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The thing about life is that it happens, that we can never unhappen it. Even forgiveness, for all its elemental power, can never bend the arrow of time, can only ever salve the hole it makes in the heart. Despair, which visits upon everyone fully alive, is simply the reflexive tremor of resignation in the face of life’s irremediable happening. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote — a simple equation, the mathematics of which we spend our lives learning. Consolation is the abacus on which we learn it — this small and mighty… read article
“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in his timeless ode to our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a chance event islanded in time; in each of us there is an island of solitude so private and remote that it renders even love — this best means we have of reaching across the abyss between us — a mere row-boat launched into the turbulent waters of time and chance from another island just as remote. Perhaps because we live with such inner islandness, islands became our earliest theoretical models of the universe and we came… read article
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a joint prompt. (The wonderful thing about minds, about the dazzling variousness of them, is what different things can bloom in them from the same seed.) I had been thinking about forgiveness — about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame… read article
In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Papers declared her candidacy “a brazen imposture, to be extinguished by laughter rather than by law.” People — working-class people, people of color, people relegated to the margins of their time and place — clamored to hear her speak, rose up in standing ovation by the thousands, cried and cheered. Born in Ohio to an illiterate mother and an alcoholic father who made a living by selling $1 bottles of opiate-laden “Life Elixir,”… read article
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Something seems to be stirring out there. I’m too cautious and cynical to proclaim a renaissance in formalist poetry but the prognosis is promising. Clarence Caddell, an Australian, has published the second issue of The Borough: A Journal of Poetry. I wrote about the first issue in September. Just last week I wrote about the third issue of New Verse Review. Especially gratifying is seeing five poems by R.L. Barth in The Borough. Bob is a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam who served as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He is the finest American poet to have served in that war – not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. His work is composed in the plain style, practiced by writers from Ben Jonson to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Here is Bob’s anti-sentimental “Letters from Home”: “I never understood Why others couldn’t wait For letters when what good Came from news three-weeks late? “Came from an alien world Of proms and family meals? Took mind from war, unfurled No memory that heals “But carelessness that kills? The truth is that you’re here On mountains or foothills Where life, not home, is dear.” And here is “Flying Home,” subtitled March 1969, also from The Borough: “Weapons surrendered to the armory, My separation papers well in hand, I look at the dark porthole, where I see Myself in civvies, ill-prepared to land.” Another good poet collected in The Borough is Vivian Smith, a retired teacher in Australia who turns eighty-two this year. As with Barth, note the emotional realism, the pared-down though conversational style, and the anti-sentimental tone. Here is Smith’s “Birthday”: “Born in the year that Hitler came to power, I don’t do face book, blog or tweet, I’ve never owned a mobile phone, kind of old-school, dressed to disappear, “and yet surprise, surprise, I’m still alive with poems waiting to be written down like sign writing scribbled on the sky, half-erased, already vanishing. “I like my life, the humdrum tasks. I never hungered for the hippie trail. Indifferent to fashion, I survive. Poems can be true in different ways. “I write them down, I do not hold my breath. I don’t just sit around, waiting for my death.” On Friday, Bob sent me a new poem not published in The Borough. Of it he writes: “Here's a poem about a subject I've been thinking about for fifty-five years. Like [J.V. Cunningham], I am a renegade Catholic; but, as JVC certainly knew, being a renegade doesn't mean you leave the training behind.” Here is “A Soldier-Poet Courts Controversy”: “‘Your unchecked rages and so forth are clearly Manifestations of PTSD.’ An all-encompassing excuse, for sure, To which I give a blunt response: bull shit. Agnostically, call them . . . character flaws; But Catholics know the Seven Deadly Sins Down in the depths of their iniquity, And strictly hold themselves accountable.”
Out of the ordinary The post Paige Ledom appeared first on The American Scholar.
Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II. One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”: “There is a moment when contradictions cross, A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal And happiness could be impartial for once.”
