Temporary Well Being -- Kenneth Burke

Guest poem sent in by Neville Clemens

(Poem #1613) Temporary Well Being The pond is plenteous The land is lush, And having turned off the news I am for the moment mellow. With my book in one hand And my drink in the other What more could I want But fame, Better health, And ten million dollars? -- Kenneth Burke

I was loitering about New York's Pennsylvania Station about a month ago waiting
for my train to arrive when I came across these lines engraved on one of the
walls. The station had been renovated a few years ago and the new polished
granite walls were liberally garnished with delightful short poems (I suppose
one isn't inclined to read epic ballads when there is a train to catch) such as
this one, by poets from in and around the tri-state area.

From the snippets that I remembered when I got back home, I wasn't able to find
the poem on the internet. So last week as I passed by the wall again, I
stopped, stared and memorized it the best I could - and here it is. I'm not
sure if this is part of a larger poem, but in any case I think it stands very
nicely on its own. [verified against a copy on the net -- martin]

This poem, to me, speaks out against what I call 'selective renunciation'. It's
an argument I've had with my parents on many an occasion. We urban people tend
to romanticize the countryside and the hill stations and often express our
desire to leave everything behind and retire to some such place and give it all
up - only we don't *really* want to give it all up. We still want a nice warm
house, a department store nearby, a bank to keep our money safe, a nice school
for our children, a car to move about and so on and so forth till we've utterly
destroyed the charm of the place, and then we move on to romanticizing the next
pristine spot.

So let's stop calling ourselves 'nature lovers'. We're urban animals and living
in an urban jungle is just the cross we'll have to bear, as responsible human
beings. Either that or we go and live by yonder pond in yonder woods like
yonder Dead Poet if we truly wish to 'suck the marrow out of life'.

Neville

[Links]

Biography:

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/kenneth_burke.html

Review:
  http://hcl.harvard.edu/houghton/departments/harvardreview/27/giamo.html

The Coromandel Fishers -- Sarojini Naidu

Guest poem sent in by Hema Manicka

(Poem #1612) The Coromandel Fishers Rise, brothers, rise; the wakening skies pray to the morning light, The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn like a child that has cried all night. Come, let us gather our nets from the shore and set our catamarans free, To capture the leaping wealth of the tide, for we are the kings of the sea! No longer delay, let us hasten away in the track of the sea gull's call, The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all. What though we toss at the fall of the sun where the hand of the sea-god drives? He who holds the storm by the hair, will hide in his breast our lives. Sweet is the shade of the cocoanut glade, and the scent of the mango grove, And sweet are the sands at the full o' the moon with the sound of the voices we love; But sweeter, O brothers, the kiss of the spray and the dance of the wild foam's glee; Row, brothers, row to the edge of the verge, where the low sky mates with the sea. -- Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu's "The Coromandel Fishers". I came across this poem the
other day.  One of those long forgotten poems from high school. What
struck me was the lines like "the sea is our mother ...". I have lived
by the sea a long time. The sea, to me, was a friend, a loving and
giving friend. Now, just over a month, after the deadly tsunami, I am
shaken by its fury.

hema

[Martin adds]

Though I used to be quite fond of Sarojini Naidu back in school, I haven't
explored her work in ages. Today's delightfully lyrical poem, rippling as a
wave, gliding like a gull over the water, reminded me just why I enjoyed her
work so much. Such meticulous attention to the musical sound of the words is
becoming increasingly rare nowadays - say what you will about Naidu, but
that is one thing she got absolutely right.

martin

Neutral Tones -- Thomas Hardy

Guest poem sent in by Cristina Gazzieri

(Poem #1611) Neutral Tones We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod, —-They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles solved years ago; And some words played between us to and fro-— On which lost the more by our love. The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have strength to die; And a grin of bitterness swept thereby Like an ominous bird a-wing... Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves. -- Thomas Hardy

This poem was written in 1890 and published in 1898 and yet, its images and
taste are already those of the twentieth century. The scene proposed by Hardy
is reduced to very few symbolic elements; the pond, the white sun, a few leaves
on the "starving sod" and an ash tree. An image of sterility which foreruns the
best poems by Eliot, though deprived of his intellectual cultivated references
and much more deeply bound to our perception of really experienced failure in
human relationship.

While Eliot is an outside observer of the aridity of man’s life in his age,
Hardy, or his poetic ego, is personally exposing his own scorched bruises. The
poetic voice addresses his woman in the first person and he explores their
mutual feelings without hypocrisy. He indulges on the mean, shabby, ungenerous
words and rancorous considerations, which may typically accompany the end of a
love story. Yet, from line twelve, it becomes evident that what he is relating
was not simply the squalid end of a love story, but a marking experience, a
malediction, which would prevent him from having any kind of love fulfilment in
his life. When I first read the poem I expected some sensual references after
the words "the smile on your mouth" and so, I found the crescendo of sinister
bitterness really striking. I also like the final polysyndeton, which
re-proposes the initial images, but much more pregnant and meaningful, at this
point of the poem.

Cristina

For the Man Who Taught Tricks to Owls -- David Wagoner

Guest poem sent in by Alan S Kornheiser

(Poem #1610) For the Man Who Taught Tricks to Owls You say they were slow to learn. The brains of owls Went down in your opinion through long hours Of unresponsive staring While you showed them how to act out minor parts In the world of Harry Potter. Come with me now Into the night, perch motionless, balanced On a branch above a thicket, where every choice Of a flight path is more narrow Than your broad wing-span, more jagged And crooked than patterns of interrupted moonlight On twigs and fallen leaves, where what you take In silence with claws and beak to stay alive Knows everything about you except your tricks, Except where you're going to be in the next instant And how you got there without anyone's help -- David Wagoner

I don't know about you, but I find most of today's published poetry (ie,
poetry published in non-poetry magazines) either too predictable or too
private. Finally, here's one---from the current issue of The New
Republic---that is neither.

The Harry Potter stories feature owls who carry messages. To do this in the
movies, an "owl wrangler" has trained a number of owls to do various owl
tricks. Through the wonders of digital photography, these tricks are
multiplied, and one owl flying from here to there become dozens flying
within a vast building. You can watch the owls being trained and see their
flights become movies in a TV feature that's been shown on one or another of
the "Discovery-type" channels. It appears that the wrangler does not greatly
admire owl intelligence. It also appears that the poet does not greatly
admire wrangler intelligence.

Like all good nature poems, this one succeeds by being perfectly accurate in
describing the natural world and through that accuracy tells us about more
than just that world.

About the poet, I am embarrassed to say I knew nothing, nor do we have any
of his other works published. A search discloses the extent of my ignorance,
since David Wagoner (b. 1926) is a chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets and editor of the journal Poetry Northwest. The author of ten novels,
he has also written many volumes of poetry, the latest of which is Walt
Whitman Bathing (1996).

Alan Kornheiser

[Links]

Here's the Academy of American Poets page on Wagoner:
  [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=152

Mrs. Thatcher -- Sue Townsend

(Poem #1609) Mrs. Thatcher Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep? Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep? Do you weep like a sad willow? On your Marks and Spencer's pillow? Are your tears molten steel? Do you weep? Do you wake with 'Three million' on your brain? Are you sorry that they'll never work again? When you're dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue? Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep? -- Sue Townsend

Notes: In the voice of Adrian Mole, from "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole,
        Aged 13 3/4" (or, possibly, "Growing Pains" - I don't have my copy handy)

  "Unemployment soon passed three million, a figure unthinkable just a few
  years beforehand. This economic crisis sparked deep rivalry in the cabinet
  and triggered a number of high profile resignations."
  -- http://www.margaretthatcher.net/biography/

Writing bad fictional poets is a delicate and seldom-mastered art. It is not
enough to write bad poetry - the poetry has to be *convincingly* bad, and
bad in such a way as to let the reader sympathise with the "poet" who
doubtless thought it one of his masterpieces. (Quoth the young master Mole,
"I think my poem is extremely brilliant. It is the sort of poem that could
bring the government to its knees.")

Above all, one should never get the impression that the author is
self-consciously writing a bad poem. Douglas Adams fell into this trap, for
instance, with his Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings poem about the dead swans,
which definitely detracted from it. Luckily, Townsend makes no such mistake;
her Adrian Mole poems are uniformly brilliant, the kind of bad poetry that
gets written by your angsty high school classmate, except that they somehow
manage to be hilariously funny as well. ("Mrs. Thatcher" is actually a pretty
good poem compared to the rest of the collection - indeed, the reason I
chose to run it rather than some of the more egregiously bad poems is that I
find it surprisingly memorable and fun to recite to myself.)

martin

[Links]

More about the Adrian Mole books
  [broken link] http://www.adrianmole.com

(and if you haven't read them, I strongly urge you to - the first few, in
particular, are altogether brilliant). There's a great review here:
  [broken link] http://www.epinions.com/content_Biography of Townsend:
  http://www.adrianmole.com/Sue/biography.html