Inter/National Poetry Month + Poem: W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Every month should be Poetry Month--and Fiction Month and Literature Month--we could go down the list, but since 1996, roughly a year after the Academy of American Poets, inspired by Black History Month (every month should be...) and Women's History Month (every month should be...), convened with poets, academics, booksellers, and poetry lovers to create a month dedicated specifically to poetry. During the first decade or so of this blog, I usually posted close to a poem a day each April, often inspired by one theme or another (poets in translation, etc.).

When I went to Cuba in April 2009, when it was almost impossible to post daily, I somehow managed to. (How did I manage to?) I've slacked off in recent years because the rest of my responsibilities have crowded in on my time, but throughout this month I hope to post some poetry, at least periodically. Though it may make "nothing happen," as W. H. Auden famously said, he also continued, if you stay with that same poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," it eludes the grasp of executives (unless of course it's set to music) and "survives / a way of happening, a mouth." That is, it gives voice to experiences, to visions, to feelings, in its particular form of representation, sometimes otherwise incommunicable, that we need and must listen to.

I guess since I have cited and quoted Auden's great poem, I should direct J's Theater readers to my post from 2012, which features it, and here, instead, is another Auden gem, "Musée de Beaux Arts," which I had to read in junior high and did not fully understand, though I get it now. As with so many of Auden's poems, the politics seem fitting for today; art offers a picture and mirror of the human sorrows we endure, and yet, at the same time, like the mundanities of life, it exists amidst the most unspeakable horrors, includes those enacted by the "torturer" whom Auden directly names. Sometimes, as in Pieter Breughel the Elder's "The Fall of Icarus," which Auden saw in 1938 at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, nearly a year before the start of the then-brewing Second World War, at the and which he discusses ekphrastically in the poem's second stanza, the two happen at the same time; there is the horror of the boy falling from the sky, even as the rest of life--and death--go about their business.

Perhaps that should be the month's theme: ekphrastic poems. (Have I already done that? Hmmm.) Happy Inter/National Poetry Month!

MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS

by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window

                                 or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s

                                                        horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Copyright © W. H. Auden, from Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940). All rights reserved.

And, the painting once attributed to Pieter Breughel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," oil on canvas, c. 1560s, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

Poem: W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden
(Photo © Jill Krementz)

I mentioned him in yesterday's (or a recent) post, so here a poem by the one and only W. H. Auden (1907-1973), one of the lodestones of 20th century Anglo-American poetry, whose life and work really need no introduction.  The fifth line in this poem's second stanza is one of the most quoted by poets, though the fuller thought often is not. Ireland remains (even today) torn, and the Irish Republic finds itself saddled with one of the worst economic collapses in all of Europe (blame those bankers and their government enablers), so in that regard, as with the weather, Yeats' poetry might not have made anything happen, but on the other hand, it's clear that Yeats and countless other writers prepared the way, politically, culturally, socially, discursively, for the Free Irish State and the Republic that followed, and provided a framework through which an Ireland, no matter how governed, could imagine itself as constituting a(n even illusory) whole.

That was in part the aim of Modernism, shoring fragments up against ruin, to echo T. S. Eliot, trying to create a whole from the shards modernity, in its multifarious ways, had left behind.  Auden continues: "For poetry....survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth." In effect, it does make things happen, by its every survival, which, he astutely noticed, passes right by the "executives" out of the mostly solitary conditions (this was in the days before MFA programs) of poets' affective and material labor ("busy griefs"), onto pages, into eyes and ears, through and out of every "mouth" that utters or imagines uttering a poem. So it was with Yeats's poetry, so it is with Auden's, so it will be with every poem that survives. There is so much more to say about this poem, a tribute, a memoriam, an elegy, an invocation, but I will leave it to Auden himself, one of the best rhetoricians of his or any age.

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS   

I


He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree 
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
     The parish of rich women, physical decay,
     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.


III

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Excerpt: Frank O'Hara

Kenneth Koch, Patsy Southgate, Frank O'Hara

Here is a snippet from one of the Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative chapbooks I picked up last weekend, a letter circa Spring 1955, from Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) to Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), during the years when they were consolidating their friendship, and just beginning to publish the poetry that subsequent generations of readers now know as the earliest examples of New York School writing. I like this letter because it gives a clear sense of O'Hara's jaunty and campy sensibility and style, as well as little hints of what he (then toiling at the front desk at the Museum of Modern Art) and Koch (then traveling in Europe with his wife, Janice Elwood Koch) were up to. It mentions one of the famous episodes in American mid-century poetry history, the initial rejection of both O'Hara's and John Ashbery's (1927-) [called "John Ash" and "J A" below] first collections of poetry by the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1955, a situation that the judge, W. H. Auden (1907-1973), later rectified when he asked that O'Hara and Ashbery send their collections to him directly, and he chose--though not enthusiastically, according both to his then assistant and eventual close friend and associate of O'Hara, Koch and Ashbery, James Schuyler (1923-1991), and to his somewhat disaffected introduction--Ashbery's volume, which was published the next year, in 1956, as Some Trees. The CUNY chapbook includes notes to all the references, but here are some clues if you're not familiar with these names: Larry [Rivers] (1923-2002), Grace [Hartigan] (1922-2008), and [Jean-Paul] Riopelle (1923-2002) were visual and plastic artists; Joe [Brainerd] (1941-1994) was an author, collagist, cartoonist and painter; Wystan is W. H. Auden; and Koch's two versions of "The Circus," the first one praised here, are among his best and most famous single poems). I highly recommend them.

***

May 9, 1955
New York

Dear Kenny,

Not knowing where you are, I'm writing you back in Paris. Doubtless you two have gone to Labrador or Aden, there's no way of guessing.

Have you see the art show we sent to the Orangerie?  and have you seen the Musée d'Art Moderne show, which has a Hartigan in it? Write me your impressions.

I'm sending you my first poem in French. If you find any mistakes please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you'll be able to get it printed in the French Vogue with a suitable decoration by Riopelle. Does it sound French, I wonder?

How is Janice? Would she like to sell me her painting of Joe by Larry I have grown passionately fond of it and would buy it at whatever price (but I know she only paid $25, honey, and ten years have not yet passed), but couldn't afford anything over $50, I don't think unless it were long-range. The money might come in handy, however, as your stay continues so let me know.

John Ash has writen a miraculous new 3 act play which takes place in the Canadian Northwest and is full of Mounties and Indians. It is more or less of an homage à Rin Tin Tin, with Pirandelloesque touches. It is full of something like fresh mountain air and has a simplicity like quicksand. You'll adore it.

We both sent books to Yale with disastrous results. Mine was returned because it arrived too late and then John's was returned because they are so stupid. And now Wystan will not see either of them. That preliminary screening gimmick is a crime--there can't be so many each year. You'd think he'd realize that no lesser person than himself should be allowed to make even the first rejections--what's the sense of his being editor if his choice is limited to the final 15 manuscripts and they are weeded out by a perfectly ordinary commercial publishing system? He was complaining before he left that there were so few interesting ones, and this certainly explains that. Oh well, who cares? But he might have liked John's enough to do it...

Are you too busy traveling to write? or writing to travel? Send me another delicious postcard, a note, some poems (I loved the ones you sent J A, especially Geography and the Circus). As you always do, give me the feeling about your works that "Alps on Alps arise" or whatever that line is.

Love to both,
Frank

From "this pertains to me which mean to you": The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O'Hara 1955-1956 PART 1. Josh Schneiderman, editor. New York: Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series 1, Number 2, Winter 2009.