Elizabeth Alexander Comments on Her Inaugural Poem

Dave Rosenthal, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun book blog, “Read Street,” sent me an email yesterday afternoon informing that he had just interviewed Elizabeth Alexander about the experience of serving as Barack Obama’s inaugural poet. Rosenthal explained he was interested in the magnitude of the discussion and debate concerning Alexander’s poem, as well as her delivery of it, in the days following last week’s historic event. He had noticed an excitement and passion for poetry in the comments at his blog, here at “One Poet’s Notes,” and elsewhere around the nation that he had not observed previously.

Regardless of a reader’s judgment of the quality displayed in Alexander’s poem or a viewer’s evaluation of the effectiveness in her reading of the work, having contemporary poetry spotlighted in such a manner revealed deep beliefs or strong emotions held by many across the country about the various purposes and forms of poetry. As I commented about the numerous reactions to “Praise Song for the Day” on this blog: “the interest received by the poem has been remarkable to witness. No matter what one's opinion may be of this individual poem, we can all thank Alexander and Obama for reinvigorating discussion or debate about poetry and its place in public ceremony.”

In Rosenthal’s fine interview of Elizabeth Alexander, she details her preparation for the day, describes her participation on such a momentous occasion, and considers the substantial commentary—positive, negative, or mixed—that has resulted from her presentation. The original article at “One Poet’s Notes” about Alexander’s reading of the inaugural poem received the largest number of visitors for any posted in the past two years, and it led to the blog’s biggest reaction from readers in the comments section. As I suggested in that piece: “Elizabeth Alexander deserves commendation for her courage as she literally placed herself and her poetry in front of the nation for critical examination.” Now, she displays grace as she accepts the consequences of that focused examination—praise and disapproval, compliments and criticism, elation and disappointment—while encouraging the continuation of a vigorous discussion about poetry.

Elizabeth Alexander declares in her conversation with Dave Rosenthal that she intended to offer a poem with “clarity that didn’t sacrifice complexity.” In preparation, she “tried to preserve a writing process” similar to her customary procedure when composing poems. The poet confides she has been impressed by the response received from so many who are “not regular readers of poetry,” indicating poetry may be “meaningful to many more people” than usually thought. Indeed, Alexander also has received messages from other poets confirming her attitude that the whole exercise has been “good for poetry,” and she encourages the sustained “natural conversation about poetry” that this opportunity appears to have initiated for some or greatly influenced for others.

After reviewing so many comments by readers following the inaugural presentation, I urge visitors to listen to the audio of Dave Rosenthal’s interview with Elizabeth Alexander. Although the opposing opinions possessed by many about the inaugural poem may not be altered by Alexander’s contribution to this ongoing conversation about poetry, the presence of her voice certainly adds weight to the significance of the discussion and, fortunately, ensures the current robust dialogue about poetry has not yet ended.

John Ashbery, Pierre Martory, and Jackson Pollock

When the finalists for poetry in this year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award were announced the other day, The Landscapist, a volume of selected poems by Pierre Martory, seemed an especially curious and interesting choice. Published by Sheep Meadow Press, the dual-language collection includes translations and an introduction by John Ashbery. As the press information from the publisher explains, Martory—born in France in 1920—first met John Ashbery in Paris in 1956, where Ashbery had gone as part of his travels under a Fulbright fellowship, and the two lived together for most of the following ten years while Martory wrote for Le Monde and Ashbery, by his own admission, luckily found work as an overseas critic for Art News and European art editor for the New York Herald-Tribune.

Just before leaving for Europe, Ashbery’s first book of poems, Some Trees, had been selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award by W.H. Auden, who had influenced much of Ashbery’s early poems and about whom Ashbery had written his senior thesis at Harvard. Although that initial collection appeared fresh and even somewhat avant-garde to some, Ashbery adventured further into the territory of experimental poetry while in France, where he composed The Tennis Court Oath, a 1962 collection the poet dedicated to Pierre Martory. In an interview with Roseanne Wasserman that appeared in American Poetry Review in late 1993, Martory recalled the circumstances when he and Ashbery were together in Paris: “He was spending days and days writing, writing, writing. I heard him on the typewriter in the other room and I admired his determination to write and write and write.”

Martory already had published a novel and completed others, but apparently he also was turning toward creation of poetry more and more. In 1990, Ashbery first brought Pierre Martory’s poetry to the attention of many American readers through his translation of The Landscape Is Behind the Door, Martory’s premiere full-length volume of poems. Ashbery explains in his remarks about the poems of Pierre Martory, who died in 1998, he found a distinct affinity with Martory’s poetry and suspected a hint of mutual stylistic influence that may have existed between the two poets:

After I began translating Pierre Martory, that is, after I began to realize that his marvelous poetry would likely remain unknown unless I translated it and brought it to the attention of American readers, I have begun to find echoes of his work in mine. His dreams, his pessimistic résumés of childhood that are suddenly lanced by a joke, his surreal loves, his strangely lit landscapes with their inquisitive birds and disquieting flora, have been fertile influences for me, though I hope I haven’t stolen anything—well, better to steal than borrow, as Eliot more or less said.

As Adam Thorpe suggests in a recent Guardian review of The Landscapist, what that collection “certainly establishes is the importance to Ashbery's career of his nine-year stay in Paris in the 1950s, when he lived with Martory and discovered the richness of modern French poetry.” At the time, Ashbery also became fond of the writings by the early-twentieth-century French author Raymond Roussel, whose emphasis on the invented over the real Ashbery embraced. In his excellent collection of essays on contemporary poetry published in 1969, Alone with America, Richard Howard observed about The Tennis Court Oath: “The compositional techniques of Roussel and of his own understanding of vanguard art brought Ashbery, in this new collection—an extremely long and various one, by the way—to a pitch of distraction, of literal eccentricity, that leaves any consecutive or linear reading of his poems out of the question.” Ashbery’s poetry also reflected his growing interest in music, mostly classical, but also more contemporary composers like John Cage, whose pieces led the poet toward greater acceptance of chance as an element in art.

However, readers familiar with John Ashbery’s poetry developed during his stay in France also will recognize a significant influence of writing art criticism and his awareness of the composition process in the new schools of painting at the time, especially as one who earlier in his life had desired to be a painter. Indeed, the young Ashbery’s ambition to be an artist seems a contributing factor inspiring “The Painter,” a sestina he had written as a student influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, and he included the poem in Some Trees. In his excellent examination of the New York School of poets, The Last Avant-Garde, David Lehman regards this poem as a “kind of prescient parable about Ashbery’s own career”:

THE PAINTER

Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

In a 1962 article about the artist R.B. Kitaj, published in Art in America, John Ashbery wrote how poetry’s “stock of idea-images is endless, yet they are visible only to the mind’s eye.” He envied the painter or sculptor whose images had “weight and inevitability.” Ashbery considered: “How wonderful it would be if a painter could unite the inexhaustibility of poetry with the concreteness of painting.”

After Ashbery returned to the United States in the mid-1960s, he continued to write criticism as an executive editor for Art News, a position he held until 1972, when he began an academic career as a professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College. An insightful Art News article, “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” published more than four decades ago in 1968, not long after his return to the United States and a dozen years after Jackson Pollock’s death, provided Ashbery an opportunity to look back at his beginnings as a poet in the forties and fifties:

Things were very different twenty years ago when I was a student and was beginning to experiment with poetry. At that time it was the art and literature of the Establishment that were traditional. There was in fact almost no experimental poetry being written in this country, unless you counted the rather pale attempts of a handful of poets who were trying to imitate some of the effects of the French Surrealists. The situation was a little different in the other arts. Painters like Jackson Pollock had not yet been discovered by the mass magazines—this was to come a little later, though in fact Life did in 1949 print an article on Pollock, showing some of his large drip paintings and satirically asking whether he was the greatest living painter in America. This was still a long way from the decorous enthusiasm with which Time and Life today greet every new kink. But the situation was a bit better for the painters then, since there were a lot of them doing very important work and this fact was known to themselves and a few critics. Poetry could boast no such luck . . . .

At that time I felt the avant-garde very exciting, just as the young do today, but the difference was that in 1950 there was no sure proof of the existence of the avant-garde. To experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink. In other words if one wanted to depart, even moderately, from the norm, one was taking one’s life—one’s life as an artist—into one’s hands.

A painter like Pollock for instance was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn’t, he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter. It must often have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn’t an artist at all, that he had spent his life “toiling up the wrong road to art” as Flaubert said of Zola. But this very real possibility is paradoxically just what makes the tremendous excitement in his work. It is a gamble against terrible odds. Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing. We would all believe in God if we knew He existed, but would this be much fun?

The doubt element in Pollock—and I am using him as a convenient symbol for the avant-garde artist of the previous school—is what keeps his work alive for us. Even though he has been accepted now by practically everybody from Life on down, or on up, his work remains unresolved. It has not congealed into masterpieces. In spite of public acceptance the doubt is there—maybe the acceptance is there because of the doubt, the vulnerability which makes it possible to love the work.

Although “The Invisible Avant-Garde” originally was delivered as a speech at the Yale Art School in the spring of 1968, part of a series organized by painter Jack Tworkov, Ashbery’s analysis of Jackson Pollock’s situation and the painter’s approach to his art frequently seem to mirror the poet’s own path. Certainly, Pollock’s famous methods of paint application emphasized the artist’s process to viewers almost as much as the finished product on the canvas, just as Ashbery’s lines of poetry engage the reader with the poet’s meditations and revelations of his thought process.

Indeed, even the poet’s suggestions of Pollock’s possible state of mind, including any doubts, appear as though they may be projections of Ashbery’s thoughts about poetry and his personal work, as well as his relation to readers or reviewers, some of whom may harbor their own doubts. Like Jackson Pollock, John Ashbery has won over most critics since his days as a symbol of the avant-garde, and the poet has been accepted by the audience for poetry among academics to the point that Ashbery now may even represent to many an august figure of the literary establishment, enough so that today he easily can serve for readers as a trusted guide to others’ poetry, such as the work of Pierre Martory in The Landscapist.

Nevertheless, despite the multitude of awards and honors John Ashbery has received over the decades, puzzlement or uncertainty still characterizes the reactions of many contemporary readers, paralleling responses by viewers to Jackson Pollock’s paintings, unveiling a “vulnerability” that yet adds to the mystery and the continuing curiosity about the poet’s work.


[Visitors are encouraged to examine other articles at “One Poet's Notes” concerning John Ashbery or Jackson Pollock: “John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter,” “John Ashbery: 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'” “Poet of the Year: John Ashbery,” “John Ashbery: 'My Philosophy of Life,'” “Poetry, Painting, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery,” and “Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock.”]

Kate Sontag: "Migration"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Kate Sontag’s “Migration,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Kate Sontag’s poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, such as Boomer Girls, In Praise of Pedagogy, The Chester H. Jones National Winners Anthology, Green Mountains Review, Kalliope, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill Journal, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. With David Graham, she co-edited After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press, 2001). Her essay from that book, “Mother May I?: Writing with Love,” also appears in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue of VPR. Sontag teaches at Ripon College and the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, 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.

Paula Bohince: INCIDENT AT THE EDGE OF BAYONET WOODS

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review Diane Lockward reviews Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, a collection of poems by Paula Bohince, as can be seen in the following excerpt and accompanying link to the complete review. In her examination Lockward explores Bohince’s complex but enticing development of suspense and mystery through the poetic use of techniques more often associated with prose fiction, such as atmosphere, plot, character, and setting.

Diane Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2006), which was awarded the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Eve’s Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have recently appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Spoon River Poetry Review. A former high school English teacher, Diane Lockward now works as a poet-in-the-schools.

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Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, Paula Bohince. Sarabande Books, 2008. ISBN: 9781932511628 $14.95
Reviewed by Diane Lockward


Paula Bohince’s Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods is a stunning debut. Both a mystery and a lyric tour de force, the collection immediately takes a choke hold on the reader’s attention and never releases its grip. Poem by poem, Bohince unravels her dark story. In Section I we learn that the setting is a lonely rural farm located in the coal-mining country of Pennsylvania. Primitive and shadowed by history, the farm is characterized by mud, grime, cold winters, and poverty. The female speaker, following her father’s grisly murder, returned to this farm where she was raised, to live there and to claim her legacy of loneliness. In the poems, she struggles to get to know her father and to make sense of his life and death. Recalling the farm as it was years ago, she says, “I taste the odor of straw and millet released into fall, / the cursive of my father’s burning cigarette, / muslin curtain parting.” Thus, the stage is prepared for the father’s entry and the mystery’s unfolding.

While Section II introduces the suspected murderers and suggests a motive, Bohince deliberately leaves the narrative incomplete, a strategy that works well to pique and hold our interest. The motive is never more than speculation. The suspects remain merely suspects. There is no real solution to the crime. As our speaker attempts to reconstruct a story she does not fully know, she moves back and forth between present and past, affording us the pleasure of finding clues and reconstructing the story ourselves. As she tries to remember events from her childhood, she must acknowledge the fallibility of memory. In “Landscape with Sheep and Deer,” she says, “I must have dreamt it,” and she wonders, “. . . if there were deer, wouldn’t they have leapt over?” Bohince subtly places us in that oddly delicious and ironic spot of uncertainty.

Other smaller but seemingly important details, personal ones that the speaker does know, are also omitted; thus, the speaker herself remains somewhat a mystery. She has returned to the farm, but never tells us where she has been or for how long. She never makes reference to a mother. She tells us she is married, but provides no information about her husband. She speaks of herself as “twice married to the land,” and seems as much a bride to grief as to any man.

Bohince’s handling of atmosphere is masterful. While the story is rife with the potential for passion, little is expressed. In “Quarry” the daughter says it would be better “if I could quarrel with these rocks, woo outrage the way / I woo sorrow. // There ought to be a slow-forming fire somewhere, / not these pale mists, which are moths, which are offerings of light / to the foiled landscape.” She notes the “stubble of weeds waiting for some emotion to occupy it, / though emptiness is its own kind of balm.” Ironically, this emptiness serves to intensify the grimness of the story and to enhance the feeling of overwhelming loneliness. As the daughter woos a sorrow she cannot feel, we feel the damage that has been done to her.

The atmosphere is enhanced as Bohince reaches back into the past, a strategy that has the effect of adding ghosts to the story . . . .


Visitors are invited to read the rest of the review, as well as other works, in the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

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Additionally, readers will find poems by Diane Lockward in past issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review: “April at the Arboretum,” “'How is a Shell Like Regret,'” “Last Dance,” and “Temptation by Water.” Lockward appeared as the featured poet in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue (Volume VIII, Number 2) of VPR, which also includes an interview with her by Sondra Gash.

Inaugural Poem by Elizabeth Alexander

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here . . .

Just as citizens across the nation eagerly anticipated Barack Obama’s inaugural address, most viewing with high expectations, many among literary circles also were looking forward to the poem written by Elizabeth Alexander especially for the occasion. Indeed, for various reasons, most poets and readers of poetry shared a sense of exhilaration that the inaugural event would again feature a poem to help celebrate this historic moment. As has been noted in numerous news reports, Alexander would be only the fourth person commissioned to write an inaugural poem and designated to deliver it as part of the national ceremony. Previously, Robert Frost had received the honor when invited by John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton had chosen both Maya Angelou and Miller Williams for the assignment.

Of course, selection for such a position presents the poet with an enormous amount of personal attention and beneficial promotion for his or her poetry, as well as an intense level of scrutiny, most closely focused upon the quality of the work submitted. Certainly, any search of newspaper columns, magazine articles, and blog entries in the past month would verify Elizabeth Alexander has achieved a widespread public recognition she never enjoyed while merely a highly praised contemporary poet, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and professor of literature at a prestigious academic institution like Yale. A multitude of stories in recent weeks chronicled Alexander’s biographical details and discussed the daunting task she confronted as Barack Obama’s inaugural poet.

On Tuesday Elizabeth Alexander presented her work, “Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration.” All of us who have loved poetry, and appreciated this bright spotlight for the art form, held our breaths anxiously as we watched and listened. For many of us who have admired Alexander’s poetry in the past, we possessed great hope for the poet, perhaps just as most Americans who had heard Barack Obama’s eloquent speeches the past few years harbored substantial expectations for the new president’s address.

However, in the immediate aftermath of the poet’s presentation, much of the reception among her fellow poets could be described as mixed at best, and some openly expressed disappointment. Surely, a few voiced approval and acclaim for the poem Alexander had written; however, in online writers’ lists, in blogs, and in newspaper columns a majority of those responding reacted with less favorable opinions.

David L. Ulin remarked in the Los Angeles Times that “‘Praise Song for the Day’ didn’t measure up” because its “prosaic language” and rhetoric “simply didn’t sing.” Writing for The New Republic, Adam Kirsch considered Alexander’s poem an example of “bureaucratic verse,” lost in clichés and driven by an agenda: “The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity.” At Times Online Erica Wagner offered a critique of the poem as “unmemorable,” and she suggested: “Professor Alexander, alas, sounded merely repetitious, or at the very least, confused.”

This sentiment was seconded by the About.Com: Poetry blog hosted by Bob Holman and Margery Snyder: “I see that there are indeed some memorable phrases, but I confess that while I was hearing the poem, I felt it was all over the place, not well put together at all, not focused . . . .” Jeff Charis-Carlson wrote at the Poetry & Popular Culture blog: “even I lost interest as Alexander read her poem. I can appreciate the difficulty that she was under—the occasional poem is a hard form for literary poets to master—but I found nothing sonorous and very little memorable about the reading.” On the other hand, at the Kenyon Review blog Kirsten Ogden supplied support for Alexander’s endeavor: “I listened today with great pleasure as Elizabeth Alexander read her poem ‘Praise Song for the Day’ at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. What a joy it was to hear ‘We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.’”

Indeed, I’d prefer to associate my response to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem with the sentiments expressed by Kirsten Ogden; nevertheless, my general reaction more closely resembles those expressions offered by the majority who wrote with disappointment. However, I do not make this statement necessarily as a criticism of Alexander. Instead, I believe she had accepted an almost impossible chore and fell victim to the difficulty of such a monumental situation, particularly in her unenviable spot on the program directly following the renowned eloquence of Barack Obama and while many of the cold folks in the audience on this frigid January day already were starting to wander toward exits from the mall. (In fact, despite the apparent effectiveness of Obama’s address, a number of political commentators mentioned in their reviews of the new president’s speech that, perhaps due to a conscious focus on its purposes as an inaugural message, it didn’t quite measure up to the lofty language and inspiring reaches listeners were accustomed to experiencing in his previous speeches.)

As Jim Fisher has written at Salon: “let's dispense with this idea that poets can produce lasting poems for public events. It's unfair to the audience, discomposes the poet, and probably confirms the low opinion of poetry some listeners already hold.” The three previous poets to offer inaugural poems have been victimized in a similar fashion. The pair who read at Bill Clinton’s two inaugurals presented poems that were targeted to the political times or social circumstances in which they were delivered, and neither piece succeeded in giving its audience exemplary poetry. Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” and Miller Williams’s “Of History and Hope” left listeners with lines that seemed more superficial than substantive.

Robert Frost was victimized by the actual environmental elements in the immense and very public situation. An aged man already in his late 80s at the time, Frost had difficulty reading the poem he’d written for the inauguration of John Kennedy because of the bright sun’s glare on his wind-blown pages. Consequently, the poet resorted to reciting a favorite old poem he’d memorized perfectly and performed for nearly two decades, “The Gift Outright,” a much stronger work than the less effective official poem he’d been commissioned to produce. As a result, Frost offered a memorable moment praised by both the general population of viewers in attendance or watching on television and revered by lovers of good poetry. In Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, William H. Pritchard suggests that the substitute poem “had more of ‘life’ in it: in the midst of flattery and display, the sound of sense suddenly and movingly made itself felt.”

In this instance I believe we may learn a lesson. A place exists in public ceremonies for poetry. However, rather than commission a poet to write an occasional poem for the political proceedings, organizers should request a quality poem inspired independent of the moment, yet one that reflects the substance or spirit of the day and has passed the test of time. After all, some of the finest advice beginning poets often receive in creative writing courses concerns an avoidance of writing toward a predetermined goal or abstract notion. Pieces written under such conditions by young poets, or even experienced poets, usually feel forced, display didacticism, or demonstrate a graceless tendency toward prosaic statement rather than lyricism and imagery. As Robert Frost once wrote about the process of composition for a poet: “Writing a poem is discovering.”

Still, Elizabeth Alexander deserves commendation for her courage as she literally placed herself and her poetry in front of the nation for critical examination. Her poem contains a few very compelling lines and some emphatic phrases, especially at its admirable center: “Say it plain: that many have died for this day. / Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, / who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, // picked the cotton and the lettuce, built / brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean and work inside of.” Indeed, the impressive opening pair of lines in that quote could have sufficed for many.

For those who have not yet seen the poem by Elizabeth Alexander with its breaks in lines or stanzas and who wish to evaluate it as a written work rather than a performed piece:

PRAISE SONG FOR THE DAY: A POEM FOR BARACK OBAMA’S PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION


Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.


—Elizabeth Alexander

Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Recently, Barack Obama visited the Lincoln Memorial to examine the text of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, regarded as perhaps the best in American presidential history. Known for the sober tone in its words about war and its hope for a peace with an evolving reconciliation among all in the nation or elsewhere, as well as its recognition that the emancipation of slaves represented a new beginning for the country toward an eventual end of racism, Lincoln’s message seems to resonate well once again with those contemporary readers now encountering it 144 years later.

The speech of just over 700 words is etched across the walls of the Lincoln Memorial, and Obama later observed about his trip to the site: “I’m not sure whether that has been wise, because every time you read that second inaugural, you start getting intimidated, especially because it is really short. There is a genius to Lincoln that is not going to be matched.”

Today, as citizens of the United States witness the inauguration of their 44th president, this seems an appropriate moment to recall the influential and sometimes poetic language of Lincoln’s speech, particularly in its magnificent closing paragraph, as seen in the accompanying manuscript copy and transcript below. [Readers may click on manuscript pages to enlarge them.] In addition, as hundreds of millions of Americans view Barack Obama’s speech in person or on television (along with maybe a billion people around the world), we should recall the rare photograph above of Abraham Lincoln offering his second inauguration address to the gathered crowd, which appears to be the only photographic picture existing that shows Lincoln delivering a speech.

Abraham Lincoln
Second Inaugural Address
Saturday, March 4, 1865

Fellow Countrymen:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention, and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Edgar Allan Poe on His 200th Birthday

The above video brings Edgar Allan Poe to life through technology on his 200th birthday.

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809. His most famous poem was “The Raven,” and Poe wrote about its inspiration and construction in his well-known essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” an excerpt of which is included below.

Excerpt from “The Philosophy of Composition”

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to dispense with anything that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one-half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prose—a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions—the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect.

It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting—and that, although in certain classes of prose composition, such as Robinson Crusoe, (demanding no unity,) this limit may be advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a poem. Within this limit, the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit—in other words, to the excitement or elevation—again in other words, to the degree of the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect :—this, with one proviso—that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all.

Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical, taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem—a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight.

My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed : and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable. I should be carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and which, with the poetical, stands not in the slightest need of demonstration—the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful.” Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes—that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment—no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. It by no means follows from anything here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem—for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast—but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem.

Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation—and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

The length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, I betook myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy which might serve me as a key-note in the construction of the poem—some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn. In carefully thinking over all the usual artistic effects—or more properly points, in the theatrical sense—I did not fail to perceive immediately that no one had been so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. I considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used, the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone—both in sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity—of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the effect, by adhering, in general, to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought : that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by thevariation of the application of the refrain—the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.

These points being settled, I next bethought me of the nature of my refrain. Since its application was to be repeatedly varied, it was clear that the refrain itself must be brief, for there would have been an insurmountable difficulty in frequent variations of application in any sentence of length. In proportion to the brevity of the sentence, would, of course, be the facility of the variation. This led me at once to a single word as the best refrain.

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas was, of course, a corollary: the refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt: and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant.

The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word “Nevermore.” In fact, it was the very first which presented itself.

The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of the one word “nevermore.” In observing the difficulty which I at once found in inventing a sufficiently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, I did not fail to perceive that this difficulty arose solely from the pre-assumption that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being—I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non -reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven—the bird of ill omen—monotonously repeating the one word, “Nevermore,” at the conclusion of each stanza, in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—equally is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

I had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word “Nevermore”—I had to combine these, bearing in mind my design of varying, at every turn, the application of the word repeated; but the only intelligible mode of such combination is that of imagining the Raven employing the word in answer to the queries of the lover. And here it was that I saw at once the opportunity afforded for the effect on which I had been depending—that is to say, the effect of the variation of application. I saw that I could make the first query propounded by the lover—the first query to which the Raven should reply “Nevermore”—that I could make this first query a commonplace one—the second less so—the third still less, and so on—until at length the lover, startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word itself—by its frequent repetition—and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the fowl that uttered it—is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character—pounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture—propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote) but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected “Nevermore” the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me—or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in the progress of the construction—I first established in mind the climax, or concluding query—that to which “Nevermore” should be in the last place an answer—that in reply to which this word “Nevermore” should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair.

Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning—at the end, where all works of art should begin—for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza:

“‘Prophet,’ said I, ‘thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil!
By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore,
Tell this soul sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.’
Quoth the raven ‘Nevermore.”’

I composed this stanza, at this point, first that, by establishing the climax, I might the better vary and graduate, as regards seriousness and importance, the preceding queries of the lover—and, secondly, that I might definitely settle the rhythm, the meter, and the length and general arrangement of the stanza—as well as graduate the stanzas which were to precede, so that none of them might surpass this in rhythmical effect. Had I been able, in the subsequent composition, to construct more vigorous stanzas, I should, without scruple, have purposely enfeebled them, so as not to interfere with the climacteric effect.

And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. My first object (as usual) was originality. The extent to which this has been neglected, in versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little possibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible varieties of meter and stanza are absolutely infinite—and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing. The fact is, originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or meter of the “Raven.” The former is trochaic—the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. Less pedantically—the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet—the second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds)—the third of eight—the fourth of seven and a half—the fifth the same—the sixth three and a half. Now, each of these lines, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the “Raven” has, is in their combination into stanza; nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted. The effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual, and some altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.

The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the lover and the Raven—and the first branch of this consideration was the locale. For this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields—but it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:—it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place.

I determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber—in a chamber rendered sacred to him by memories of her who had frequented it. The room is represented as richly furnished—this in mere pursuance of the ideas I have already explained on the subject of Beauty, as the sole true poetical thesis.

The locale being thus determined, I had now to introduce the bird—and the thought of introducing him through the window, was inevitable. The idea of making the lover suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the shutter, is a “tapping” at the door, originated in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader’s curiosity, and in a desire to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover’s throwing open the door, finding alldark, and thence adopting the half-fancy that it was the spirit of his mistress that knocked.

I made the night tempestuous, first, to account for the Raven’s seeking admission, and secondly, for the effect of contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber.

I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, also for the effect of contrast between the marble and the plumage—it being understood that the bust was absolutely suggested by the bird—the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.

About the middle of the poem, also, I have availed myself of the force of contrast, with a view of deepening the ultimate impression. For example, an air of the fantastic—approaching as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible—is given to the Raven’s entrance. He comes in “with many a flirt and flutter.”

“Not the lease obeisance made he—not a moment stopped or stayed he,
But with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door.”

In the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously carried out:—

“Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
‘Though thy crest be shorn and shaven thou,’ I said, ‘art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!’
Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’

“Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as ‘Nevermore.”’

The effect of the dénouement being thus provided for, I immediately drop the fantastic for a tone of the most profound seriousness:—this tone commencing in the stanza directly following the one last quoted, with the line,

“But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only,” etc.

From this epoch the lover no longer jests—no longer sees anything even of the fantastic in the Raven’s demeanor. He speaks of him as a “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore,” and feels the “fiery eyes” burning into his “bosom’s core.” This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover’s part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader—to bring the mind into a proper frame for the dénouement—which is now brought about as rapidly and as directly as possible.

With the dénouement proper—with the Raven’s reply, “Nevermore,” to the lover’s final demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world—the poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple narrative, may be said to have its completion. So far, everything is within the limits of the accountable—of the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word “Nevermore,” and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams—the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. The casement being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird’s wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, amused by the incident and the oddity of the visitor’s demeanor, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, “Nevermore”—a world which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl’s repetition of “Nevermore.” The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer “Nevermore.” With the indulgence, to the utmost extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real.

But in subjects so handled, however skillfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required—first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness—some undercurrent, however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of the theme—which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists.

Holding these opinions, I added the two concluding stanzas of the poem—their suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all the narrative which has preceded them. The undercurrent of meaning is rendered first apparent in the lines—

“‘Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!’
Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore!’ ”

It will be observed that the words, “from out my heart,” involve the first metaphorical expression in the poem. They, with the answer, “Nevermore,” dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated. The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical—but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza, that the intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance is permitted distinctly to be seen:

“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore.”

"William Stafford: Genius in Camouflage" by Jonathan Holden

William Stafford was born in Kansas on this date (January 17) in 1914. Therefore, I recommend readers revisit the following essay exploring memories of Stafford by Jonathan Holden that appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Volume II, Number 1).


William Stafford: Genius in Camouflage


In 1972, five years before driving to Missoula, Montana, to interview Richard Hugo, I was a student in the Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado. I was driving into Denver with my friend Reg Saner to conduct a Poets-in-the-Schools program. We had turned off U.S. 36 onto I-25 and were heading straight toward downtown Denver when, in one of those moments James Hillman discusses in The Soul’s Code, dictated, perhaps, by one’s daemon, I realized what I should do with my studies—with my life. I should drop the pathetic idea of doing a thesis in medieval literature to please some father figure and instead do a thesis in twentieth-century American literature, about William Stafford. My thesis would be immediately publishable, for there were no books about him. Best of all, I could drive out to Lake Oswego and interview him for the book. I could actually meet him.

The first time I met him was in July 1972 at his house. He was fifty-eight. It was thrilling to meet him, but it was daunting, too, because he was so much like my own father, Alan. Wiry, elfin, with the face of a fox, Stafford was curious about everything around him, absolutely alert. Alan had graduated from Harvard with a B.S. in chemistry in 1925, the year after Stanley Kunitz had. They both graduated summa cum laude. All my life I had been surrounded by Bell Labs physicists gossiping about who was in line for the Nobel Prize this year, who was at Cal Tech, who was at Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory, who was at M.I.T. (The gossip of scientists is depressingly similar to the gossip of writers.) Like the Bell Labs scientists, Bill was on the leading edge of his field, lecturing everywhere, everywhere in demand. He was a genius. From being in the presence of Bell Labs geniuses for my entire childhood, I’d learned to recognize them, like a bird-watcher. I had to. It was a kind of survival technique, to avoid making a fool of oneself in the presence of some of the most high-powered intellectuals in the world. Some of them had worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos had been their vortex.

In his book Alone with America, Richard Howard refers to the “arrogant otherness” of the persona in Stafford’s first poetry collection, West of Your City. It has been pointed out by the poet/critic Judith Kitchen that “West of Your City” alludes to Frost’s title North of Boston. “Your city” is Boston. “You” is Frost. Howard, the quintessential New Yorker and European traveler, is right, but only partially. Stafford’s “otherness” wasn’t arrogant. It was the otherness of every major mind I’ve had the privilege to observe. It was the neutral, appraising, canny posture of intellectuality—an appetite that is aesthetic, amoral, and endlessly curious. And cold. What must have it been like having Stafford as a father? Not easy. It is now legendary how Stafford, so as not to disturb his family, would get up well before dawn to write. He described the routine in his poem “Mornings”:

Quiet,
rested, the brain begins to burn
and glow like a coal in the dark,
early—four in the morning, cold, with
frost on the lawn.

We are familiar, too, with Stafford’s cooperative venture with his son Kim: the book Braided Apart. We are less familiar with the fact that Stafford’s eldest son, Brett, killed himself. Brett must have felt as I did: compared to Alan, I would never measure up. Virtually Alan’s last words to me—we were discussing Wittgenstein—were, “Son, until you know German, you’ll never understand Western culture.”

When Stafford’s son Kim visited Kansas State in the fall of 1998, as the primary speaker in a conference in honor of William Stafford, he and I talked about Brett’s suicide in 1988. Kim said that the suicide had been about a love affair and that his father had said of Brett: “He wasn’t mean enough.”

Meanwhile, the mistaken identification of Stafford as a “regional” poet continues: In the New York Times obituary of August 31, 1993, the headline read, “William Edgar Stafford, Professor and Poet of the West, Dies at 79.” The writer, Wolfgang Saxon, wrote:

Both his life and his writing looked westward or to the Northwest, and he found his themes in small-town family life and in nature. His work was infused with the vast expanses of desert and prairie, mountain ranges and sky.

Like a fox, like a wildcat, Stafford lived his life in camouflage. He camouflaged his true nature. A poem which for me epitomizes this camouflage is his poem “For the Governor” in Someday, Maybe:

For the Governor

Heartbeat by heartbeat our governor tours
the state, and before a word and after a word
over the crowd the world speaks to him,
thin as a wire. And he knows inside
each word, too, that anyone says,
another word lurks, and inside that . . .

Sometimes we fear for him: he, or someone,
must act for us all. Across our space
we watch him while the country leans
on him: he bears time’s tall demand,
and beyond our state he must think the shore
and beyond that the waves and the miles and
the waves.

On the surface, the poem is about a man campaigning for the governorship of a state like Kansas. But read closely, the poem yields a second meaning. The poem is about the relation of the mind to the body. “Across our space / we watch him while the country leans / on him: he bears time’s tall demand.” The mind is able to conceive of its end, the body’s eventual death. Moreover, the mind is able to conceive of itself: consciousness of consciousness is what makes us particularly human. This, the poem’s true issue—Stafford’s intellectuality—has been camouflaged. I asked him about a female figure named Ella who appears in some of his poems about rural Kansas life. He remarked that “Ella” is a female third-person pronoun.

A second well-known poem, “Report from a far place,” camouflages its sophistication in a way that is also typically Staffordian. The poem reads:

Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.

They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.

In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.

Be careful though: they
burn, or don’t burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.

At first glance, this poem appears to be about writing, “making word things.” Read closely, however, it appears to be more about reading than about writing, especially the lines “In war or city or camp / they could save your life; / you can muse them by the fire.” The cleverest line, though, is the offhanded remark “and they turn up at the toes.” Often, in Stafford poems, casual asides are profound. If we think of the way in which the turned-up toes of skis or snowshoes deflect the snow, deflect the world, we find a metaphor for the way in which the abstract nature of words deflects the world from us and thus keeps us from suffocating in existence, allowing us to ride “on top of” things momentarily. The title puzzles us, until we remember that in Stafford’s symbolic vocabulary “near” means “kindred” and “far” means “different.” The “far” place which imposes “word things” upon the world is the mind.

There is another side of Stafford, though, that dispenses with camouflage. It is not affable. It is fierce. We glimpse this side, at the end of “Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets,” where he says:

There is a place behind our hill so real
it makes me turn my head, no matter. There
in the last thicket lies the cornered cat
saved by its claws, now ready to spend
all that is left of the wilderness, embracing
its blood. And that is the way I will spit
life, at the end of any trail where I smell any hunter.

The last piece Stafford published before his death was a review of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche. His approach to the anthology is prickly:

But there are inherent problems in a collection like this. For instance, the individual glimpses that create the distinction of poetry put a strain on the thesis of the book; books that buckle down to the thesis can hardly attain the shiver of the unexpected that distinguishes lively discourse. We can be informed; we can encounter the thoughts and emotions of significant people . . . but it takes something more to validate the poetry experience.

And later in the review he writes:

A further problem above achieving authenticity in a survey like this one lurks everywhere in the selections: quality is primary, but the need for wide representation put a strain on that criterion. And how vividly do you have to suffer in order to qualify?

I feel a bump when the explanatory note says, “the Germans decided.” All Germans? And similarly when Carolyn Forche says, “My new work seemed controversial to my American contemporaries.” (Who, me?) The labels in the book . . . put a torque on me, snagged my attention, kept me wary of living on the emotional high of atrocity hunger.

Morally and intellectually exacting as Stafford’s mind was, there was a softer side to him. I glimpsed it most vividly in the summer of 1987 when he and I were on the staff of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Several of us were being driven back to Fort Worden State Park from dinner at a restaurant. Stafford was in the front seat, Marvin Bell was beside me in the middle seat. As we drove past a brightly lit bar that was the students’ hangout, Marvin called to the driver to let him out there. Stafford burst out to Marvin: “Must you?” It was a motherly gesture, pure reflex, like a mother instinctively reaching out to stop a toddler from walking into a busy street. I realized that he loved Marvin.

When, the day after Stafford suffered his heart attack at home, Henry Taylor called me with the news, my first thought was, “How lucky to go like that, that cleanly,” and that Stafford had indeed led a lucky life. He himself had told me as much, years ago at Stephens College, when I had invited him there. I don’t remember what I was mumbling to him, but he suddenly faced me and glared at me, pure wildcat: “You don’t understand.” He hissed it. “I was just lucky.” He took nothing for granted. And I thought, also, of Willa Cather’s famous story “Neighbor Rosicky”:

The old farmer looked up at the doctor with a gleam of amusement in his queer, triangular-shaped eyes . . .. Rosicky’s face had the habit of looking interested—suggested a contented disposition and a reflective quality that was gay rather than grave. This gave him a certain detachment, the easy manner of an onlooker and observer.

The end of the story describes Rosicky’s friendship with his daughter-in-law, Polly:

She had a sudden feeling that nobody in the world, not her mother, not Rudolph, or anyone really loved her as much as old Rosicky did. It perplexed her. She sat frowning and trying to puzzle it out. It was as if Rosicky had a special gift for loving people, something that was like an ear for music or an eye for colour. It was quiet, unobtrusive; it was merely there . . .. After he dropped off to sleep, she sat holding his warm, broad, flexible brown hand. She had never seen another in the least like it. She wondered if it wasn’t a kind of gipsy hand, it was so alive and quick and light in its communications—very strange in a farmer. Nearly all of the farmers she knew had huge lumps of fists, like mauls, or they were knotty and bony and uncomfortable looking, with stiff fingers. But Rosicky’s hand was like quicksilver, flexing, muscular, . . . it was a warm brown hand, with some cleverness in it, . . . and something else which Polly could only call “gipsy-like”—something nimble and lively and sure, in the way that animals are.

I would like to imagine that William Stafford died as Rosicky did, as described by Willa Cather:

After he had taken a few stitches, the cramp began in his chest, like yesterday. He put his pipe down cautiously on the window-sill and bent over to ease the pull. No use—he had better try to get to bed if he could. He rose and groped his way across the familiar floor, which was rising and falling like the deck of a ship. At the door he fell. When Mary came in, she found him lying there, and the moment she touched him she knew that he was gone.

In my experience, Cather is the only author to describe accurately, without sentimentality, in the figure of Rosicky, the mysterious, inexplicable quality of human goodness—its elusiveness, its disinterestedness, its absence of vanity. William Stafford understood all this. He lived it. Determined to keep the truth of his genius from embarrassing us, he camouflaged it as carefully, as considerately as he could.

—Jonathan Holden


[Readers will find a group of poems by Jonathan Holden and an interview with him by Chris Ellis in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, where Holden appeared as the featured poet. In addition, all are invited to examine an earlier post on “One Poet’s Notes” containing my essay concerning William Stafford’s most famous poem, “Traveling through the Dark.”]

W.D. Snodgrass (1926-2009): Walking Through the Universe

When I received the sad news early Tuesday afternoon from his wife Kathy that W.D. Snodgrass had died during the morning hours, succumbing to the lung cancer he had battled for the last four months, I was relieved to be informed he at least had passed away quickly and without pain. In addition, I was grateful that I had an opportunity just last week to communicate to De how much he and his poetry had meant to me and many other fellow poets or readers of contemporary literature. Indeed, only eight days earlier I had published at “One Poet’s Notes” a tribute to the poet on the occasion of his 83rd birthday. In that article I had provided visitors with a link to a video interview, demonstrating De’s lively ability to engagingly discuss poetry and displaying his lovely personality. At the time, I was pleased to learn from Kathy Snodgrass that De had seen the note of appreciation and had heard of numerous similarly complimentary comments coming from others as well.

Today, as those of us who love passionate poetry and value fine literature mourn the passing of W.D. Snodgrass, and as we offer comments of condolence to his family and friends, let us realize we will miss the man, but through the magnificent words of his poetry, De will forever be “walking through the universe” and will always remain in the hearts of his readers. In fact, let us begin compiling our treasury of Snodgrass’s poetry with the following appropriate piece, “These Trees Stand . . . ,” which first appeared in his groundbreaking premiere collection of poems, Heart’s Needle, published fifty years ago in 1959.

THESE TREES STAND . . .

These trees stand very tall under the heavens.
While they stand, if I walk, all stars traverse
This steep celestial gulf their branches chart.
Though lovers stand at sixes and at sevens
While civilizations come down with the curse,
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.

I can’t make any world go around your house.
But note this moon. Recall how the night nurse
Goes ward-rounds, by the mild, reflective art
Of focusing her flashlight on her blouse.
Your name’s safe conduct into love or verse;
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.

Your name’s absurd, miraculous as sperm
And as decisive. If you can’t coerce
One thing outside yourself, why you’re the poet!
What irrefrangible atoms whirl, affirm
Their destiny and form Lucinda’s skirts!
She can’t make up your mind. Soon as you know it,
Your firmament grows touchable and firm.
If all this world runs battlefield or worse,
Come, let us wipe our glasses on our shirts:
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.

—W.D. Snodgrass

Sherod Santos: "A Writer's Life"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Sherod Santos’s “A Writer’s Life,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue (Volume V, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Sherod Santos is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Perishing (W.W. Norton, 2003). His collection of poems, The Pilot Star Elegies (1999), which won a Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and The New Yorker Book Award. His other honors include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the B.F. Connors Long Poem Prize from the Paris Review, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Prize. Santos has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His book of essays on poetry and poetics, A Poetry of Two Minds, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and Yale Review.

In 2005 Santos published a collection of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry, which was awarded the Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in the Humanities. Andrew Mulvania conducts an interview with Santos in Volume V, Number 1 of VPR, which also contains my extended review of his work, “The Fundamental Desire to Sing: Two Decades of Poetry by Sherod Santos.” After the spring 2007 semester, Sherod Santos retired as Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Missouri.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, 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.

Celebrating a Second Anniversary

Today marks the second anniversary for “One Poet’s Notes,” the editor’s blog for Valparaiso Poetry Review. As described in the blog’s sidebar, “One Poet’s Notes” was begun as an editor’s personal notebook or writer’s journal that offers readers ongoing commentary complementing content published in VPR. The blog’s entries are intended to associate those poems, essays, reviews, and interviews in the magazine’s semiannual issues with other news and additional information relating to poetry, poetics, and various aspects of other arts.

The format of the blog has allowed readers to connect with numerous notable sources for poetry or information about poets, especially with links to various media, including recordings of poetry readings and interviews, as well as selected videos relating to poetry and poetics.

Furthermore, since Valparaiso Poetry Review has now existed for ten years, a particular goal of the editor’s blog has been to reintroduce readers to works published in previous years and still available in the periodical’s archives. The VPR Poem of the Week feature has spotlighted many poets with works appearing in earlier issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This element of the blog has helped increase interest and readership for VPR’s decade of back issues, and it has acquainted readers with a number of poets or poems they might not have previously known.

Indeed, the continuing presence of “One Poet’s Notes” has dramatically increased the daily readership for VPR throughout the last two years. When the initial entries of “One Poet’s Notes” were posted in January of 2007, one could not know how many readers might find their way to the blog. However, I have been pleased to see its audience increase steadily over the past pair of years, rising from only about 500 readers that first month in 2007 to about 4,000 per month one year ago to about 10,000 readers each month now. Consequently, this as well has enhanced the number of readers who have visited Valparaiso Poetry Review’s nineteen issues published thus far to a total of around 200,000 in just the past couple of years.

The increase in readership has been assisted by recognition and respect generously demonstrated by others, including many friendly fellow bloggers who have pointed their readers in this direction with high recommendations of the content here. I especially would like to take this opportunity to thank those in the literary blogging community for their support of “One Poet’s Notes.” In a time when the print sources for commentary on literature, especially poetry, are diminishing daily, as evidenced in the recent abandonment of book review sections by some newspapers, the literary blog has become a welcome addition to further discussions of literature and the writing process.

I have been honored and very happy to recognize specific works from Valparaiso Poetry Review’s recent issues by nominating them publicly on “One Poet’s Notes” for selection to various “Best of” collections (Best of the Net, Best of the Web, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies) and to see some of them chosen. As I have said a few times in this blog, I am pleased when an opportunity arises to share the work of VPR’s poets with a larger audience and enable them to receive the greater recognition they deserve.

As 2008 began, the higher readership of Valparaiso Poetry Review brought about by the first year of “One Poet’s Notes” required some changes (including discontinuation of the VPR mailing list, which had grown too long and awkward) and permitted the initiation of the Valparaiso Poetry Review Facebook group page, global and open to all who wish to receive regular updates on news about Valparaiso Poetry Review, as well as instant notification when new issues of VPR are released. This move has proven to be a successful transition in the last year, as more than 1,000 readers have subscribed as friends of Valparaiso Poetry Review, who receive regular news items relating to VPR and the blog. Again, I urge readers to take advantage of this additional feature.

When I decided to experiment with an editor’s blog and wrote my first comments in “One Poet’s Notes” two years ago, submitting those words for public viewing, I could not anticipate what would occur in the future. Nor could I foresee that direction the blog would take to where it is today, approaching 300 posts later. Bolstered by the encouragement I have received from readers and the continuing support from VPR’s writers, I look forward to the future, which I trust will present a few more different features in the next year, including an upcoming celebration of Valparaiso Poetry Review’s tenth anniversary, observing publication of VPR’s initial issue in October of 1999.

Thank you, once more, to all who repeatedly have been readers of “One Poet’s Notes.” I hope you will continue to return regularly to discover entertaining and enlightening entries. On this second anniversary of the blog’s first article, I again express my appreciation, and I offer a note of gratitude to each of you.