The Poetry Cosmos

[ejp626]

So I've been checking out the Vancouver library. It's pretty nice for a city roughly the size of San Francisco. I was impressed by their poetry section. They seem to have almost the entire run of August Kleinzahler's recent works and a pretty complete set of Charles Simic. They even have one I haven't gotten to yet (Master of Disguises), so I checked this out. Several sections are very similar to Simic's previous work, which strikes me as a kind of melancholy urban reverie (not totally dissimilar to Ben Katchor). I like the start of this poem -- "Worriers Anonymous"

We are a doomsday sect

With a membership that runs into millions

The waitress stepping out for a quick smoke

And the yellow dog tied outside the bank,

We don't need nametags to know each other.

The middle section, however, is more of a rural melancholy, which doesn't work as well for me. In any case, one thing that is different is that many of the poems (in all the sections) struggle with the idea of the divine and the absence of the divine for a confirmed skeptic (who may in fact wish for the comforts of faith but is denied them). This may make the book more or less interesting for those who are more used to Simic as a poet who has a bit of a smirk about him. And I wouldn't say that Simic has really pulled off the effort of tackling such issues in any depth. Here's one example: "I'm just a shuffling old man,/ Ventriloquizing / For a god / Who hasn't spoken to me once." I guess I'd say this seems a bit forced. He pulls it off a bit better in the title poem, however.

Definitely not my favorite collection by far, but certainly worth checking out (if you can find it at a library)...

Edited October 9, 2011 by ejp626

[Larry Kart]

Two stanzas from "A Treatise on Religion" by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628):

VIII

Then seek we must, that course is natural

For owned souls, to find their owner out;

Our free remorses, when our natures fall,

When we do well, our hearts made free from doubt,

Prove service due to one Omnipotence,

And Nature, of Religion to have sense.

IX

Questions again which in our hearts arise

(Sin loving knowledge, not humility)

Though they be curious, Godless, and unwise,

Yet prove our nature feels a Diety:

For if these strifes rose out of other grounds,

Man were to God, as deafness is to sounds.

When that cat sat down at the keyboard, he could play!

[ejp626]

So I reread Simic's Master of Disguises and decided I liked the 4th section a bit more the second time around -- it actually had some of the surreal touches of his earlier collections. I find it interesting that we dwell on some of the same imagery -- keys to lost locks, broken bottles, etc. -- though these are not that unique in poetry of course.

Then I checked out That Little Something, which was published a few years prior to Master of Disguises. Not as good -- I only connected with a few of the poems. I think in general his collections from the 1990s are the best: Hotel Insomnia, A Wedding in Hell, Walking the Black Cat, maybe even Night Picnic from 2001. Maybe there is too much of a sameness to his recent work, but when he tries to depart too much from his earlier style that doesn't work as well and people keep asking him for more poems like the earlier ones. I think it is a real problem for artists who kick around for long enough (another reason why it is better -- from a legacy perspective -- to only be on the scene for a relatively short while -- Rimbaud or Jackson Pollack). One equivalent from the art world might be Giorgio de Chirico who tried to make a major shift in his painting style but was roundly attacked for it.

One odd thing at the library today. I have been reading Robert Kroetsch's late poetry. The Snowbird Poems -- not too bad. The Hornbooks of Rita K. -- kind of a long and tedious metawork where the author is commenting on short poems by a poet (Rita K.) who has vanished. For completists only.

Anyway, it turns out that one of the fairly recent Galway Kinnell books has been catalogued in the midst of the Kunitz's books (so even if someone like me filed it properly, eventually it would be reshelved into its proper, i.e. wrong location). The librarian just sort of threw up his hands and said that sometimes the Dewey decimal system was off. Frankly, that strikes me as unlikely. I think it is more likely that when the book came through, someone on staff put the wrong sticker on it -- and maybe they have a Kunitz book shelved with Kinnell. It's awfully annoying when librarians act as if they are completely helpless to fix errors (and this isn't the first time). When I worked at a library (many, many long years ago), we wouldn't have been quite so quick to admit defeat.

[ejp626]

... They (the Vancouver library) seem to have almost the entire run of August Kleinzahler's recent works ...

Speaking of Kleinzahler, who has come up a couple of times on this forum, I've been kind of impressed by the Poetry Foundation website, which is a pretty interesting resource. Here's their page on Kleinzahler: Poetry Foundation. Sadly many of the audio tracks of poets reading their own works are not available outside the U.S., but most folks here can still listen in.

[johnlitweiler]

This probably dates from the 1970s:

Love Poem to You, by Bill Knott

I will love you as far as I can throw you

then I will throw you some more

your veins are carrying us to

unanimous-poem climax

from my lips escape the mating-cries of extinct animals

--now do you understand the radiocarbon-dating process?

once I had to leave you, so

I arranged for earth-tremors at night

so in your sleep you would think I was caressing you

o you

you orbiting the earth

at a height of 5 feet 8

moon

childhood mired in light

[paul secor]

... They (the Vancouver library) seem to have almost the entire run of August Kleinzahler's recent works ...

Speaking of Kleinzahler, who has come up a couple of times on this forum, I've been kind of impressed by the Poetry Foundation website, which is a pretty interesting resource. Here's their page on Kleinzahler: Poetry Foundation. Sadly many of the audio tracks of poets reading their own works are not available outside the U.S., but most folks here can still listen in.

They omitted mention of his book of writings on music, Music: I-LXXIV, which was published in 2009. The Poetry Foundation page says that it was updated in 2010. I love his poetry, but imo the book of music writings isn't much. Still, it exists and should have been mentioned.

[johnlitweiler]

I think I had said I would include something of the newer poems out of Merwin's Migration, which I just picked up. This one is about John Berryman (author of the brilliant The Dream Songs) and apparently a bit of a mentor to Merwin.

I don't know if the audio here still works (I couldn't get it to):

Berryman on-line

I won't quote the whole thing (you can follow the link for that), but I did like Berryman's advice to Merwin, which ends the poem:

as for publishing he advised me

to paper my wall with rejection slips

his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled

with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence

that permitted everything and transmuted it

in poetry was passion

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

Aha! Thanks for the advice.

[jeffcrom]

A poem by one of my favorites, David Budbill. He recorded a wonderful duet album with William Parker. This poem is from Moment to Moment.

The First Green of Spring

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,

this first sweet green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting

to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching

on this message from the dawn which says we and the world

are alive again today, and this is the world's birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we

will never be young again, we also know that we're still right here

now, today, and, my oh my! don't these greens taste good.

[ejp626]

Just learned that Adrienne Rich has passed away: obit Kind of sinking in, and I'm getting a bit bummed out.

She was my favorite of the feminist poets that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, although I also liked much of the work of Audre Lorde. I went to hear Rich at a reading in the early, early 1990s and had her sign a copy of The Fact of a Doorframe. This was in a bookbag that was stolen and was probably the most upsetting thing to have lost of the various things that were stolen. I suppose I could have gotten another autographed copy at some point, but it wouldn't have had the same connection.

I should say that I am more than a casual fan, as I have 12 of her collections, including all of them since The Fact of a Doorframe, with the exception of the very, very latest (and presumably last): Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. I probably should try to snag a copy of that in the next week or so.

Edit to add: So I pre-ordered a paperback copy of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve and even found an inexpensive signed copy of Dark Fields of the Republic (have a copy but it was a bit beat up -- so I can justify it ). Time will tell if the dealer will honor this order or jack up the price because of her passing.

Here's a poem that tries to draw connections between the literary and the personal/political, forcing (perhaps) a re-evaluation of War and Peace when viewed through the lens of women's experience.

The Novel (from Time's Power)

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and Peace

Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield

were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound

like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers

You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary

as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand

on the slight strand that held your tattered mind

blown like an old stocking from a wire

on the wind between two rivers.

All winter you asked nothing

of that book though it lay heavy on your knees

you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk

you were old woman, child, commander

you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing

you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages

you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-

hand growing few, you knew the end was coming

you knew beyond the ending lay

your own, unwritten life.

(1986)

A more comprehensive examination of the poem may be here: Yawp and Peace

Edited March 29, 2012 by ejp626

[jeffcrom]

At the Station

The blue light was my blues,

and the red light was my mind.

ROBERT JOHNSON

The man, turning, moves away

from the platform. Growing smaller,

he does not say

Come back. She won't. Each

glowing light dims

the further it moves from reach,

the train pulling clean

out of the station. The woman sits

facing where she's been.

She's chosen her place with care-

each window another eye, another

way of seeing what's back there:

heavy blossoms in afternoon rain

spilling scent and glistening sex.

Everything dripping green.

Blue shade, leaves swollen like desire.

A man motioning nothing.

No words. His mind on fire.

- Natasha Trethewey

Edited May 28, 2012 by jeffcrom

[ejp626]

I came across this one a short while ago. I like it, esp. reconciling the dream of reaching America and the reality of reaching America. It is one of the stronger poems from his collection Falling Deeply into America.

Sailing to America

By Gregory Djanikian

Alexandria, 1956

The rugs had been rolled up and islands of them

Floated in the centers of every room,

And now, on the bare wood floors,

My sister and I were skimming among them

In the boats we’d made from newspaper,

Sheets of them pinned to each other,

Dhows, gondolas, clippers, arks.

There was a mule outside on the street

Braying under a load of figs, though mostly

There was quiet, a wind from the desert

Was putting the city to sleep,

But we were too far adrift, the air

Was scurfy and wet, the currents tricking

Our bows against reef and coral

And hulls shearing under the weight of cargo.

“Ahoy and belay!” I called to my sister,

“Avast, avast!” she yelled back from her rigging,

And neither of us knew what we were saying

But the words came to us as from a movie,

Cinemascopic, American. “Richard Widmark,”

I said. “Clark Gable, Bogie,” she said,

“Yo-ho-ho.” We had passed Cyprus

And now there was Crete or Sardinia

Maybe something larger further off.

The horizon was everywhere I turned,

The waters were becoming turgid,

They were roiling, weeks had passed.

“America, America, land-ho!” I yelled directionless.

“Gibraltar,” my sister said, “Heave to,”

And signalling a right, her arm straight out,

She turned and bravely set our course

North-by-northwest for the New World.

Did we arrive? Years later, yes.

By plane, suddenly. With suitcases

And something as hazy as a future.

The November sun was pale and far off,

The air was colder than we’d ever felt,

And already these were wonders to us

As much as snow would be or evergreens,

And it would take me a long time

Before I’d ever remember

Boats made of paper, islands of wool,

And my sister’s voice, as in a fog,

Calling out the hazards,

Leading me on, getting us there.

Source is the Poetry Foundation website here

[ejp626]

On a related note, I am attempting to pull together an anthology of poems about various modes of transportation with a heavy emphasis on subways, elevateds, biking and walking. There will of course be a few poems on cars, sailing and airplanes, but these have been pretty well anthologized already. I actually had prepared a subway poetry anthology, but the scope was deemed a bit too narrow. So that gives me a pretty good starting point for this new anthology.

Any suggestions are welcome, though I have to say up front there will be no financial compensation or finders fee for any poem, no matter how good. But you could find yourself in the acknowledgment section, FWIW.

[Late]

Just finished reading (again!) James McMichael's Each In A Place Apart, and again I came away thinking that it was the best American poem in the last fifty years, a work of poetic genius IMHO.

McMichael rarely gets mentioned, even in poetry circles, though he was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. I was surprised when my book was reviewed along with Capacity. (Four Good Things is still my favorite book of his.)

Matthew — have you read any Killarney Clary? She studied with McMichael, and I think all her books are fantastic (she has three). She writes the finest prose poems.

[ejp626]

On a related note, I am attempting to pull together an anthology of poems about various modes of transportation with a heavy emphasis on subways, elevateds, biking and walking. There will of course be a few poems on cars, sailing and airplanes, but these have been pretty well anthologized already. I actually had prepared a subway poetry anthology, but the scope was deemed a bit too narrow. So that gives me a pretty good starting point for this new anthology.

Any suggestions are welcome, though I have to say up front there will be no financial compensation or finders fee for any poem, no matter how good. But you could find yourself in the acknowledgment section, FWIW.

This project continues and I have most of the poems I need on subways, trains, biking. I could use a few more good poems about airplane rides, walking (primarily in the country but also in the city) and driving. Do let me know if you have any leads. I'll put a few of the more interesting ones up later.

This poem is on a completely different topic, but I really liked it, so here it is.

Thomas McGrath

Nuclear Winter

After the first terror

people

Were more helpful to each other

As in a blizzard

Much comradeliness, help, even

laughter:

The pride of getting through tough times.

Even, months later,

When the snow fell in June,

We felt a kind of pride in

our

Unusual weather

And joked about the wild geese

Migrating south,

Quacking over the 4th of July presidential honkings.

It was, people said,

The way it had been in the Old Days...

Until the hunger of the next year.

Then we came to our senses

And began to kill each other.

(The spacing is a bit off. Someone showed me how to add in extra spaces but I forgot the details. I'll have to fix later.)

Edited August 7, 2012 by ejp626

[Pete C]

I came across this one a short while ago. I like it, esp. reconciling the dream of reaching America and the reality of reaching America. It is one of the stronger poems from his collection Falling Deeply into America.

Sailing to America

By Gregory Djanikian

Greg Djanikian is a very good friend of a very good friend of mine. Greg's son Zach is a musician who has studied with Odean Pope.

[ejp626]

Winding up the anthology. Still a bit short on driving poems. In part this is because many of the best were already included in Drive, They Said (which not coincidentally was put out by the same publishing company I am talking with).

Anyway, it has been an interesting process, diving back in and rereading a lot of poetry. Most of my old favorite poets still hold my interest, though I wasn't as grabbed by L.E. Sissman as I used to be. In general I found that I was not very interested in long poems or poetry series. Certainly in part this is because they cannot be anthologized (or anthologized easily) but just in general I don't have the attention span to read a really long poem -- and at root I think that poetry should be shorter and to the point. Thus, I found I was not nearly as interested in Adrienne Rich's later work. I struggled a bit with Basil Bunting's Briggflats, though I liked his Odes a fair bit. He was a bit of a new discovery for me (I think he is mentioned way upthread).

Two pleasant discoveries were that Alan Dugan and Harvey Shapiro had continued to write (past the books I knew them by) and indeed had quite recent collected volumes out (Poems Seven and The Sights Along the Harbor respectively). Even better, I found used copies of these books super cheap (even with shipping to Canada), so I ordered them. Both of them have a bit of wry perspective on urban life. Dugan in particular seems to have written quite a bit about mid-1950s/1960s business life. If I were his publisher, I would definitely try to get some kind of Mad Men tie-in.

I'll add a Dugan poem later on. Right now I'll just attach a short poem from A Day's Portion (Harvey Shapiro). This poem doesn't have quite the gravitas to go into the anthology, but it is still fun:

Harvey Shapiro

New York Note

Caught on a side street

in heavy traffic, I said

to the cabbie, I should

have walked. He replied,

I should have been a doctor.

[Larry Kart]

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies

a girder, still itself among the rubbish.

- Charles Reznikoff

[ejp626]

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies

a girder, still itself among the rubbish.

- Charles Reznikoff

Reznikoff is quite high on my list of pithy urban poets. It looks like the current collected poems has maybe a handful of additional poems not included in my earlier edition from Black Sparrow, but I couldn't justify ordering it for that. I'll just borrow from the library.

Here's a subway poem from Reznikoff:

In steel clouds

to the sound of thunder

like the ancient gods:

our sky, cement;

the earth, cement;

our trees, steel;

instead of sunshine,

a light that has no twilight,

neither morning nor evening,

only noon.

Coming up the subway stairs, I thought the moon

only another street-light —

a little crooked.

From Jerusalem the Golden (1934)

[ejp626]

So I have been going through some other poets' work. I had high hopes for Alice Notley, but virtually all of the poems that she chose for her New and Selected Poems are truly epic length. While I can sort of see the ideological appeal of staking a claim that near book-length poetry is just as important as novel writing (following in the footsteps of H.D. I guess), I just think it is close to career suicide to do it. You can't get your poems in magazines or anthologies, and you need to carve out excerpts anyway if you go out and give readings. I think the only one whole really gets away with it anymore is John Ashberry.

Anyway, I found one of the office poems by Alan Dugan. I guess the other one I found amusing is in his newest collection, so I'll post that later when the book turns up here.

ON TRADING TIME FOR LIFE BY WORK

The recepionist has shiny fingernails

since she has buffed them up for hours,

not for profit but for art, while they,

the partners, have been arguing themselves

the further into ruthless paranoia,

the accountant said. The sales representatives

came out against the mustard yellow: “It

looks like baby-shit,” and won, as ever. In

the studio, the artist, art director, and

the copy chief were wondering out loud:

Whether a “Peace On Earth” or a “Love

And Peace On Earth” should go around

the trumpeting angel on the Christmas card.

In this way the greeting card company

worked back and forth across a first spring

afternoon like a ferryboat on the river:

time was passing, it itself was staying the same,

and workers rode it on the running depths

while going nowhere back and forth across

the surface of the river. Profits flow away

in this game, and thank god there is none

of the transcendence printed on the product.

From Poems 2 (1963)

[ejp626]

I've always thought this was a powerful poem, but today it really hit me. Guess I've been thinking about my mother lately (she's been gone nearly 16 years )

The Race by Sharon Olds

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,

bought a ticket, ten minutes later

they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors

had said my father would not live through the night

and the flight was cancelled. A young man

with a dark brown moustache told me

another airline had a nonstop

leaving in seven minutes. See that

elevator over there, well go

down to the first floor, make a right, you'll

see a yellow bus, get off at the

second Pan Am terminal, I

ran, I who have no sense of direction

raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish

slipping upstream deftly against

the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those

bags I had thrown everything into

in five minutes, and ran, the bags

wagged me from side to side as if

to prove I was under the claims of the material,

I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,

I who always go to the end of the line, I said

Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said

Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then

run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,

at the top I saw the corridor,

and then I took a deep breath, I said

goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,

I used my legs and heart as if I would

gladly use them up for this,

to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the

bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed

in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of

women running, their belongings tied

in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my

long legs he gave me, my strong

heart I abandoned to its own purpose,

I ran to Gate 17 and they were

just lifting the thick white

lozenge of the door to fit it into

the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not

too rich, I turned sideways and

slipped through the needle's eye, and then

I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet

was full, and people's hair was shining, they were

smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a

mist of gold endorphin light,

I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,

in massive relief. We lifted up

gently from one tip of the continent

and did not stop until we set down lightly on the

other edge, I walked into his room

and watched his chest rise slowly

and sink again, all night

I watched him breathe.

Sharon Olds

from The Father (Knopf, 1992)

On-line source

[Joe]

"The Guitarist (Wes Montgomery & James Clay, Hollywood 1958)"

Kendra DeColo

It is the look of terror on his face—

the glossy flank of an open grand piano

untouched & muscled with light

behind them—that makes me turn

away, the saxophonist leaning

into the curve of breath, the arc

glinting from his lips, almost

unwieldy, thick-limbed, the precision

of a volt striking the ground. He is cruel,

I think, his lips gripping the brass

mouth & wood tongue, because

he knows he can’t be touched

as the fighter who doubles

inside the ring, winged fits

of blood & electricity humming

like a halo around the near-corpse

of the man he’s whipped, fists

demarcating notes into the haze

between them, the guitarist’s mouth

& eyes swollen with knowledge

he is ill-equipped, his left hand

a culled constellation, flaccid above

the strings as if to form the chord

of a blistering universe, the first

cut into darkness, deliberate chaos

of the child who pretends to play

lifting the wooden body to his chest,

who knows what stirs in his cells

has no name, the crook & jag, blue

smoke, a bud opening in his abdomen

swelled to the size of hope as we become

the shape of whatever we hold

in our hands when asked to lift up

what we cannot bear to touch.

(VINYL POETRY, Vol. 5, Summer 2012: http://vinylpoetry.com/volume-5/page-32/)

Also, and at the risk of being a being a self-promoting jerk, I'm happy to announce that my first chapbook -- THE TERRACES (DAS ARQUIBANCADAS) -- has just been published as part of the Little Red Leaves Textile Series. You can learn more by visiting this link. Beyond that, LRL is a great small press that makes (and publishes) beautiful books.

Edited August 16, 2012 by Joe

[Larry Kart]

Roy Fisher's "The Thing About Joe Sullivan":

The pianist Joe Sullivan,

jamming sound against idea

hard as it can go

florid and dangerous

slams at the beat, or hovers,

drumming, along its spikes;

in his time almost the only

one of them to ignore

the chance of easing down,

walking it leisurely,

he’ll strut, with gambling shapes,

underpinning by James P.,

amble, and stride over

gulfs of his own leaving, perilously

toppling octaves down to where

the chords grow fat again

and ride hard-edged, most lucidly

voiced, and in good inversions even when

the piano seems at risk of being

hammered the next second into scrap

For all that, he won’t swing

like all the others;

disregards mere continuity,

the snakecharming business,

the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’

under the long variations:

Sullivan can gut a sequence

In one chorus --

approach, development, climax, discard --

And sound magnanimous,

The mannerism of intensity

often with him seems true,

too much to be said, the mood

pressing in right at the start, then

running among stock forms

that could play themselves

and moving there with such

quickness of intellect

that shapes flaw and fuse,

altering without much sign,

concentration

so wrapped up in thoroughness

it can sound bluff, bustling,

just big-handed stuff --

belied by what drives him in

to make rigid, display,

shout and abscond, rather

than just let it come, let it go --

And that thing is his mood:

A feeling violent and ordinary

That runs in standard forms so

wrapped up in clarity

that fingers following his

through figures that sound obvious

find corners everywhere,

marks of invention, wakefulness;

the rapid and perverse

tracks that ordinary feelings

make when they get driven

hard enough against time.

[ejp626]

Also, and at the risk of being a being a self-promoting jerk, I'm happy to announce that my first chapbook -- THE TERRACES (DAS ARQUIBANCADAS) -- has just been published as part of the Little Red Leaves Textile Series. You can learn more by visiting this link. Beyond that, LRL is a great small press that makes (and publishes) beautiful books.

That is so great to get your stuff out there. I'll definitely try to check it out.

That's so funny. The books look quite a bit like the books we put together in grade school, where we wrapped chapbooks (not that we called them that) in cloth and ironed them.

It might help sales (in general) if a poem or two were up on the LRL website so people had some sense of the contents.

Edited August 17, 2012 by ejp626

[jeffcrom]

I posted this a few months ago, but for personal reasons I wanted to repeat it tonight:

The First Green of Spring

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,

this first sweet green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting

to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching

on this message from the dawn which says we and the world

are alive again today, and this is the world's birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we

will never be young again, we also know that we're still right here

now, today, and, my oh my! don't these greens taste good.

- David Budbill

[ejp626]

I'm trying to get a handle on whether Charles Causley was ever in the UK poetic canon or not. He hasn't made the cut in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, probably because he was writing ballad-inspired poetry well past the point it was fashionable. I have a sense he may have been more widely read in the 1950s and 60s. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me while I was browsing the library shelves and I ended up borrowing Union Street. I thought some of the poems were fairly interesting, particularly the earlier ones which draw on his experiences in the Royal Navy during WWII (a lot of lost sailors in these poems, which definitely ties in with the ballad form).

One of the poems singled out in the introduction is "Ou Phrontis" where the refrain of every stanza is "I don't care!": "But the bridegroom is occupied elsewhere, / I don't care!" "Another the bridal bed will share. / I don't care!" etc. To be honest, I don't really care for the poem, but I have to think that Maurice Sendak came across it at one point, since it seems like Pierre is just an extended riff on "Ou Phrontis."

Of the poems I did like, two really stand out (to me): "Conversation in Gibraltar" (which I hope to have included in the transportation anthology) and "Convoy." For now, I'll just report on "Convoy"

Convoy

Charles Causley

Draw the blanket of ocean

Over the frozen face.

He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish,

Staring through the green freezing sea-glass

At the Northern Lights.

He is now a child in the land of Christmas:

Watching, amazed, the white tumbling bears

And the diving seal.

The iron wind clangs round the icecaps,

The five-pointed dogstar

Burns over the silent sea,

And the three ships

Come sailing in.

(From Union Street, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957)

What I think Causley is getting at here is contrasting the drowned sailor, lost in the North Sea perhaps, with the three ships that make it safely into port (as part of a convoy). I find the poem really open-ended, since it isn't clear whether Causley is somehow making a (false) equivalence between these two things, like the safe passage of the three ships doesn't outweigh the loss of one sailor. But he probably isn't saying that precisely. It would make the poem clearer if the reader knew whether the sailor was on a ship that sank (though presumably Causley would say something about his mates) or was on one of the saved ships but was swept overboard or died in some other manner. It is probably the fairly radical open-endedness that makes it interesting to me (certainly more than the semi-traditional ballads he also writes).