January 30, 2019

Anthony Madrid uncovers the source text of a small poem by Stevie Smith

Poet Stevie Smith/Wikimedia Commons

Stevie Smith’s first book of poetry was called A Good Time Was Had by All. It came out in 1937; she would have been around thirty-five at the time. That book happens to contain one of my favorite four-line poems in all the galaxies; it deserves to be better known. Here it is:

From the Greek

To many men strange fates are given
Beyond remission or recall
But the worst fate of all (tra la)
’s to have no fate at all (tra la).

Allow me to spell out why this is good.
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April 30, 2018

On Poetry

Nabokov Reads “The Ballad of Longwood Glen”

By The Paris Review

Vladimir Nabokov.

As a capstone to National Poetry Month, we bring you a 1964 recording of Vladimir Nabokov at 92Y reading his poem “The Ballad of Longwood Glen,” which he describes as “a short poem I composed in Wyoming, which is one of my favorite states of existence, and it is also one of my favorite ballads.” Nabokov was quite particular about pronunciations, particularly that of his own name. As Matt Levin, who spent long hours at the Morgan Library listening to the archival audio of our Writers at Work interviews for our podcast, wrote recently:

The four-beat leitmotif that George Plimpton conjures out of the name Nabokov never fails to delight me in its voluptuousness—Nǝ (pause) Beau (pronunciation drawn out like an arch gossip columnist) Kavv (the fricative subtle, fading away like a comet tail). It corresponds perfectly to the wily quote that Nabokov himself gives about the pronunciation of his name—“My New England ear is not offended by the long, elegant middle o of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.”

In the recording below, there are precisely zero despicable gutterisms to be found:

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April 18, 2018

On Poetry

“First of All I’m Naked”: On the Collected Poems of Michael Lally

By Eileen Myles

Michael Lally reading at Folio Books in Washington, D.C., c. 1977, with Doug Lang and Terence Winch.

Michael Lally’s Another Way to Play, out next week, is an awesome book and you should read every word of it. You won’t do it in a day or in many days, but during the passage of reading it you will learn something about time. Another Way to Play seems to offer advice—and it’s advice from self to self, which might be the only way to enact advice truly. Plus, who is that “another”? Somebody else?

As I’m climbing over the rocks, the poems of Michael Lally, this incomplete utopia, a rugged landscape of a book, it occurs to me that what Michael takes on is nothing less than the feat of being alive and the exploding and strewn nature of that exactly on its own terms (living in a body) while this writer keeps trotting out his own arrogance like a family joke, and deep humility is in there, too, humility is the gas station of so much of what Michael Lally does and is, poet and man. Lally is mostly a straight guy, but you may viscerally experience the embrace of another man in “Watching You Walk Away,” which was dedicated to Gregory Millard, one man who died collectively—of AIDS, so there’s an imputation here—of being a survivor of love, even being a man of a certain age or moment who knows that being a loving man and loving men now has both its glory and its price:

The world is all around us, even at night, in bed
in each others arms
distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others
backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay
down in the dark to pick up in the morning
I like your brown eyes when you talk

This collected poems or collected poem is constructed of similar yet all different mostly brave moments. It’s a compendium of what one is possibly brave enough to do—to labor, to fail, to lounge, to love. Lally’s not fessing up, but he’s proud. This is undoubtedly the book of a proud man. Proud to a fault, and he’s the first to tell you that as well. I mentioned family before. Yet what one more likely feels throughout the four-hundred-odd pages of Another Way to Play is that you’re kind of in a relationship with this guy. Whether you’re male or female. Which is kind of octopussy, but stylistically Lally is a dancer, habitually reeling from form to form. It’s a broken book in the best sense. There’s no whole here, the self is never resolved, but what’s delivered, weltered in poem form, is a novelistic series of impressions. It’s a real thing and a changing thing. An aesthetic and a biographical one. Years ago I read in James Schuyler’s “Morning of the Poem” that Schuyler approved of Michael Lally because he looked you straight in the eye. Here we’ve got an extended Lally poem (“The Jimmy Schuyler Sonnets”) that tells us much the same thing—that “Jimmy knew what mattered.” The men’s mutual admiration, their like for one another has a special feeling, a leveling affect. They invite us into their intimacy. Their public “like.” Which makes me want to step out too and acknowledge that I’m discovering that I’m extremely influenced by Michael Lally and I hadn’t thought so much about that until I was dwelling in Another Way to Play. Because his affect occurs through so many different gestures. In the most existential way, his poem is an act. Read More

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April 16, 2018

On Poetry

I Have Wasted My Life

By Patricia Hampl

Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow, 1872.

“I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.”

But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity.

Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never “be alone.” Read More

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December 22, 2017

On Poetry

John Milton’s Strange Christmas Poem

By Ed Simon

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people … ”
—Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)

Some eccentric designer should craft a manger scene based on John Milton’s first great poem: 1629’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” There would be many familiar tropes: the “Star-led Wisards haste with odours sweet” who “from far upon the Eastern rode” to bring a “present to the Infant God.” Surrounding Jesus’s crib would be the “Shepherds on the Lawn” gazing upon the infant swaddled by that “wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother.” Of course, there would be the baby Jesus himself, the “Heav’n-born-childe … in smiling infancy” who “meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.” None of those elements would be out of place on the lawn of a suburban church.

But that’s where my hypothetical Miltonic manger would depart from the familiar, because Milton’s Christmas story has an epic metaphysical violence as its theme. For Milton—and Christianity for that matter—Christ was coming to conquer. In Milton’s Advent, Christ vanquished the demonic pagan “gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines.” When the twenty-one-year-old Milton wrote his nativity ode, he was following what Renaissance humanists called the rota Virgilii, the wheel of Virgil. This was the idea that poets should pattern the progression of their work after Virgil’s literary triad, beginning their vocation with a pastoral and concluding with an epic. Milton did, of course: his crowning achievement, three decades later, was Paradise Lost. For the nativity ode, Milton took the theme of an innocent babe born to redeem the world, just as Virgil explored in his pre-Christian poem “Eclogue IV” (which many later thinkers interpreted as a type of prophecy). If Virgil sang of the “great cycle of periods born anew” then Milton wished to do the same.

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October 19, 2017

On Poetry

The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow

By Ed Simon

C. Hansen, La Fête D’Aegir, 1861

“What could be dafter / Than John Skelton’s laughter?”
—Robert Graves

Sometime early in the sixteenth century, a frequently hungover, perennially in trouble, and womanizing priest named John Skelton took to the lectern at his church. He faced his angry congregation and tried to explain the bastard child born to his mistress. Despite his Cambridge education, his humanist credentials, the fact that he’d once been tutor to Prince Henry, and the immaculate poetry he’d penned, the good Christians of Diss, Norfolk, had complained to their bishop about the priest’s behavior. Skelton may have claimed that (when it came to poetry at least) he’d imparted “drink of the sugared well / Of Helicon’s waters crystalline,” but his congregation was less than impressed. The priest penned inspired lyrics like “Speke, Parrot,” “Phillip Sparrow,” and the immaculate doggerel “The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng,” of which the five-hundredth anniversary is this year. Across these works, he developed an innovative rhythm known appropriately enough as “Skeltonics.” But that sort of thing was of no sway with the bishop. Laity and clergy alike didn’t care for the literary pretensions of this self-styled “British Catullus.” Perhaps it was clear that ordination was not Skelton’s calling, for what could the parishioners expect from sacraments administered by a man who once wrote that “To live under law it is captivity: / Where dread leadeth the dance there is no joy nor pride.” Read More

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Category Archives: On Poetry

On Poetry

Where Stevie Smith’s “From the Greek” Is From

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On Poetry

Nabokov Reads “The Ballad of Longwood Glen”

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On Poetry

“First of All I’m Naked”: On the Collected Poems of Michael Lally

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On Poetry

I Have Wasted My Life

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On Poetry

John Milton’s Strange Christmas Poem

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On Poetry

The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow

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