It needs to be said, is all.
When Chef Mucus makes a mincemeat
When Chef Mucus makes a mincemeat
he boils up the brain
tossing out the cartilage and
spicing up the plain-
tasting parts of my head
with cider and cinnamon
the tongue will taste just right
add a little nutmeg
and the eyes are outta sight
finish it with salt to taste
and bake for half an hour
and hope the guests the Allergys
enjoy the season’s flowers.
It is not Wednesday. In fact, it is nearly Friday, which makes this post almost two days late. Among other things, that means my promise to write daily isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. For that, I have little excuse. Nor have I an excuse for the even greater tardiness of the subject of this post. Way back in September I challenged Jeremy P—— to practice writing formal poetry. I said it would help him learn to write with the line rather than in spite of it. I said that I would write whatever he did, and then I laid it on the line: Write a villanelle," I said.
“Well, f— me!” he replied. “You might as well have asked me to f— an elephant.”
Then he added, “It’s not a real form, you know. It’s not ancient.”
Despite the vulgarity and the snobbery, he obliged, sending me a dramatic rendition of the fall of Barcelona during World War 2. He didn’t follow the assignment all that well; he played fast and loose with the idea that the first stanza’s first and third lines should in fact repeat. But it was a fair poem nonetheless. (He says he has revised it since, and that it is much better now.) Meanwhile, for several weeks I would write him, saying “I’m still working on it,” though I wasn’t, and eventually I didn’t say anything at all, hoping he might forget. And he may have: soon after my challenge, he published his first poem, then he published another, and then he was invited to write some occasional poetry for a Haiti benefit, and in less than a winter his poetic career had taken off no thanks to my lame and unnecessary “formal poems will help you write with the line” attempt at an intervention.
But even if Jeremy did forget, I didn’t. I kept his villanelle in my inbox, and every time I cleaned it of all the mail I had replied to, I felt a twinge of regret that I couldn’t archive it, too. Now, six months after he sent it, I have decided to do something about it.
A week has passed since all was still
A week has passed since all was still.
The snow and ice and bitter wind had won. But
today a blackbird returned to sing his trill,
and tonight, while walking the dog, I saw
a muskrat swimming in the creek.
A week has passed since all was still
unknown. “The nurse will call soon,”
I said. “We will know what to do.”
Today a blackbird returned to sing his trill
from the same honey locust perch he held
last year when I was clueless. Then, I couldn’t say
“A week has passed since all was still”
because despite the doctors’ cool confidence
I was frantic to find hope in confidences.
Today a blackbird returned to sing his trill
soon after her call. We were clueless.
Still, no one regrets winter’s passing.
A week has passed since all was still.
Today a blackbird returned to sing his trill.
On the eve of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Vietnam is percolating to the surface in places both expected and unexpected. Last week, the first segment of Bill Moyers Journal was dedicated to Lyndon Johnson’s conversations with advisers about Vietnam, soon after John F. Kennedy’s assassination but before the 1964 election.1 Primarily told through Johnson’s (secretly) taped conversations, the segment is a fascinating portrait of the deliberations of power.
Similarly, Vietnam arises in in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry off the Shelf podcast. Curtis Fox and Michael Hoffman unpack Robert Lowell’s “July in Washington” as a meditation on American empire at the time Johnson was worrying on the phone. In contrast to Moyer’s focus on the office of the President, Lowell turns attention to Congress, or perhaps more generally all those who seek and find power in the beltway. Here is Lowell’s poem.
July in Washington
The stiff spokes of this wheel
touch the sore spots of the earth.
On the Potomac, swan-white
power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.
Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,
raccoons clean their meat in the creek.
On the circles, green statues ride like South American
liberators above the breeding vegetation—
prongs and spearheads of some equatorial
backland that will inherit the globe.
The elect, the elected … they come here bright as dimes,
and die dishevelled and soft.
We cannot name their names, or number their dates—
circle on circle2, like rings on a tree—
but we wish the river had another shore,
some further range of delectable mountains,
distant hills powdered blue as a girl’s eyelid.
It seems the least little shove would land us there,
that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies
we no longer control could drag us back.
1 Listening to the tapes, it seems to me that Johnson’s biggest mistake was to presume the domino theory to be true. As any President would be, Johnson worried about both the prospect and politics of war. He thought Vietnam would probably become another Korea, but he also believed the consequences would be much worse if the United States did not support South Vietnam than if it did. If South Vietnam fell, he argued, eventually India would, too. Who did he have to argue against such alarming—and alarmist—prospects?
2 Not that it matters much, but Fox and Hoffman mostly ignore around the poem’s circles, though much takes place on them. The wheel is the first circle, which they ignore entirely, though surely the allusion is to Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s street plan for Washington, in which the “spokes” of the streets radiate out from the Capitol, the source of power. The second circle, as Hoffman says, is probably a reference to traffic circles, though what matters is that the statues are on them. The third circle is the shape of a dime, and the fourth is a metaphor for the “elect, elected” who are unnameable and undatable. These figures are “circles on circles”; the metaphor recalls the statues (on circles) riding “like South American / liberators above the breeding vegetation.” But the figure is dense and made more ambiguous by the simile “like rings on a tree,” which Fox latches onto to say that Lowell is “tying it back to nature again.”
