Copia

Who's Gonna Take The Weight?

As for the second point, I say what our faith says, and the truth of the matter. At a certain time a motion begins which is not precipitated by another motion and this occurs in this very manner: that there has been eternally a first mover, although there was not eternally a first moved; but at a certain time the first moved began, and then motion began.

—Albert of Saxony, Questions on the Physics (Questiones et decisiones physicales insignum virorum). Uche Ogbuji's translation. Latin original as follows:

Quantum ad secundum, dico quod secundum fidem nostram et rei veritatem. Aliquando incepit motus quem non precessit aliquis motus et hoc per istum modum quod eternaliter fuit primum motor, licet no eternaliter fuerit primum mobile; sed aliquando inceperit, et tunc incepit motus.

For some reason I've been sparring with the notion of the Prime Mover a lot this year. In my poems and other writings I've taken on the idea playfully, angrily, and sometimes in sheer bafflement. The idea comes from the tortured efforts to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism, received by medieval scholars with such reverence once re-discovered in contact with the Islamic civilizations, with Christian dogma. I think this struggle still dominates modern science and philosophy, though no serious enquirer outside the Bible Belt, except maybe Peter Geach, would dare plead directly to Christian principles in such discussion, and not many would directly invoke Aristotle. Despite this coyness a great deal of thinking behind Western civilization is bogged down in two theoretic systems which seem to betray utter ignorance of the natural world.

Albert of Saxony was one of those medieval natural philosophers instrumental in marrying Aristotle with St. Augustine; I believe I ran into his quote at the library of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and I managed to dig it up again in God and reason in the Middle Ages by Edward Grant. As I've grown older I've become very sympathetic with Epicurianism, respectful of Sophism and hostile towards Socratism, the great enemy of both. Unfortunately Socratism won out in post-Classical times, with its insistence on impossible absolutes and false humility in style. I won't go so far as to claim that looking back more to Epicurus (who in turn looked back to Democritus, subject of savage attacks by Plato) would have prevented the religious distortions, cultural chauvanism and geopolitical distortion that characterize the West's material triumphs, but I do think Platonism served as a heavy, clumsy stick swung wildly about the world by Europe.

I must admit that it was not Plato and Aristotle who gave the Europeans that chilling formula "dico quod fidem nostram et rei veritatem", "according to faith and the truth of the matter," which so polluted Medieval natural philosophy with divinity studies. Ibn Rushd ("Averroës" in the West) had already compiled a herculean defence of Aristotle against some agents of Islamic dogma, having to cover much the same ground as Christians did centuries later. Since they were getting their Aristotle from the schools of Ibn Rushd, the Christian philosophers had to deal not only with the Greek, but also with the brilliant (though fundamentally flawed) elucidations of the Spanish Moor. In the end they pretty much just cut Ibn Rushd out with the neat scalpel of church dogma. Back to superstition square one. The dogma of six-day creation sixteen hundred years before the great flood could not withstand the empirical idea from the natural world that nothing suggests any beginning to the chain of causality. Things are in motion because things have always been in motion. The church needed to silence this heresy to make room for Yahweh and they did so with the garrotte rather than with fair debate.

The lasting effects of this strangulating threat occurred to me once again a few days ago when listening to Kool and the Gang's soaring, aching composition, "Who's Gonna Take the Weight." What lyrics there are to this song are eye opening:

People! The world today is in a very difficult situation,
And we all know it because we're the ones who created it;
We're gonna have to be the ones to clean it up;
We're gonna have to learn to live together

And love each other.
Because I believe one day someone or something
Is gonna wanna judge

Who's creating all this corruption and death and pollution,
All these difficult situations on earth.
And he's gonna wanna know:
Who's gonna take the weight?

So the world is screwed up, and we're the ones who have to sort it out, but why? Not because it's our world to sort out, but because it's a world belonging to some Daddy Abstract hanging out in the sky who's going to come along some day to judge what we've done. What's the point of so much soul if all were doing is renting it, anyway?

Under the Aristotelian shadow of Ptolemy both Islamic and Christian natural philosophers wound themselves into ridiculous contortions until Copernicus and Galileo. The primum mobile, the first or empyrean sphere was equated to utter goodness in gratification of Christian doctrine and was accounted by Sacro Bosco in his seminal De Sphaera the only sphere of "motus rationalis" (i.e. rational motion by which they meant the rotation any idiot can see by observing the sun) and then by complete hocus-pocus the idea came about that all other spheres were of "motus irrationalis sive sensualis" ("irrational or sensual motion"; take that, Aristotle!). So now suddenly the church had not only the keys to goodness, but also to reason. How convenient!

Sadly, I'll close with one of the more lurid illustrations I've seen of how all this nonsense addled even the most brilliant minds in the West. "Good-friday, 1613, Riding Westward"

by John Donne is a poem of his usual technical virtuosity, but is full of the sloppy, slavish sentiments that leave me so scornful.

LET man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

This is about the half-way point of the poem, and marks the heave of theme from a philosophical to a devotional bent. The church was all about facilitating such arcs, and The Dean of St. Pauls well illustrates how they got their wish for so long. I like to think the 21th century will mark another turning point in which we throw all that twaddle into the vaults of history, and actually look upon the universe with our own eyes. I personally have no truck with waiting out to determine Who's Gonna Take the Weight.

Chez Labbé, au-delà de la terre

Je vis, je meurs: je me brule et me noye,
J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure:
La vie m'est et trop molle et trop dure.
J'ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye:
Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment n'endure:
Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure:
Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye.
Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine:
Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.
Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine,
Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.

—Sonnet VIII by Louise Labbé (I found an English guide to the poem.)

The first time I heard Morcheeba's Au-delà, featuring Manda, the french fan who became a lead singer for a brief spell, I was at a Morcheeba concert in Denver, just before the album Dive Deep came out. When she started singing the lyrics, I started jumping up and down yelling "C'est Louise Labbé!" I guess half-hoping Manda could hear me. Yeah, wifey thought I'd gone mad. She would have thought so even more if she'd realized, as I did quickly, that the lyrics that started with Labbé quickly went its own way.

Je vis, je meurs; je ris, je pleure.

Je vis de la mer; je vis de la terre.

Je le dis aux fleurs; au lac de vapeur.

Au ciel de toutes les couleurs,

Ton soleil réchauffe mon cœur.

Je vis, j'ai peur; je crie de douleurs.

En secret je m'enterre: je cherche la chaleur.

Je m'enfuis dans les airs; au delà de la terre.

Au ciel de toutes les couleurs,

Ton soleil réchauffe mon cœur.

—"Au-delà" by Morcheeba

I live, I die; I laugh, I cry.
I live of the sea; I live of the ground.
I say it to the flowers; to the lake of steam.
In the all-colored sky,
Your sun warms my heart.
I live, I die; I scream of pain.
I bury myself secretly: I am seeking heat.
I abscond into the air; beyond the earth.
In the all-colored sky,
Your sun warms my heart.

—translation by Uche Ogbuji

BTW the last time I mentioned Morcheeba on Copia I was anticipating the new album after Skye Edwards had rejoined them. "Blood Like Lemonade" came out last year and is I think worth the wait. If you've been sleeping, wake up and check it out.

Labbé's sonnet famously brings Petrarca's style of antithetical tropes into French. Just this morning Au-delà came up in my shuffled playlist and I remembered I'd resolved to translate it, to see if I could preserve some of its music, which has eluded translations I've seen so far. Here is an excerpt from my attempt:

All at a stroke I laugh and I lament,

And suffer many torments in my pleasures:

They live forever, my absconding treasures:

All at a stroke I wither and augment.

—from "Je vis, je meurs" a translation of Sonnet VIII by Uche Ogbuji

re: lament/augment, you can either accept it as rime riche, or consider the "g" borrowed into its following syllable, as it does sound in my pronounciation.

Ou sont les péans d'antan

The morning glory climbs above my head,
Pale flowers of white and purple, blue and red.
I am disquieted.
Down in the withered grasses something stirred;
I thought it was his footfall that I heard.
Then a grasshopper chirred.
I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,
I saw him coming on the southern road.
My heart lays down its load.

—"The morning glory climbs above my head" by Helen Waddell (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913)

Yesterday I was going through old notes from my writing while at The University of Nigeria at Nsukka, and I came across Waddell's translation, which I'd copied out by hand. In those days before Google and ready cut&paste, I used to do a lot of copying out poems I found and loved. This lovely poem, a translation of a translation from the Book of Odes, was originally published with the note "Written in the twelfth century before Christ, c. 1121," and demonstrates once again that extraordinary facility that's blessed Asian poetry through the ages of taking the broad sweep of Nature and tacking it lightly onto the human experience, such as compelled Ezra Pound to toil over Fenollosa's notes to produce Cathay. Of course that's what many European Classic poets tried to do in pastoral efforts, but generally ended up being so much more heavy-handed with political and academic statement than their Asian counterparts. That's what the European Romantic movement poets tried to do, but also without much subtlety or delicacy.

The modernist movement in Europe seems to have unfortunately banished this sort of expression entirely, and that is a major tragedy. Even among poets working to reinstate metrical verse to contemporary practice, there seems to be some inexplicable terror of abstract and natural themes. This is a shame, but I'll take what I can get, and yesterday I also came across "The Wind with its Smell of Flower," a wonderful translation from Mongolia's Poet Laureate G. Mend-Oyoo by Simon Wickham-Smith and Lyn Coffin.

I love this peaceful blue evening
It is absolutely a castle of the East
I love this cloud with its golden mane
It is absolutely a lantern of the East
I love this wind with its smell of flowers
It is absolutely the fragrance of the East

—from "The Wind with its Smell of Flower," translation from G. Mend-Oyoo by Simon Wickham-Smith and Lyn Coffin in Qarrtsiluni

If you read Mongolian, I'd guess you are very lucky to be able to read the original "ЭНЭ ЦЭЦЭГ ҮНЭРТСЭН САЛХИ." And while at Qarrtsiluni be sure to check out "The Man in the Yellow Coat/L’Homme au Pardessus Jaune" by my friend M.J. Fievre, a stunning story both in the original French/Creole and in the English translation made by the author. I'll repeat in public something I remarked to the author in private:

You say "While the omniscient P.O.V is admissible in Haiti, a country known for its oral tradition, it was frowned upon in American literature." I'm not much for American fiction but that startled me. If it's true, it probably helps explain why I'm not much for American fiction.

For me banning the omniscient narrator from story-telling is like banishing the color black from visual art. Or hey! maybe like banishing abstraction and nature from poetry. Shame on any MFA departments and workshop people involved in such heresy.

By the way, my title for this posting includes some poetic license. More accurate to my point would be something such as "Ou sont les idylles bucoliques d'antan," but that doesn't sound nearly as nice.

First in flight

Let’s imagine for a second that the robin
is not a contained entity moving at speed
through space, but that it is a living change,
unmaking and remaking itself over and over
by sheer unconscious will, and that
if we were to slow down the film enough
we would see a flying ball of chaos,
flicking particles like Othello counters,

—from 'Robin In Flight' by Paul Adrian, winner of The National Poetry Competition, UK

This might be the best poem I've ever read to have won a recent competition. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the winner has never published before. The more I deal with the poetry establishment the more I'm convinced it has a way of curbing fresh voices. I hope this honor encourages Mr. Adrian to persevere with his style. For me it's not far from being up there with the great bird poems (OK maybe not 'The Windhover' but does anything even approach Hopkins's iconic piece), including D.H. Lawrence's 'Humming Bird.'

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

—from 'Humming Bird' by D.H. Lawrence

Back to the UK National Poetry Competition, one of the runners up is quite good fun.

The records show that in Shanghai
at the end of the Yuan Dynasty,
the year 1364, a glassblower blew
a mermaid that came to life, and swam
away. And in Cologne, in 1531, a team
of glassblowers blew an orchestra,
instruments and all, and these played.
Then on Hokkaido, in 1846, a blind
monk blew his own Buddha to pray to,
and the next day he was able to see.

—from 'A History of Glassblowing' by Matthew Sweeney

Here's a neat project using Blake's illustrations and music to set The Songs of Innocence and Experience nicely into video.

It includes treatment of "The Blossom."

Pretty pretty robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Hears you sobbing sobbing
Pretty pretty robin
Near my bosom.

—from 'The Blossom' by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789

Labor, industry and negligence

Solvency or luxury
Or modesty of revenue—
Campaigners seem to want all three
But most that they can have is two.

—adapted from "The Madison Front" by Uche Ogbuji

The above stanza is the crux of my poem, "The Madison Front," which was posted in Verse Wisconsin this weekend as part of their "Poems About Wisconsin Protests" series. It takes a critical look at all sides of the politics and economics of the Madison protests. There's also audio of my reading it, which in some cases will automatically play when you load the site. I'll try to figure out how to record better quality audio next time.

The bottom line is that I think all sides tend to miss the most important point, though no one more than Scott Walker and his supporters. Gutting union rights won't solve their fiscal problems. The only things that will are increasing revenue or reducing the overall standards of living to a point neither left nor right would be likely to accept. This is a fundamental problem throughout the U.S. Most of the talk about "small government" by folks such as the Tea Party is either vague, or focuses on institutions that offend right-wing social sensibilities and are yet the most infinitesimal fraction of spending. No one who insists on maintaining current levels of defense spending while sniping at environmental and educational institutions is in the least bit serious about budgets.

At the same time the left has lost its backbone. Despite steeply declining overall tax rates over the past century, right wing campaigners have succeeded in turning "tax" into a word so dirty even progressives fear to use it. I personally think it's a good ting that tax rates have declined, but I think it's common sense that there reaches a point where you reach the nerve bundle of the tradeoff in my stanza above.

No one in the U.S. seems to be calling the true debate. Are we willing to accept being the greatest military power in the world by just a small margin rather than by two or three times, or are we willing to sacrifice our standards of living to levels that would place us wel at the bottom of OECD league tables? No one seems interested in the latter, and I can understand that. I enjoy having a high per-capita standard of living. I think the crux of the debate, then should be in the matter of defense spending versus taxation, but everyone seems terrified to press this point forthrightly.

It's hardly unusual for the U.S. to have arrived in this situation. It's just the way of power in the world. As Samuel Johnson says in a famous quote:

There is a general succession of events in which contraries are
produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with
success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and
negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.

—from section 21 of The Rambler by Samuel Johnson

And speaking of The Rambler, my search for the above image of Dr. Johnson (caught possibly in the eyes-open phase of winking and blinking) led me to a Weblog established by a gentleman inspired by the great Doctor's efforts. I've read a few of the entries and it's got a bit of The Copia about it. I'm always delighted to find a fellow journeyman.

"Gog" by Ted Hughes

I woke to a shout: 'I am Alpha and Omega!'
Rocks and a few trees trembled
Deep in their own country.
I ran and an absence bounded beside me.
The dog's god is a scrap dropped from the table,
The mouse's savior is a ripe wheat grain—
Hearing the messiah cry
My mouth widens in adoration.
How far are the mosses!
They cushion themselves on the silence.
The dust, too, is replete.
The air wants for nothing.
What was my error? My skull has sealed it out.
My great bones are massed in me.
They beat on the earth, my song excites them.
I do not look at the rocks and trees, I am frightened of what they see.
I listen to the song jarring my mouth
Where the skull-rooted teeth are in possession.
I am massive on earth. My feetbones beat on the earth
Over the sound of motherly weeping....
Afterwards, I drink at a pool quietly,
The horizons bear the rocks and trees away into twilight.
I lie down, I become darkness—
Darkness that all night sings and circles stamping.

—"Gog" by Ted Hughes, from Wodwo

I was looking at my old essay "Slender Mitochondrial Strand," written on the occasion of the death of Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. I saw that I'd promised to find and post "Gog," one of my favorite poems, which I'd memorized as a teenager. Of course I found it in my favorite volume of poetry, John Wain's Anthology of Modern Poetry (Hutchinson, 1963). I used to have copies of Wodwo and Lupercal, my favorite Hughes volumes, but I can't find them now, so I just added them to my Amazon shopping cart. Just for completeness I'll post Wain's comment on the poem:

"Gog" refers to the biblical prophecy (Ezekiel, chapter xxviii) of a hostile power that will arise in the world immediately before the Last Judgment, and inflict untold destruction.

Now that I've mentioned a Bible verse on Sunday my relatives might be quietly satisfied that I might still be "saved," though they'll probably reconsider if they read "Fire Next Time," a poem I just wrote today for NaPoWriMo.

Then again the Bible is the last thing I really think of when I read "Gog." To me it's all about Hughes's aggressive Paganism. And it really brings me home to my chosen home of Colorado, where I still feel the rule of the "rocks and trees" (though sadly the bark beetle is making a large dent in the latter). I think of Lewis and Clark mounting the continental divide and seeing an infinite expense of wooded and icy mountains. "I am Alpha and Omega!" And weren't they forced to believe it! And then, closer about them, below the tree-line, the fauna and flora on the verge of losing its indifference to people, replicated in that infinite expanse that pushed their field of vision and imagination. Man and his power that derives from Nature, and yet holds it within to destroy so much of Nature's creation. That is the paradox that I see written into "Gog."

By the way, if you're as interested in Hughes's poetry as I am, don't miss my discussion of his recently uncovered poem "Last Letter." I focus on the poetry, because everyone else seems so much more interested in the drama.

Aged aged man, old old school

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.
Sometimes I think that nothing really changes -
The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he's a dummy.

—from "The Change" by Tony Hoagland

Came upon this poem like a doctor's dropsy poster.
In the streets the hot pants glittered
and on the corner pimps color-flagged that ass parade.
Sometimes I dress inane in the outrageous.
Those young girls call in robbers on their dummies
and when I need a rhyme I turn to mummy.

—from "Shitstrum" by Uche Ogbuji

I'll mention that my "Quotīdiē" quotes generally derive from admiration, but now and then I pick them for more negative reasons, such as: "How does such a god-awful poem even draw enough attention to be controversial? I'm never quite au fait on the poetry scene, but even I heard of the commotion Hoagland's poem made at a recent AWP conference. A "shitstorm" my friend Wendy termed it. I read the poem and wondered whether it was a prank by an idle sophomore. I understand the trend towards plainspoken poetry, though I disagree with it. I think the language of poetry should be special, almost by definition (the language of Williams and Sandburg is much more special than many of their would-be imitators seem to think.) But there is plain speaking and there is random collage of the inane. Hoagland's poem sounds like a found poem from scraps overheard at a grocery store. I myself am not much for plain speaking, whether in poetry or in everyday conversation. I revel in words perhaps too much for my own good, so I couldn't do much justice to that aspect of "The Change" in my parody.

After the extraordinary productivity I enjoyed participating in Heather Fowler's poem-a-day project last June, I decided to pay attention to National Poetry Month this year, to the extent of joining the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) tradition. I considered following prompts, but I couldn't find a prompter of Heather's quality, so I decided to just keep it old school. Read a lot of poems every day and thus shore up inspiration to write. The kick-off, of course, is April Fool's Day, so I re-read a few favorite comic poems and parodies, including Lewis Carroll's "The White Knight's Song" (or "Haddock's Eyes" or "The Aged Aged Man" or "Ways and Means" or "A-Sitting On A Gate").

He said "I look for butterflies
That sleep among the wheat;
I make them into mutton-pies,
And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men," he said,
"Who sail on stormy seas;
And that's the way I get my bread --
A trifle, if you please."
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one's whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That it could not be seen.
So, having no reply to give
To what the old man said,
I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!"
And thumped him on the head.

This delight is a spoof of a Wordsworth poem, and decided me to write my own spoof; "The Change" came to my mind as a poem ripe for the treatment.

and because that cracker
had a fucking Les Paul and a bottle of Jack,
not giving a damn
strumming those wires like he was Andrew Jackson
putting the Sioux crew on the trail of tears
all like "this land is MY land, bitch!"
Now and then manifest destiny
asks you to lean in and check whether
it's got something on its teeth
and you could just stretch a bit
and box its epiglottis
and I know squat about chess
but that day felt like "Uno, pardners!"

—from "Shitstrum"

Really Hoagland's poem is more of an offense to my literary sense than for its supposed race-baiting. I think it's entirely fair game for a white person to express some ambivalence at how Serena and Venus Williams, the all-but-certain players to whom Hoagland alludes, a pair of girls straight outta Compton like N.W.A., come on to the country club scene of tennis to ruthlessly batter their competition. I find Serena's "to-hell-with-everybody stare" a wonder of sport, but I can see how some would take it as a blunt challenge to their cherished idols. And why should a poet not frankly express such ambivalence? That's why my spoof does not only parody the Hoagland poem, but it also jabs at the responses to the poem. The very first comment on the Weblog where I found the poem posted is as follows:

This is the most offensive poem I have ever read. With respect, TS Eliot's anti-semitism has nothing on the bigotry expressed in this poem.

You would think he'd laced his work with racist terms and judgments, but I think that would be overstating the case. I'd say the closest he came was the contemptuous generalization of "Zulu bangles on her arms" but again why should a poet not be free to express the sorts of deep, tortured thoughts that real people do? If anything, I think he held back. I decided to do somewhat less of that. If folks want something to shock their publicly good-mannered faces, why not do it with some gusto? At first I made the underdog banjo player a black guy, but I figured maybe it was a bit too easy for me as a black guy to take chances with that sort of taboo language. I thought there was more bite to making him Native American, especially as it plays with contrasts of which "tribes" are the underdogs, and what changes when one such tribe finds a champion, looking back not just to the end of the 20th century, but also the end of the 19th, and the pain and injustice that attended that change in the fortunes of the original population.

Writing "Shitstrum" was a ton of fun, and gave me my first NaPoWriMo entry rather painlessly, for which I'm grateful, but I expect that for the rest of the month I'll address my pen towards the glories of poetry, rather than its silly asides. I'd consider myself blessed beyond belief if I can write as Serena plays.

Ecstasy and measure

From Keter unto Malkhut.
    The seventh day of rest.
The naming of Creation.
    No, this is not a test.

The rustling wind in forests.
    The stars just out of reach.
Crude scribbles in a cavern.
    The rudiments of speech.

—from "Discipline" by Quincy R. Lehr in The Flea #13

The Sephirot of Kabbalah drapes all creation with the intersected lineaments of the creator's will, from the utter abstract divinity of Keter to the mortal appendage of Malkhut. The latter manifested such hazard to geometric universal order as Elohim created the genera of species mounting to humanity that he required rest on the seventh day. Gnostics of almost all religions including Kabbalists conceive the journey from common flesh to immanent numen as the very communication of these divine lineaments within the human mind, a reversal of the journey from godhead firmament to man to fallen man in the primitive allegory of Genesis. From a modern perspective we see a similar progress in our scientifically attested, aeons-long development from cavemen braving their everyday dangers to fix on their glimpse at the infinite in the stars. This inspired the myths and scribblings about myths that evolved into culture and religions and, some would claim, enlightenment. Lehr's poem is a series of collages that wave into this theme.

Among the many celebrations of Richard Wilbur's 90th birthday earlier this month I caught his poem "Teresa" in The Atlantic blog.

After the sun’s eclipse
The brighter angel and the spear which drew
A bridal outcry from her open lips,
She could not prove it true,
Nor think at first of any means to test
By what she had been wedded or possessed.
Not all cries were the same;
There was an island in mythology
Called by the very vowels of her name
Where vagrants of the sea,
Changed by a word, were made to squeal and cry
As heavy captives in a witch’s sty.
The proof came soon and plain:
Visions were true which quickened her to run
God’s barefoot errands in the rocks of Spain
Beneath its beating sun,
And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.

The paradox of St. Theresa lies in how ecstatic manifestations in her flesh were revered as signs of divinity. Even in religions that encourage monasticism the lure of the orgasm is an irresistible magnetism, so what a great windfall for them to have found a lady in whom they could package both parOxysm and temperance. What a great lesson for the church to seize upon in its quest to put the Malkhut genie back into the Keter bottle, though doctrine, through dogma, through the rod of discipline. Wilbur expresses the ambivalence of St. Theresa by connecting it to Eëa, Circe's island, throwing in a Kabbalistic touch of his own by seizing on the vowels (which represent the very nature of mystery) distilled from "Theresa" into "Eëa". Odysseus famously lingered a full year on the island where he, as Ezra Pound put it:

Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

—from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" by Ezra Pound

Those mottoes of course connecting back to our scribblings in quest for divinity—the lexical power of Alpha and Omega. But Odysseus was drawn from discipline by the immediate tangling of man and woman, the elegance of Circe's hair.

The cosmology of the Igbo has a much less schizophrenic attitude towards divinity and the realized elements of nature, including flesh. In the Weblog Odinani: The Sacred Science of the Igbo People, you can find many explorations of such characteristics of Igbo cosmology, set in contrast to Western systems of thought. Among the Igbo, life itself blends ecstasy and measure in utter braid, and discipline is decreed by connectedness to nature, rather than by institutions seeking removal from nature. To quote Odinani, "We once understood the oneness of the Source/Creator (Chineke) with Creation and our relationship with Nature (Ani)."

One of my own missions in poetry is to work with the traditions that better reflect this continuum, seeking excitement in the tensions between my Igbo traditions and the foreign philosophies that have colored so much of my life. I'm wrestling right now with a poem, "Nchefu Road," that I first wrote as a teenager and seem to return to and refine every decade or so as knowledge and experience within my own life expand its bounds. To quote a key passage:

So how fitting that here in Port harcourt

Where the river shunts to infinity,

I found the bald temerity to pose

Questions of the cosmos, to shun humility

Decreed by Lao-tze; whose "Chi"

Spelled cosmos as mine spells my soul,

So I should need less Brahmin casuistry

To venerate my slice of godly role.

But the river knows that Gao law

Sparks market riots in Igbo land

And that deadly poison in Bamako

Is sweetmeat in the Samarkand.

So Nchefu Road will lead me clear

From splendent-robed enlightenment

To wisdom of its opposite science

To naked bath in firmament.

To a Niger poet's rock of

Hippopotamus contentment.

Strangely I'm only today realizing that for the most part I'm following the four-beats accentual pattern of Pound's Mauberley. No surprise, of course, as Pound is a long-standing influence of mine. I suppose I'm always looking for that discipline of measure to express rather than to suppress the constant ecstasy of my own complex mind and experience.

Hear it in the deep heart's core

Glory be to hooch for painted things—
For bleach-blonde strippers, collagen-plumped lips;
For pink acrylic nails and spike-heeled shoes;
Bright thong bikinis; belly-button rings;
Wet T-shirts; tan lines; liposuctioned hips;
Mascara; lip gloss; butterfly tattoos

—from "Dyed Beauty" by James Wilk in Shoulders, Fibs, and Lies (Pudding House Press, 2007)

So I finally made the trip to Innisfree on the Hill, a new Boulder bookstore stocking only poetry. I pretty much just went the first night their community events coincided with my spare time, but it turned out to be good timing, as they were featuring the work of Dr. James Wilk. I arrived just before the reading and the small (but well appointed) space was rather full. I enjoyed the reading and the craft and humor of the poet's work, including the poem from which I quote above. It's another "Pied Beauty' parody, of course; earlier on Copia I mentioned "Carnal Beauty," Kate Bernadette Benedict's own play on the poem that came out in The Flea in January. That was back when I first discovered that great journal, and since then I'm proud to say they've accepted a couple of my poems for publication later this year.

Speaking of my own poems, I should mention my own poem, "Dream Residue", which appeared in The Nervous Breakdown today (I am an editor and regular contributor there, so that's less of a feat).

Can't believe I stayed asleep to give
Honey slope après ski GPS,
Real life need-to-piss bringing the cock-block;
Her black greek letter accent fading fast
With harem eyes under bright bluebird skies
To duller daybreak wink of bluing chalk…
Damn! I planned to smash that like Thor's hammer.
The ferry over cream slides cruel to dock.

—from "Dream Residue" by Uche Ogbuji in The Nervous Breakdown

But back to the Wilk reading. I made a few neat discoveries on the night as well. Wilk mentioned Eaven Boland's poem Anorexic, which apparently is rather a phenomenon in the circles, though it was new to me, the rather elliptical.

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

—from Anorexic by Eaven Boland

Rather packs a punch, doesn't it? Wilk also mentioned Turner Cassity, and in particular "Meaner than a Junkyard Dog." Both are poems to which he had responded with his own.

I'll surely be back to Innisfree for more poetry and company. Who can resist that quiet cabin on the lake, especially when the lake is constantly whispering what is best received in the heart's core.

Impertinent verse striding past love's hearse

First wonder if the love you celebrate
will prove sustainable. Will it endure,
renewed, a life-time guaranteed amour,
or does it have an expiration date?

—from "How to Write a Sustainable Love Poem" by Miriam N. Kotzin in The Flea #13

I'm a sucker for the unromantic, a sucker for the impertinent, and of course the two often go hand in hand. Kotzin's sonnet is some shelter from the endless mist of moony swoony one finds in so much of today's poetry. Yesterday I mentioned my moderated opinion of Houellebecq's provocations. Every age needs its attempted addenda to L'Œuvre du marquis de Sade:

Not that I'm saying there is anything of sadism in Kotzin's poem, of course. Degrees in everything, which are informed at the extremes. Our minds are all infected by devils, but most of us fall short of the assassin's Shogun. (Yeah, the quote from that really should be: "He cut off the heads of 131 lovers for the Shogun," which even adds a hint at kink with its odd number, but I digress). The infection is just as ripe in Villon, and hardly less even in, say, the Andrew Marvell of "To his Coy Mistress", but it takes a different sort of expression.

In the Kotzin poetry serves as buffer state, and I've often imagined Auden's "O What Is That Sound" as a metaphor for poetry in its sometimes vengeful function.

O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming.

The scarlet soldiers. The purple of poetry. The sound that so thrills the ear. The beat. The baton. The lovers say:

O where are you going? Stay with me here!
Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?
No, I promised to love you, dear,
But I must be leaving.

I've had occasion in my life to witness poetry forcing love to expiration date, and striding along as it outlives its victim. How very, very refreshingly unromantic.