'When a warrior is gone'... Seamus Heaney

GONE FAR TOO SOON: The master in 2009. Ah God, I thought we'd have Seamus Heaney for at least a few more years. The wispy white-haired Irish laureate died in Dublin today, at the age of 74, according to various media reports, and there are no words to properly express what he contributed to poetry and language during his immense career.

He was a makaris; an archeologist of peat bogs and Latinate etymology; a singer of old songs ("Antigone," "Beowulf," from Virgil) in a thrilling modern idiom... and on and on. He was a wonder.

I'm wrong about one thing, though. There ARE very good words appropriate for this moment of loss  -- his own, taken from his best-selling translation of "Beowulf":

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

He won plenty of glory, didn't he? I wonder if the thought ever crossed his mind, as he worked on these lines in his farmhouse years ago, that such words could apply to him and his career.

Rest in peace, old artificer.

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Rowdy...robust...r.i.p. ... poet John Hollander

poet-john-hollander Well, John Hollander couldn't live forever, could he?

I thought he might. His poetry's  so rowdy and so robust that I figured, if the Grim Reaper showed up at his door, Hollander would tell him to #$%&@ off, and the Reaper would have to listen.

Alas, that didn't happen. The New York Times reported the passing of a great contemporary American poet this Saturday at the age of 83. I have little to add aside from saying that I worked on some edits to an article with him once -- he was the soul of kindness, by the way --  and sharing a poem of his that mixes the high and low as he muses on the battle of the sexes. I hope you enjoy it, my friends.

The Lady's-Maid's Song

When Adam found his rib was gone He cursed and sighed and cried and swore And looked with cold resentment on The creature God had used it for. All love's delights were quickly spent And soon his sorrows multiplied: He learned to blame his discontent On something stolen from his side.

And so in every age we find Each Jack, destroying every Joan, Divides and conquers womankind In vengeance for his missing bone. By day he spins out quaint conceits With gossip, flattery, and song, But then at night, between the sheets, He wrongs the girl to right the wrong.

Though shoulder, bosom, lip, and knee Are praised in every kind of art, Here is love's true anatomy: His rib is gone; he'll have her heart. So women bear the debt alone And live eternally distressed, For though we throw the dog his bone He wants it back with interest.

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Mystic moments: Taliban poetry and more

sunlight-cloudsWhat's the purpose of poetry? A news story made me think about that question again. It also made me take a fairly recent book down from my shelf that I haven't looked at in a while, Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn (Columbia University Press). The Times of India reported that a university in Kerala pulled a poem from a class syllabus that had been written by an Arabic poet who's a former Guantanamo Bay detainee with alleged links to al Qaeda. The poet, Ibrahim al-Rubaish, composed the poem, "Song from Guantanamo" (for more information on this poem and the poet, see the two links at the end of this post) and it's included in an anthology that's a part of that college course in Kerala.

What I wanted to know, obviously, was what the poem said: What was behind the university administrators' decision? What had disturbed them?

The news article doesn't quote from the poem, but it does include an interesting point about the reasons behind the decision to pull the poem:

The Dean's report, without commenting on the literary quality of the poem, said it would be against moral values to prescribe a poem penned by a person who is said to have terrorist links, the sources said.

It sounds like the decision was based more on  the poet's alleged associations than on a specific message in the poem. (I'm sure there are plenty of people more familiar with this news story than me, and if you're reading this post, I'd welcome your comments and clarifications!) When you read the poem itself in the links at the bottom of this post, you'll probably conclude the same thing.

That brings me to the Linschoten/Kuehn book. It isn't about this situation, but it still seems relevant for this discussion, and that's why I wanted to share it with you.

Before I left my last job, that book arrived at the Times editorial offices and I kept it. Its title intrigued me. What did the poems say to their audience? I expected 200-plus pages of verse attacks on the West. There are certainly fierce, rallying cries like these lines from "Blood Debt":

Today, I write history on my enemy's chest with my sword, I draw yesterday's memories on today's chest once more.

But I also found other poems of intense spirituality with no hint of any political or military context:

I have opened my mouth in prayer, You have brought down your blessings In order to make my body blessed, To have the problems resolved. The spot on my heart makes a candle like the sun...

A preface to the book declares that "it is no exaggeration to say that in the ever-increasing archive of studies on the Taliban only a miniscule number have attended to the movement's aesthetic dimension..." Linschoten and Kuehn have certainly addressed the need for this kind of aesthetic study with their invaluable book.

But I also think their book not only helps us to understand the poems they've collected -- composed in the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world -- but also situations in the world like the one involving the university in Kerala. The editors (and the translators of the Taliban book) have provided us with a deeper level of knowledge that can only help the world community -- and our common future. With that in mind,why not keep the poem in the Kerala syllabus and accompany it with context? The stakes remain the same, don't they?

My friends, I welcome your comments.

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'Belief is possible at night': Averill Curdy's poetry

Poetry by ancient light. (Credit: www.davidtribble.com) It was such a nice experience this week dipping into Averill Curdy’s "Song and Error," published a couple months ago by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and finding Ovid there. It’s a pleasure to pick up a book by a contemporary poet like Curdy (or Carol Ann Duffy, whose favorite seems to be Virgil) and find someone who doesn't hesitate to invoke the Latin greats.

It's encouraging too. Here's a writer who believes that those laureled heads still have much to give to our present.

In "Ovid in America," we listen to 17th-century translator George Sandys as he meditates on life in the new world (Sandys was an early settler of Jamestown) and shares the great poet's sense of exile in a strange, unfamiliar place:

Without coppice, park, romancely glade, Or commanding vantage, Woods press on us; they fester.... I find no empires here, no apostles or emeralds. Instead, all things a-broil with an awful begetting & my hours unsettled by some new show Of riotous & mystical imagination...

Long before strip malls and highways, America existed in a mythic state, wild and  "a-broil with an awful begetting." Magnificent.

Words are so powerful, but how often do we think about that in the course of our days? We don't. We write memos and send texts, using language like a shovel or a fork. Which is why poetry matters, and why a poet like Curdy, a teacher at Northwestern University, is to be appreciated in this book, her debut collection.

Here, a little later in the same poem, is an act of creation, as Sandys hovers over  his translation:

From my hands at night (my light Some oil in a dish or a rush taper smoking, Not so different from Ovid’s), flower His fantastic shapes, shadows Of an old empire’s former splendor... Belief is possible at night, solitary, firelit. Then, I can believe in Ovid’s centaurs, Or that he was met at death by a three-headed dog....

The shadow of Robert Lowell falls here, Amy Clampitt's, too. Sometimes her language is much more complex, more elusive--and if it feels too elusive at times, well, that's okay too. The beauty of the language more than compensates, as in “Anatomical Angel” :

Unfastened avidly from each ivory button Of her spine, the voluntary muscles open Viruousities of red: cinnabar

The mutagen, and carmine from cochineal Born between fog and frost....

I think I get it, but even if I don’t, does it matter? The words stay with me an hour later, an hour after that, at the end of the day, at the end of the week.

Can I say the same thing about a text or a TV show?

Not really.

That's why it's poetry. That's why it matters.

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Books of death: new in bookstores

balloonist When Julian Barnes writes about losing his wife to a brain tumor, he writes instead about the adventures of 18th and 19th century balloonists. It makes for the most unusual kind of memoir -- and it highlights how truly difficult it is to express what we're feeling when one of our loved ones dies.

The loss goes deeper than any words can reach, and that may be why Barnes turns to the early history of ballooning in his forthcoming book "Levels of Life" (Alfred A. Knopf). He's able to speak of the harrowing experience of losing his wife, Pat Kavanagh, only in terms of something else.

Joyce Carol Oates recently weighed in on the U.K. edition of the book in the TLS. She called its approach and perspective "unorthodox" -- but she means it as a compliment. I can't help but agree. Most memoirs of death and dying sound the same. I think we've all lost loved ones, right? If it's a loss from illness, there's an existential formula you just can't escape: symptoms, diagnosis, terror and treatment, slight improvement and hope, sudden decline, death. Grief. Every book about such a loss can't help but sound the same. The Illness Industry is mercilessly efficient.

I think that's why Barnes has recorded his own sorrow in such an "unorthodox" vehicle. He avoids the formula. His love for his wife, and the meaning of her loss, deserve more than the typical formula. His pain is still there, between the lines, hovering at the margins. He doesn't directly confront it for many pages. Still, as we read about the excitement and perils of hot-air ballooning in the pages that precede, we can feel his grief indirectly in passages like this one:

In August 1786 -- ballooning's infancy -- a young man dropped to his death in Newcastle from a height of several hundred feet. He was one of those who held the balloon's restraining ropes; when a gust of wind suddenly shifted the airbag, his companions let go, while he held on and was borne upwards. Then he fell back to earth. As one modern historian puts it: 'The impact drove his legs into a flower bed as far as his knees, and ruptured his internal organs, which burst out on to the ground.'

I'll risk saying it -- isn't that how you feel when someone you love dies? Like you've been ripped off your feet and driven into the ground? If it were just a book about ballooning's history, I'd call this a colorful anecdote. In a book about losing his wife, it means so much more. This is also Barnes at his best. Something to pre-order at your neighborhood bookstore for your fall reading.

Also this season...

endings happierYou can tell from the title that Erica Brown's "Happier Endings: Overcoming the Fear of Death" (Simon and Schuster) isn't coming from the same personal sense of loss as Barnes' book. Instead, what Brown gives us is an excellent overview, a little in the Mary Roach vein, of death and dying in the contemporary world. Bucket lists, ethical wills, cremation or kafn, last words, final forgiveness, suicide and survivors -- it's all here. A scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, Brown capably navigates a myriad number of topics and issues connected with the Great Beyond. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Brown marshals a compelling amount of information to illuminate an often gloomy subject. Hence her book's title. The fact is, she reports, "the grim reaper is not always grim."

bright abyss coverChristian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is about what Wiman, a published poet, thought about after being diagnosed with cancer. His book assembles several essay meditations, full of poetic allusions and excerpts from world literature, on his struggle to understand his faith in the face of his mortality. What he realizes is that faith, true religious faith, is something different from what's taught in church on Sundays. It's "tenuous, precarious," he says. "The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs flexibility."

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