Anne Haines: "Swallowed"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Anne Haines’s “Swallowed,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue (Volume VIII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Anne Haines has had poems published in various literary journals, including Blackbird, Boxcar Poetry Review, Calyx, Cortland Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Poetry Midwest. Her work has also appeared in anthologies, including Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press, 2004). Finishing Line Press recently released her first chapbook of poetry, Breach. Haines lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she currently works as a staff member in the Indiana University Libraries.

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.

Michael Martone: Visiting Writer Reads Sept. 28 at 7 p.m.

All in the Valparaiso area are invited to attend a presentation by Michael Martone, fiction writer and essayist, September 28 at 7 p.m. in Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art. Martone’s appearance represents the English department’s opening event in this year’s Wordfest series of readings by prominent writers of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or critical commentary. Visitors to the museum are also urged to examine the current featured exhibition: “Selections from the Robert and Ellen Haan Collection of Historic Indiana Art.” A reception and book signing will follow the presentation by Martone. Admission is free.

Michael Martone was raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University who also earned an M.A. in the creative writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Among his publications—including works of fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction—are Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins (University of Georgia Press, 2008), Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone (Quarry Books, 2007), Michael Martone: Fictions (Fiction Collective 2, 2005), Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art (University of Georgia Press, 2005), The Blue Guide to Indiana (Fiction Collective 2, 2001), The Flatness and Other Landscapes (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Seeing Eye (Zoland Books, 1995), Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle (Broad Ripple Press, 1994), Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List (Indiana University Press, 1990), Safety Patrol (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), and Alive and Dead in Indiana (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). He has edited two collections of essays about the Midwest: Townships: Pieces of the Midwest (University of Iowa Press, 1992) and A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest (University of Iowa Press, 1988). Michael Martone is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama.

Martone’s crisp and creative prose often appears poetic. Indeed, the title chapter of Racing in Place, recalling incidents of the author’s past relating to Memorial Day and the annual running of the Indianapolis 500, contains 33 brief pieces labeled “Hoosier Haiku.” A few examples follow:

22

I have a picture of my mother and father sitting on their graves. Always planning ahead, they purchased the plots in the Catholic cemetery years ago. They bought the monuments too, already engraved with their names and birthdates. They were optimistic enough not to have the 19 of the death date inscribed, but their names are there and their birthdates. The markers are simple slabs of polished granite the size and shape of swing set seats, very low to the ground. It looks as if they are sitting on the ground. They are smiling. We went there one Memorial Day to look at all the graves. My father’s parents’ and sister’s, my mother’s parents’ and grandparents’. We ended up checking out how their own graves were doing. There they were. The stones were supposed to be that small and low to make maintenance of the cemetery efficient. No flowers allowed. There were flags on Memorial Day but those were taken back up after a day or two. In the future, the mowers would cut right over the stones as they sank the rest of the way into the ground.

***

27

One year, something happened. A wreck at the start of the race had killed several drivers. I remember listening to the restart in school a day later. I was in art class rolling out clay to coil into pots. Others were kneading the clay or cutting blocks of it with wire. The teacher was firing pieces in the small kiln, and you could hear the whoosh of air as it burned. The announcers at the track were subdued and sad. It seemed the completion of the race was more of a chore now, something that had to be done. The engines sounded muffled. I liked my art class. It was quiet as we worked. The teacher moved from table to table, here smoothing the lip of a pitcher with his thumb, there applying a slip with an old brush. The radio muttered in the corner.

***

30

I practice driving in the cemetery. My father sits in the passenger seat playing with the radio. The yellow Rambler is a company car he bought at auction, a decal of the company’s logo peeled from the door. It’s a big cemetery. In the older part there are old trees and the monuments are columns and urns and obelisks. Wrought iron fences or low walls of stone outline family plots. The roads curve around in circles. I stop and start and signal. I ease out the clutch, and the engine bucks. I can gain a little speed on the straightaways of the new section where the markers are in ordered rows and next to the ground. Mary, the Mother of God, directs traffic at an intersection. I go by my grandmother’s grave again. A troop of Boy Scouts carrying backpacks filled with toy flags sifts between the stones, dipping down to the ground, in ones and twos, to decorate them for the weekend.

T.S. Eliot: Poets and Anthologies

T.S. Eliot was born on this date (Sept. 26) in 1888. During his career, Eliot actively controlled the appearance of his poetry, always conscious of the value in strategically placing his works with certain journals and carefully manipulating their appearance in anthologies. Indeed, when Harriet Monroe, editor at Poetry, requested permission in 1916 to reprint in an anthology “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which had first appeared in the journal’s pages in 1915, Eliot declined her request. His poem would have been a most appropriate contribution to Monroe’s gathering of poems, The New Poetry: An Anthology, which she co-edited with Alice Corbin Henderson for publication in 1917. However, Eliot wrote a letter to Monroe on March 27, 1916, explaining his reluctance. He informed her that the poem already had appeared in an anthology published in London, and he stated: “I really feel that I should be making a mistake in reprinting it again in an anthology before it appears in a book.” Eliot’s initial book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917.

Following a further inquiry by Harriet Monroe, Eliot replied in a letter (dated June 7, 1916) that he still would not release “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for her anthology: “As for ‘Prufrock’: you see, I shall probably have a small volume coming out just about the same time as your anthology, in the autumn, in New York. If it were much before or much after I should probably be quite glad to enter ‘Prufrock’ in both, but it seems to me that to synchronise would be inadvisable.” Eliot instead offered Monroe a different poem, “Portrait of a Lady,” as a substitute for her anthology, which she accepted.

On another occasion, when reading a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Eliot discovered poems of his had been included in an anthology (Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer) apparently without his permission. Eliot responded by sending a letter to the editor of the newspaper, and it appeared in the November 24, 1921 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, under the heading “Poets and Anthologies,” a year before the publication of The Waste Land. In his statement, Eliot declared the following, perhaps referring to Robert Graves as the poet “whose name is much more widely known”:

“I should like to remark that I should have much preferred not being included in this anthology. On previous occasions, when compilers of such works have asked my consent, there have always been personal reasons for my willing compliance: here there would have been none.

“Some months ago I discussed the general question of anthologies with a poet (of a different school and tradition from mine) whose name is much more widely known than mine is. We agreed that the work of any poet who has already published a book of verse is likely to be more damaged than aided by anthologies. I hope that other writers may be encouraged to express their opinions.”

Eliot’s comments concerning his views on anthologies seem even more interesting today as his poems are continually introduced to readers—especially on class reading lists, semester after semester, distributed to students like those in my Twentieth Century Poetry course—through their inclusion in massive anthologies. Certainly, any author would prefer his or her work to be encountered within the original framework of the poet’s own volume, individually designed as a primary source, rather than possibly diluted by its presence among a thousand pages packed with the distractions of poems by more than one hundred fellow poets.

Nevertheless, the anthology allows readers to easily and more economically become familiar with an abundance of poets, and its benefits include the opportunity for readers to determine a poet’s place, chronologically and contextually, among others who might be regarded as contemporaries or peers. Ideally, the poetry anthology serves as a perfect sampler from which readers select an array of contributors for further investigation in the poets’ individual collections of work.

Furthermore, one wonders how the issue of exposure through anthology publication has been altered nowadays by the widespread availability of poems online at websites like the Academy of American Poets or, ironically, the Poetry Foundation (publisher of Poetry magazine), which includes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” among its roster of T.S. Eliot’s poems.

Best of the Web: Top Poetry Blogs, "One Poet's Notes"

I am pleased to announce another recognition for “One Poet’s Notes,” the editor’s blog for Valparaiso Poetry Review. The Daily Reviewer has named “One Poet’s Notes” among its “top poetry blogs.” The Daily Reviewer selection committee reports their process includes sifting “through thousands of blogs daily to present the world's best writers,” and that it considers blogs chosen for distinction as ones that are “authoritative on their respective niche topics and are widely read. To be included in The Daily Reviewer is a mark of excellence.” As mentioned in previous posts when “One Poet’s Notes” has received similar positive attention, such rankings admittedly can be subjective and incomplete. Nevertheless, I am impressed by the good company of so many other blogs I regularly visit for enjoyment and enlightenment about poetry or other topics concerning writing and the arts, including The Best American Poetry, Harriet: The Blog, Poet Hound, Poetic Asides, Poetry Foundation.Org, Poetry News, Poets.Org, Silliman’s Blog, They Shoot Poet’s—Don’t They?, World Class Poetry Blog, and a number of others. The Daily Reviewer advises “One Poet’s Notes” also received consideration due to high recommendations received from the blog’s readers. Once more, I thank visitors to “One Poet’s Notes” for their continued support of Valparaiso Poetry Review and this editor’s blog.

Celebrating Composition of the U.S. Constitution

On September 17, 1787, the United States Constitution was signed, changing the course of history. In a speech written for the occasion by Benjamin Franklin praising the convention members for coming together to compose a unified statement, he declared: “I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.” Although the language contained in the document does not achieve the poetic levels seen at times in the Declaration of Independence, the words represent an amazing example of conscientiousness, commitment, and compromise written by a committee despite often-contentious debate and disagreement. The memorable preamble of the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

John Ashbery Presentation at NBCC Anniversary Ceremony

In Sunday’s post at “One Poet’s Notes” I discussed the celebration in New York City of the National Book Critics Circle Board’s 35th anniversary, and I noted John Ashbery’s participation since his book of poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the recipient of the first NBCC book award for poetry. I am pleased to see Ashbery’s prepared remarks are now available on a video, and I offer it here for all to view. He is introduced by Rigoberto Gonzalez, an NBCC board member.

Best of the Net 2009 Nominations: VPR

Sundress Publications is again accepting nominations of poems published in online journals (between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009) for its annual “Best of the Net” anthology. As I have observed in the past, the editors of Sundress deserve praise for continuing to draw greater recognition to the presence of quality writing online.

In previous posts to “One Poet’s Notes,” I have expressed my high regard for every poem among those listed in the table of contents for each issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR, many of whom I have come to know well and have admired over the years. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge and accept occasions that allow some of VPR’s deserving poets an opportunity to reach a larger audience through special recognition or possible inclusion in an anthology.

Therefore, I have decided once more to adhere to the process I followed when making past nominations, which includes noting the numerous comments (concerning poems appearing in VPR’s pair of recent issues) that I have received in correspondence from readers or submitting poets throughout the past twelve months. In this manner, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in the two issues of Volume X (Fall/Winter 2008-2009 and Spring/Summer 2009), which are eligible for the upcoming 2009 edition of the Sundress “Best of the Net” anthology.

Aided by those observations from VPR’s readers, I offer the editors of Sundress six poems for consideration selected from the two issues in Volume X of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:

SPRING/SUMMER 2009 (Volume X, Number 2)

Ingrid Wendt: “Armistice”
Pam Bernard: “War Work”
Kay Mullen: “You Ask Why I Left”

FALL/WINTER 2008-2009 (Volume X, Number 1)

Elise Paschen: “Moving In”
J.P. Dancing Bear: “Chiroptera”
Al Maginnes: “The Moon as Absence and Desire”

I offer my congratulations to the nominated poets. At the same time I express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this last year, as well as in past years. I also hope this post encourages readers to continue communicating their feedback on writings in the journal, commentary I always enjoy receiving. Indeed, I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers during a decade of publication, which will be celebrated with a special tenth anniversary issue of VPR next month. Readers are urged to check the blog sidebar for details about the upcoming issue’s contents.

National Book Critics Circle Board 35th Anniversary and John Ashbery

Last night the National Book Critics Circle Board celebrated its 35th anniversary with a gathering in New York City that featured John Ashbery and E.L. Doctorow, winners of the first NBCC Awards for poetry and fiction in 1974—Ashbery had been recognized for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Doctorow received his award for Ragtime. Fortunately, the 35th anniversary proceedings were available on a live webcast presented by the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space for all viewers to enjoy.

Indeed, I viewed the event in widescreen clarity on my laptop while sitting in a wicker rocker on my backyard screen porch facing a line of trees half a nation away from the setting. Drinking coffee and eating delicious chocolate cake my wife had baked, I must have been more comfortable than those actually attending the ceremony, who seemed to be repeatedly shifting their positions upon generic metal and hard plastic seats as they witnessed nearly two hours of speeches or brief commentaries by the pair of honored guests and a couple dozen present or former board members, all anticipating an opportunity for refreshments.

During the evening, mixed emotions were expressed by a number of participants about an apparent shift of book reviewing from newspapers to online venues in the past decade. Herb Liebowitz, former board member and editor of Parnassus, succinctly declared the concern shared by others when he asked: “Will bloggers replace book reviewers? I hope not.” Some speakers, including Doctorow, voiced distinctly negative reactions to recent developments online, as well as trepidation about literary commentary and book blogs.

However, Ashbery professed a bit more optimism about the future in his gracious remarks, suggesting online journals and literary blogs were not necessarily bad for poetry. To the contrary, he stated his belief that such Internet presences had engendered a situation nowadays in which new and larger audiences were continually being introduced to poetry.

Although I appreciated listening to the history of the National Book Critics Circle as revealed through anecdotes offered by various board members, my mind kept returning to the fact that thirty-five years had passed since the release of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a volume that has been a significant influence for many poets and a collection that has been a personal favorite of mine. Even Ashbery appeared uneasy being reminded how long ago the book had been published, humorously beginning his comments: “I don’t need that ‘thirty-five years ago.’ What can you do?”

Currently at Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors (where readers will find live-blogging of the activities and the webcast will be available for viewing), Maureen N. McLane presents an essay in retrospect of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Additionally, I invite readers to visit elsewhere on “One Poet’s Notes” (“John Ashbery: ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’”) where I have written about the collection’s title poem and discussed my own personal associations with the book through my experiences as Ashbery’s student at the time of its release.

Update (9/15/09): Video of John Ashbery’s presentation at the National Book Critics Circle Board anniversary ceremony is now available.

[Readers will find additional articles concerning John Ashbery on “One Poet’s Notes” in the following posts: “Crossing John Ashbery’s Bridge,” “John Ashbery: ‘Interesting People of Newfoundland,’” “John Ashbery: ‘Forties Flick,’” “John Ashbery, Pierre Martory, and Jackson Pollock,” “John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter,” “Poet of the Year: John Ashbery,” “John Ashbery: ‘My Philosophy of Life,’” and “Poetry, Painting, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery.”]

Remembering 9/11: Stanley Plumly's "'The Morning America Changed'"

As we recall today the events of September 11, 2001, I thought the following poem by Stanley Plumly would be appropriate to bring again to readers’ attention. “’The Morning America Changed’” first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and it was later published in Plumly’s excellent 2007 collection of poems, Old Heart (W.W. Norton). Although eight years have now passed since the terrible incidents of that infamous day, Stanley Plumly’s fine poem still resonates with its intimacy and immediacy, and its lines remind me once more of the intense rush of emotional reactions caused by those images seen on television screens all around the world.

“THE MORNING AMERICA CHANGED”

Happened in the afternoon at Villa Serbelloni. 

We’d closed up shop on the work for the day 

and decided to make the long descent down 

the elegant stone switchback path into Bellagio 

for coffee and biscotti. It was still Tuesday 

and a quarter to three and a good quarter hour 

to the exit gate or if you stopped to look 

at the snow on the Alps or at “the deepest 

lake in all of Italy” or looked both ways 

at once—as we say crossing a street—five, 

ten minutes longer. This day was longer 

because it was especially, if redundantly, 

beautiful, with the snow shining and the lake 

shining and the big white boats shining 

with tourists from Tremezzo and Varenna. 

And the herring gulls and swallows at different 

layers, shining like mica in the mountain rock. 

And the terra cotta tiles of the village roofs 

almost shining, almost close enough to touch. 

Judith was already in the pasticceria 

and I was looking skyward on Via Garibaldi, 

the one-way traffic lane circling the town, 

when I heard the rain in the distance breaking 

and then her voice through the window calling 

and then on the tiny screen inside 

pillars of fire pouring darkly into clouds. 




—Stanley Plumly 


Richard O'Connell: "Voladores"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Richard O’Connell’s’s “Voladores,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2006-2007 issue (Volume VIII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Richard O’Connell has authored a number of collections of poetry, including RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press. His poems also have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, The Formalist, Margie, National Review, The New Yorker, Texas Review, and elsewhere.

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.

Philip Levine's "What Work Is" on Labor Day

Philip Levine received the National Book Award in 1991 for his volume of poems titled What Work Is. For decades, Levine had been associated with the working class, particularly those blue-collar workers in factories and on the assembly lines of the hometown Detroit he knew as a young man in the 1930s and 1940s. What Work Is seemed to reaffirm and solidify such a perception of Levine, at least for a significant body of poems that addressed the subjects of poverty and substandard workplace conditions for many laborers. Levine has explained in interviews how he obtained firsthand knowledge at the early age of fourteen as a factory worker during World War II, when older able-bodied men were away at war and teenagers were employed in plants supplying materials for the battlefront. Indeed, a powerful poem, “Growth,” from the 1991 collection begins: “In the soap factory where I worked / when I was fourteen, I spoke to / no one and only one man spoke / to me and then to command me / to wheel the little cars of damp chips / into the ovens.”

David Baker—in a review of Philip Levine’s What Work Is that first appeared in Kenyon Review and is reprinted in Baker’s fine book of criticism, Heresy and the Ideal (University of Arkansas Press, 2000)—describes Levine’s poetry as often being populated by individuals who “have been betrayed by the false promise of the American Dream. They have been beaten into slavery by the dehumanizing agency of capitalism.” In fact, Baker praises What Work Is as possibly “one of the signal books of our time. Poem after poem confronts the terribly damaged conditions of American labor. Further, Levine insists on attending to the particularities of personality and character, on seeing distinction in the face of blurring abuse, and on demanding the restorative authority of song wrenched out of the pain and grime of such detail.”

Earlier this year Americans witnessed the emergence of news concerning the bankruptcy at General Motors, one of the companies where Levine once worked on the assembly line. Therefore, on this Labor Day, I thought perhaps readers would find interest in listening to Levine recite his title poem, “What Work Is,” and explain a personal emotional experience that fed his anger and frustration about the situations in which many poor workers and unemployed citizens frequently find themselves. The text of the poem follows:

WHAT WORK IS

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Additionally, visitors are invited to read other posts at “One Poet’s Notes” about Philip Levine: “Reading Philip Levine at Mother’s Day,” “Edgar Degas and Philip Levine,” “Philip Levine on His 80th Birthday,” and “Philip Levine: Breath.”

Richard Poirier Description of Robert Frost

A little more than a week ago I commented in a post at An Author’s Assemblage on the passing of Richard Poirier, one of our finest literary critics, and I quoted comments from a remembrance published in the New York Times. Today, as I prepared for class discussion on Robert Frost in my Twentieth Century American Poetry course, I recalled one of my favorite descriptions of Frost written by Richard Poirier. The words were included as a brief preface to an interview of the poet by Poirier for the Paris Review in 1961, a conversation that was later collected in Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Penguin Books, 1989), edited by George Plimpton. Indeed, in some manner a few of the observations by Poirier, which begin by him discussing specifics about his meeting with Frost, are as interesting as many of the details within the content of the interview:

“Mr. Frost came into the front room of his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, casually dressed, wearing high plaid slippers, offering greetings with a quiet, even diffident friendliness. But there was no mistaking the evidence of the enormous power of his personality. It made you at once aware of the thick, compacted strength of the body, even then at eighty-six; it was apparent in his face, actually too alive and spontaneously expressive to be as ruggedly heroic as in his photographs.

“The impression of massiveness, far exceeding his physical size, wasn’t separable from the public image he created and preserved. That this image was invariably associated with popular conceptions of New England was no simple matter of his own geographical preferences. New England is of course evoked in the scenes and titles of many of his poems and, more importantly, in his Emersonian tendencies, including his habit of contradicting himself, his capacity to ‘unsay’ through the sound of his voice what his words seem to assert. His special resemblance to New England, however, was that he, like it, had managed to impose upon the world a wholly self-created image. It was not the critics who defined him, it was Frost himself. He stood talking for a few minutes in the middle of the room, his remarkably ample, tousled white hair catching the late afternoon sun reflected off the snow in the road outside, and one wondered for a moment how he had managed over so long a life never to let his self-portrait be altered despite countless exposures to light less familiar and unintimidating. In the public world he resisted countless chances to lose himself in some particular fashion, some movement, like the Georgians, or even in an area of his own work which, to certain critics or readers, happened for the moment to appear more exotically colorful than the whole. In one of the most revealing parts of this interview, he said of certain of his poems that he didn’t ‘want them out,’ the phrase itself, since all the poems involved have been published, offering an astonishing, even peculiar, evidence of the degree to which he felt in control of his poetic character. It indicated, too, his awareness that attempts to define him as a tragic philosophical poet of man and nature could be more constricting, because more painfully meaningful to him, than the simpler definitions they were designed to correct.

“More specifically, he seemed at various points to find the most immediate threat to his freedom in the tape recorder. Naturally, for a man both voluble and often mischievous in his recollections, Frost did not like the idea of being stuck, as he necessarily would be, with attitudes expressed in two hours of conversation. As an aggravation of this, he knew no transcript taken from the tape could catch the subtleties of voice which give life and point to many of his statements. At a pause in the interview, Mr. Robert O’Clair, a friend and colleague at Harvard who had agreed to sit in as a sort of witness, admitted that we knew very little about running a tape recorder. Frost, who’d moved from his chair to see its workings, readily agreed. ‘Yes, I noticed that,’ he laughed, ‘and I respect you for it,’ adding at once—and this is the point of the story—that ‘they,’ presumably the people ‘outside,’ ‘like to hear me say nasty things about machines.’ A thoroughly supple knowledge of the ways in which the world tried to take him and a confidence that his own ways were more just and liberating was apparent here and everywhere in the conversation.

“Frost was seated most of the time in a blue overstuffed chair which he had bought to write in. It had no arms, he began, and this left him the room he needed.”

W.H. Auden: "September 1, 1939"

On the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland by Germany and the opening of World War II, perhaps today presents the perfect time to revisit W.H. Auden’s famous poem, “September 1, 1939,” written in the immediate aftermath of those events. The piece appeared in The New Republic in October of 1939, and it was included in Auden’s 1940 collection of poetry, Another Time, published by Random House. Although this poem has been a favorite of many readers ever since, it received particular renewed attention in the days after September 11 in 2001, and not just for the uncanny superficial similarities in lines like the following: “The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night.”

However, we also know Auden became disenchanted with his own poem soon after its publication. Auden attempted editing the work from the very start, omitting a couple of stanzas even before its publication and later changing one of the poem’s most memorable lines, which Auden concluded displayed “dishonesty”: “We must love one another or die” became “We must love one another and die.” Auden eventually revised the poem by deleting the stanza containing that line. Finally, still unhappy with the language, he tried to limit reprinting of the poem altogether by refusing almost all requests for its inclusion in anthologies.

One reason for Auden’s change of heart about this poem could be a personal shift in political perspective on his part as he moved from England to the United States and drifted away from his earlier stance as one sympathetic to socialism, adopting more concern for religion as well. The poem also attracted criticism from some readers for what they perceived as too easy an explanation for horrible actions, if not an excuse for evil behavior, in lines such as the following: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Nevertheless, as evidenced by the work’s enduring stature seventy years after its composition despite Auden’s attempts to erase it from his body of work, and as witnessed in the poem’s recent popularity after 9/11, most readers have responded well to the poetry, even if many apparently seem to misread some of its elements. As Adam Gopnik has written in The New Yorker (“The Double Man”: September 23, 2002): “‘September 1, 1939,’ far from being a call to renewed conscience after a period of drift, is actually a call to irony and apolitical retreat, a call not to answer any call. But, past a certain point, poets can’t be misread, not by an entire time, no more than an entire family can misread a father: the homecoming noises in the hallway are the man; the accumulated impression is the poet. What matters is the sound he makes. Auden’s emotional tone is our tone, even if his meanings are not always our meanings.”

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H. Auden