After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics -- W H Auden

Guest poem sent in by Zenobia Driver

(Poem #1450) After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics If all a top physicist knows About the Truth be true, Then, for all the so-and-so's, Futility and grime, Our common world contains, We have a better time Than the Greater Nebulae do, Or the atoms in our brains. Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe Wherein a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck. Though the face at which I stare While shaving it be cruel For, year after year, it repels An ageing suitor, it has, Thank God, sufficient mass To be altogether there, Not an indeterminate gruel Which is partly somewhere else. Our eyes prefer to suppose That a habitable place Has a geocentric view, That architects enclose A quiet Euclidian space: Exploded myths - but who Could feel at home astraddle An ever expanding saddle? This passion of our kind For the process of finding out Is a fact one can hardly doubt, But I would rejoice in it more If I knew more clearly what We wanted the knowledge for, Felt certain still that the mind Is free to know or not. It has chosen once, it seems, And whether our concern For magnitude's extremes Really become a creature Who comes in a median size, Or politicizing Nature Be altogether wise, Is something we shall learn. -- W H Auden

Note: As the son of a physicist, Auden had an enduring interest in science and
the moral issues surrounding it.
   -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/auden.shtml

I could not resist a poem called 'After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern
Physics'. Never read a poem like this before - that compared one's life to
the way it would be if one was a nebula or one were an atom. (BTW can a
nebula or an atom have an identity? So 'one' in the sense of 'me' could
never be a nebula right? Anyway. )  The first time I read the poem I
couldn't stop grinning at consequences of the lovers kiss. And the lines 'but
who/ Could feel at home astraddle/ An ever expanding saddle?' totally grabbed
me. They are just too cool - the idea of some astronomical body feeling
uncomfortable because it was being stretched as the universe expanded was a
nice quirky way to think of the big bang theory. Wish he had taken a shot at
some more science theories - Darwinism would have been interesting I think.

Regards,
Zenobia D. Driver

[Links]

Auden's reading of the poem here:
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/auden.shtml

The Inner Part -- Louis Simpson

Guest poem sent in by Bob Fish

(Poem #1449) The Inner Part When they had won the war And for the first time in history Americans were the most important people -- When the leading citizens no longer lived in their shirtsleeves and their wives did not scratch in public Just when they'd stopped saying "Gosh" -- When their daughters seemed as sensitive as the tip of a fly rod, and their sons were as smooth as a V-8 engine -- Priests, examining the entrails of birds, Found the heart misplaced, and seeds As black as death, emitting a strange odor. -- Louis Simpson

Reading Yehuda Amichai's poem, "The Diameter of the Bomb" [Poem #1448] made
me think of the awful diameter of American political hegemony in the world
today and brought this poem by Jamaican-born poet Louis Simpson to mind. I
have long admired the economy with which he paints this ominous augury,
re-claiming the priestly mantle for the contemporary poet. Just a few
carefully selected swaths of a brush effectively paint a picture of a gawky,
adolescent American society coming out of the World Wars, proud and slightly
naive about it's newfound status. Progress through technology would be the
new religion that would shape the planet in a benevolent Pax Americana.

Then, with a startlingly glorious turn at the word "Priests," Simpson
skewers the modern political pretension with a reminder of the ancient
mysteries, confirming that the sources of true life-sustaining power remain
elusive, dark and primordial. America's current hubristic foreign policy
clearly indicates this is a lesson we are still obstinately unwilling to
learn.

--Bob Fish

[Links]

Biography: [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0E02

The Diameter of the Bomb -- Yehuda Amichai

Guest poem sent in by Huat Chye Lim

The Yehuda Amichai poem from a couple of weeks ago [Poem #1437] reminded me of
another poem of his that I really like and isn't in your anthology:

(Poem #1448) The Diameter of the Bomb The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God. -- Yehuda Amichai

        (translated by Chana Bloch)

Amichai starts with a recitation of cold, technical facts about the bomb--its
diameter, its range, the number of casualties.  But then, unexpectedly and
rather jarringly, he segues into a personal sketch of one of the victims and
her grieving lover, "the solitary man mourning her death / at the distant
shores of a country far across the sea"--two lines I find especially poignant.
Amichai's conversational, somewhat detached tone ("And I won't even
mention...") throughout the poem serves almost as a foil to the raw emotional
loss that the bomb wreaked, and emphasizes it all the more.

Cheers,
Huat Chye Lim

Take This Waltz -- Leonard Cohen

Guest poem sent in by M. Karki

(Poem #1447) Take This Waltz Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry There's a lobby with nine hundred windows There's a tree where the doves go to die There's a piece that was torn from the morning And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay Take this waltz, take this waltz Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws Oh I want you, I want you, I want you On a chair with a dead magazine In the cave at the tip of the lily In some hallways where love's never been On a bed where the moon has been sweating In a cry filled with footsteps and sand Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay Take this waltz, take this waltz Take its broken waist in your hand This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz With its very own breath of brandy and Death Dragging its tail in the sea There's a concert hall in Vienna Where your mouth had a thousand reviews There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking They've been sentenced to death by the blues Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture With a garland of freshly cut tears? Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay Take this waltz, take this waltz Take this waltz it's been dying for years There's an attic where children are playing Where I've got to lie down with you soon In a dream of Hungarian lanterns In the mist of some sweet afternoon And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow All your sheep and your lilies of snow Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay Take this waltz, take this waltz With its "I'll never forget you, you know!" This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz ... And I'll dance with you in Vienna I'll be wearing a river's disguise The hyacinth wild on my shoulder, My mouth on the dew of your thighs And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, With the photographs there, and the moss And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty My cheap violin and my cross And you'll carry me down on your dancing To the pools that you lift on your wrist Oh my love, Oh my love Take this waltz, take this waltz It's yours now. It's all that there is -- Leonard Cohen

Note: This is Leonard Cohen's adaptation of Lorca's "Pequeño Vals Vienes"
  ("Little Viennese Waltz"). An ordinary English translation of the poem,
  along with Cohen's version, can be found at:
  http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/waltz.htm

The best measure of translated work's worth, as it has often been pointed
out, is to see how well it holds up as a poem in the translated language. By
that yardstick this poem should be counted among the very best ever.

Unfortunately, Cohen's reputation as a poet seems to have suffered much for
his taking up singing as a profession... Cohen manages to preserve both
Lorca's vision and form while taking many liberties with the words
themselves, and the end product is not only the best translation of Lorca in
English, but also a song/poem that is not only faithful to Lorca's original
but also uniquely Cohen's. Cohen's admiration of Lorca is, of course, quite
well known... I always like to think of this poem as Cohen's tribute to his
"master".

Cheers,
Manan.

The People of Spain Think Cervantes -- Edmund Clerihew Bentley

(Poem #1446) The People of Spain Think Cervantes The people of Spain think Cervantes Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes; An opinion resented most bitterly By the people of Italy. -- Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Bentley's eponymous invention, the clerihew, is one of those simple ideas
that seem so natural in retrospect. Humorous biographies are nothing new, of
course, but the formal structure of the clerihew lends them a certain extra
something, in much the same way that the structure of a limerick predisposes
the reader to expect humour, and thereby enhances that humour.

And the clerihew espouses a particularly irreverent form of humour. To begin
with, the idea of summarising someone's life in four lines already calls for
a certain lack of regard, a willingness to pick out the most salient feature
and satirise that. And then there are the rhymes - Nash may have lent a
certain respectability to the bad rhyme, but the clerihew practically
institutionalises it, to the extent that I feel slightly cheated if there
isn't at least a hint of contrivedness. And the short lines and rhyming
couplets give the poem a breezy, dashed-off feel that reinforces this
irreverence - a perfect contrast to the hundreds of serious (and often
deadly serious) eulogies out there.

martin