A commonplace book
Spotted in the TLS:
It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought – that is to be educated.
And also on the literary life, there’s a charming cartoon by Brooke Barker about how her grandmother, a voracious reader, finally took on Will and Ariel Durant.
A short poem from the least known of the “New York School” poets, James Schuyler. He’s the one I have connected with most recently; his personal, inward looking poems are like journal jottings (a trait Frank O’Hara had as well).
Salute by James Schuyler
remembers what one
meant to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.
A love poem by the least known of the New York Poets (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara).
Letter Poem #3
The night is quiet
as a kettle drum
the bull frog basses
tuning up. After
swimming, after sup-
per, a Tarzan movie,
dishes, a smoke. One
planet and I
wish. No need
of words. Just
you, or rather,
us. The stars tonight
in pale dark space
are clover flowers
in a lawn the expanding
Universe in which
we love it is
our home. So many
galaxies and you my
bright particular,
my star, my sun, my
other self, my bet-
ter half, my one
–Jame Schuyler
The paper version of today’s New York Times came with a lovely insert, “The Daily Miracle,” a photo essay on the paper’s printing plant in College Point, Queens. The pictures are by Christopher Payne who has previously documented the making of a Steinway, as well as architectural and industrial topics, and has an eye for process monumental yet personal.
He captures the immense challenge of turning out a daily paper, one particularly resonant now that the materiality of the newspaper has given way to digital, pixels replacing ink, for many if not most. As somebody who makes a living pushing pixels, the physical newspaper seems ever more to to be a pinnacle of a certain kind human activity–of organization, craft, industry, know how, (and this isn’t just my growing up around them as the child of newspaper writers and journalism teachers. Luc Sante captures some of this in his graceful intro essay to the photographs,
And then you can hold it in your hand, fold it, tear it, use it as a rain hat–a voluminous paper object with visual dazzle and hundreds of thousands of words representing the collected information of that moment: news, opinion, analysis, testimony, critique, charts, graphs, photos, displays. And it happens every day over and over again. Small wonder they call it “The Daily Miracle.”
Luc Sante
The photos aren’t online yet reasonably enough (although I’m betting they will be). So you will have to find a copy of Sunday’s paper. But there is a little info about the series here, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/reader-center/printing-plant-section-christopher-payne.html .
In the midst of getting sentimental about all things newsprint, I remembered the best printing joke, “What does the sign say in the NYTimes’ compositing room? All the news that fits, we print.”
Also worth noting: March 24 is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday. He was a grand old man of beat poetry when I was a teenager, and that he is still around–as is his landmark North Beach store, City Lights Books–is enormously reassuring. Barry Mills has an essay worth reading up at Poetry Foundation. To Lawrence, in addition to wishing him the happiest of birthdays, I offer this quote from George Burns, another long-lived good guy, “If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.”
Provincetown poet Mary Oliver died yesterday at 83. Bryan Marquard has written a lovely obit in the Globe, and I’m sure more tributes will follow.
The Summer Day
Two of many of her poems that have stayed with me over the years.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Poppies
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t
sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—
and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?
A poet who grew up around the shop floor and the classics reflects on craft, and lessons from his father.
Song
by B. H. Fairchild
Gesang ist Dasein
A small thing done well, the steel bit paring
the cut end of the collar, lifting delicate
blue spirals of iron slowly out of lamplight
into darkness until they broke and fell
into a pool of oil and water below.
A small thing done well, my father said
so often that I tired of hearing it and lost
myself in the shop’s north end, an underworld
of welders who wore black masks and stared
through smoked glass where all was midnight
except the purest spark, the blue-white arc
of the clamp and rod. Hammers made dull tunes
hacking slag, and acetylene flames cast shadows
of men against the tin roof like great birds
trapped in diminishing circles of light.
Each day was like another. I stood beside him
and watched the lathe spin on, coils of iron
climbing into dusk, the file’s drone, the rasp,
and finally the honing cloth with its small song
of things done well that I would carry into sleep
and dreams of men with wings of fire and steel.
Bert Fairchild, 1906-1990
Gesang ist Dasein, singing is being, is the title of a poem by Rilke, glossed a while back by Robert Hass in his Poet’s Choice column.
Came across this photo of great books steps at a university in Lebanon in a post on Brian Leiter’s philosophy blog. As a long time list-maker (who did a lot of it when I co-produced a show on world literature), I’m always interested in choices of this kind.
Lots of these make sense to me, Gilgamesh is an inevitable and reasonable starting point. I don’t read Arabic so can’t assess those titles. The others are mostly good company, whether literary monuments like Goethe or Dante, or core philosophy texts from The Republic to Thus Spake Zarathustra. And while I get while The Prophet, Steven Hawking, and even Toynbee are there. But the final step appears to be Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead has me a bit stumped, although acknowledgment of the digital age is valid, and perhaps what seemed like a tepid read 20 years ago or so has aged better than I would have predicted. But in the company of Descartes? Kant? For reals?
I like the collection of books that the Kansas City Public Library built into its architecture too:
Found a ‘new & collected’ by a poet I’ve been following for years, and have been browsing it happily. A lot of his works are about that most essential question, do you stay put in your life (geographically, psychologically, culturally, etc.) or do you light out to some other destination?
The Men
By B. H. Fairchild
As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl
booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern,
you watch the late-afternoon drunks
coming and going, sunlight breaking
through the smoky dark as the door
opens and closes, and it’s the future
flashing ahead like the taillights
of a semi as you drop over a rise
in the road on your way to Amarillo,
bright lights and blonde-haired women,
as Billy used to say, slumped over
his beer like a snail, make a real man
out of you, the smile bleak as the gaps
between his teeth, stay loose, son,
don’t die before you’re dead. Always
the warnings from men you worked with
before they broke, blue fingernails,
eyes red as fate. A different life
for me, you think, and outside later,
feeling young and strong enough to raise
the sun back up, you stare down Highway 54,
pushing everything—stars, sky, moon,
all but a thin line at the edge
of the world—behind you. Your headlights
sweep across the tavern window,
ripping the dark from the small, humped
shapes of men inside who turn and look,
like small animals caught in the glare
of your lights on the road to Amarillo.
I have a special place in my heart for ‘minor figures,’ the characters some feet back from stardom in their chosen artistic enterprise. (Perhaps that comes from my realized contentment in being a second violin in the orchestra of life.)
The British poet, children’s author and novelist Walter De La Mare is one such second violin. Al contemporary of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Ezra Pound, he harkened back to a 19th century literary life, with well-crafted poems, and stories and novels that shaded to the twee.
I had a book of his stories, which I adored, in my earliest days. And of course he turned his hand to some ghost stories and books of rhymes (Victorian pleasures all). James Campbell has a wonderful run down on him in The Guardian a few years back,
“The repeating elements of his work are the times of day and their domestic rituals, the seasons and their fruits, the symbolic death and rebirth inherent in sleeping and waking, autumn and spring. A dozen poems employ “Winter” in the title; half-a-dozen more, “Snow”. He likes the things that children like, as well as those that children like to fear: scarecrows and shepherds, ghosts and fairies, knights and huntsmen, “bumpity rides”, a lost shoe which is sought from “Spain, and Africa, / Hindustan, / Java, China, / And lamped Japan”; phrases like “Alas, alack”, “do diddle di do” and “riddle-cum-ree”; sailors – mariners, rather – either coasting “sweet o’er the rainbow foam” or fated to be “flotsam on the seas”. Numerous De la Mare poems are simple and delightful nonsense: “Three jolly farmers / Once bet a pound / Each dance the others would / Off the ground”, but many are tinged with subtle melancholy, the effect of a sensitivity attuned to high-pitched notes of grief even at times of contentment.”
Here is his best known poem,
The Listeners
By Walter De La Mare
It is perhaps too long, yet remains one of those poems from which lines float up unbidden (and not just because they have found their way to so many titles).
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
By Thomas Gray
A Few Reasonable Words 