Greg Zeck Poetry

More sweat, no sweat

Sweating it out — Even sweat is no sweat when work is play. Image: Jeff Lipsky.

To continue sweating over what may be the beginning of a poem, a new poem, maybe an ekphrastic poem (done in imitation of another objet d’art).

To continue sweating, and yet swearing it’s no sweat, it’s fun. At least that’s how I find playing with language, and playing is the essence of the game. It’s form more than content, especially at the start, and form creates the content that is.

“I gotta use words when I talk to you,” said T. S. Eliot, another crucial modernist. But what words, what words we talking here?

Our own, we would hope, even when interfused with those of the poet we are imitating. For if imitation is flattery it also may mean flattening, drowning in another’s voice.

So taking up, carefully, consciously, playfully, where we left off:

Yet what he said who knew? He was poet,
after all, not executive, not poohbah
of the boardroom. He wrote,
he did not underwrite. He took,
he did not undertake. He was
focused, not schizwit.

This is pretty tight but, sure, frankly imitative of Stevens: especially poohbah and schizwit. If this is a tribute, an ekphrasis, that’s one thing. But it if means to launch out, rocket like, from the gantry of another’s voice, that may be something else altogether. Will these words, launched, in other words, find their own orbit?

To this end, let’s play around with what we have, taking out the Stevensian effects:

Yet what he said who knew?
He was poet, after all, not
executive. He would not
sit godlike at the head,
executing policy,
throwing thunderbolts,
but enforce it. He would
write, not underwrite.
Take, not undertake,
the letter of the law,
and when he left
the office for his
home, walking
back the three
miles he had
trod that
morning,
the letters
formed in
glory, in
full words,
and he wore
them like the
helmet of the sun
god that
he was.

Well, good gods, I have gotten ahead of myself here, you see. Forgotten that I was to shape the sestet into another sestet. Got wordy, perhaps, adding ideas but not yet shaping them.

Proof if anything that I may be in the early stages of development. But let that be as it may. I can always go back, recursively, you see, and press and mold these words into six-line stanzas if that’s that they seem to want or warrant.

But now merely letting some ideas play, along with the nascent shapes and sounds of the words. Here it’s the idea that Stevens didn’t want to be too much a businessman or lawyer, though he was that gladly during the workday. From what I surmise in the Brazeau book (see yesterday’s post), he would sometimes fiddle around with words in the office, even have his secretary type up a few lines, and then he’d stash ’em in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk.

But as I’m fooling around here I’m operating under poetic license, with no oath of fidelity to the letter of the law or the law itself.

The office was one realm for Stevens, an earthly realm. The home, and the walk home, were another, a celestial realm, a place of resting from work and wrestling with the angel of the word, a place of contemplation (aside too from the wife, with whom Stevens did not share a bed or bedroom for many years, for poetry was his muse, his mistress, you see).

As a matter of course, to make the process clearer, I take early versions of a poem, early drafts, and print them up as I go along. Let them rest and breathe on the desk a day or two. Fiddle with them with my pencil, crossing out certain words or phrases, asking questions. And then waiting for the next, I hope clearer, vision of the whole when I come back the next day and have at it.

So let’s see what will happen tomorrow, shall we? Or what already has?

Spark, Spunk, Inspiration, Perspiration

If you’re a poet, you know how it goes. What seems to be a spark of a poem — an image, a rhythm — hits you first, and off you go, like a test firework, one of the little ones that warm up the crowd. And so it goes a few lines at a time, could be, till you stand back, scratch your head, wonder what if anything you might have here.

So it goes with me, at times, and I’d like to delve here a bit into the process just to see if it’s anything of value to myself or readers; if it’s any help in any practical, or for that matter impractical, way.

This last weekend I picked up a couple of poetry books at a local used bookstore, one by a poet-friend Gerry Sloan, the other a collection of recollections by those who had known Wallace Stevens, lawyer and insurance executive and great American poet (1879-1955) in one capacity or another, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, by Peter Brazeau.

There are so many good directions and lines in this collection, so many throwaway lines you might think, unless you gather them up, I must have felt, and do something with them. And so I began inscribing them, or something like:

He wrote quite beautifully,
they said, though his hand was
up and down, up and down, his
signature a rocket launch going
PFFFT! or MUMMMM! though
surely that’s not what he wrote.

Wallace Stevens: de dood van een soldaat | Remy in Wonderland

We all know the bit about doctors’ illegible handwriting. But here it’s the fastidious lawyer Stevens, vice president in the claims department, whose signature seemed to his colleagues at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company all but unreadable. They joked that his John Henry looked like MUMMM, and called Stevens Mr. Mumm. (Reticent and often silent in the company of those he did not know, or did not like, he was not the usual back-slapping insurance man.)

My first line above, “He wrote quite beautifully,” addresses Stevens’ style. Evidently, as a lawyer, Stevens was clear, logical, precise, and everybody appreciated that. As a poet, however, he was baffling, at least to his practical-minded insurance company colleagues. According to the testimony of Brazeau’s book, they seem to be uniformly puzzled. One typical reaction: “I’ve tried to read his poetry, and to me it’s the biggest bunch of gobbledygook.” A polite way of saying “bullshit,” I suppose, but as Stevens observed to several of these people they were too literal-minded to understand poetry.

Now here I must confess that, in writing even these few prose paragraphs, I have seen fit to revise the opening of the poem I give above. I wrote above, in paragraph one, about how starting a poem is like “a test firework,” and only subsequently added that image to the first stanza of the poem, Stevens’ handwriting becoming a “rocket launch,” an image that seems to reinforce the shape and force of Stevens’ hand.

What I scribbled next has a few right rhythms, could be, or images, but is rough, rough, rough:

Yet what he said who knew? He was a poet, after all,
and the others merely executives, too literal minded
he advised to understand. It was a world of underwriting
and sureties, of odds and evens, some of them odder than others,
oddities you might say, and they surmised he was schizophrenic,
after all, mixing poetry and insurance; locking up wife
and daughter at the little bungalow, from which, daily,
he would sally forth to the office, and there perhaps scribble
in a dewy notebook a few lines that occurred along the way;
dictate them to his secretary and have her file ’em away
in the right hand file drawer.

This is too verbose, you see. Too many words (as the emperor in Amadeus says about Mozart’s work: too many notes) … and not well enough chosen or spliced in.

So we go back to work and hack our way through this jungle of first thoughts or inspirations.

I like the first sentence: it’s short: it’s to the point: its rhythm is right:

Yet what he said who knew?

And it’s more in accord with the length and punch of the first six lines.

So now what? It’s not that the next few lines are wrong. It’s that they’re slack, or as Stevens says in an admirably taut and funny early poem, “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”

He seems to position himself here in “Bantams” as poet of the New World, battling not practical men, lawyers or insurance men, but Old World poets and their pretenses. (“Bantams” was published in 1922 and made its way, the next year, into Stevens’ famous first volume, Harmonium. It was a declaration of modernism.)

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines …

So if past is prelude, including the past of early modernism, by god we can do worse than follow Stevens’ example. For example,

OK, so this is rough, too, and maybe silly. (One can get giddy silly under Stevens’ early Harmonium example of a hundred years ago.) But it’s taking shape, acquiring a tighter form. Notice I’ve repeated here the idea of the sestet, or six-line stanza, an idea that seems popular these days in the little magazines, for even without pre-modernist rhyme or meter a poem looks tighter when arranged in neat stanzas.

What’s a schizwit anyway? (I’m interested in schizophrenia, for sure, having experience among family and friends.) Do poets, whether ten-footers or inchlings, use neologisms to proclaim or to define? And how much room do we have to do so?

In a world of underwriting,
of sureties, odds and evens,
they surmised he was schizophrenic,
mixing poetry water and insurance oil.
What did they know? Who? Who? Hoo!
He kept wife and daughter locked in the cellar.

Well, you get the drift, and it’s still drift for sure. Am I going toward, or away, from an idea? A central idea, you might say. Getting anywhere? Or gliding toward a form?

It’s impossible, could be, to separate form and idea in poetry. If you haven’t got the one, how can you have the other? But let’s come back to this, shall we, before too long? This poem, I mean. This process of revising and seeing new. This relation of form and idea.

I Am the Child of Earth and Starry Heaven

In Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past, a gift from a friend who like me will soon enough pass, Lewis Hyde cites a spooky passage from an Orphic poem (“The Hymn of Orpheus”) of the 4th Century BC. It’s not the earth that we need fear forgetting, but the heavens themselves and the gods, the poem suggests.

In the halls of Hades you will find on the right, by a ghostly cypress tree, a spring where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw close to this spring for it offers [only] the Waters of Forgetfulness.

Farther on you will find the pool of Memory. Over this stand guardians. They will ask with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades. Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: “I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my true lineage. I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.”

Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will give you water from the spring; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory. After that you will rule among the other heroes.

Orphiká. I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven II - YouTube — The Greek text is set to music in this video.

How to forget that which doesn’t really matter, our life on Earth? And remember that which does, our life before our Earthly life?

Is this a little Platonic for you, or neo-Platonic?

It’s not the verbal spring from which we drink every day, for sure. It’s a paradox: we must forget in order to remember, die in order to live.

A little too Christian or salvific?

How about, more simply, poetic? To be a poet, or maker, we must cast aside that which doesn’t matter, which is matter itself, paradoxically, and all that matter begets. Mother, we might cry, like the dying old man in Chaucer, let me in! And in this reverse birth seize that which does matter, the starry Heavens, the starry night, and day of making things anew.

Small kindnesses

Ran into the poem below on Facebook, where a friend had posted it. Did not know of this poet, Danusha Laméris, until now. She’s a keeper and winner, for sure.

What do we do with such illuminations? Read ’em and weep? Read ’em and smile? Read ’em and reflect on how they can be applied, if there’s such a thing as applied poetry, to our daily lives?

Gods know we are still tribal, even if, as the poet says, we are “So far / from tribe and fire.” We huddle in our own, old prejudices, I mean, and when we meet others we growl or bite.

Isn’t this especially true, these days, of politics?

Better to lavish on each other, however transient these exchanges, a smile, a helping hand? Even when we suspect the other guy/gal is crazy? As crazy as we are ourselves?

Small Kindnesses
by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

End to End Solutions and Other Absurdities of Jargon

Listening to NPR the other day when I heard a sponsor mention “end to end solutions.” Good God, I thought, thinking as a poet would, or a student of language, or a pornographer, I don’t want to connect ends with a tube or any other conveyance of solutions. Of course, in business jargon “solution” itself is the dead-metaphor solution to all problems: just name ’em, there’s a solution. (Scant honor for the solids and gases.) Look at freeway traffic a few minutes: how many trucks will you see plying by with the word “solution” emblazoned on their side?

Antonyms for jargon

We get tired of the cliches and jargon of the business world because it permeates our consciousness so easily. We begin to think in these terms, or not-think, repeating the jargon as if it represented something true.

Beware of cliches, jargon, mind-altering and -alienating language. We are being used. We’re the consenting tool of our own demise.

We hear ad nauseam that someone is “impacted” by an event. What! Was he hit on the side if not front of the head? Was he in fact “compacted”? After the event did he allow his brain to repeat the mantra and reproduce it, so that every time he means simply “affected” he says “impacted”? Oh, he took a hit, so sorry, and had no idea of the damage.

I raise these concerns not to make everyone a poet or philologist but simply to make us a bit more aware of how repetitive, lazy language captures us and turns us into parrots. We sit on our perches, squawking the same dumb phrases when we mean something else, don’t we? If someone is in IT, sure, he may talk about end-to-end solutions with his colleagues and clients. Otherwise, what’s the upside of such nonsense?

If you’re in a traffic accident, you may well be impacted (or compacted). Otherwise, why repeat such ugly absurdities? You were simply affected, altered, changed, disturbed, influenced, interested, involved, touched,
upset, etc.

The more we parrot business jargon, the more we fall into the trap of talking and thinking like those who control the capital … whether financial or political. The more we become not our own person but theirs.

Chekhov and his continuing relevance

So, as I wrote a few days ago, Chekhov is the one great Russian writer of the late 19th century and also the most influential. His observational skills and his gentle irony were an opening into modernism.

Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” for example, has been read and reread, taught and retaught, adapted for the stage, and admired from a distance of time and space. How does this story of a man (Gurov) and woman (Anna) married to people they despise echo in the 21st century?

If you find yourself married to a cold, intellectual type of whom you are secretly afraid (Gurov), what do you do? If you’re married to a bureaucrat, or “flunky” (Anna), ditto? You meet someone new and fall in love, and all is well?

It’s what Gurov and Anna do, and yet they cannot divorce without losing social standing not to mention economic wellbeing. So now what?

Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from this intolerable bondage?

“How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

This ending that is no ending, that presents no solution, this open ending, this peering into the psyche is what we still have, how long after the story was written? What do we do with our psychic problems, with our inability to adapt to conditions, to get along with the people who, at least at one time, were the most important in the world?

In America today half of all marriages end in divorce, and if you try it a second or third time the rate is higher. Why such failure in the art of intimacy? Why such eagerness to try it again? (I know a fellow writer and lawyer who has been married now seven times. The first few lasted about five years each, but the subsequent entanglements maybe 90 days.)

So we find ourselves in counseling or adultery, and seek illumination. Where is the light of our youth, the idyll we occupied when we were young and still inspires our illusions? How can we restore what we were promised, how, how?

Christopher Durang Dies: Playwright With A Genius For The Absurd Was 75 — Absurdist playwright Christopher Durang, 75, died at home Tuesday, April 2.

Other writers, of course, have taken up Chekhov’s mantle, transforming his modernist stories and plays into postmodern or postrational performance. Christopher Durang, for example, who died just the other day of a rare aphasic form of Alzheimer’s, wrote the 2012 stage play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a Tony Award winning satire “that borrowed freely (and hilariously) from Chekhov.”

We continue to borrow from Chekhov, imitating his themes, his forms, his tones, and continue wondering how and why?

Chekhov and the Truth

Finished not long ago Donald Rayfield’s Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) and am rereading Chekhov’s stories and plays.

This morning I run across an excellent essay in Literary Hub, “Everything You Think You Know About Chekhov is Wrong: What Would Chekhov Say of Vladimir Putin?,” by Boris Fishman. The author’s thesis seems to be that Chekhov was the opposite of programmatic and predetermined. That among classic Russian authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky — only Chekhov was modern: determined to observe closely and report faithfully, not indulge in polemics.

Anton Chekhov Biography — Anton Chekhov, 1860–1904

Fishman quotes Maxim Gorky, a “revolutionary” writer, about the Russian soul in Chekhov: “In the presence of Anton Pavlovich everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself, and I had many opportunities of observing how people threw off their attire of grand bookish phrases, fashionable expressions, and all the rest of the cheap trifles with which Russians, in their anxiety to appear Europeans, adorn themselves, as savages deck themselves with shells and fishes’ teeth.”

So what does Chekhov have to do with Putin or politics? The only party to which Chekhov belonged, says Fishman, was the truth party. Not Truth Social or Putin propaganda. Neither liberal nor conservative. Only truth. And that as the only great Russian writer of the 19th century to emerge from the peasant class Chekhov alone was situated to provide what moderns would recognize as the truth.

In the US today, as in Chekhov’s Russia, most of us are drawn magnetically to one ideology or another. It’s as if our brains were reduced to filings, the flimsiest scraps, and they’re pulled to one irresistible position or its polar opposite. We want to be right (or left), correct (or infallible), and declare our allegiance to the truth, at least the truth as it’s been formulated and decreed by the various parties with stakes in the game.

But to quote Fishman on Chekhov’s likely response to America today:

… he would savage, equally, the witch-hunts enacted by social justice warriors, the soul-sellers lining up to lie for Trump, the provincialism of liberal echo chambers like New York and San Francisco, and the media’s reductions and manipulations.

Whether we’re planning to flee from the wrath to come (Trumpugees stampeding to Canada) or celebrate our astuteness and decency here in New York, San Francisco, and other provinces of the mind, we haven’t yet gotten to where Chekhov, among the few literary sages, might like us to be. If we want to call this place the soul, that’s fine with me.

Political fuss & bother

What is the role of the writer during political turmoil such as we have in the US today? Does he bear witness — to whatever cause he espouses? Does he transform the crudities of everyday politics into gold?

This morning the Washington Post has an article about Dmitry Muratov, a journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, “living on a knife’s edge.” He still lives in Moscow, within reach of Putin, that is, and continues to write about the threats of the regime even when his newspaper is shut down. Even when most critical voices have been silenced, gone into exile or imprisoned and murdered like Alexei Navalny.

It’s too easy to be shrill about such things, even as most of us in the US stay comfortable to date. But if an autocrat like Trump is to win office again, what happens to our comforts and our First Amendment rights? For now we can say pretty much what we want, within decent limits. But then, when the unthinkable and incredible occurs, what then?

Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the socialists..." | The ... — Martin Niemöller, German pastor who warned about Hitler and the fascists.

We didn’t say anything when they came for the socialists, did we? And then the gypsies, the queers, the Jews. Should it be a surprise when they come for us?

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. And Trump for sure thinks he’s the Lord and is armed with vengeance against his legions of enemies. What then? If he loses, a bloodbath, as he asserted in a recent rally? If he wins, more far-reaching acts of retribution?

I exaggerate, you might think. But do I? Is it safe simply to wait and then decide what to do?

Theme in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Moving along from the discussion of Feb 6, “Theme,” I’d like to suggest possible themes of a novel I’ve reread lately. I have no idea whether the author started with a theme in mind, or not, a pronouncement on an idea that was worming its way into his consciousness. Or his society’s. But if you were a white South African of any feeling and intelligence, during apartheid, how could such an idea elude you?

This book is the celebrated novel Disgrace (1999) by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. It’s set in the South Africa of the 1990s, just after the end of apartheid. It’s about a literature professor named David Lurie who gets fired from his job for abusing, molesting, having sex with (what are the right words here?) a young student of his. He refuses to apologize in the terms his academic colleagues require and is let go.

He goes out into the South African countryside and lives for a while with his grown daughter, who is farming and taking care of dogs. He helps her with these tasks and is there when three black men break into her house, beat him, rape her.

The daughter refuses to get an abortion when she becomes pregnant.

The father continues ministering to the needs of stray and unwanted dogs at a local veterinary clinic; he assists in their euthanasia and takes the corpses to a crematorium. The last page of the novel is unsentimentally powerful, even shocking:

He opens the cage door. "Come," he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags his crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. "Come."

Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. "I thought you would save him for another week," says Bev Shaw. "Are you giving him up?"

"Yes. I am giving him up."

No, Coetzee is not proposing a Christian framework of salvation, of disgrace and redemptive grace. This fallen creature, David Lurie, cannot save the dog, even for another week. The dog must die, and David must continue living like a dog; for that is the human condition.

The dog is a secular lamb, not Jesus, and will not redeem our sins. Still, if we cannot save the dog but enter into empathy with the doomed creature, identify with the miserable animal, then we ourselves, not without sin, may begin to rise above our misery, our degradation, our disgrace. May achieve some kind of secular grace, which if it does not take us to heaven enables us to go forward with a better notion of our duties and our place in the fragile human condition.

Vulnerable, crippled, disgraced, carrying on and doing the dogged best we can.

Precocial and altricial

Say what?

Ran into these two words in a new bird book my wife Jen bought recently, What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley.

Isn’t that a grand and curious title? I mean, a title to inspire curiosity?

Just about everyone, I think, at some time, has wanted to fly like a bird, at least for a short while, before descending once again (not crashing) to earth.

But these two new words, precocial and altricial? I’m not much of a birder, though Jen and I feed birds in our backyard and try to identify them.

Precocial? I might have first read precocious.

Altricial | All Birds Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia — Oh, mammy, are we hungry or what? Altricial birds in the nest.

Yes, the words are related, both signifying early development. (According to dictionary.com, precocious first appears in English in the 17th century and derives “from Latin praecox early maturing, from prae early + coquere to ripen.”)

But precocial means, roughly, that a bird is born eyes wide and able to take care of itself more or less. Think chickens.

Or, to cite the dictionary once more, “Born or hatched in a condition requiring relatively little parental care, as by having hair or feathers, open eyes, and the ability to move about. Water birds, reptiles, and herd animals usually have precocial young. Compare altricial” (American Heritage Science Dictionary).

Altricial, on the other hand, signifies a bird (think most birds), or other animal, that’s naked and pretty helpless at birth without parental care and protection.

To speak metaphorically, we might designate human beings who still need care, despite their age, as altricial. “Oh, do grow up, man!” (Some might be our relatives, sigh.) Those who are precocial or precocious can take care of themselves fully and fly with the best of ’em.