A Storm at Sea on Whitman's 200th Birthday

Oak Island, NC 

May 31, 2019

At mid-afternoon it was visible off-shore to east and west.

Before sunset, the sheets fell sidewise in a stiff north wind,

as we gathered to witness from the top deck of the house.

As rain swelled, winds dropped to naught for the first time in days

only to return to gale when the rain came to a temporary halt.

The sun in the southwest hung a double-arcing bow—

bridging road and house and sea, diverting all eyes.

But it was after dark that the show began in earnest—
a pulsating sky alive with electricity.

For hours, the night beach was lit up by flashing clouds

and the forked tongues of sky-fire—allowing the beach, 

empty of its human play, to be realized as in daylight.  

I lay awake in the night and listened as the thunder hummed:

This is a world alive with the possibility of perfection.

Bringing It All Back Home

“the smallest sprout shows there is really no death” [Whitman]

the places we go that mean the most leave traces

in us matching the prints we left, a little dirt here

& there that marks our being there, our respect

for the moments spent together or alone, within

the sacred spot, the gathering place, the haunt

though there is really no going home, home shifts

like a satellite disguised as planet so slowly making

a way across the vast unempty,  detected but not

known, unknowable until the orbit ends in slow

oblivion, then the many pieces sort out one by one

when happiness settles in the lines around a mouth

something changes in the brain allowing an unusual

connectivity to link ego & sound, sight, feeling, urge,

sending a slow building pulse through the body whose

consistency converts inclination into faith into certainty:

this can never go away because it is a part of me

when pain & loss settle in the tributaries of the eyes

something triggers these same memories, though

the certainty fades to doubt, denial & disillusion,

still the faithful call out in prayer & skeptics clinch

down upon the traces of what was & might still be

answers, hard to come by, float up as pond steam

on a morning that seemed too cool for fog or storm

or the look of a cloud suggests a known place, sun

hanging through an evening in such a way as to

bring back a day’s feeling thought unrecoverable:

could it be possible that you know what I mean?

are you listening to these thoughts  as footprints

of a former life, lived & shared, slowly reappear

as blue grey cloud, & jet-stream trails lead to some

reunion, homecoming, or dream-haunted home?

if we wait patiently, will you really meet us there?

Why I Still Make Poems

Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The delusions of fame and fortune have long since gone, but the ideas still arrive nearly every day. Reading Whitman the first time wasn't a magic moment because I had already tried making rhymes before, sitting in some corner making a song I'd never be able to sing. But it was the truthful and easy way the lines stretched out on the page that made me keep trying, and unrequited love provided plenty of opportunities. Now, there is enough requital to fill the day and though the poems still don't pay, by the word or otherwise, the songs keep coming, by the bird and otherwise.


Publication – is the Auction (788) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

I guess I've always been afraid of the fairest price of the words that spill out. If the best of the my poems typed, recited, or scribbled out on yellow legal pages were to be weighed out against an honest merchant's wool, I'm afraid the warp & woof would be left wanting. The seldom & slender publications that have come through the years don't amount to much proof of worth. At least there is the knowledge that what isn't sold remains priceless, though mostly unread.

Enter: The Blogosphere. Though admittedly it doesn't increase the readership of these poems much and certainly doesn't lead to critical acclaim, it does provide a sense of writing for an audience larger than the self, satisfying the need to speak out without needing a third party to certify the parcel as approved poetry.

The Farm on the Great Plains by William E. Stafford : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

My father was not a poet, but he was a lover of words with a keen sense of both things and sentiment. He was an engineer; therefore, he was a maker. Home, the idea, has always been a kind of poem: filled with the familiarities of place, the kitchen smells, the sounds of family, feet and floors, the movement of air, cool & heat, as it lurched or slinked through a decades old house. And this home was a Midwestern home, a Midwestern family removed from its Eastern roots by years of coal dirt, machine oil, and schoolroom chalkdust.

Enter: William Stafford. The simplicity of what this man, a surrogate, though dead himself, for a dying dad whose poems never made it beyond throat or fingertip. Here were pages and pages of stories carefully crafted as early mornings' news. A paradigm to follow, a family of poems to admire, learn from, imitate, and teach to children, other people's children, and someday my own. Kids, these are poems your grandpa might have written and your father tried but never could.


Home for Christmas by Franz Wright : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

As I said, dad didn't write them down. If he had I might have had that to contend with every time I head home or visit a white blank page. Instead, the blinking cursor says: maybe this is the moment the ghost arrives to write the first poem to hold its own dusty weight.

Kindness by Yusef Komunyakaa : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

But words matter to me. The way they conjure intentions, images, inflection, and innuendo. I make my career teaching words to kids many of whom do not privilege them beyond popular use. There is no word that doesn't signify to the importance of poetry. It might just be that poets have tried them all. Few do it as playfully and powerfully as Yusef Komunyakaa does it today. When he writes:

A barometer, temperature
gauge, a ruler in minus fractions
& pedigrees, a thingmajig,
a probe with an all-seeing eye,
what do we need to measure
kindness, every unheld breath,
every unkind leapyear?

is he not testifying to what we do when we string the words along a line, breaking here and there to catch a breath, skip a beat, or wink an eye?

New Intelligence by Rae Armantrout : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Finally, we write, or, rather, I write to keep learning. Whatever can be asked can be answered in a poem without the burden of limited faith or limitless doubt. Where else can words pull things together so tightly or warm exiles with starfire? Isn't every poem a birth and a dying? Doesn't every poem create a world, underworld, and heavenly hope? Or if not heavenly, a world of spirits that only the right words can reach.

*****

I'm not sure this little meandering through poems and personal history gets at why I write, and it doesn't make up for the lack that is my poems' curse, but it does provide a few examples of why I keep doing it, namely, to believe in poems like Whitman, to believe in doubt like Dickinson, to understand the difficulty of simplicity like Stafford and the inevitability of loss like Franz Wright, to chase the wonder in words like Komunyakaa and to create a new way of making meaning like Rae Armantrout.

In the end all the excuses fall away like old beliefs that get outgrown. Given wider world and longer time, I might never strike the vein that leads to fame. Truthfully, I spend my patience in too many other places to make these poems work the way they should, but I've wasted too much time saying: this is the last one only to get the itch again. So until the next one comes along, I'm sorry about the imperfections of the rest.

Great men? Great women?

Whitman Notebook, mid 1850s

Democracy is not the right word for it, nor is Republicanism. Conservative. Liberal. Reactionary. Progressive. Left. Right. All terminology, somehow: wrong.

This is nothing new, after all, over 6o years ago it was written: "The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another" (Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" 1946).


And here we are now, 2010, nearing a mid-term election that has all the markings of a "sea-change," "referendum on...," "mandate," "blood-bath," "wave election," "sweeping change," "critical barometer," "another 1994/1982/1946," and I could go on.


What all this, and the punditry, polling, & pandering in the media, has me thinking about is a need for a positive political movement. As we continually relearn: it may be possible to win a campaign on "Hope & Change," but those concepts are exceedingly hard to live with or live up to. Political campaigns, after all, have by definition a remarkably short shelf-life and are peppered with the wrong kind of rhetoric. But a political movement, even a movement of one or two or three thoughtful people can last and have small but important effects, especially when positive.


Perhaps this is what Walt Whitman was thinking about in, say, 1856 when he was scribbling in one of his pocket-sized leather notebooks about a city and a house being "great" because of "great men" and "great women." As meaningless as the word "great" has become (and most likely was already in the 1850s), the sentiment of those scribblings still suggests that it is the people that create, maintain, and evolve the system: government, civil society, cityscape, and home. A little bit of greatness of confidence, consensus, and candidness just might scratch up something positive.


The trouble is not finding the willing followers. The trouble is linguistics. It is so much easier to define a political movement in the negative, as protest, using fear, and threat, and anger. These are not qualities that we lack or that we need, but what we need cannot be found any longer through words. 


At this point there is only one word that comes to mind. Happiness. Not "the pursuit of" because that is too reducible to property. Not "a return to" because that too is a defining by negation. Not "don't worry" because there is indeed much to be worried for. But just the simple slogan: Happiness. To cut some of the fear, anger, hypocrisy, bribery, and gridlock. 


I am not sure how far we can get with this one word. We could hope for something "trans-formative"... but there I go again with that problematic diction.


Wish us luck.

Camerado: The Birth of a Word

I mentioned in a previous post that one of my earliest formative poetic moments was reading Whitman for the first time, specifically, the section of "Starting From Paumanok" pictured below. The Whitman Archive has made available "The Blue Book" or Whitman's annotated copy of the 1860 Leaves of Grass. The page presented below shows, in Whitman's hand, his coining of the term: "Camerado".

I realize that I am a bit of a Whitman-nerd, but I find it quite exciting to have access to the development of what is certainly one of the most important books of American (World?) poetry. In addition, as a writer, poet, teacher, editor (ha!), this digital copy of that ever-evolving (and devolving) book provides a window into how creation happens and continues through revision. It seems we could all learn something about the power of re-seeing by perusing Uncle Walt's epic task of revising a behemoth.

Enjoy!

A Return to the Poem as Daydream

Reportage. Confession. Complaint. I know these modes best; that is, I employ them most often. More memory than imagination, a puzzling of word, line, break, emphasis, image, figure of speech, end, revise, fail to edit well enough… But even these apparent truth-tellings require the strategic lie: the replacement detail, the memory with différance.

In this most digital of ages, boredom is difficult, with or without a smartphone. Piles of books stack up in walls around me, articles, both cyber and print go unread, television episodes, seasons, and series remain unwatched, movies (the good and the bad) remain to be seen. Two books of poetry arrived in the mail today. The World Cup has begun. A recent vacation, 2000 miles, four major destinations, three bear sightings, and  multiple river crossings yielded  hundreds of pictures to be examined, deleted, posted, printed, and filed. And on top of all this (and two sons and a wife), last night I dreamed uncontrollably.

But a lack of boredom, apart from being overwhelming, can also be stifling. After all, it is a “heavy” boredom that makes an achilles out of Henry and J.B. both at once. In dreams time and place are differed; we move freely in time and space.  As in poetry: “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not […]” (Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). Following this double advice, and trying to survive the most recent bout of poetry self-doubt known as artistic honesty,  the next poem (not here yet) will be full of lies, will be more imagination than memory, will try to reconnect with daydream and not be limited by wakeful vision. I am through with truth (for now) as I find that I'm not that good at it anyway.

Faith, Hope, & Doubt

Where have you been? / And what have you done? / I've been under the ground / Eating prayers from this old book I found / Under the ground / Saving it up / And spending it all / n moving pictures / Silent films / Moving pictures / Silent films (Tony Dekker (Great Lake Swimmers), “Moving Pictures Silent Films”)

But see, this logical God, I don't like him all that much. Even His voice, He's got this voice that I just can't, I don't know, I can't like. I can understand it, but I don't necessarily like it. He's out of my range. But that's no problem. Plenty of times I haven't liked Him. It's good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse. (Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin 50)

I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible, but I do not praise myself on that account. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a pristine lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy, when it is absent I yearn for it more intensely than the lover for the beloved; but I do not have faith; this courage I lack. God's love is for me, both in a direct and inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. I am not coward enough to whimper and moan on that account, but neither am I underhand enough to deny that faith is something far higher. I can very well carry on living in my manner, I am happy and satisfied, but my happiness is not that of faith and compared with that is indeed unhappy. (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: “Prelude from the Heart” 63)

_______________________________________________

Let this stand for the failed poems & the false prayers. 

What the blue behind the black, the flickering of lights, the unrecognized face in the mirror attempt to locate and dream, memory, imagination, and discourse fail to make whole is the age-old struggle between faith & hope & doubt & resignation.

Writing a poem is as much an act of faith as it is an act of will. The electronic posting of a poem, especially, is a pitiable type of prayer. To pray is to be hopeful. Yet the problem remains: prayers are never answered in predictable ways. Sometimes the voices remain silent; other voices respond with too much kindness; still others speak the words poets fear most, the truth about the lack. And the poet’s own voice always hints at its own phoniness.

What the poet pours over in books, scratches out in paper, taps out piano-like on keys is the connection that links what is already lost, is beginning to fade, or never materialized.

Poems pray to birds, speak to the dead & reinvent the voices of both.

I      In the swamp in secluded recesses,

A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,

Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,

If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

What is this if it is not the sincerity of prayer?

Poems beg forgiveness, plead for help, praise, thank, and damn…all at one time.  And they nearly always fail. But in failing, poets breathe easier, hedging their bets against doubt, if only for the minutes & hours of invention, savoring a little death, in the hope of stealing a little extra time.

for it is not so much to know the self   

as to know it as it is known

   by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:

A. R. Ammons, “Gravelly Run”

Hope & doubt settle near one another; happiness was not the only quality born a twin. One holds on as faithfully as it can, and the other does its best to settle for resignation. The product of this labor is art; the more faithful the more absurd, or so the Dane would have us believe.

What I’m wrestling with in writing this is what I already know before I finish the poem: it will never become what it was when it arrived as idea. The prayer will not find its answer. The voice will never match the hopefulness. Resignation is not faith, and doubt is not bread.

But we will not resign ourselves to anything but continuing to pray out lines, one failure at a time.

Re-Public

[This is against my better judgement!]


Here's a couple of sad poems this guy (see picture from ~13, 14, 15 years ago) wrote:

Autumn

"I will make a poem of true riches" -W.W.

True riches only found in eyes
And richer still in those that cry
for longing of a dear, true friend
Who, gone too long, will come again
When softer shadows paint this hall--
And new-born leaves find hue and fall.

[23 September 1996]

The above poem was written in response to several things:


1) The Whitman line is from part 12 of "Starting from Paumanok" the poem continues:

I will make the true poem of riches,
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death;
I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other  [...]

and earlier in that poem (part 9) (and this is the stanza from Whitman that as a high school boy first hooked me) he preaches:

What do you seek so pensive and silent?
What do you need camerado?
Dear son do you think it is love?

Listen dear son--listen America, daughter or son,
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great,
But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all.

2) A newly dead dad (17 September 1995)


3) The love of a girl that was "just a friend."
______________________________________

I grew up in one house; in fact, I only ever had one bedroom that I shared with two brothers, then one brother, then none. That house was on Adams Street, 407. In college, I lived with some friends for 1 3/4 years, first on a couch (unofficailly) and then officially in an upstairs bedroom, at 407 Laramie Street.

407's
Twenty-two years old, upstairs bedroom
Of a college house, sounds like bridge night.
Suddenly, ten again, my brothers are out--my
sisters are gone-- I sit, by myself, in a shared room,
listening to women laugh and men move ice-
cubes in small glass tumblers. Now, mason jars
and Jim Beam and the women are still laughing--
and I am still listening, by myself, in a shared room.

Oak & Ivy

"Parasitical"-the word is an interesting one. It suggests the image of "the obvious or univocal reading" as the mighty, masculine oak or ash, rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious twining around it of ivy, English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap of its host, cutting off its light and air.

(J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host” 1977)

“Wyatt, you are an oak.” (Doc Holliday to Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, 1993)

I.

My friend, the oak, is not about to fall. In winter, not exactly skeletal, but showing strength and weakness at once.  A confidence that knows that soon birdsong, leaf, & bloom will return: the coming alive, again. And then, again, go. Meanwhile, he is content to stand alone. To let wind mock before it sings the branches that will not break. Then there is the temptation to give in to winter dreams. Does the oak dream? Does he consider the lady cardinal, hiding red with brown, as she flirts, with fickle foot & sleek song, all the while knowing he cannot compete with the red of early bloom and the ashy snow? Not to mention the blue flashes of spring, the guest beside the grain, the ivy in the hedgerow.

II.

In Old French:

          As in Camus:

“L'Hôte” implies

          A doubling;

Host is Guest;

Guest is Host.

The double bonds of hospitality:

                       Greet, eat, ask, answer, switch.

Story for story; performance per performance.

Tell you mine: show me yours.


              Remember: welcome the stranger; 
                                 speed the parting guest.


              Beware: some guests don't know how to go.

III.

In these numbered hostels that we borrow, guesting, we host them daily, performing the stories, the truth & the fictions. We remain open (before, during, after) to their apathy as well as their neediness. A place of lodging, even slumber, though the sitting uncomfortable, and the stories compelling—these travelers don’t always accept our strange currency, the best guest/host gift we have to give.

But they are the secrets that we keep that ghost these halls, these rooms, comme des hôtes des bois.

IV.

Respectability. That's what did it. I found out some time ago that it's idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities--contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures--eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun--than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it--oh, yes, she taught me that; she has marked me too forever--nothing, nothing.
[The Wild Palms, William Faulkner, 1939]

V.

What host of virtue, spent

nights without sleep, wondering which branch

might be the one to send the whole house finally crashing?

What truthful prayer: < nada y pues nada>>

might make it all clear once and for all:

I’ve staked nothing upon nothing and have nothing to show?

What guest of pleasure, tempting,

might arrive singing: <<There is a Balm…>>

suggesting that giving in is not giving up?

The difference between health & sickness,

fidelity & infidelity, enemy & friend, lost & found,

is felt by walking that thin line of a fragile faithfulness.

VI.

As a reminder of friendship Whitman twined a switch of live-oak with New Orleans’ moss, sitting it on a bookcase, in memory of the loved ones miles away. How much like ivy our attachments keep a hold on us. How much like ghosts, our smallest unrealized desires hang around our old haunts.

My friend, who fears God and seeks Glory, rises as an oak among us—a new string of ivy climbing slowly but steadily to some inevitable end.