A Singular Metamorphosis -- Howard Nemerov

Guest poem submitted by Paul E. Collins:

(Poem #1859) A Singular Metamorphosis We all were watching the quiz on television Last night, combining leisure with pleasure, When Uncle Harry's antique escritoire, Where he used to sit making up his accounts, Began to shudder and rock like a crying woman, Then burst into flower from every cubbyhole (For all the world like a seventy-four of the line Riding the swell and firing off Finisterre). Extraordinary sight! Its delicate legs Thickened and gnarled, writhing, they started to root The feet deep in a carpet of briony Star-pointed with primula. Small animals Began to mooch around and climb up this Reversionary desk and dustable heirloom Left in the gloomiest corner of the room Far from the television. I alone, To my belief, remarked the remarkable Transaction above remarked. The flowers were blue, The fiery blue of iris, and there was A smell of warm, wet grass and new horse-dung. The screen, meanwhile, communicated to us With some fidelity the image and voice Of Narcisse, the cultivated policewoman From San Francisco, who had already Taken the sponsors for ten thousand greens By knowing her Montalets from Capegues, Cordilleras from Gonorrheas, in The plays of Shapesmoke Swoon of Avalon, A tygers hart in a players painted hide If ever you saw one. When all this was over, And everyone went home to bed, not one Mentioned the escritoire, which was by now Bowed over with a weight of fruit and nuts And birds and squirrels in its upper limbs. Stars tangled with its mistletoe and ivy. -- Howard Nemerov

        (1920-1991)

Here's a fun American poem that deserves a little recognition.

The theme is agreeably whimsical: an old escritoire (or writing-desk)
spontaneously bursts into bloom and wildlife, and nobody notices because
they are watching the television. The language, for the most part, is
equally absurd. Small animals "mooch around", the escritoire is dubiously
likened to a battleship, and - in a delightful piece of verbosity - we are
told that only the narrator "remarked the remarkable transaction above
remarked". Of course, there are some compelling phrases, too: we can imagine
the legs of the escritoire becoming "thickened and gnarled, writhing" among
the "fiery blue of iris", and the vividness of that image mocks the scornful
"some fidelity" that is all the television can achieve.

Beneath the silliness we note a clear revulsion towards the stereotype of
Narcisse on the TV gameshow, who is amassing unearned dollars by
regurgitating factoids. Here is somebody who "[knows] her Montalets from
Capegues, Cordilleras from Gonorrheas" (garbled references to Shakespearean
characters); Shakespeare himself and his home town of Avon are likewise
churned into garbage. There is a nod to Greene's criticism of his
contemporary (whom he styled "an upstart crow ... with his tyger's heart
wrapt in a player's hide"), but here it seems to refer to the contestant,
aggressive and greedy under a veneer of sophistication, and by extension to
all the viewers who "[combine] leisure with pleasure" - a marketing
catchphrase for empty materialism.

What of the antique escritoire? It is a striking metaphor for manual,
thoughtful work ("where he used to sit making up his accounts") and so the
antithesis of passively watching television. Ignored for too long, the
wooden escritoire shrugs off its workmanship, reverts to its natural state,
that of a tree, and turns the "gloomiest corner of the room" into a blaze of
genuine beauty. This is the heart of Nemerov's message: that we too, by
letting ourselves sink into a swamp of style over content, risk losing our
roots.

Eq.

Poet Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Nemerov

The Winter Palace -- Philip Larkin

Guest poem submitted by Paul E. Collins:

(Poem #1819) The Winter Palace Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder. I spent my second quarter-century Losing what I had learnt at university. And refusing to take in what had happened since. Now I know none of the names in the public prints, And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces And swearing I've never been in certain places. It will be worth it, if in the end I manage To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage. Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow. -- Philip Larkin

This is a beautifully bleak little poem. Instead of the cynical bitterness
that characterises some of Larkin's most popular pieces, here we have a
dreary despair where nothing is worth knowing or doing, matched by an
uncertain, halting rhythm and carried along by a progression of ideas in
sharply delineated couplets.

Larkin's chatty, colloquial tone is in evidence here, but somewhat subdued.
It feels more that we are eavesdropping on the narrator's private thoughts
("it will be worth it ... in the end") than that he is talking to us
directly. The poem is enlivened, too, by a certain self-deprecating wit: the
second couplet, with its clownish half-rhyme and casual jab at the
irrelevance of formal education, is wonderfully quotable.

For a poem about apathy and brain-death, _The Winter Palace_ evokes plenty
of thoughts and emotions. Can the narrator, who initially boasts of giving
the "cold shoulder" to knowledge and experience, genuinely be pleased with
his detachment from society, or is it some sort of last-ditch defence
mechanism against his failure to fit *into* society? It is surely part of
him that is "doing the damage", not (as he half-heartedly proposes) some
consequence of the external things he has learned.

The last couplet is simple but remarkably poignant, evoking a kind of mental
shutdown that is tantamount to suicide.