists in unusual ways and it would have been interesting to have a conversation with Wallace on whether, even subconsciously, his experience with sonnets had an impact on his creation of this wonderful poem.

I often am attracted to a poem for one line and for me in this poem it is the line “Let be be finale of seem.” It is such a convoluted use of the word be and yet it makes sense to me. It says to me – our impressions have the final say in what’s real and what is not, for though we may have eyes in our heads it is our brains that decide what is that we see.

My Eager Heart of Fire

file-1 (4) — The Bliss of A Summer Camp-Fire

Heed me, feed me, I am hungry, I am red-tongued with desire;
Boughs of balsam, slabs of cedar, gummy fagots of the pine,
Heap them on me, let me hug them to my eager heart of fire,
Roaring, soaring up to heaven as a symbol and a sign……

Excerpt from The Song of the Camp-fire by William Service

Life is good. Summer life in Minnesota can be extravagant in its simplicity. Friday night I grilled sweet corn, ate outside on the patio and afterwards enjoyed a summer backyard campfire. We are in that sweet spot of June; the mosquitos are almost non-existent, the fire flies have hatched and highlight the growing darkness and the temperature was cool enough that you could enjoy a bit of heat emanating off the coals. We toasted marsh-mellows, ate a couple of smores (roasted marshmallows between graham crackers with a bit of a chocolate bar), sipped a glass of red wine and talked through our week, realizing how incredibly lucky we are to be alive.

There is something pleasantly visceral pleasant about watching a fire die down, as the fading light turns to darkness. There is more than just smoke that rises into the evening sky, as anxiety and stress follow it on its winding path high above the tree tops. The smell of ash and smoke a reminder of our more primitive selves when fire was the primary source of energy of human endeavors. There are few things as peaceful as a campfire, when there are no responsibilities for a moment, other than to feed a log or two to keep it going and experience the fellowship of life with those that gather with you, in circle, to share its flames.

Sonnet Li

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Not without fire can any workman mould
The iron to his preconceived design,
Nor can the artist without fire refine
And purify from all its dross the gold;
Nor can revive the phoenix, we are told,
Except by fire. Hence if such death be mine
I hope to rise again with the divine,
Whom death augments, and time cannot make old.
O sweet, sweet death! O fortunate fire that burns
Within me still to renovate my days,
Though I am almost numbered with the dead!
If by its nature unto heaven returns
This element, me, kindled in its blaze,
Will it bear upward when my life is fled.

Buy Terms Divine

Sonnet XX

By Langston Hughes

POOR soul, the centre of my sinful earth–
My sinful earth these rebel powers array–
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men;
And Death once dead, there ‘s no more dying then.