rhythm & spores

If I am not Ulysses, I am
his dear, ruthless half brother.
Strap me to the mast
so I may endure night sirens
singing my birth when water
broke into a thousand blossoms
in a landlocked town of the South,
before my name was heard
in the womb-shaped world
of deep sonorous waters.
Storms ran my ship to the brink,
& I wasn't myself in a kingdom
of unnamed animals & totem trees,
but never wished to unsay my vows.
From the salt-crusted timbers
I could only raise a battering ram
or cross, where I learned God
is rhythm & spores. If I am
Ulysses, made of his words
& deeds, I swam with sea cows
& mermaids in a lost season,
ate oysters & poison berries
to approach the idea of death
tangled in the lifeline's slack
on that rolling barrel of a ship,
then come home to more than just
the smell of apples, the heavy oars
creaking the same music as our bed.

—Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947), "Latitudes" from The Emperor of Water Clocks, 2015.

It rained all day, and I'm making Cat watch the beginning of Black Sails, and I never can get enough of Odysseus.

memory speaking in dactyls

I spent a lot of time thinking about this poem while we were in Greece, but I had so many poems I wanted to post while we were there that some of them had to get saved for later, and this is really more of a poem about Latin than about Greek. Luckily, I then missed a whole bunch of days, so here is an extra poem for April 15.

"…forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit…"

This is dactylic hexameter. This is the meter I learned about
back when I first studied Virgil, much longer ago than I'll tell you.
I tell of a lesson that failed; I sing of a student who stumbled.
"This, even this, one day, will be helpful for us to remember…."
That's what the poet said, anyway.

Think of a scratchy recording, a thirty-three rpm relic,
and under the scratches and crackles, a basso declaiming Evangeline:
"This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks"—
that was to show us the meter of Arma virumque cano—
and beating it out on the table,

the hand of an elderly teacher, her finger-joints lumped and arthritic.
Think of old Longfellow's poem, unread now for so many decades.
Think of old classrooms, old desks, old textbooks with fray-cornered covers.
Feel the great age of the Latin, and all this antiquity pressing
on us who were girls of sixteen.

Soothing old rhythms and sounds, but the road where they led me dead-ended.
English is different from Latin, and stresses are different from long-marks.
Scattered and careless, I fumbled the Latin idea of duration.
(Lord, how I cringe when I think of the ways I misscanned the Aeneid,
misunderstanding the sound of it.)

A wonder it happens at all, that young people learn from old epics.
So many ways of mishearing the rustle of papery voices.
Still, there are fragments that stick; we look for them later and find them.
"Tears of things": now that I've shed them, the line that most comes to me lately—
memory speaking in dactyls.

—Maryann Corbett, "A Meditation on Dactylic Hexameter." I am about 98% certain that I got this poem from the wonderful wintercreek, many moons ago, but I don't have any other publication information. Maryann Corbett is pretty cool, though.

without contraries is no progression

I'm about halfway through the third book of K. J. Charles's Society of Gentlemen series, which is wonderful and amazing and—as my friend Emily put it—probably going to ruin me for all other historical romances. There's rather less Blake in A Gentleman's Position than there was in A Seditious Affair (don't even talk to me about Seditious Affair, I love it too much to be coherent), but I'm still thinking about Blake.

I've had the The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in my poetry month back pocket for a long time. Since the very first year I did this, in fact, when I was taking a truly phenomenal seminar called "Milton and the Romantics" with one of the best professors I have ever had. I've never posted it, because it's long and weird and difficult and only questionably poetry—a little poetry, but mostly essay and art. Also, because Blake is legitimately batshit. When I last posted Blake, I posted a pair of poems that look more like poems, and are a little more easily understood; mostly I don't post Blake, because I have a hard time choosing, and I always want to post the long, weird, complicated, incomprehensible ones. As impossible and incomprehensible as this one is, though, I feel like maybe it's time. So, behind the cut for length, William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790. (Plus a bonus.)

total things known

Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to excerpt an epic, and then I excerpt an epic anyway. This time, I am even giving you the end instead of the beginning or the middle, which makes the whole excerpting an epic thing even worse, but sometimes...well. Sometimes I have to listen to what my heart tells me about poetry.


Flour powders the air around them and settles on their arms and eyes and hair.

-----

One man shapes the dough,
the other two shovel it on long handles into a square hole filled with flames
cut into the back wall.
Herakles and Ancash and Geryon have stopped outside the bakery to stare
at the hole of fire.
After quarreling all day they went out to walk the dark streets of Jucu.
It is a starless windless midnight.
Cold drills up from the ancient rocks below. Geryon walks behind the others.
Little spurts of acid
keep filling his mouth from two red pepper tamales eaten fast a few hours ago.
They are following the palisade.
Pass down an alley then turn a corner and there it is. Volcano in a wall.
Do you see that, says Ancash.
Beautiful, Herakles breathes out. He is looking at the men.
I mean the fire, says Ancash.
Herakles grins in the dark. Ancash watches the flames.
We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back.

~Anne Carson (b. 1950), 'XLVII. The Flashes In Which A Man Possesses Himself', from Autobiography of Red, 1999. Now go read the whole poem -- novel -- whatever. I don't think reading the last part first will ruin it for you. It's not the kind of thing you can spoil.

I wrote a lot, today, and took a long and really lovely mid-afternoon coffee break with Penny, who, to my very good fortune, was in London and at loose ends. I left the library around 7:30, and walked through Bloomsbury at dusk on my way to pick up a few things at Senate House, and I couldn't really stop smiling. The writing comes, even if it comes slowly, and though this is a long week, and work-filled, and intense, I can't find it in myself to be overly stressed; I am too busy glorying in moments.