Sylvia Plath: "New Year on Dartmoor"

Since I chose to feature a Christmas poem by Vachel Lindsay last week, I am keeping with a similar theme by presenting today another tragic poet’s work concerning a normally celebratory occasion: Sylvia Plath’s “New Year on Dartmoor.” This piece details a mother’s introduction of the new year’s onset to her child. The poem clearly discloses a contrast between the innocence of the young one and a woman’s growing weariness with the world, as exhibited by specifics of the word choice in the mother’s descriptive language picturing danger in the landscape around her: “tawdry obstacle,” “sudden slippiness,” “the blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant,” etc.

Apparently, the working draft title under which the poem originally was composed read “The Bald Truth about: Frost on Dartmoor in the New Year.” Plath penned this brief, most likely unfinished, piece in December of 1961 and the beginning of 1962 at the time of her son Nicholas’s birth, merely a year or so before her suicide. Plath’s daughter, Frieda, had been born less than two years earlier in 1960.

In the work, readers see the speaker reflecting upon an outing when she walked with her child on Dartmoor, which was near the country village of Devon. Plath and husband Ted Hughes were living there in a charming old manor house at the time, just before the storminess of their marital troubles and turbulent separation in the summer of 1962.

Despite the stereotypical attitude toward a fresh beginning many may associate with the start of a new year, experience has taught the speaker in this poem differently. She seems to believe opening the pages of another calendar may only lead to more days of disappointment and seasons of heartbreak. She seems to detect darker moments lie beneath the bright surfaces of the scenery before her and her baby. Perhaps she even envies the child’s inability to understand the difficulties that lie ahead in the life to be led.

In an interview given about the time this poem was written, Plath spoke of the way she hoped to blend personal experience with a keen intellect and a developed sense of craft in her poetry: “I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences—even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience—and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience.”

Perhaps Plath viewed her poetry in a manner approximating her approach to painting a self-portrait, as in the above pastel accompanying this post that she completed during her student years at Smith College in the early 1950s, a time during which she had already suffered an emotional breakdown. In both the painting and her poetry Plath appears to be presenting an accurate picture of herself, yet one that subtly and compellingly evokes great unease or suggests lurking melancholy.

I trust everyone looks forward to 2008 with hope for a better future. However, as the start of this new year approaches and many people eagerly anticipate with excitement the days ahead or once again propose resolutions that will not be kept, this poem provides a note of caution when considering what lies before us. It might even suggest that experience and language supply knowledge of the world that will not allow one to be overcome with unrealistic optimism, especially the naïve kind that we often find expressed carelessly each New Year’s Eve before the festive balloons are popped or they slowly deflate during the following day.

NEW YEAR ON DARTMOOR

This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you
Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There's no getting up it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat.


—Sylvia Plath

Poet of the Year: John Ashbery

With December coming to a close, in the spirit of year-end reviews popping up all across the media that name a prominent figure for recognition, I have decided to join the fun, and I have picked the “Poet of the Year” for 2007. As with Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” or other publications’ selections of individuals for such labels as “Athlete of the Year” or “Entertainer of the Year,” the poet chosen has demonstrated achievement and influence during the last twelve months in a way that has set him apart from a number of worthy candidates who also were considered for this distinction.

In the past year John Ashbery, after more than a half century of publishing poetry—and more than thirty years since he won the triple crown of publishing awards with the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror—continued to produce new poetry that both delights and disorients its readers. In addition, his influence was chronicled in numerous reviews appearing upon publication of a collection of selected later works. Moreover, many in the literary world took time to look back at his long and distinguished career through retrospective essays and profiles accompanying celebrations of the poet’s 80th birthday in July.

Early in the year, John Ashbery’s 26th book of poems, A Worldly Country, appeared and assured readers of his ongoing ability to simply amaze, or possibly to antagonize, with singular lyrics that are daring even as they frequently defy definition. Before the end of the year, Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems—including works from his ten previous collections and spanning nearly two decades—once again proved the impact Ashbery steadily has had on contemporary poetry. Responses to this book also have indicated how much sway his poetry has had over a couple of generations of poets who have paid homage to him and who have exhibited evidence of his influence in their own works through the last few decades.

During the summer, as articles noted John Ashbery’s 80th birthday, and poets across the country gave tribute in readings or on blogs, some made the most of the opportunity by reexamining his body of work. The Poetry Foundation marked the occasion by making available the original 1974 publication in Poetry of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

Recently, Angie Mlinko lamented in the Nation that John Ashbery has not received even greater recognition for the cumulative collection of innovative and inventive poetry he has delivered in the past five decades: “Every year that the Nobel committee passes over poet John Ashbery for a socially responsible novelist, it proves that the prize for literature is just an arm of the Peace Prize, rather than—like the Nobels for physics or chemistry—a prize for radical discovery in the field.” An article appearing in The Economist considered Ashbery alongside Robert Lowell as the two great American poets since World War II: “Just as Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth were at various times regarded as the greatest American novelist since the second world war, John Ashbery and Robert Lowell vied for the title of greatest American poet.”

Harold Bloom repeatedly has championed John Ashbery as the contemporary poet perhaps most worthy of inclusion with other great Romantic American writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens. Indeed, in Marjorie Perloff’s current Bookforum essay on Ashbery, “Necessary Deranger,” she furthers Bloom’s comparison between Stevens and Ashbery:

The first thing worth observing, perhaps, is that the evolution of Ashbery’s lyric mode is startlingly similar to that of Wallace Stevens. Both poets gained recognition relatively late (Stevens was forty-four when Harmonium was published in 1923, Ashbery forty-nine when Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror appeared in 1975); in both cases, the themes and stylistic habits of the verse (even when, in Ashbery’s case, it is prose) remain the same, but in the late work, the rhythms become more relaxed, the vocabulary and syntax more informal and inconsequential, and there is a new willingness to take risks, even if that means striking out now and again. In late Ashbery, as in late Stevens, “the edges and inchings of final form” (“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”) are never far away, but Ashbery (unlike Stevens) assumes a playful stance to what one of his titles calls “Autumn on the Thruway.” Laughter, laced though it is with anxiety, echoes through these pages. Given the times we live in, these poems suggest, the comic modality—burlesque, parody, satire, and always a measure of irony—is surely our Necessary Angel. If Ashbery is, in Harold Bloom’s lexicon, the ephebe of Stevens, he is an ephebe for the information age, our blog- and cell-phone-crazed universe in which, to cite the first poem in Some Trees, “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.”

In a New York Times interview that appeared at the beginning of the year, when asked about having never been appointed as the U.S. Poet Laureate, Ashbery replied that he didn’t think he was “poet laureate material.” However, perhaps as support for Perloff’s observation that Ashbery remains a poet of “the information age, our blog- and cell-phone-crazed universe,” his postmodern poetry also now appears to be accepted by the iPod and MTV generation. In August, MTV selected the 80-year-old Ashbery as its first “poet laureate” and featured 18 of his poems on their website, each accompanied by a brief visual spot promoting the poetry.

Ashbery once began his poem, “My Philosophy of Life,” with the following two lines: “Just when I thought there wasn't room enough / for another thought in my head, I had this great idea . . ..” Readers certainly hope there will be more great ideas and more provocative poetry from John Ashbery in the upcoming year and many others to come.

[Previous entries this year on “One Poet’s Notes” concerning John Ashbery: “John Ashbery: ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’”; “John Ashbery: ‘My Philosophy of Life’”; “Painting, Poetry, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery.”]

William Carlos Williams: "Burning the Christmas Greens"

As these December days dwindle toward year’s end, I’m reminded again of a regular ritual in which I participated as a boy each winter during the week before New Year’s Day. In those days most people decorated real trees under which they could place their gifts on Christmas morning. Few homes had artificial trees, and pine needles would be scattered among the presents or on the silver tracks of the Lionel train set still circling drooping limbs that had dried out rapidly the past couple of weeks. Therefore, in the days after Christmas, families throughout my Brooklyn neighborhood would quickly discard their thinning Christmas trees, placing them beside the street curb for disposal.

My friends and I would drag away the trees before the neighborhood’s weekly trash collection, and we would stack a few dozen of them in an open lot to be lit just after darkness fell. The flames of the bonfire would flare, feather overhead, rising thirty feet or higher above us and brightening the night sky. At the time, my friends and I didn’t consider the scene symbolic in its seasonal colors, the green trees consumed by red flares lifting and twisting above them. Nor did I consider the incident a final salute to the departing year, even as a fresh calendar, ready for markings signaling birthdays or anniversaries, already hung on the kitchen wall.

Along with many from the neighborhood who stood on their stoops or watched from their apartment windows, my friends and I only enjoyed the spectacle of the burning bark, popping branches, and sizzling needles. However, looking back, I now view that annual event as a way for those on my street to eke out one more celebratory moment before providing a sense of closure to the Christmas season, everyone circling the trees and staring in wonder one last time. All shouting with amazement and approval as the darkness gave way to an array of colorful plumes looming over us.

In later years as my interest in poetry developed and I discovered the poems of William Carlos Williams, one work he’d written in 1944 always brought back those wintry days in Brooklyn just before the beginning of the new year when my friends and I would briefly warm ourselves beside a fiery mound of Christmas trees:

BURNING THE CHRISTMAS GREENS


Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
—go up in a roar

All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash—

and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame

At the winter’s midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green

At the thick of the dark
the moment of the cold’s
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees

to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons

we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the

mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they

were walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We

stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log's smouldering eye, opening
red and closing under them

and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we

did not say so) a challenge
above the snow's
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where

small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down

the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow—Transformed!

Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.

In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind

and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red—as

yet uncolored—and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,

breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.


—William Carlos Williams

[To hear a 1945 audio recording of William Carlos Williams reciting “Burning the Christmas Greens,” readers should visit the mp3 page at the University of Pennsylavania’s PennSound website.]

Vachel Lindsay: "This Section Is a Christmas Tree"

Vachel Lindsay—a Midwesterner from Springfield, Illinois, who was born in a home once belonging to an in-law of Abraham Lincoln and where the just elected president received his farewell party before departing for Washington—lived a life that could provide Hollywood with an interesting script chronicling an engaging character. Throughout most of his adult years, Lindsay sought to present poetry in an entertaining fashion. Perhaps a predecessor to today’s performance poets, Lindsay traveled all across the country for long stretches of time, journeying mostly on foot in stints throughout the Midwest and along the West Coast, as well as hiking through Glacier National Park—an experience that resulted in a thematic book of nature poetry (Going-to-the-Sun, 1923).

He usually survived by singing or chanting his poems, written with characteristically strong rhythms, sonorous sounds, and distinctly incantatory language. As he traveled from town to town, he also traded printed copies of his pieces for food or a place to sleep. Indeed, he has been linked to Langston Hughes in their popularizing of musical lyricism based upon the rhythms of blues or riffs of jazz, and readers will find on the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound site (located at the Center for Programs in Creative Writing) a treasure of audio recordings in which Lindsay can be heard performing his poetry.

This populist poet, often compared with fellow Midwesterner Carl Sandburg, viewed himself as a critic of contemporary society. In fact, Vachel Lindsay’s most famous and most infamous poem, “The Congo” (1914), represented his attempt to promote awareness of African Americans. In other poems he exposed the poverty and the plight African Americans faced under the social conditions they endured in the early twentieth century throughout the United States. Unfortunately, stereotypical depictions and racially offensive language (especially by today’s standards) included in the poem caused Lindsay to receive much harsh criticism, particularly from some in the black community.

However, Lindsay saw himself as an advocate for civil rights and would champion African Americans in other poems as well. He sent a letter to the chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP defending his poetry: “The third section of ‘The Congo’ is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race.” In fact, considering the work and the author’s intentions more favorably, Langston Hughes (whom it is said may have been discovered and promoted by Vachel Lindsay) later chose to anthologize the controversial piece. (Lindsay’s rendering of “The Congo” is one of those preserved among the samples at the PennSound website.)

After beginning college with a desire to follow his father’s footsteps as a doctor, Lindsay found more pleasure and personal satisfaction in painting. Therefore, like William Blake, he then turned to a career as an artist, studying at the Chicago Institute of Art and the New York School of Art, and as Blake had done, Lindsay sometimes claimed to have mystical visions he attempted to transform to images in his drawings.

Throughout his life, Vachel Lindsay exhibited eccentric behavior and held to idealistic thinking, hoping his work would eventually be well received and exert a powerful influence over many, leading toward social and cultural changes benefiting the weak and the forgotten. In 1913, Harriet Monroe published in Poetry magazine perhaps his most successful poem, “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” in which he elegizes the founder of the Salvation Army who had died in 1912. Composer Charles Ives made the poem even more famous when he set the it to music in 1914. (This poem also can be heard at the PennSound website.)

However, later in life when finally faced with intense pain of personal adversity and the prospect of professional failure because of an inability to attract great popular or critical attention for his newer poetry, Lindsay’s story came to a tragic end. In December of 1931, at the age of 52 and having returned to live in the same Springfield home where he had been born, suffering poor health and depression, he committed suicide by drinking a bottle of poison. Lindsay’s stature at the time was such that Edgar Lee Masters wrote a biography of him in 1935, but Lindsay’s importance as a poet has declined over the decades since then.

Nevertheless, in this December 76 years after his death, I invite readers to take the opportunity to recall Vachel Lindsay’s life with one of his works offering a more cheerful and festive spirit:

THIS SECTION IS A CHRISTMAS TREE

This section is a Christmas tree:
Loaded with pretty toys for you.
Behold the blocks, the Noah's arks,
The popguns painted red and blue.
No solemn pine-cone forest-fruit,
But silver horns and candy sacks
And many little tinsel hearts
And cherubs pink, and jumping-jacks.
For every child a gift, I hope.
The doll upon the topmost bough
Is mine. But all the rest are yours.
And I will light the candles now.

—Vachel Lindsay

Best of the Web Selections!

On this weekend before Christmas, I am pleased to see a few gifts have arrived early, as I have been notified by Nathan Leslie, the editor of Dzanc Books’ upcoming Best of the Web anthology, that two nominations from Valparaiso Poetry Review have been chosen to be included in the publication. Jared Carter’s “Prophet Township” and Frannie Lindsay’s “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea” were selected from “many hundreds of nominations from the entire spectrum of online magazines.”

As I mentioned in September when nominating poems from VPR for the anthology, I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in Valparaiso Poetry Review. Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the anthology’s editor to bring attention to the growing number of fine works being published in online journals. Also, I am pleased when an opportunity arises for a couple of VPR’s splendid poets to reach a larger audience and find the greater recognition they deserve through inclusion in the anthology. I congratulate Jared Carter and Frannie Lindsay on the selection of their poems for this honor.

In a related note, I am delighted to report that I have been informed my poem, “Island Fever,” which appeared earlier this year in Apple Valley Review, also has been selected to be included in the Best of the Web 2008 anthology published by Dzanc Books. News of this came as a pleasant surprise this morning since I wasn’t even aware my poem had been nominated. I thank Leah Browning, editor at Apple Valley Review, for honoring me with the nomination of my poem, and I thank Dzanc Books for recognizing my poem alongside those of Jared Carter, Frannie Lindsay, and all the other distinguished poets published online during the past year whose works they have decided to celebrate in the forthcoming Best of the Web anthology.

Library of Congress Poetry Room

On December 20, 1985, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill fulfilling an act passed by Congress that created the position of Poet Laureate of the United States and formally elevated the stature of the genre. Robert Penn Warren, who was appointed by the Librarian of Congress, was the first to assume the official role of Poet Laureate in 1986.

From 1937 to 1986, a prominent poet had been recognized each year as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Indeed, Warren had been the Consultant in Poetry more than forty years earlier (1944-1945). Included among others who had held that title were Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, Robert Frost, Robert Hayden, Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, Maxin Kumin, Robert Lowell, Karl Shapiro, William Stafford, Allen Tate, and William Carlos Williams.

After Warren completed the initial one-year appointment as Poet Laureate, various well-known poets followed, some serving more than one term: Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Mona Van Duyn, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins, Louise Glück, Ted Kooser, Donald Hall, and now Charles Simic. Readers may examine the complete list of those who have served during the last seventy years at the Library of Congress’s web page chronicling the history of chosen poets. The quality of poetry produced by the figures in this distinguished roster provides evidence the title of Poet Laureate continues to represent a high standard set by the original selection of Robert Penn Warren as Poet Laureate and by the many predecessors who served as the Consultants in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Additionally, with the existence of the Internet, one now no longer needs to travel to the Library of Congress main reading room (pictured above) to find materials by these poets and others. One may visit the virtual poetry room at the Library of Congress’s “Poet Vision” site, where readers will find a page devoted to video webcasts of interviews and conversations about poetry (each around an hour long) with well-known poets, including Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Sam Hamill, Michael Harper, Etheridge Knight, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, and Robert Penn Warren. An accompanying page, “Poet and the Poem,” also contains dozens of audiocasts of poetry readings.

During the upcoming holiday weeks when many devotees of poetry are seeking leisure activities, perhaps this time of year provides everyone a perfect opportunity for browsing these pages to rediscover some of the important poets whose videos and audio presentations are available at the Library of Congress’s “Poet Vision” or “Poet and the Poem” locations.

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner: "Uprooted"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s “Uprooted,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is the author of Finding Cuba (Chimney Hill Press, 2001), a collection of poems that explored her Cuban ancestry, and three poetry chapbooks: Leaving Eden (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 1995), Namings (Franciscan University Press, 1999), and My Father’s Bones (Finishing Line Press, 2006). She also has edited a textbook, Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1990), and has written a book of criticism, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring (Cornerstone Press, 1998).

She has been a winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press’s poetry chapbook contest, the Goodman Award, an Illinois Arts Council Award, the Illinois Prize of the Rock River Poetry Contest, and the CCL Midwest Poetry Contest. Additionally, she was a Fulbright fellow to Spain. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner serves as poetry editor of The Christian Century and is a past president of the Conference on Christianity and Literature. She is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Wheaton College.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

The World of Words

When my university library arranged online access to the complete Oxford English Dictionary recently, I found another convenient outlet for my almost lifelong fascination with the world of words—their definitions, connotations, pronunciations, and origins. From my first words learned as a child to the most recent examples of technological jargon created to characterize aspects of the evolving environment in which we live, I always have been intrigued by these signifiers made up merely of markings on a page or pixel dots on a digital screen.

Even for entertainment, I have enjoyed word games. When I was a graduate college student and worked at the New York Public Library’s research center on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, on fair afternoons I’d spend every lunch hour on the front steps between the famous library lions, and I’d challenge myself to finish the daily crossword in the New York Times while I ate a hero sandwich or a couple of knishes, testing myself by trying to finish the puzzle before consuming my final bite.

Repeatedly, during lunch breaks while working on the computer, I now find entertainment for myself by dipping into the online dictionary just to discover additional etymological tidbits about words or terms with which I thought I had a fair degree of familiarity. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives I have appreciated and thought I had known so well—through everyday use in prose composition, during crossword play, or within lines of poetry—suddenly seem even richer upon my opening of their page in the online OED. I relish each detail of a word’s historical development (as well as the multiple quotes gathered over time, chronicling gradations in their meanings and minute alterations in the shadings of their connotations or tone) due to a series of successive changes throughout the chronological stages in the English language.

Like many other writers and editors, I often have considered the various elements of vocabulary as the rudimentary tools with which interesting literature can be constructed. Each semester I try to emphasize to my creative writing students the way words seem to be nearly tangible to many authors. Words sometimes invoke supplementary sensory responses among writers. In addition to images, certain traces of sound, scent, texture, or taste arise with every complex combination of vowels and consonants that distinguishes one word from another.

When advising my writing students, I encourage an intimate knowledge of language that allows them to draw their readers fully and persuasively into the atmosphere of any scene they imagine in their works. Additionally, I urge an exploration of the unique layers of language associated with specific words, knowledge of the exact definitions and multiple secondary meanings each word carries with it when entering one’s written work.

Indeed, even words that at first appear to be synonyms frequently feel different to individual writers, particularly when placed side by side with other words. Though I hesitate to present a baseball analogy on this day when the investigative report on steroid use in the major leagues has been released, I must say that when I consider use of a certain word choice, I am sometimes reminded of my days playing baseball so long ago, and I recall how I’d lift each bat strewn around the on-deck circle as I awaited my turn at the plate. Even those bats labeled with the same length or weight felt different when held in one’s hands. Nearly negligible degrees of variation could cause each one to appear to have a distinct balance. The slightest disparity in the width of the bat’s handle could create greater or lesser comfort for the hitter when he stepped into his stance at the batter’s box. Any one of the bats could propel a baseball upon contact; however, whether as the consequence of an objective decision based upon the bat’s length and weight or a subjective choice made upon a player’s simple instinctive feel, each hitter felt better with the bat he’d selected, convinced the results would be beneficial.

For writers, perhaps particularly for poets, unusual details hidden deep in dictionary entries often have supplied pleasant surprises that enhance a word’s attraction for inclusion in an imaginary work of literature. Therefore, I was delighted by the sample poem highlighted today at Poetry Daily, Barbara Hamby’s “Ode on Dictionaries,” which originally appeared in Subtropics. I recommend this poem to all who have written a poem, who value those basic components that constitute our vocabulary, or who have wondered about any writer’s fascination with dictionaries.

In the poem Hamby recalls “the dictionary I bought / in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought / I’d never plumb its depths.” Even now, so many years later, the poet discloses: “yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls, / Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash / I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish, / kleptomaniac in the five-and-dime of language, / slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge / lipstick that smears with the first kiss.” Reading these lines in Hamby’s wonderful poem, I thought once more of those days in my own history when I have spent time over lunch learning and loving words, being nourished by them.

William Matthews: "On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, N.H."

The VPR Poem of the Week is “On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, N.H.” by William Matthews, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

William Matthews taught and lectured all over the United States. He served as the president of the Poetry Society of America and of the Associated Writing Programs, as well as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1997, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize. His dozen collections of poetry include Ruining the New Road (1970), Sleek for the Long Flight: New Poems (1972), Rising and Falling (1979), Blues If You Want (1989), Selected Poems and Translations 1969-1991 (1992), and Time & Money (1996), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

After All: Last Poems (1998) and Search Party: Collected Poems (2004), a volume of his work edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly, were released posthumously. An extended review of William Matthews’s poetry appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. At the time of his death in 1997 Matthews was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the College of the City University of New York.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Emily Dickinson: "Because I Could Not Stop for Death"

On December 10th, 1830, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although she belonged to a family that listed well-known public figures among their members, including statesmen and community leaders (her father was a lawyer and Congressional representative, while her grandfather helped found Amherst College), Emily Dickinson apparently lived a very private—and eventually almost reclusive—life, perhaps partly a result of vision problems that plagued her and led to a series of eye treatments, possibly even operations.

Those details today’s readers have about Emily Dickinson indicate she may have been a modest woman, perhaps even a bit insecure, who did not seek public attention for herself or for her poetry, which she pursued for personal satisfaction or as an entertainment to be shared merely with family or a few friends, mostly in letters. Indeed, the small number of poems published during her lifetime only appeared as a consequence of an ongoing correspondence with Samuel Bowles, a friend who also edited the Springfield Republican newspaper, where the poems were printed anonymously and heavily edited.

Not until after Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886 did relatives discover more of her poems, and a thin volume of edited selections from Dickinson’s poetry was released in 1890 as a tribute to her. Unlike her contemporary, Walt Whitman, who often expressed confidence his poems would be read for generations after his death, Emily Dickinson would be most surprised to find her poetry continuing to be read and cherished more than a century after her passing. In fact, it took nearly a century for the full treasure of her work to be revealed and inform the world as to the magnitude of her poetic achievement, when a three-volume edition of her Complete Poems finally was published during the 1950s—totaling over 1700 poems, including the hundreds of hidden pieces uncovered in the time since that first slim volume had been released.

Throughout the decades since her death, but especially since the full extent of her production was revealed about fifty years ago, Emily Dickinson’s reputation and influence have grown so that few contemporary American poets could exclude her from the list of significant predecessors who have helped shape the current climate for poetry writing. Dickinson’s importance has been established in words of homage spoken both by prominent poets and perceptive critics. For instance, Charles Wright has recognized Emily Dickinson as a primary force behind his poetic approach: “I admire and revere and am awed by a good many writers; I have been in thrall to several. But Emily Dickinson is the only writer I’ve ever read who knows my name, whose work has influenced me at my heart’s core, whose music is the music of songs I’ve listened to and remembered in my very body.” Harold Bloom has expressed his high regard for her work, suggesting she is one of America’s four greatest literary figures, alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, and Walt Whitman.

Nevertheless, Emily Dickinson’s individual style and personal perspectives continue to exist as unique, sometimes even quirky, examples that cannot be readily imitated by many subsequent poets as the work of fellow poet Walt Whitman so frequently seems to serve as model for those who have followed in his literary footsteps. Poets influenced by Emily Dickinson, such as Elizabeth Bishop, wisely have avoided an appearance that mimics Dickinson’s singular style.

On this day of her birth, to choose one poem as truly representative of Emily Dickinson’s output would be a fruitless task. Despite her swiftly identifiable style, I find myself frustrated by an inability to display the subtly wide range of possible selections that might easily be seen as significant pieces. Still, today I offer the following poem that repeatedly has struck readers with its view of typical themes usually associated with Dickinson—nature, faith, mortality, death, God, and the possibility of an afterlife—as well as its demonstration of Dickinson’s careful crafting of elegantly rhythmical lines and even a little of her recurring dark humor. Allen Tate once declared that he regarded this Dickinson poem, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” as “one of the greatest in the English language.”

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity—

With the beginning lines the poet personifies Death, portraying the figure as a friendly and cordial suitor courting the speaker on a pleasant carriage ride. Describing Death with words that characterize him as being “kindly” and exhibiting “Civility,” Dickinson offers a more positive view of death than most people normally hold or that even she usually has presented in other poems. Although fully engaged with life, the speaker suddenly must face her own mortality. However, Death brings with him a present, “Immortality,” maybe the greatest gift one can receive and an offering that may assuage any fear by allaying concerns about an afterlife.

Indeed, as readers will see by the close of the poem, perhaps by delivering reassurance of an afterlife, Dickinson’s attempt to reinforce one’s faith in God becomes a priority in this piece. The verb tenses in the poem even switch from past to present in the last stanza with “feels,” signaling an ongoing spiritual presence after death. This conclusion proves even more promising and optimistic than some other Dickinson poems. For instance, although “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” also contains a persona speaking from the grave, suggesting an afterlife, that poem ends with the moment of death after a possible display of faltering faith and a brief bit of uncertainty.

The speaker here relinquishes all of her life, “labor and leisure,” similar to the manner the persona in “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” had “signed away” all her earthly belongings. Yet, Dickinson then cleverly depicts the couple’s journey “toward Eternity” with scenery symbolizing the various stages of life: the innocence and leisure of childhood, the productiveness and labor of adulthood, and an aged one’s awareness of mortality in the image of “the Setting Sun.” In doing so, Dickinson reviews life at the moment of death, as though in the cliché about life flashing before one’s eyes, but with an accompanying notion that death is also a natural stage in the cycle of life. Indeed, the children are described as they “strove” during their “Recess—in the Ring.” (In an earlier and less effective published version of this poem, titled by editors as “The Chariot,” the children simply play and the image of the ring is absent.) Like Death, nature is personified when “gazing” modifies “Grain,” and with the poem’s instances of personification, death and nature achieve an equal stature with human life.

In that previous version, the editors also had omitted stanza four. But the images in this stanza signify clearly that the journey represents a funeral procession, the carriage is a hearse, and perhaps the speaker is dressed in the flimsy materials of her burial gown, though impractical for the cold of this physical world and perhaps as elegant as a bridal gown, which some could believe would be appropriate for her fresh start with the new suitor.

Finally, Dickinson further comforts readers about the prospect of death by labeling the grave as “a House,” perhaps connoting a pleasant domestic dwelling where the spirit will live on forever. Indeed, the speaker reports the centuries since her death have passed so quickly that the time feels “shorter than the Day,” which the poet already has metaphorically presented as representing a mortal lifetime. For the speaker, eternal life with God is so joyful that time flies by, as another cliché now might state.

Consequently, the speaker encourages readers to have greater faith because one who has passed through life to death now has reassured them about what bliss they can expect afterwards. Thankfully, in her many poems that have been retrieved and preserved (like the lone existing daguerreotype photograph of her accompanying this post), though now more than a century has passed since her death, Emily Dickinson continues to speak so eloquently to us.

Walt McDonald: "The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor"

In early January 1942, as the American home front prepared for the difficulties and personal sacrifices involved with war, posters calling for all to unite with a common cause quickly began to be displayed across the United States. Most government sponsored posters urged acting upon a renewed patriotism, though some sought vengeance and at times even may have appeared to appeal to racist notions of the Japanese in purely blatant propaganda pieces. One of the earliest of the poster maker's art accompanies this post: “Remember Dec. 7th!”

The illustration pictured here—with its powerful words (“ . . . we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . .”) quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and positioned above a battle tattered flag at half mast as well as the billowing smoke associated with newsreel images of U.S. naval ships destroyed during the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor—was designed during the nation’s darkest days. In that period most citizens were still suffering through a state of shock in the immediate aftermath of the horrors read in local newspaper articles or heard from accounts on radio. Perhaps the country’s collective mood and the intensity of individuals’ emotional reactions at that time have not quite been felt in the same way since then except for the period following September 11, 2001.

In fact, one might find an interesting parallel could be drawn not only between various reactions to the two events, but also with the way the days of the attacks were at first labeled by most people and in the media. Initial illustrations, editorial cartoons, and posters rallying the nation in the wake of the news from Pearl Harbor simply spoke of the incident in terms of the date: “December 7th.” As soon as the war effort moved forward, however, the day popularly became known as “Pearl Harbor Day,” a term still normally employed today, while references to the 9/11 attacks continue to carry the date for identification.

On this December 7th in commemoration of Pearl Harbor Day, I am pleased to present Walt McDonald’s “The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor,” which also happened to be the first poem published in the initial issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Volume I, Number 1: Fall/Winter 1999-2000).

THE WINTER THEY BOMBED PEARL HARBOR

All winter peacocks screamed, strutting the same
slow pose. At dawn, we smashed the ice with hammers,
dumped pots of boiling water steaming into troughs
for beaks of preening peacocks. They shoved each other off
like cousins bunched at the only mirror at church.

My logger father whittled a forest with buzz saws,
the roar and buzz of steel and mosquitoes
more than my ears were tuned for.
My sister and I played keep-away with feathers,
dazzling the surly turkeys and peacocks with footwork,

lobbing frozen dirt clods like grenades,
until our father called us. When roads were frozen,
I jockeyed the throttle of a John Deere
rusted before the war, hauling logs and hay bales
to farmers miles away. The war was almost lost

when my father enlisted, Pearl Harbor bombed,
the fall of Bataan all we heard for hours
on every station at night, except for our parents
talking softly after bedtime
and peacocks screaming in the dark.

Walt McDonald has published twenty-two collections of poems and a book of fiction, including Faith Is a Radical Master (Abilene Christian University Press, 2005), Climbing the Divide (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), Blessings the Body Gave (Ohio State University Press, 1998), Counting Survivors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), and Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989). His poetry also has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, First Things, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review.

McDonald was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy, and served as Texas Poet Laureate in 2001. In May 2002, he retired from Texas Tech University as Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English and Poet in Residence. When Walt McDonald appeared as the featured poet in Valparaiso Poetry Review’s debut issue, he also contributed an essay of practical advice for beginning poets, “Advice I Wish I’d Been Told.”

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick

With news this week of Elizabeth Hardwick’s death at the age of 91, readers certainly might be quickly reminded of her dramatic marriage to Robert Lowell and the controversy concerning his publication of a pair of books based upon their relationship. Although Hardwick established her own impressive reputation as a novelist, critic, and essayist, her connection to the turmoil surrounding Robert Lowell’s release of a trio of his loose sonnet collections nearly thirty-five years ago (History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, all released in 1973 and the latter two frequently chronicling the couple’s personal moments—as well as those of their daughter Harriet—or the painful process leading to their divorce) has been thoroughly reported over the decades since then.

At the time, Lowell had been immersed in a period during which he produced personal poetry that stretched the limits of his confessional style, sequences of open sonnets, unrhymed lines that often incorporated verbatim intimate snippets of dialogue or private passages of correspondence. Among the materials included were quoted sections drawn from letters sent by Hardwick after their separation and Lowell’s relationship with Lady Caroline Blackwood had begun. Indeed, Blackwood’s pregnancy and the birth of their son, Sheridan, are documented in The Dolphin.

Lowell’s use of such confidential details disturbed some of his closest friends and most trusted readers of his poetry, including Elizabeth Bishop. Despite her admiration for “honest poetry” and the quality evident in many of the poems, Bishop advised Lowell in 1972 he was betraying Hardwick a second time in his writing by setting down aspects about his infidelity during their marriage and particularly by violating the trust inherent in a private correspondence. Ironically, in a famous letter she wrote him, Bishop counseled Lowell that “art just isn’t worth that much.” Continuing the irony with references to lines in a letter once written by Hopkins about how to be a gentleman, she explained to Lowell: “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it’s cruel.”

Critical responses to Lowell’s three volumes varied greatly, especially those reviewing For Lizzie and Harriet, which narrated difficulties in marriage and his position as a father, and The Dolphin, which went further and employed segments of Hardwick’s letters in a sequence that reported his romance with Blackwood, who would become his third wife. Some reviews remarked favorably upon the poetic experimentation and bare emotions revealed in the collection; in fact, The Dolphin eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Lowell’s first since Lord Weary’s Castle, published three decades earlier. However, others expressed dismay at the impropriety of Lowell’s tactics, as well as a sense of laxness they perceived in the act of composition: in Sewanee Review, Paul Ramsey wrote that the poems were “unimportant, incomprehensible, and boring.”

Perhaps the most vicious attack came from poet and feminist Adrienne Rich, who characterized The Dolphin as “a cruel and shallow book” and wrote in her American Poetry Review commentary: “what does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife?”

Nevertheless, a number of the poems in these volumes seem to rise above the worst tendencies exhibited by Lowell in the personal sequences. Among those better poems would be the final piece in For Lizzie and Harriet, which captures some of the conflict and the continuing but conflicting emotions experienced during Robert Lowell’s marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick:

OBIT

Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel—

in the end it gets us, though a man know what he’d have:
old cars, old money, old undebased pre-Lyndon
silver, no copper rubbing through . . . old wives;
I could live such a too long time with mine.
In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.
Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest
of all transcendence in a mode of being, hushing
all becoming. I’m for and with myself in my otherness,
in the eternal return of earth’s fairer children,
the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at dusk,
the loved, the lover, and their fear of life,
their unconquered flux, insensate oneness, painful “It was. . . .”
After loving you so much, can I forget
you for eternity, and have no other choice?

On this occasion of Elizabeth Hardwick’s death, one also might be reminded of the well-known circumstances of Lowell’s death in 1977. After troubled times in his marriage to Caroline Blackwood and their estrangement, Lowell had returned to Hardwick. As Ian Hamilton describes Lowell’s last hours in his biography, the poet travels from England to be with Hardwick: “Lowell arrived in New York on the afternoon of September 12, and took a taxi from Kennedy Airport. When the driver reached West 67th Street, he saw that Lowell had slumped over in his seat, he was holding a large brown-paper parcel and he seemed to be asleep. Elizabeth Hardwick was called from the house and rode in the taxi to Roosevelt Hospital: ‘But I knew that he was dead.’ Hours afterwards Hardwick opened the parcel Lowell had been carrying—it was a portrait of Lady Caroline. He had brought it over to be ‘valued’ in New York.”

Ricardo Sternberg: "Paulito's Birds"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “Paulito’s Birds” by Ricardo Sternberg, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue (Volume V, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Ricardo Sternberg’s poetry has been published in various magazines, such as American Poetry Review, Descant, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Sternberg’s three books of poetry are The Invention of Honey (1990) and Map of Dreams (1996), both published by Vehicule Press, and Bamboo Church (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Cyclops Press released a CD of his readings, Blindsight, in 1998.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.