Fat Tuesday: Elizabeth Bishop's "Pink Dog"

On this Fat Tuesday, the following poem by Elizabeth Bishop, the last she completed before her death in 1979, seems most appropriate. “Pink Dog” is a marvelously satirical piece that camouflages its social criticism with witty and playful language, even in its heavy use of rhyme and the appearance of a couple innovatively teasing line breaks. Bishop contrasts the superficiality and excess of Rio’s Carnival atmosphere with the disturbing treatment of the growing numbers of poor or other people throughout the city who exist at society’s margins.

As Brett C. Millier reports in her biography of Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (University of California Press, 1993), “Pink Dog” was begun by Bishop in 1963; however, due to her well-known care and caution when writing poetry, the work was not ready for publication until 1979. Indeed, Millier writes: “Although it was not finished until 1979—it was the last poem Elizabeth finished—‘Pink Dog’ dates from the Carnival season of 1963 and expresses her growing disaffection with Brazil’s poverty, finding irony even in the people’s good spirits.” Millier continues to suggest that another theme readers should take away from the poem concerns “a good deal of ambivalence about femaleness as well.”

In fact, a number of critics have commented upon the metaphorical implications offered by Bishop’s presentation of the naked body of the dog in the poem. As Bonnie Costello observed in Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Harvard University Press, 1991): “In ‘Pink Dog’ she urges a costume on a naked dog (a dehumanized image of the body) for the sake of its survival in a culture that wishes to deny the mortal body. The poet writes from the margin, on the divide between culture and nature, a creature of both. It is her empathy for the pink dog, her own sense of marginality, that provokes her terrible advice. In a culture which abhors the body’s mutability, disguise is the only alternative to expulsion of annihilation. The dog in us must be dressed up and taught to dance if it is to be tolerated at all. Carnival is now the expression not of freedom but of repression.”

PINK DOG

Rio de Janeiro


The sun is blazing and the sky is blue.
Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.
Naked, you trot across the avenue.

Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!
Naked and pink, without a single hair . . .
Startled, the passersby draw back and stare.

Of course they’re mortally afraid of rabies.
You are not mad; you have a case of scabies
but look intelligent. Where are your babies?

(A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.)
In what slum have you hidden them, poor bitch,
while you go begging, living by your wits?

Didn’t you know? It’s been on all the papers,
to solve the problem, how they deal with beggars?
They take and throw them in the tidal rivers.

Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites
go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights
out in the suburbs, where there are no lights.

If they do this to anyone who begs,
drugged, drunk, or sober, with or without legs,
what would they do to sick, four-leggéd dogs?

In the cafés and on the sidewalk corners
the joke is going round that all the beggars
who can afford them now wear life preservers.

In your condition you would not be able
even to float, much less to dog-paddle.
Now look, the practical, the sensible

solution is to wear a fantasia.
Tonight you simply can’t afford to be a-
n eyesore. But no one will ever see a

dog in mascara this time of year.
Ash Wednesday’ll come but Carnival is here.
What sambas can you dance? What will you wear?

They say that Carnival’s degenerating
—radios, Americans, or something,
have ruined it completely. They’re just talking.

Carnival is always wonderful!
A depilated dog would not look well.
Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!

—Elizabeth Bishop

Readers also are invited to examine previous posts in “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Elizabeth Bishop: “‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetic Voice: Reconciling Influences’ by Laura Ebberson,” “Jennifer Yaros: ‘Nature and the Self: Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver,’” and “Elizabeth Bishop: The Poet’s Voice.”

Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns

Much has been made this weekend on writers’ individual blogs or email literary lists about the content and tenor of David Orr’s valuable and thought-provoking article in the New York Times, “The Great(ness) Game.” Some of the online commentary has focused upon questioning ambiguous definitions of “greatness” or the accuracy in Orr’s portrait of contemporary poetry, particularly his perceptions of college writing programs and a tendency toward careerism evident among those in the current community of authors. As with Orr’s essay, all of the opinions I have seen online so far have been interesting and insightful, have engendered discussion or debate, and have initiated some serious reflection.

At the same time, I have been thinking about my course on twentieth-century poetry that I again will be teaching in the fall. For the past few years I haven’t taught the class, since the university recently had instituted a new creative writing major and I was asked to concentrate on creative writing workshops during the first years of the major. Considering a return to teaching Twentieth-Century Poetry, I reexamined the course syllabus this week, wondering what additions or subtractions I might make, and pleasantly discovered once more an impressive depth of talent demonstrated by the chronicle of twentieth-century American poetry.

Moreover, after reading Orr’s article, especially his apparent suggestion that today’s poets are limited by producing works in the shadow of a generation of greatness—exemplified in Orr’s piece by John Ashbery, my own former teacher—and effectively diminishing their own output, I decided to isolate that chronological section of twentieth-century American poets to which Ashbery belongs. If one designs an admittedly artificial guideline for a generation as those born within a period of twenty years, and if everyone agrees for sake of the argument that modernism reached a pinnacle about 1923—upon publication of Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and the composition of early Cantos by Ezra Pound in 1922, as well as release of Spring and All by William Carlos Williams, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, and a first edition of Selected Poems by Robert Frost in 1923—while sowing the seeds for the beginning of post-modernism may have coincided with the World War II years, then an arbitrary but convenient two-decade stretch of time to study might be 1923-1943.

When I review my course syllabus for this segment of the past century, I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

If my math skill has not eluded me, this compilation of poets comes to fifty individuals. Readers could disagree about the greatness of any single poet listed above. Even talk about Orr’s example of Ashbery would create contentious conversation among some. However, looking back upon their record of accomplishments from the present position, the collective greatness of this generation’s poetry most likely would be indisputable in the minds of today’s readers.

Obviously, many would legitimately offer that the greatest generation of American poetry to arrive since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson earlier fostered the art in the nineteenth century occurred during a wave of poets born in the 1870s and 1880s who swept into prominence in a period at the start of the twentieth century—the Ezra Pound (born in 1885) era that also included T.S. Eliot (1888), Robert Frost (1874), Wallace Stevens (1879), and William Carlos Williams (1883). Nevertheless, it would be difficult to argue against the 1923-1943 combined group above as a pool of poets that represents a great generation of poetry.

Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others. Indeed, as David Orr indicates, the strong influence of these poets still lingers into this premier decade of the twenty-first century.

David Orr also contends contemporary poets continually swayed by the writing styles of these previous figures have not yet developed their own sense of greatness. Therefore, Orr wonders whether, “for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness.” A portion of Orr’s intriguing explanation makes a certain amount of sense, especially coming just one week after the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, perhaps resembling a typical business convention more and more each year, again drew thousands of poets to its venue in the Chicago Hilton:

Greatness isn’t simply a matter of potentially confusing concepts; it’s also a practical question about who gets to decide what about whom. Our assumptions about poetic greatness are therefore linked to the reputation-making structures of the poetry world—and changes in those structures can have peculiar effects on our thinking. For most of the 20th century, the poetry world resembled a country club. One had to know the right people; one had to study with the right mentors. The system began to change after the G.I. Bill was introduced (making a university-level poetic education possible for more people), and that change accelerated in the 1970s, as creative writing programs began to flourish. In 1975, there were 80 such programs; by 1992, there were more than 500, and the accumulated weight of all these credentialed poets began to put increasing pressure on poetry’s old system of personal relationships and behind-the-scenes logrolling. It would be a mistake to call today’s poetry world a transparent democracy (that whirring you hear is the sound of logs still busily being rolled), but it’s more democratic than it used to be—and far more middle class. It’s more of a guild now than a country club. This change has brought with it certain virtues, like greater professionalism and courtesy. One could argue that it also made the poetry world more receptive to writers like Bishop, whose style is less hoity-toity than, say, Eliot’s. But the poetry world has also acquired new vices, most notably a tedious careerism that encourages poets to publish early and often (the Donald Hall essay I mentioned earlier is largely a criticism of this very tendency). Consequently, it’s not hard to feel nostalgic for the way things used to be; or at least, the way we imagine they used to be. And this nostalgia often manifests as a preference for a particular kind of “greatness.”

Based upon Orr’s description and his observation about a perceived lack of greatness or unique ambition in particular younger poets, some might suggest a pessimistic outlook for American poetry. However, just as I believe the profile of American poetry may have shifted in the last century from a focus on the greatness of individual figures to an additional and equally important glimpse at the greatness of a collective generation of contributors, I view the new model of American poetry in the future as one that will prove even more inclusive and democratic, concentrated not only in the powerful works of a few individuals, but also in the strength of the whole production of poetry by the nation’s poets. As a larger number of folks write accomplished or well-crafted poetry, whether due to studies in university programs or the increased access to online writing communities and publications, maybe a new paradigm of greatness will present itself, though the word “greatness” suddenly may seem somewhat inappropriate.

As Daisy Fried states in a forum discussion, “Ambition and Greatness,” that appeared in the March 2005 issue of Poetry and is cited by David Orr in his article: “One of the delights of contemporary poetry is that there are as many ways of being great as there are of being ambitious. I’m not arguing against making distinctions. I like saying what I like and loathe. I’ll say why I think any poet is good or bad. I’m not particularly interested in persuading anyone to agree with me; it’s hard enough getting people to like my own poems. When I read I don’t ask myself, ‘Is this great?’ I look to see if something interesting is going on, hopefully something I don’t quite understand, something I need to figure out. Is that looking for ambition?”

In the same discussion, Jeredith Merrin adds: “This isn’t merely a matter of vocabulary: dramatic changes in our understanding of physical reality mean shifts in our ethical and emotional relationships to the world. Ambitious new work need not be ‘about’ physics, of course; and the juice of poetry remains in the homely details—Williams’s woman munching her plums. But writers stuck in Romantic or even twentieth-century assumptions can’t do the present job. Poetry (to allude to Frost) stays vital, necessary, ‘great,’ by giving accurate accounts of the altering weather—both ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’”

Perhaps Adam Kirsch rightly hinted at one problem with considering greatness in contemporary poetry: “If we look at poets of our day who seem likely to earn and sustain the name of great—I would think right away of Derek Walcott and the late Czeslaw Milosz—it is obvious that even the great poets are no longer interested in greatness, at least not in the sense that Milton or Keats were. After the world wars, communism, and fascism, there is a drastic mistrust in all intellectual fields of naive, triumphal humanism, of universal claims that disguise personal interests and assumptions. For a poet like Milosz, greatness consists not in self-assertion but in self-abnegation, not in mastery but in witnessing. This is a more modest and self-suspicious ideal, which may recoil from the very name of greatness, even as it retains the old ambition that defines the word—in Milton's formula, to create something that time will not willingly let die.”

One can blend the three comments by Fried, Merrin, and Kirsch to create a more complete understanding about the concerns contemporary poets and critics sometimes have with the use of certain terms, the uneasy relationship a number of them recognize between concepts of greatness or ambition and the current distrust by some for such labels, at least as they have been seen employed in the past. As the image above of an ancient muse reading words on a scroll might remind us, today’s readers also ought to consider it a bit risky to regard greatness in any specific contemporary poet since, as we all know, such a judgment is tenuous at best until tested by the passage of time and critically attested by forthcoming generations of readers as worthy of acclaim. Already, I look forward to “making distinctions,” as Daisy Fried phrased it, and exploring further all these issues about greatness with the students in my Twentieth-Century Poetry course next semester, fall 2009, when we will be able at least to claim we have distanced ourselves a decade from the end of the previous century.

Best of the Web: Valparaiso Poetry Review

I am pleased to announce that Dan Wickett of Dzanc Books has recently notified me a poem from Valparaiso Poetry Review has been chosen for inclusion in their upcoming anthology publication, Best of the Web 2009 (guest-edited by Lee K. Abbott), scheduled for release in July. Elise Paschen’s “Hive,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, was selected from among many hundreds of nominations of literary works across the entire spectrum of online magazines eligible for consideration.

The Best of the Web anthology series was started last year by Dzanc Books as an effort to spotlight excellent literature published in online journals. I was happy at the time to report two poems that first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review—“Prophet Township” by Jared Carter and “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea” by Frannie Lindsay—were honored by being chosen for publication alongside nearly sixty other works in that initial anthology of the series. I also was grateful to be able to add that one of my poems, “Island Fever,” which first appeared in Apple Valley Review, received a nomination from that journal’s editor, Leah Browning, and it was selected for inclusion in the Best of the Web 2008 anthology.

As I have mentioned previously, I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in Valparaiso Poetry Review. Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the anthology’s editors to bring attention to the growing number of fine works being published in online journals by selecting individual pieces for praise. Also, I am pleased when an opportunity arises for one of VPR’s splendid poets like Elise Paschen to reach a larger audience and find the greater recognition she deserves through inclusion in the anthology. Consequently, I congratulate Elise Paschen on the selection of her wonderful poem for this honor, and I thank her once more for her contributions to Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Also, I wish to take this opportunity to express again my appreciation to all whose works have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review during this last year, as well as in the past nine years of the journal’s publication. I hope this latest bit of good news for the journal serves to encourage further submissions of high quality to VPR by many poets. Additionally, I am grateful for all the ongoing support and positive feedback Valparaiso Poetry Review and “One Poet’s Notes” have received from visitors to both locations, and I am confident they can look forward to much more fine work in the future from other contributors to VPR, which I hope readers will find equally as entertaining, engaging, and enlightening.

Readers will find further information about the Best of the Web anthology series and Dzanc Books by visiting the publisher’s web site. In addition, more poetry by Paschen can be found in the current issue of VPR. As well, visitors are invited to examine an interview I conducted with Elise Paschen for Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Rebecca Dunham: "Two Photographs"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Rebecca Dunham’s “Two Photographs,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2005-2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Rebecca Dunham’s first collection of poetry, The Miniature Room, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was published by Truman State University Press in 2006. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary journals, including Agni, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner. Rebecca Dunham is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Readers also will find a review of The Miniature Room in a previous post at “One Poet’s Notes.”

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.

Indiana Basketball, Homer Drew, and "Jumpshots in the Dark"

Readers of “One Poet’s Notes” are aware this site serves as the editor’s blog for Valparaiso Poetry Review, an online journal hosted by Valparaiso University. With its location in Indiana, the university’s identity in sports naturally focuses on basketball. After all, throughout the state communities have long regarded winter as the season when news of high school basketball games dominates not only the sports sections of local papers, but often also front page headlines. In Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana, Phillip M. Hoose describes the environment: “In Hoosierland, the pulse of winter life is the high school team, the Sabbath is Friday night, and the temple is your home gym. It’s a place where you grew up, a room where, if you really had to, you could find your parents, and where you can look after your children. It’s a place that others call ‘the snake pit,’ or ‘the lion’s den,’ but for you it’s a place to gather with most of the people you know for a common, assumed, unspoken purpose: to root.”

Easily, the images most associated with the ardor folks in Indiana hold for basketball are contained in the movie Hoosiers. Although the film features a fictional little town in a time past, the narrative arrives as a version of the legendary run to the state boys basketball championship by the small rural town high school of Milan in 1954. Perhaps the height of Hoosier Hysteria happened decades later in 1990 when Damon Bailey’s Bedford North Lawrence High School team won the state championship in a dramatic game before 41,000 spectators at the Indianapolis Hoosier Dome, while ESPN televised the event to millions more.

Despite the university’s position in Valparaiso, the town’s high school basketball history is similar to that of hundreds of other towns in the state, and a passion for basketball exists here as well. In fact, during the 1994 season the Valparaiso High School basketball team experienced a magical stretch as they swept through the regular schedule undefeated, worked their way past the sectionals and regionals in dramatic fashion, and eventually played for the state championship in the Hoosier Dome before falling in overtime to South Bend Clay. Many of us in town followed the team throughout the season, caravans of automobiles driving to away games, and we knew with every contest we were witnessing something special.

Indeed, the closing minutes of regulation of the championship game, when Valparaiso lost a lead to a last second three-point shot after seemingly assured of victory, are often replayed by memory and the coaching strategy debated in coffee shops by those of us who attended the game. Similarly, we argue the state’s switch to class basketball in the years since then. Many believe, as I do, the change ruined much of the enthusiasm and uniqueness of the single statewide tournament that gained fame throughout the country, and we regret the tremendous excitement felt in the past will not be experienced by those growing up now.

The star player of that Valparaiso High School team, Bryce Drew, was named Indiana’s Mr. Basketball, but just as importantly also won the Trestor Award, treasured by many since it is given to the player in the basketball finals who excels in mental attitude, scholarship, leadership, and athletic ability. Most of us in the local area already had followed Bryce since he was a freshman and frequently the smallest player on the court, and we had seen him struggle through health problems due to a heart condition causing irregular beats that demanded a series of surgeries. Indeed, I recall watching a game when he would stop by the side of the court while play continued around him, pausing to gather himself a minute before resuming.

Bryce had come to Valparaiso because his father, Homer, had accepted the head-coaching job at the university. Previously, Homer had coached a dozen years at smaller Indiana colleges, Bethel and Indiana University-South Bend, with great success; however, Valparaiso University presented a serious challenge he was willing to accept, and the university seemed a perfect fit for Homer and his family. Since the university had elevated its basketball program to Division I in the 1978-79 season, the school’s win-loss records were abysmal, never even reaching the .500 level. Therefore, by the time Homer Drew took the reins in 1988-89, lifting the basketball program to the highest division appeared to many to have been a doubtful decision by the university administration.

Nevertheless, Drew moved forward with optimism and quickly changed the tone, beating a top-20 ranked Notre Dame team with an undersized and inexperienced group in the first home sellout. Indeed, I still can see myself in a You Tube video of the game, sitting behind the Notre Dame bench, listening as Digger Phelps assured his players there was no way they would lose, and then watching the stunned expressions on their faces as the underdog Valpo team tied the score at the buzzer in regulation and won in overtime.

Homer’s squads improved gradually, especially when he skillfully recruited his own son to join the team. The atmosphere of Hoosier Hysteria connected to Indiana high school basketball always had seeped into the setting at university games, and it still did; however, Valparaiso University’s basketball team became a perennial leader in its conference and began to make appearances in the NCAA tournament, even establishing an indelible mark in the March Madness highlights when Bryce Drew hit a memorable last-second shot to lead the team to an upset victory that placed them in the Sweet Sixteen in 1998. Still today, whenever I am at writers’ conferences and attendees spot my affiliation on a nametag, they oftentimes will begin conversation by recalling “the shot” that made Valparaiso University famous to many watching the tournament on television more than ten years ago.

Last Friday I originally had intended to attend another writers’ conference, the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) in Chicago; however, for a couple of reasons my plans changed, and instead I was able to be present at the university basketball game that evening. I even hosted a relative visiting from out of state. Like many faculty members at Valparaiso, I have had basketball season tickets for more than twenty years, though I sit with my father-in-law—a life-long Hoosier and an expert on Indiana high school basketball—in a section filled with local townspeople rather than university staff and an area that is comfortably reminiscent of the bleachers at the high school. I have seen most of the games Homer Drew has coached since 1988, and fortunately, Friday evening I witnessed Homer win his 600th basketball game, a feat accomplished only by a little more than 30 coaches in the history of Division I basketball.

Therefore, today Valparaiso Poetry Review and I salute Homer Drew for his accomplishment and for the contributions he has made over the years as a member of Valparaiso University and a citizen in the local community. Few figures in sport have his impeccable image as a courteous and considerate gentleman or the great respect from his peers that Homer commands. His Midwestern values of hard work and a positive attitude, combined with faith and an unending encouragement for the underdog, reflect the best characteristics tied to Indiana communities and their special regard for basketball at all levels.

Perhaps today, as a nod to Homer Drew, the following poem by Daniel Henry, with its mix of Indiana basketball and poetic allusions, published in the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, would be an appropriate work for reintroduction to readers:

JUMPSHOTS IN THE DARK

Winter nights in Indiana
we played with gloves
in my driveway cleared of snow,
high school games
on the radio.
Tonight, breathing hard,
an empty gym in late March,
I gauge each shot
by cracks in that driveway
sold years ago;
I clang all of them,
spin the turnaround
off the base of the rim,
run down the ball
to keep it
from crossing black lines.

There are sweeping metaphors
to be drawn here;
talk about continuity,
about loss and the chase
of a ball—I could say I make
most long set shots
after whispering lines of poetry;
it would be true and irrelevant,
true and useless.

I feel too old now for metaphors;
there is, always, a soft bounce
back into my hands, and when
I am distracted by love
or Stafford or Merwin,
the long sweet
snap/swish/bounce
somewhere off in the darkness.

—Daniel Henry

Daytona 500, NASCAR, Tom Wolfe, and American Literature

This afternoon, weather permitting, a grandstand crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands will be joined by tens of millions of television viewers as NASCAR begins its new season with the Daytona 500, a race often considered the sport’s Super Bowl. Along with the first major league baseball players reporting to spring training camps this weekend, “speed week” at Daytona represents the unofficial beginning of the new spring season for many sports fans across the country.

The initial Daytona 500 race occurred at the speedway on February 22, 1959 in front of a crowd of about 40,000 and the prize money totaled less than $70,000. Now, fifty years later NASCAR rivals all other sports in attendance and riches, with awards for the Daytona 500 approaching $20 million and the winner receiving nearly $2 million.

Forty-three cars, each one whose design matches the aesthetics one might find in modern works of art, will race—bumper-to-bumper, side-by-side, sometimes three or even four wide—at speeds of nearly 200 miles per hour. A quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, though its origin is disputed by many, declares: “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” Whether or not Hemingway spoke those words, the statement’s message of admiration for individuals who literally place their lives on the line as the ultimate test of sport seems clear. Nowhere else in sport does the risk of one’s life become so apparent, and at Daytona the danger exists for the full 500 miles as the racers never escape from one another, tense and focused for hours, always only one mental slip or one mechanical defect away from tragic disaster, from death.

As I noted in a previous post marking last year’s Daytona 500, “Cars, Culture, and Contemporary Poetry,” the automobile has been an essential fixture in American literature throughout the last century. Still, over the years, among the various sports NASCAR has been somewhat ignored by American literature. While many poets and novelists have focused upon other sports—such as baseball, football, golf, tennis, boxing, etc.—in their works, thus far rarely have serious authors examined stock car racing. Although I have written poems about the sport, I have found few others who have included the sport in their material. Only the movies, though usually unsuccessfully, have attempted to portray NASCAR more completely a number of times. Perhaps with the sport’s newfound explosion of popularity during the last decade and a fan base now extending beyond its traditional southern roots into a nationwide phenomenon, as chronicled in the recent book by NASCAR reporter Liz Clarke (One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation: Villard, 2008), more writers will find inspiration for literary works in its dramatic actions and the personalities of its actors.

Nevertheless, Tom Wolfe long ago showed himself as one author who recognized early the engaging characteristics of the sport and the appeal evident in some of its characters. In a classic essay first published in the March 1965 issue of Esquire as “Great Balls of Fire” and later included in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965), Wolfe depicted the “good ol’ boy” culture of the South and the sub-culture of moonshiners wishing to outrun Alcohol Tax agents that fostered a desire for fast cars, leading to the first races and the birth of NASCAR.

In his article, recently designated by Esquire as one of its seven greatest stories, Wolfe spotlighted Junior Johnson as an epitome of the sport’s figures, an initial hero for fans and now a NASCAR legend. However, much of Wolfe’s piece emphasized the depth of old boy southern culture tied to the sport, perhaps limiting its appeal for many elsewhere who felt excluded from that particular social sector or who saw the culture as foreign to their own lives. Nevertheless, in the last few decades NASCAR has expanded its appeal to all sections of the nation and grown in popularity more than any other sport, including among women—as evidenced by the book from Liz Clarke. Additionally, if anything demonstrates the distance between those early days of racing taking place in the segregated South described by Tom Wolfe forty-five years ago and the contemporary situation in which we find ourselves, Junior Johnson himself made news in 2008 when he formally endorsed Barack Obama for president and issued a statement encouraging others to support the candidate as well.

Therefore, as the nation turns its eyes toward Daytona International Speedway today, a half century since its first 500 race, I offer this brief excerpt of poetic prose from Tom Wolfe’s important and influential piece with the hope that other authors of fiction and poetry will soon discover this sport as a source of inspiration:

The roar of these engines is impossible to describe. They have a simultaneous rasp, thunder, and rumble that goes right through a body and fills the whole bowl with a noise of internal combustion. Then they start around on two build-up runs, just to build up speed, and then they come around the fourth turn and onto the straightaway in front of the stands at—here, 130 miles an hour, in Atlanta, 160 miles an hour, at Daytona, 180 miles an hour—and the flag goes down and everybody in the infield and in the stands is up on their feet going mad, and suddenly here is a bowl that is one great orgy of everything in the way of excitement and liberation the automobile has meant to Americans. An orgy!

The first lap of a stock-car race is a horrendous, a wildly horrendous spectacle such as no other sport approaches. Twenty, thirty, forty automobiles, each of them weighing almost two tons, 3700 pounds, with 427-cubic-inch engines, 600 horsepower, are practically locked together, side to side and tail to nose, on a narrow band of asphalt at 130, 160, 180 miles an hour, hitting the curves so hard the rubber burns off the tires in front of your eyes. To the driver, it is like being inside a car going down the West Side Highway in New York City at rush hour, only with everybody going literally three to four times as fast, at speeds a man who has gone eighty-five miles an hour down a highway cannot conceive of, and with every other driver an enemy who is willing to cut inside of you, around you or in front of you, or ricochet off your side in the battle to get into a curve first.

Readers will find the entire essay by Tom Wolfe at an Esquire web page celebrating it as one of the magazine’s greatest stories. Also, all are invited again to read my previous article at “One Poet’s Notes” last year on the Daytona 500, the culture of cars, and contemporary poetry.

Robert Penn Warren: "Birth of Love"

On this Valentine’s Day, I’d like to remind all of Robert Penn Warren’s poem, “Birth of Love,” which appeared in his collection, Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1974 (Random House, 1974).

Reminiscent of the Botticelli painting, Birth of Venus (detail pictured above), this poem reflects an individual’s passionate and admiring attention to his beloved. In doing so, it examines the subject of his love and the source of his lust. Robert Penn Warren’s friend and fellow poet, Allen Tate, confided to him that he considered “Birth of Love” one of his favorite poems by Warren. In fact, Tate believed “Birth of Love” the best poem of those from the collection in which it was published, even though that book included a string of Warren’s stronger and laudable poems, such as “The Nature of a Mirror,” “Natural History,” “Blow, West Wind,” “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision,” “Rattlesnake Country,” “Stargazing,” and “There’s a Grandfather’s Clock in the Hall.”

Dave Smith—commenting in a chapter on Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1974 from Homage to Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays (Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc., 1981), edited by Frank Graziano—perceptively advises readers how to approach and understand Robert Penn Warren’s tactics in the composition of his works:

Warren has long considered that it is the responsibility of a poem and of a collection of poems (indeed, in Or Else, he blurs the distinction) to discover coherent meaning. Yet he believes that meaning is dynamic, not static: it shifts constantly, is altered by circumstance and perspective, and needs continual re-focusing. His poems are constructed as tentative, necessarily pragmatic lenses employed not just to see reality but to dramatically experience it while within the drama the intelligence is allowed to sift and comment. Such a poetry places crucial dependence on the image, but the image does not constitute the poetry. If the image is actual experience, whether resurrected from memory or created out of the imagination’s whole cloth, he must still create a form which will tease out the luminous, usually refracted meaning of the image. His construction of the tale causes the image to become the mind’s stepping stones through time and space. But Warren makes a distinction between what we might call the lower and the higher image. The lower image is the literal thing pointed at by words in the line by line movement of the poem. The higher image is the figurative, form-embodied vision that the tale represents.

As readers encounter “Birth of Love,” the narrator elevates a simple situation during which he imaginatively envisions a man watching his lover leave a pond where the two had been swimming. The man delights in her physical beauty, even as it has been altered by time, and he discovers the extent of his love for her. By the close of the poem the language, which had begun with detailed description of the various elements in its setting, literally and figuratively reaches extreme heights in the described scenery of a distant mountain or the first far star of nightfall and in the suggested emotional state of his desire for the woman.

BIRTH OF LOVE

Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky
Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,
From water the color of sky except where
Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver,
Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against
The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness
Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips
With fluent silver. The man,

Some ten strokes out, but now hanging
Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet
Cold with the coldness of depth, all
History dissolving from him, is
Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees

The body that is marked by his use, and Time’s,
Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air,
Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank. Sees
How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is,
And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge down in
The pure curve of their weight and buttocks
Moon up and, in swelling unity,
Are silver and glimmer. Then

The body is erect, she is herself, whatever
Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each hand,
Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but
With face lifted toward the high sky, where
The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star
Yet throbs there. The towel, forgotten,
Does not move now. The gaze
Remains fixed on the sky. The body,

Profiled against the darkness of spruces, seems
To draw to itself, and condense in its whiteness, what light
In the sky yet lingers or, from
The metallic and abstract severity of water, lifts. The body,
With the towel now trailing loose from one hand, is
A white stalk from which the face flowers gravely toward the high sky.
This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits
Of no definition, for it
Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which
Definition might be possible. The woman,

Face yet raised, wraps,
With a motion as though standing in sleep,
The towel about her body, under her breasts, and,
Holding it there hieratic as lost Egypt and erect,
Moves up the path that, stair-steep, winds
Into the clamber and tangle of growth. Beyond
The lattice of dusk-dripping leaves, whiteness
Dimly glimmers, goes. Glimmers and is gone, and the man,

Suspended in his darkling medium, stares
Upward where, though not visible, he knows
She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only
He had such strength, he would put his hand forth
And maintain it over her to guard, in all
Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever
Inclemency of sky or slur of the world’s weather
Might ever be. In his heart
he cries out. Above

Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he sees
The first star pulse into being. It gleams there.

I do not know what promise it makes him.

—Robert Penn Warren

Readers also are invited to view previous posts at “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Robert Penn Warren and Dave Smith: “Robert Penn Warren: ‘The Nature of a Mirror,’” which includes a link to an audio of the poet reading his poem, and “Dave Smith: Little Boats, Unsalvaged.”

Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and an American Masterpiece

As Americans honor Abraham Lincoln today—200 years after his birth on February 12, 1809—readers need look no further than Walt Whitman’s tremendously moving elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” to recognize the pairing of a great political figure and a great poetic moment. Indeed, in the nation’s literary history few poems may lay claim to such high regard among the country’s citizenry, as well as such elevated esteem among members of the critical community.

Harold Bloom has declared, “in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, Whitman wrote his greatest poem, the last expression of his full genius” (Genius: Warner Books, 2002). Furthermore, Bloom has suggested: “only a few poets in the language have surpassed ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’: Shakespeare, Milton, perhaps one or two others. Whether even Shakespeare and Milton have achieved a more poignant pathos and a darker eloquence than Whitman’s ‘Lilacs,’ I’m not always certain” (The Western Canon: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994).

Recently, many readers of American poetry have discussed extensively, even debated vigorously, the official poem (“Praise Song for the Day”) commissioned from Elizabeth Alexander for Barack Obama’s inaugural ceremony. The poem, its presentation, and much of the controversial conversation have been reported in previous posts on “One Poet’s Notes”: “Inaugural Poem by Elizabeth Alexander” and “Elizabeth Alexander Comments on Her Inaugural Poem.” Observing the comments by critics concerning Alexander’s effort, I offered that “a place exists in public ceremonies for poetry. However, rather than commission a poet to write an occasional poem for the political proceedings,” poetry produced independently through spontaneous inspiration and passionately written in a way that “reflects the substance or spirit” of the occasion, urged out of one’s individual imagination as a consequence solely of one’s emotional attachment and personal investment, ought to be considered.

In his biography of Walt Whitman, The Solitary Singer (Grove Press, 1955), Gay Wilson Allen describes “‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,’ Whitman’s masterpiece,” as a composition initiated by the poet’s emotional response to Lincoln’s death, but also originated in reaction to feelings attached to the poet’s prior Civil War experiences assisting in the treatment of wounded or dying soldiers at the battlefront, where his brother had been reported missing in action. Singer suggests: “all combined to strain the poet’s nerves and heighten his sensitivity to physical and mental stimuli.”

Reflecting on Whitman’s association of the lilac with the tragic circumstance of Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday, Singer reports: “When Whitman returned to Washington (by Easter Monday) the lilacs were in full bloom, and either then or the following Wednesday, when the funeral service was held in Washington and the casket was banked with lilacs, this flower became everlastingly associated in the poet’s memory with the death of Lincoln: ‘I remember where I was stopping at the time, the season being advanced, there were many lilacs in full bloom. By one of those caprices that enter and give tinge to events without being at all a part of them, I find myself always reminded of the great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms. It never fails.’”

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” was only one in a group of pieces Whitman wrote concerning President Lincoln’s death. Four of those poems eventually were gathered together and published as “Memories of President Lincoln,” with this elegy standing as the strongest entry. Helen Vendler has commented in The Music of What Happens (Harvard University Press, 1988): “It was in ‘Lilacs’ that Whitman sought to find a middle ground between triumph and ‘the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,’ to find not a sullen hymn of defeat but an acceptable ‘Battle Hymn’ for a man whose life, he was certain, transcended the brutal fact of his death. He wished to find, in the language of perception, an equivalent for transcendence, and he turned to three objects of perception—the star, the flower, and the song of the bird—as ways of exploring that problem of equivalency.”

By selecting the trio of symbols from nature to represent Lincoln (star), love (lilac), and the elegiac poetry of mourning (birdsong), Walt Whitman behaves the way any true Romantic poet might be expected. He furthers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s perception of natural elements as physical signs pointing toward spiritual understanding, the material as metaphor for the emotional. Whitman also engages readers by extending his elegy for Lincoln into a more encompassing poem, one of national memorial for all who sacrificed during the Civil War to save the nation and maintain its unity. Consequently, the poet enlarges his poem’s scope, as a personal expression of elegy for one man transforms into an assertion of a nation’s gratefulness for the ultimate offering of one’s self made by so many throughout the land. Indeed, he acknowledges not only those wounded or lost in battle but also the pain endured by those who remain and will continue to suffer, longing for absent loved ones.

Appropriately, this great American poem was written by a figure Harold Bloom has labeled “the genius of the shores of North America,” one who “founded what is uniquely American in our imaginative literature.” In his composition of an outstanding occasional poem lamenting the death of an individual, Walt Whitman created a work of literature with language that conveyed sentiments felt throughout the country. He produced a national treasure, a testament to his time, and an everlasting historical document, one in which President Lincoln represents an American martyr, the savior who preserved democracy in a unified America.

WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D

1

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

2

O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.

3

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.

4

In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die).

5

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray débris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

6

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

7

(Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)

8

O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d,
As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side (while the other stars all look’d on),
As we wander’d together the solemn night (for something I know not what kept me from sleep),
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

9

Sing on there in the swamp,
O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
I hear, I come presently, I understand you,
But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,
The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.

10

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.

11

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows,
And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.

12

Lo, body and soul—this land,
My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,
The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.

Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

13

Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me (but will soon depart),
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.

14

Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty (after the perturb’d winds and the storms),
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,

I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

15

To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the débris and débris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

16

Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.


—Walt Whitman

* * * * *

Readers are invited to visit some of the other articles at “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Abraham Lincoln or Walt Whitman: “Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address,” “Poetic Prose: ‘The Gettysburg Address,’” “Stuart Davis, Walt Whitman and Jazz,” “Walt Whitman and Harold Bloom,” “A Vote for Walt Whitman’s ‘Democratic Vistas,’” and “Walt Whitman and American Independence.”

Janet McCann: "The Bookstore on Broadway, in Albany: AWP Conference 1999"

Since many of the readers who regularly visit “One Poet’s Notes” are preparing to attend the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference in Chicago later this week, the appropriate selection as VPR Poem of the Week appears to be “The Bookstore on Broadway, in Albany: AWP Conference 1999” by Janet McCann, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Janet McCann’s collections of poetry include Looking for Buddha in the Barbed Wire Garden (Avisson Press, 1996) and Emily’s Dress (Pecan Grove Press, 2005). She also has edited a number of anthologies of poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Kansas Quarterly, McCall’s, New Letters, New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Parnassus, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Janet McCann is a professor in the English Department at Texas A & M University.

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.

"Elizabeth Bishop's Poetic Voice: Reconciling Influences" by Laura Ebberson

Elizabeth Bishop was born on this date (February 8) in 1911. Sherod Santos writes about Elizabeth Bishop in an essay, “In a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Contemporary American Poetry,” which was included in his volume of criticism, A Poetry Of Two Minds (University of Georgia Press, 2000): “If any one person were going to serve as a model for younger poets, I think she’d make a pretty good choice.” Santos further describes Bishop’s career: “In a writing life that spanned more than fifty years, Bishop published just over ninety poems. There are no epics, no poems of elaborate or showy technical experiment, there’s nothing that requires an academic guide, nothing to make a reader feel inferior to the text. In fact, her poems seem completely free of that desire to be as great as someone else or to make their mark on the world of literature. And yet, of course, the mark they’ve left is both large and indelible.”

Certainly, Santos correctly sums up Bishop’s quiet excellence, and he hints at the manner in which her poetry has contributed as an example for many contemporary poets. Nevertheless, readers also ought to be reminded of ways Bishop first learned and carefully developed her craft while under the influence of others, most prominently Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and established a personal voice somewhere between the styles promoted by this pair of instrumental figures. Laura Ebberson recently explored this issue in Volume VIII, Number 1 of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Therefore, today appears the perfect time to remind readers of Ebberson’s article, and I encourage all to examine her essay.

ELIZABETH BISHOP’S POETIC VOICE: RECONCILING INFLUENCES

by Laura Ebberson


With Alice Quinn’s recent publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected poems, drafts and fragments titled Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, she has stirred up new discussion and debate about the mid-twentieth century poet. Critics are disagreeing over how the collection will affect readers’ perception of the poet. Adam Kirsch believes that the collection can increase readers’ understanding and admiration of Bishop (Times Literary Supplement). He sees the collection as “chosen material that cast a great deal of light on Bishop’s mind and methods” (3). Helen Vendler, on the other hand, vehemently asserts that the publication will alter readers’ opinions of the meticulous and reticent writer. She declares the publication a “betrayal of Elizabeth Bishop,” and believes the poems “[transgress] her commitment to exactness.” This new debate about Bishop’s uncollected work reminds readers of the critical debate surrounding Bishop that has persisted for many years. Both arguments involve her fastidious revision process and discomfort with giving readers obvious insight into her personal life.

Bishop’s career almost appears fated for discussion and debate because of her relationship with two poets of diametrically opposite writing styles. In a conversation about her revision process, she said “If I’ve shown my work to anyone for criticism, it’s usually been to Cal Lowell or Miss Moore” (Wehr 323). Bishop’s two major influences, poets Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, embodied very different poetic styles. Moore strove to be what Bishop described as “fundamental[ly] … [a poet] who has brought a brilliant precision to poetic language by meticulous conservatism … [and] maintaining the ancestral, ‘out-of-date’ virtues of American culture” (Ribeiro 15). Her other influence, Lowell, “had … embraced poetry in the grand style, thinking in terms of the largest gesture, history and politics” and, more famously, the poet who started what Bishop herself called “that nonsense of confessional poetry” (Millier 198 and Schiller 22). Bishop’s relationship with both of these poets created a tension between their opposing approaches toward poetry. Her response to this tension resulted in the creation of her own style of writing, one that satisfies both Lowell’s “confessional nonsense” and Moore’s “meticulous conservatism.” Although she created a unique blend of these elements, a debate arose over which was the defining characteristic of her poetry: the precision learned from Moore or the personal revelation she learned from Lowell.

The original critical discussion surrounding Elizabeth Bishop focuses on those two different sides of her writing styles. The prevailing critical interpretation “valued [her poems] for their brilliant surfaces, keen observation, and formal perfection” (Travisiano 903). Bishop strove to provide perfect representations of the physical world through her poetry. To her “the physical world was real, and language, if used carefully, could describe it well enough to communicate something essential” (Gioia 25). Many critics praise her ability to render realistic and vivid images of the scenes she described.

The opposing critical interpretation, however, centers on the personal and emotional side of Bishop’s poetry. These critics focus on Bishop’s relationship to the overwhelming popularity of “confessional poetry” from the early 1940’s to the early 1970’s. Confessional poetry gave poets an outlet to express their personal experiences or emotions. Poet-critic Jonathan Kirsch writes, “The motive for confession is penitential or therapeutic—by speaking openly about his guilt and suffering the poet hopes to make them easier to hear” (Kirsch x). While confessional poetry existed before 1956, critics often refer to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies as a benchmark in the development of modern confessional poetry. In this compilation, Lowell depicts a raw and honest look into his life and exemplifies the candid autobiographical expression of the confessional movement.

Bishop’s poetry, however, does not fall neatly into this category of “confessional” because she does not immediately place herself into her poetry, even though “connections between Bishop’s themes and images, and her autobiography, are obvious to anyone who reads her letters or visits the archive at Vassar” (Costello, “Impersonal Personal” 334). Bishop adamantly opposed confessional poetry throughout most of her career, but one sees her reliance on personal experiences as subjects in much of her poetry. From chronicling her experiences and travels in foreign lands to reminiscing about her childhood in Nova Scotia, Bishop could not avoid her personal life from seeping into her poetry . . . .

Visitors are urged to read the rest of Laura Ebberson’s essay, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetic Voice: Reconciling Influences,” in Valparaiso Poetry Review.

* * * * *

Readers also are invited to examine a pair of previous posts in “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Elizabeth Bishop: “Jennifer Yaros: ‘Nature and the Self: Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver’” and “Elizabeth Bishop: The Poet’s Voice.” In addition, Elizabeth Bishop can be heard reading “The Fish,” “In the Waiting Room,” and “The Moose” at a Salon audio web page.

Henry David Thoreau on Writing a Journal: 300 Posts

I have just noticed that the number of entries to “One Poet’s Notes” passed the 300 mark in the last week. When I began the blog a little bit more than two years ago, I had no sense of the direction or frequency of posting that might take place. Nevertheless, I knew I wanted the blog’s purpose to approach the intentions often witnessed in a writer’s journal—a record of observations and experiences, as well as personal perspectives on literature and writing—while also acting as an editor’s notes inviting and engaging readers with references to works included within the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Certainly, my associations with examples of writers’ journals reflect back to my studies on the extensive logs of such authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, though I make no pretense that the entries in this blog even approximate the excellence found in the works of those two figures.

Additionally, despite my own surprise at the amount of content I have offered here over the past two years, I remain stunned by the phenomenal extent of the compositions by Emerson and Thoreau in their various volumes. Indeed, Thoreau kept his journals for decades and accumulated more than two million words. Furthermore, Thoreau viewed his endeavor with great seriousness of intent as a writer, including an attempt to use language for better understanding the connections between humans and nature, through images and the imagination, as well as between the realms of the physical and the spiritual evident to Thoreau in the elements of the world surrounding him.

Consequently, in an expression paying homage to these individuals one might regard as possible precursors to the contemporary blog, I present one of the entries Thoreau wrote about the act of recording one’s observations and thoughts regularly in a journal, proposing periodic writing of personal perceptions as a natural gesture arising from one’s imagination and evoking significant spiritual sentiments.

My journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods. They are my correspondent, to whom I send off the sheet postpaid. I am clerk in their counting-room, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger. It is as a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig and write my prayers on it; then letting it go, the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven. As if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. It is papyrus by the riverside; it is vellum in the pastures; it is parchment on the hills. I find it everywhere as free as the leaves which troop along the lanes in autumn. The crow, the goose, the eagle carry my quill, and the wind blows the leaves as far as I go. Or, if my imagination does not soar, but gropes in slime and mud, then I write with a reed.

—from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau: February 8, 1841

Rita Signorelli-Pappas: "Parmigianino Thinking"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Rita Signorelli-Pappas’s “Parmigianino Thinking,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue (Volume VIII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Rita Signorelli-Pappas has had poems published in Chelsea, Literary Review, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Southwest Review, and other journals. Her poetry also has appeared on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She has been a regular reviewer for Small Press Review and The Women’s Review of Books, and she currently reviews poetry for World Literature Today. She was a finalist for the 2008 May Swenson Award, and she received the 2008 Italian Americana Award in Fiction. Signorelli-Pappas has taught courses in writing and literature at Valparaiso University and Purdue University. “Parmigianino Thinking” is among the poems included in her chapbook of poetry, Satyr’s Wife, which is available as a part of the Web del Sol World Voices international chapbook series of prose and poetry.

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.

James Dickey's Last Lecture: What It Means to Be a Poet

“ . . . this will almost undoubtedly be my last class forever.”

James Dickey was born on this date (February 2) in 1923. Dickey’s reputation as a contemporary poet rose quickly to the highest levels in the early 1960s with publication of his first three volumes of poetry—Into the Stone (1960), Drowning with Others (1962), and Helmets (1964). About that third collection, Richard Howard later declared Dickey “as the telluric maker Wallace Stevens had called for in prophesying that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written (Alone with America: Atheneum, 1969).

However, in 1965 James Dickey produced Buckdancer’s Choice, winner of the National Book Award and one of the great collections of poetry of its time. In fact, this book, too often overlooked by recent readers of poetry, contains some of the more original and compelling poems to contribute to the body of contemporary American literature. Indeed, Dave Smith speaks of Dickey’s first decade of poetry in his book of criticism, Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1985), that it is “often as good as American poetry has gotten.”

In one of the three chapters concerning James Dickey in Unassigned Frequencies, Laurence Lieberman’s 1977 book of criticism on contemporary poetry, Lieberman describes the persona he finds in Dickey’s poems as “a unique human personality. He is a worldly mystic. On the one hand, a joyous, expansive personality—all candor, laughter, and charm—in love with his fully conscious gestures, the grace and surety of moves of his body. An outgoing man. An extrovert. On the other hand, a chosen man. A man who has been picked by some mysterious, intelligent agent in the universe to act out a secret destiny.”

Lieberman considers the major poems in Buckdancer’s Choice—such as “The Firebombing,” “The Fiend,” and “Slave Quarters”—as works in which “the conflict between the worldly-mindedness of modern life and the inner life of the spirit is dramatized.” Regarding Dickey’s fifth collection of poems, Falling (included in Poems 1957-1967), and its amazing title piece, Lieberman admires the poet’s “joy that’s incapable of self-pity or self-defeat. There is a profound inwardness in the poems, the inner self always celebrating its strange joy in solitude, or pouring outward, overflowing into the world. No matter how much suffering the poet envisions, the sensibility that informs and animates him is joy in the sheer pleasure of being.”

Anyone who met James Dickey may have encountered the poet’s “sheer pleasure of being.” His presence was felt whenever he entered a room, and his forceful personality certainly evoked various reactions, positive and negative, from those whom he engaged with his thoughts on poems, poets, poetics, and sometimes politics. In a chapter titled “James Dickey’s Motions” from Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (LSU Press, 2006), Dave Smith explains that “Dickey cunningly and rightly counted on notoriety to carry his poetry to an audience usually indifferent to academic poems.” Additionally, his eagerness and ability to attract attention often led to instances of friction, controversy, and confrontation with a few fellow poets and critics, including an ongoing public feud with Robert Bly, especially during his difficult later years, much of which is chronicled in Henry Hart’s informative biography of Dickey, James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, 2000) and Christopher Dickey’s more intimate and further insightful book about his father, Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

My own observations of James Dickey occurred when he and I once shared a publication party at the Gotham Book Mart for our volumes of poetry published by BOA Editions, his a limited edition work of poetry and mine a first-book collection. As Dickey and I greeted attendees and signed our books, I discovered his immense acuity at understanding his audience when telling tall tales that enthralled the folks gathered around us. Although at times boastful of his talent or rudely dismissive of the skills demonstrated by a couple of contemporary poets, the man’s enthusiasm for the art of poetry and his great energy even appeared to lift the ordinary language of small talk toward oratorical elegance or sometimes steer it toward the harshness of sharp sarcasm.

In addition, I appreciated his generosity toward me as privately we spoke of the odd contrast in one another’s situation—he already well-known not only for his prize-winning poetry, which at that time included more than a dozen volumes, and his position as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate), as well as poet and presenter for President Carter, but also for his novel, Deliverance, adapted into a movie phenomenon, in which he appeared in a minor part, and I merely introducing my premiere book of poems. Indeed, as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, at one point James Dickey turned to me and asked if I’d like to trade signed copies of our books, to which I agreed quickly, knowing that I was getting the better end of that deal.

Writing about James Dickey in a chapter of Local Assays, “The Strength of James Dickey,” Dave Smith remarked: “No one was ever a greater lover of poetry, of the sheerness of passionate sound and the honesty of feel that poetry makes our first and last way of knowing the labor that life is. No one has tried to demand more of art as the ungulled and absolute measure of individual experience.” Certainly, readers who have examined James Dickey’s Self-Interviews (Delta, 1970), a book in which the poet speaks openly of his life and vehemently about his poetry—with what Barbara and James Reiss label in their introduction as “the candid, uncompromising opinions of a man unafraid to speak the truth as he sees it, aloud and in a scary marketplace of ideas”—could doubt Dickey’s love for poetry, as well as his respect for his role as a poet and teacher of poetry.

Consequently, on this day marking Dickey’s birth, I have returned to Christopher Dickey’s excellent book of memoirs, Summer of Deliverance. Near the end of this wonderful glimpse at the poet and his relationships with others, the son describes his actions upon hearing in a phone call from his brother Kevin in late January of 1997 that their ill father had died. Christopher Dickey recalls that his father had given a last class at his home, which the university fortunately had recorded on tape. One afternoon in the days after James Dickey’s death, while driving with his brother through the streets of Columbia, South Carolina, Christopher places the tape in the car player to listen as his father addresses the students, and the son notes: “God, our father’s voice sounded weak—so much weaker, even, than it had been two weeks before, when I was with him. But now he was changing the subject again. He was getting stronger as he started to talk about exactly what it means to be a poet.”

Christopher Dickey experiences his sense of grief as he listens to his father’s voice on the tape, and he is “breathless with loss” when the poet reports to the students that, considering his poor physical condition, “this will undoubtedly be my last class forever.”

As I re-read the words in James Dickey’s lecture to his last class, I thought of the very popular and very inspiring “Last Lecture” Randy Pausch, the terminally-ill professor at Carnegie Mellon University, delivered on videotape just before his death. I also thought that perhaps all aspiring poets or lovers of poetry should hear the reflections, emotions, opinions, lessons, and advice offered by James Dickey. His insightful and inspiring comments provide much to contemplate, interrogate, evaluate, and appreciate:

Invent is the guts of it. “To invent.” You can say as much as you like with stuff you know. But don’t be confined to it. Don’t think about—honestly—don’t think about telling the truth. Because poets are not trying to tell the truth, are they?

They are trying to show God a few things he maybe didn’t think of. It takes us to supply that. We are not trying to tell the truth. We are trying to make it so that when we sit down to write we are absolute lords over our material. We can say anything we want to, any way we want to. The question is to find the right way, the best way to do it. This is what we are going to be looking for.

This is going to take us through some very strange fields, across a lot of rivers, oceans, mountains, forests. God knows where it will take us. That is part of the excitement of it, and the sense of deep adventure. Which is what we want more than anything. Discovery. Everything is in that. Everything is that.

We have to fight for it. We have to fight through to it. We have to cut the angel out of the marble, out of the rock, the form of the angel. Michelangelo used to say the angel is already in the stone, all I got to do is chip the rock from around it and set it free. Well, the shape is already in there. It takes a lot of chipping to get the angel to stand up, much less to fly. Sort of heavy for that [chuckling at his own joke]. So, as I say, this is a strange and long journey that we are undertaking.

With my current physical shape this will almost undoubtedly be my last class forever. But what we start here I would like you to continue on your own. When we get started, I want you to fight this thing through with your own unconscious, with your own dreams, and see where it comes out. That is the excitement and fun of it—deep discovery, deep adventure. It is the most dangerous game, and the best.

Flaubert says somewhere that the life of a poet is a hell of a life, it is a dog’s life, but it is the only one worth living. You suffer more. You are frustrated more by things that don’t bother other people. But you also live so much more. You live so much more intensely and so much more vitally. And with so much more of a sense of meaning, of consequentiality, instead of nothing mattering. This is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide. The feeling that we are living existences in which nothing matters very much, or at all. That is what is behind all the drugs and the alcoholism and suicide—insanity, wars, everything—a sense of nonconsequence. A sense that nothing, nothing matters. No matter which way we turn it is the same thing. But the poet is free of that. He is free of that.

For the poet, everything matters, and it matters a lot. That is the realm where we work. Once you are there, you are hooked. If you are a real poet, you are hooked more deeply than any narcotics addict could possibly be on heroin. You are hooked on something that is life-giving instead of destructive. Something that is a process that cannot be too far from the process that created everything. God’s process. You can say what you want of God. I don’t know what your religion might be. You can say what you want as to whether this is a chemist’s universe or a physicist’s universe or an Old Testament, New Testament God’s universe—whatever kind of universe you might want to attribute the cosmos to. You can attribute it any way you want. To an engineer, as I say, to a physicist or an astronomer. Or whatever you might want the deity to be.

Those are things that he might be. What this universe indubitably is is a poet’s universe. Nothing but a poetic kind of consciousness could have conceived of anything like this. This is where the truth of the matter lies. You are some way in line with the creative genesis of the universe. In some way—in a much lesser way, of course. We can’t create those trees or that water or anything that is out there. We can’t do it. But we can re-create it. We are secondary creators. We take God’s universe and make it over our way. And it is different from his. It is similar in some ways, but it is different in some ways. And the difference lies in the slant, in the slant that we individually put on it and that only we can put on it. That is the difference. That is where our value lies. Not only for ourselves, but for the other people who read us. There is some increment there that we make possible that would not otherwise be there.

I don’t mean to sell the poet so long or at such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn’t esteem the poet very much. They don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us. They don’t understand if there is any use. They don’t really value us very much. We are the masters of the superior secret. Not they. Remember that when you write. You are at the top level, and they are down there with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, and the general idols of the schlock culture we live in. We are the elitists. I don’t mind saying that at all. Quality is what we strive for, best standards. My grandmother was born in Germany, and she used to quote from Goethe, a lot. One of her favorite sayings was, “He who ever strives upward, him can we save.” That is what we are doing.

[Readers also are invited to read a previous post in “One Poet’s Notes” about James Dickey’s “The Firebombing.”]