Showing posts with label Auden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Auden. Show all posts

2014/02/21

Conflagrations Leap Out of Every Poor Furnace

Wasn't going to post links today but discovered this morning that blogfriends have new content and I want to bump them while the links are fresh (and before the weekend Blegsylvanian deadness):



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Born One-Hundred Seven Years Ago Today




MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.







On Auden's birthday I always post that photo, then Musee Des Beaux Arts, it still gets better with each rereading, and then some version of this paragraph:

Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him on his final two books of criticism in exchange for his company, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.

I've told some version of this story countless times: I was hired by Georgetown University mid-August, I sought Hecht out immediately and asked to audit his Fall semester grad poetry class, telling him not only was I only a Georgetown staffer but I hadn't an undergraduate degree and asking please let me audit the class. It focused on five main poets - Frost, Eliot, Auden, Bishop, and Wilbur - but we spent more than half the semester on Auden alone. I've probably spent more time with Auden than with any other poet, and if I only read him now on his birthday, I can pull up countless poems in my head whenever I want.







EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.







THE FALL OF ROME

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.







THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.



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2013/11/01

("Mere Protocol"? - More Like a Second Backbone!)




  • Holyfuck, listen to my new obsession. 
  • Aesthetics, morality, politics, and disaster.
  • The Kafkaesque world of data mining.
  • Auto-pilot! 
  • Sirota brings the duh.
  • Hillarian inevitability: campaign against Obama's legacy from the right. Of course. And with that I hearby proclaim I suspend the use of the terms Hillarian inevitably, motherfucking Clinton, and motherfucking Clintons (which means they won't be mentioned at all) from this blog NOT because those terms aren't completely valid but because they are (though I allow myself this one last Fuck the Clintons, the two of them the perfect symbol for all that's fucked in American politics).
  • Should be easy until 2016, then, probably not so much, though there's an obvious way to guarantee there's not talk of them in 2016 on this blog, executed on my end.




  • Reminder (to me): field-recordings, music, poems, aargh-free links if links at all, one weekend post, tomorrow.
  • BRT!
  • CCT!
  • Did you know new water-heaters cost $2600? It's true!
  • Wolfson's has closed! (h/t SeatSix). I mean, it's been years since I was inside, but there's always been a Wolfson's on Diamond Avenue.
  • Scharpling's show on Tuesday night's on WFMU never worked for me - I don't want to hear talk on the radio - but news of his retiring Best Show is noteworthy if for no other reason that it, by far, raised the most money during marathons.
  • Fabio played an hour-and-a-half tribute to Lou Reed yesterday, but listen to the show for the two Meredith Monk pieces.
  • Fifteen problems.
  • Sebald, for those of you who do. I confess I have not felt compelled to pick up another since finishing Austerlitz, though that's more a matter of enthusiasm for other stuff than never-minding Sebald.
  • Joyce Carol Oates v Robert Frost.
  • Auden and ecopoetry.
  • In Evidence: 3.
  • New Eno interview.






INTELLIGENCE

Tom Sleigh

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed
bugs and mikes,
                           intercepted letters
full of passionate declarations, contradictory
intelligence—
                           how attached he’d grown
to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging
the influx of intelligence
with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost
                           like love: he felt
the cool gray eyes of his superiors
trained on him, rebuking him
                           for swerving, for letting
himself go—such tender obsession
occasioned by the file!
                           Not quite the professional style
he or the Agency expected…
But such official loyalties
                           seemed mere protocol to this!—
what was wrong with him,
                           he wondered, that he construed
the documents to make the subject
seem a hero,
                           a bastard whose sole patrimony
was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword
left by an unknown father beneath a stone?
And yet his exploits in the tabloids,
the headlines screaming,
SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!
HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC
                           were these heroic
different in kind from the rumors,
unverified,
                           of a rape, a murder?
—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!
To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…
On balance, for such a life,
                           the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:
think of the opportunities for evil
                           a man of such qualities must have had!
How well he knew him—an essential innocence
that followed impulse, blind
to protocol, not noticeably more kind
                           than he was cruel.
But to stamp Case Closed and cease
                           gathering intelligence,
to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,
like a lover…:
                           such limits the hero
unknowingly transgressed!
And the Agency, cold-blooded where
                           limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—
more like a second backbone!), committed
                           to keeping order, could not afford
such sentiments—the Chief of Security
felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence
                           should lead to this…
He leaned back in his chair and sighed:
                           a forged genealogy certifying
that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual
assistance pact
                           to aid in taking back the usurped crown:
he could see them now, the wind
blowing lightly, the two of them sweating
as they climbed the cliff, discussing
                           the terms, exchanging information,
intelligence—
                           how would his own face look
staring down across the sea
                           as he gestured earnestly toward
some island, saying,
                           “According to our sources,
the tax revenues…”
                           And then, edging
the hero closer to the cliff, pointing
                           out the harbor, he’d push.



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2013/09/02

The Carrion-Stinking Dog, Who Is Calf and Human and Wolf, Is Chasing and Eating Little Blood Things the Humans Scatter, and All Me Run Away, Over Smells, Toward the Sky















THE COWS ON KILLING DAY

Les Murray

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still   
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths   
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.
One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,   
the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light   
and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.
Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human   
bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,   
big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,   
that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.
She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll   
and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human   
and is angry. All me look nervously at her
as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy   
of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.   
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,   
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human   
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.   
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky   
that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood   
in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree   
is with the human. It works in the neck of me
and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,
some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.
The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.
All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,   
and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,   
is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,   

and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky. 



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2013/07/12

There's a Jolt, Quasi-Electric, When One of Our Myths Reverts to Abstraction



 
  • Went to sleep with that Sonic Youth song in my head.
  • That novel I posted a photo of yesterday? It failed me, I didn't fail it, I gave a hundred pages, fifty more than I should have because I thought it was my fault the novel sucked, it wasn't, the novel sucked. Baal save me from first novels written in the first person in which every character in every dialogue competes to be the smartest and most cuttingly ironically detached social observer. Sure, it's like twitter, or Stringtown, or your staff lounge, it's me, doesn't mean I want to read it. I can't tell you how liberating it is to know in this one case with this one novel it wasn't me at fault. Best SHAZAM! that's happened to me since the last until the next. An unshackling.
  • We talked about trolls last night at Thursday Night Pints. Analog trolls, digital trolls, trolls at work, trolls in real life, trolls in Stringtown. The trolls we are, to others, to ourselves. There were details in the stories I can't talk about (analog trolls) and details in the stories I could talk about (digital trolls) but only the first is interesting, the second, fuck that. The history of trolling - there's always been trolling - and technological innovations in trolling. Fuckwads in our lives, how we can avoid being fuckwads in return. And fail.
  • Contained selves: In the machinery of social media, none of this experience need be particularly transgressive to be felt as transformative. Posting videos of one’s cat is sufficient to tremble the network. The contradictions and intensities and dangers of attempting to write the truth about oneself are made accessible to anyone with a Tumblr, and at the same time, new resources other than opaque language are readily available to convey affect on social-media sites. These resources (gifs, links, images, likes, screen grabs, serial selfies, cut-and-paste collages, etc.) can seem to express the self without the same limits brought about by the imprecision or, maybe more often, the overprecision of one’s own words, which come from some posited central location of the “I.” That “I” is a transcendental trap, binding one to the posited position of the speaking subject.











UPPER WORLD

Rae Armantrout

If sadness
is akin to patience

                            we're back!


Pattern recognition
was our first response

to loneliness.

Here and there were like
one place.

But we need to triangulate
for someone to show.


*

There's a jolt, quasi-electric,
when one of our myths
reverts to abstraction.

Now we all know
every name's Eurydice,
briefly returned
from blankness

and the way back
won't bear scrutiny.

High voices
over rapid-pulsing synthesizers
inton, "without you"---

which is soothing.

We prefer meta-significance:

the way the clouds exchange
white scraps
in glory.

No more wishes.

No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools.



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2013/02/21

Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely from the Disater

W.H. Auden was born 106 years ago today.


 



MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS


About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.





Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him on his final two books of criticism in exchange for his company, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.

Until two years ago or so I hadn't read Auden since Hecht's book went to the publisher in 1992, not because I'd lost my love for Auden but because I was tired of my love for Auden. Serendipity always charms but is double-edged: I rediscovered Auden just when his poetry became fresh and relevant and urgent (to me) again.

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.







STOP ALL THE CLOCKS 
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


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