O’Keeffe’s Music—Pink and Blue

Now that I have seen myself, I can say what I want to say in my paintings.
—Georgia O’Keeffe, on being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz

…

Maybe it was the title, but it’s too late
for me to know for certain why at eight

I’d hung a copy on my bedroom wall.
It seems to me—I’m starting to recall—

I’d gone to the library by myself
to find Collected Paintings on a shelf.

I think I’d seen her calendar of flowers,
Irises and Lilies. And for hours

I sat admiring petals and their hues,
their plume-like curves and boldness. I refused

to close the book till I had memorized
each flower, as if that would give me eyes

to paint like her: the master of her craft.
I wonder if my parents ever laughed

or wrung their hands to see their child gaze
so deeply and intensely at the ways

Nature could suggest, or shout out, “SEX”.
Perhaps they failed to see? I sat and sketched

orange tiger lilies and blue morning glories,
copying the endless inventory,

but then I saw an old book, fabric-bound,
and grasped for it—something flitted down,

a xerox of Music—Pink and Blue, not flowers,
but rather something leading us to our—

I didn’t know the word for it—our song?
an entrance, painting with its sounds: belong.

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Posing

Penny Burns got me interviews for ‘permanent temp’ positions as a secretary at investment banks. This meant they neither gave me benefits nor claimed me in their staff headcount. It also meant I could jump ship without compunction. Jobs came easily. I typed fast and was overeducated. I also had an unbridled manner which – according to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – fit a certain bill. In the language of oil painting and advertisements, women are one of several archetypes: serene mother (madonna); perfect hostess (spectator-owner’s wife); sex-object (Venus, nymph surprised); and freewheeling secretary (actress, king’s mistress). Every morning as I crossed Park Avenue at 53rd Street I looked up over my right shoulder to burn the image of the Met-Life building into my eyelid-album, nurse white; Midwestern innocence is an antiseptic. One has to bolt (taxis, tulips, taxis) as soon as the walk sign turns. You might just make it after allllllll’, and I toss an invisible beret into the air, which hangs there, because that is where the song ends.

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Susan J. Barbour earned an MSt in English Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford, in 2009. She is currently living in Paris where she is completing a book of poetry on the model-artist dynamic. You can visit her here and here.

Clash of the Titans

Misawa’s spinal cord severed by a routine headdrop;
uploaded months ago, his Emerald Frosion ‘absolutely kills’.

Related videos: Coulter owns Paxman, Paxo pwns Coulter;
gouts of purple prose incur a nine-page thread

as a typo-addled slave is forced by the flames to admit
she knows he knows she’s bound by garlands of her own.

Like the Harris levels, our moans don’t represent real doom.
Through the pre-dawn hours I learn to follow, follow to learn

the hurt of you poured forth with the red. The yellow brick road
is paved with eggshells – you scratch my wound, I’ll scratch yours.

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Obsessive-compulsive

Although I have picked
my keratinized thumb
smooth and hard
as a thimble

or a circumcised glans
it’s what’s inside
that counts –
it must be I think

each turn of the knob’s
less than whole,
less wired
than a licked index;

five twists
leave me grasping
for the plot,
about the point

of inarticulacy
suspense builds
this room
that’s basically sound

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Lemmings

The sprites are tiny but our villainous
leather swivel chair encompasses
a hundred lemmings headed off
a bitmapped cliff – an unhappy few

hold back. No wonder we admire those
who cliff-dive, shattering from above
fear’s terrible glass ceiling;
no wonder we admire,

smelt from downwind, doesn’t keep
the scent of the cliff-edge,
the sea whose calculable peaks and troughs
are the teeth of a side-on hacksaw blade.

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Vidyan Ravinthiran is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. His pamphlet, At Home or Nowhere, was published in 2009 by Tall-Lighthouse; other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Magma, Poetry Review, The North, The Times Literary Supplement, Ambit, Stand, and Horizon Review.

Antipodes

My pinky toe became numb,
and then my tongue,
and by the time all food tasted like coffee grounds,
the only way I knew I touched
was by seeing myself touch the thing I touched.
Mr. Dwyer suggested
I was the dream of a polar explorer
eyed hungrily
by his very sled-dogs.
He is an ass to be making foolish comments
in these serious times.

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River Ether

the fishermen reel
in skulls and abaci
and a turtle with
no eyes and a
lute with no
strings and something
is tugging on the
line something
heavy                let go

I’m telling you let go

a dugout boat
then a one-mast
skiff then a
brigantine drifts
down the acid
blue no sails
no passengers no flag
only a black
dog that jumps off
and swims to
shore                    don’t call it

don’t you remember last time

in the water the
pines look
crooked the sun too
red for noon the
horsetail clouds are
jagged and snarled
so you want to
see your face

see it you might as well drink

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The Calliope

after Vachel Lindsay

The circus came over the hill and pitched its tent.
The blue circus pitched its tent.

A clown, an elephant too often beaten.
A wooden carousel too often ridden.

I saw the hoops of fire, I heard the calliope.
I saw the Dancing Princess of the Nowhere Country,

heard the harnessed lion’s minor roar.
A man called out from outside a tent door:

“Come see Atlas, the Giant Horse, alive!”
He’s there, inside, absolutely alive!”

But I passed Atlas, the Snake Child, the Poison Twins,
I came to the woods where the circus ends,

where the wah hah whoop of the calliope
was still the calliope’s wah hah whoop.

**********************************************

Here

Here are the big woods

Here is the tumbledown stable

Here is the tumbledown stable in the big woods
Where Elliot tends the old cow

That his father kept
That his grandfather kept
That his grandfather’s father kept
Who knows how long it goes back

Or when she was calved
From what kind of mother

Or who sewed the patchwork quilt that covers her
Who tied the ribbons to her horns

Who empties the rusty pail
Elliot leaves outside each night
Full of black milk

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Travis Smith completed a minor in creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2009. His poems can be found online at storySouth and Wag’s Revue.

Times Literary Supplement

We sifted through his room at the museum,
Opened it like a tomb; sorted, emptied,
Claimed its small treasures: coins, copper sculptures,
Maps of an Augustan mausoleum,
Tripods, stalled watches, stiff river reed,
Nicked reading glasses, vivid fishing lures.
Stubbornly, the TLS still came,
Week after week, as the excavation
Ended and boxes crashed into the trash,
Reports of books newly born, wild or tame,
Jacketed, crated, and shipped by the ton.
Reviewers plough on, as careers rise and crash—
Few are prized, most pulped, conveyed to landfills,
Compacted like coal, toppled timber, great fossils.

**********************************************

Rowing in the Dawn

1.

We heave the great oak hull over our heads,
Lower it into the dark off the dock.
Oars clunk into brass oarlocks. Latches clink shut.
We push off past the soft black velvet of barge
Chains and their anchors swathed in river moss.
Our blades, bearing St. Catherine’s cutting wheel,
Catch and lug us forward into the dark.
Our knock-hard longboat divides the river—
Venetian oarsmen, Egyptian pullers,
Athenian arms raising speed to ram.
Frozen wind fans Hard Shield-ferns in the meadows,
Nods slender thistle, courses through stone walls
As freezing chalk curls through the granite sky.

2.

Swans, stirred from their invisible stillness,
Lunge at our prow, as if to assault us.
At the last yard, they pad and splash up
From the cold Lethean glass and soar
Into the thinning darkness above us.
We pull and watch our milky wake.

3.

The moon withers over limestone,
And from the night emerge the reaching edges
Of English elms, silver birches, star sedge,
Aspens, ashes, and alders. Beyond,
Sashed in retreating lunar mist, the spires,
The bell tower, and, beneath it, the priory
Wrecked by Norse maulers in the departed dark,
Venetian façades clung with red ivy,
Norman chevrons enclosed by barbs of holly.

**********************************************

Enemies and Co.

After Cyril Connolly

So many, the enemies of promise.
They’re everywhere. Larkin imagined a toad,
Squatting on the back, weighing us down, called work.
You’re smothered half to death by false kindness.
The temp job stinks. They increased your workload.
Lunch talk is dry and spiteful. You grip your fork
While they jaw about the next vacation.
They couldn’t care less about your efforts
To improve the novel or refine verse.
Your folks urged law school—you’ll need a pension.
What if your prospects plunge from worse to worst?
There’s much more hope in pharms and e-commerce.
We’re all in it. It’s how writers’ lives go.
Forget the rest: you’ll be your own worst foe.

Ernest Hilbert is an American poet, critic, and editor who completed his doctorate in English Literature at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford in 2000. His first poetry collection, Sixty Sonnets, was issued by Red Hen Press in 2009.

Adrienne Rich
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society
W.W. Norton & Company, 2009
208 Pages
£11.99
ISBN 978-0393070064

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Adrienne Rich’s latest volume of essays, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, gathers short lectures, prefaces, and reviews written and published between 1997 and 2008. Emphasising social awareness and engagement as the critical aims of art, these essays reflect Rich’s lifelong struggle to integrate political conscience with artistic creation.

Rich has been a major voice in poetry ever since W.H. Auden selected her debut  collection, A Change of World (1951), for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Yet while the poems in this volume were remarkable in many ways, it was not until Diving into the Wreck, published in 1973 and winner of the National Book Award, that Rich gained canonical status. She is known not only as a poet—she has received nearly every major American poetry award—but also as a cultural critic and activist, and has been an outspoken participant in feminist and anti-war movements.

“A Human Eye”, her 29th book, takes its title from Karl Marx’s “Private Property and Communism”, which Rich quotes in her foreword: “the eye has become a human eye only when its object has become a human, social object.” She adds, “When art—as language, music, or in palpable, physically present silence—can induce that kind of seeing, holding and responding, it can restore us to our senses.” Whether dealing with Jewish identity, translation of Iraqi poetry, poets like Muriel Rukeyser and LeRoi Jones, or Marx himself, Rich’s commentary is always rooted in the ways art can, or should, reawaken our numbed consciousnesses to levels of physical and cultural awareness.

Art’s purpose, in other words, is to uncommodify the gaze, to replace the eye’s need to own an object with the eye’s need to “see” it and understand its unique physicality. This ideology of blending politics, poetics, and the body echoes lines from “The Demon Lover”, an early poem published in Leaflets (1969): “Only where there is language is there world/ In the harp of my hair, compose me a song.” Reality as language, language as physical act, whether by lips, or touch, or both.

Rich’s work has always aimed to discern real “truth” from the “truths” presented to us by the dominant capitalist discourse. This aim is nowhere more apparent than in her groundbreaking poem, “Diving into the Wreck”, in which she encases her flesh in “body-armor of black rubber/ the absurd flippers/ the grave and awkward mask” and dives into the deep searching for “the wreck itself and not the story of the wreck.” This wreck is both metaphorical and literal, representing not only the wrecks of history and culture, but the wreck of the body itself. Holding “a book of myths/ in which/ our names do not appear”, she sets herself the task of writing her body—and the bodies of the dispossessed implicit in the word “our”—back into the language and thus back into the world.

This was also the task of her eminent essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, a deliberate attempt to write lesbians into feminist discourse, and it remains the task of A Human Eye. Perhaps the greatest example of this can be found in her essay, “Jewish Days and Nights”, in which she characterises “true” Jewishness as being variegated in nature, insisting that “diaspora—a multi-faceted condition—means never always, or anywhere, being just like other Jews.” To follow this “truth” would be to dive into the wreck and discover bodies and voices not represented by dominant Jewish, especially American Jewish, discourse. She laments the highjacking of Jewish culture by fundamentalists groups, which she finds antithetical to “true” Jewish teaching.

Judaism envisioned in this way as something plural and shifting rather than fixed reflects the necessity of transmission within and between cultures. Rich further addresses this necessity in the preceding essay, Iraqi Poetry Today, where she interrogates the politics of translation with a battery of suggestive questions: “whose poetry is translated, from and into what languages, what of the poetry actually translated can get published and receive international distribution, what poets (and what poetics) are disseminated, and who decides these matters?” These inquiries beget others relating to the authenticity and trustworthiness of the translation. Beneath it all lies the question: what bodies are being left behind in the wreckage?

For Rich, poetry is in part untranslatable, “unmistakably human as the human face yet varied as faces are.” At the same time, the act of translation is a bodily event: it is to “make love with a new person, in a different body.” This romance can yield beauty and even understanding, though that understanding will always remain imperfect. Rich is wary of the pitfalls of translation yet conceives of it as a powerful vehicle for the dissemination of difference (of cultures, of bodies, of politics) that we must dive into in order to rescue individual and collective bodies from the wreckage.

Perhaps the most rewarding parts of Rich’s collection are those in which she allows other voices to speak. She is fond of presenting full quotations, laying the whole bodies of poems down in the middle of her text to converse with it, merge with it, and transform it. She is not afraid to pull back and allow other poems to deliver their own individual impact, without the distraction of her critical commentary. She also delights in exposing readers to poems which they might have never encountered; though LeRoi Jones (better known by his adopted name, Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin, and Walt Whitman may be household names to most readers, poets such as Thomas Avena, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Fawzi Karim, Nazik alMala’ika, Shulamith Hareven, Edmond Jabès, June Jordan, Judy Grahn, Yannis Ritsos, Dennis Brutus, and Rami Saari might not be.

Similarly, the social critics whom she quotes, such as  Che Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg are probably best known to many readers by name alone. Even Karl Marx is represented by less popular quotations (such as that referenced in Rich’s title),  thereby offering most readers “new” material from a major figure. Rich’s project is to rescue these figures and their bodies of work from the wreck, to restore them to the surface.

A Human Eye is an essential text that carries Rich’s joint political and artistic project into the 21st century. The essays included in this volume teach us to see differently, to think differently. Rich writes, “Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embody—make into flesh—another principle. A complex, dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair.” Rich herself has always provided us with this type of poetry, and these essays continue this legacy. Her voice is never self-important or self-involved, it never claims absolute authority; rather, it takes every chance to relinquish authority in the service of a greater and more impactful inclusiveness. Everything should be questioned; everyone should be given a voice. To read Rich’s new volume is to share in a communion of voices ranging from the forgotten to the dispossessed, who are all struggling, along with Rich, to be heard. Rich’s eye gazes on them all, and they all gaze back; survivors of the wreck, left out of the book of myths, but written here.

Erik Fuhrer received an MLitt from the University of Glasgow in 2009. He wrote his dissertation on Virginia Woolf.

Since graduating from Keble College, Oxford in 1953 Geoffrey Hill has pursued a joint career as academic and poet. From 1988 until retirement in 2006 he taught at Boston University, where he co-founded the Editorial Institute with fellow academic and Oxford’s current Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks. Hill’s academic interests are unusually wide-ranging; his recent Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008) contains essays across a wide spectrum of poets, critics, theologians, and philosophers from the Reformation to the late 20th century.

His first publication was a pamphlet in the now-celebrated Fantasy Poets series, a joint-venture of the Eynsham-based artist Oscar Mellor and the Oxford University Poetry Society; this appeared at the beginning of his third undergraduate year at Keble, and, like other pamphlets in the series (which included Adrienne Rich and George Steiner), is now a “collector’s item”. Since that time he has published 12 individual books of poetry. A Selected Poems appeared from Penguin in 2006; a Collected Poems is scheduled for 2012. Hill is an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (where he taught from 1980 until 1988) and of Keble College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from Leeds and Warwick.

What follows is an edited version of an interview given at Keble on the morning of 27 February. On the previous evening he had addressed the Lord Herbert of Cherbury Society at Jesus College on the theme “Strongholds of the Imagination”.

As a poet and as an academic, what do you think the poet’s place should be within the institution of the university?

I don’t have much faith in creative writing courses such as the Master of Fine Arts programmes so prevalent in the States and increasingly active in the UK. I believe that poets should be self-taught, based on an intensive programme of preferably serendipitous reading. I exempt the Oxford Chair of Poetry and the Christopher Tower Chair at Christ Church; these are currently in very good hands and the emphasis on traditional teaching methods is probably firm. Auden used to hold informal sessions, for those who cared to attend, in a coffee shop in the Broad; that also I find entirely acceptable. I’m sorry to say that among early practitioners of creative writing degree classes in the States were people I greatly respect, such as the poet Allen Tate and the novelist Caroline Gordon. But at the time they were struggling to live by their wits, and were probably at their wit’s end.

Have you ever taught creative writing?

Once only; that was 50 years ago in the States. To teach creative writing well requires a particular kind of self-confidence which I didn’t possess. Looking back over so many years I feel more sorry for the students than for myself. It must have been a dismal experience for them also.

What is the public role of the poet? Are they historians or journalists?

Not quite in the sense that I think you intend. Obviously the poet’s public role is to be first and foremost a poet. But it is not ‘philosophically’ wrong for a poet to be deeply, or heavily, involved with journalism and/or politics; it all turns on the matter of intrinsic quality. The public role of the poem is to be a stronghold of the imagination. I wish in a way that I hadn’t read English at Oxford even though I obtained a first, which I doubt I would have done if I’d read any other school (well, history maybe). If I’d read PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics], in which no doubt I’d have got a lower second or a third, I could have taught myself the necessary contexts for writing English poetry (I virtually did so, anyway).

How do you envisage your own poetry’s readership?

Impossible to say. When I see my half-yearly royalties statements I seem not to have a readership at all. Yet in 2006 when I gave a reading in the Sheldonian the place was packed, chiefly with young people. And at poetry readings I continually meet older people who bring for signing a copy of every book since For the Unfallen (1959). A few even have the frail 1952 Fantasy pamphlet. There are obviously devoted readers, but it’s all rather subterranean, a bit like wartime resistance. When you ask about “public role” you have to take into account this aspect also.

You have said that you admire poetry which creates “strongholds of the imagination” and that is why you tend to write “strong poetry”. Was this the type of writing you had in mind when you first began composing poetry?

No. I became a poet because at the age of ten or thereabouts (and long before concepts like “strong poetry” would have had any meaning) I fell in love with English poetry. I was brought up in a Worcestershire village where my father was the local bobby. I sang in the church choir and attended Sunday school. And that year my good attendance prize was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Poetry, a Victorian bestseller. I might be impatient, even scornful now of some of its preferences, but to a boy of ten, it was a revelation and an initiation. From then until now there has been no escape. What I say latterly about strong poetry and semantics and the choice that poetry has, either to resist the pressures of the age or be imploded by them, these are my variants of Auden’s “dyer’s hand”; but the first reaction was total unjudgemental love. I should add that at Bromsgrove High School I had, as early even as the second form, a marvellous English teacher, Anne Gledhill, who was showing us Auden’s Look Stranger! poems.

Do you intend to reinvent your writing persona with every new collection?

Anyone reading through my Selected Poems might very well get that impression. The change in style between Mercian Hymns (1971) and Tenebrae (1978) was severe and intentional: from loping prose-poems to reined-back exercises in traditional forms, in particular the English versions of the Della Casan Sonnet (see F.T. Prince’s splendid The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, 1954). I wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy in rhetorical quatrains modelled on Péguy’s own. Poets who had liked Mercian Hymns—and I was surprisingly popular for a brief while—hated Tenebrae and The Mystery. I have to admit that, in changing about, I’m setting myself formal problems in order to see whether I can solve them, carry them through, to my own satisfaction (which can be pretty demanding). I think that people who in some odd way respect me bear with me; and that those who, for understandable reasons, don’t, don’t.

Is there any kind of unity across your work?

If there is unity it probably resides in a sense of gratitude to past, partly erased, national and international human intelligence and in my desire to celebrate it formally. I’m an in memoriam poet; have been since my earliest days, the days of the Fantasy Pamphlet in 1952. In the English 17th century I admire equally Hobbes and his great opponent Clarendon (and have written critical essays on both). I have learned much of value from a Catholic (Péguy) and a Confucian (Pound). Salman Rushdie says somewhere—I hope my memory serves—that he has always believed that literature should conduct an argument with the world. I’m drawn to writers who seem to me to be brave, beleaguered, and cheerful—like John Dryden.

What motivated you to write your most recent collection A Treatise of Civil Power?

The initial impulse to put together a book may be trivial. In the case of A Treatise I wanted a work that would resemble in appearance a pamphlet by John Milton: the likeness is evident only in the original Clutag Press edition; later printings by Penguin and Yale have lost it. I have summoned the presiding genius of Milton several times: he features in Canaan (1996), in The Triumph of Love (1998), and of course in Scenes From Comus (2005). I greatly admire his political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris. A few days ago I happened upon the text of a lecture delivered at University College, Oxford in 1883 (“John Ruskin in the Chair”). Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”.

Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.