Long Pauses

Category: Poetry

  • Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter

    Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter

    Several years ago, in a seminar on modern and postmodern lit, I wrote a fun paper on Ezra Pound’s music criticism. In particular, I was interested in Pound’s admiration for Bartok’s String Quartet #5, which he described as:

    a work in [Bartok’s] own idiom, consistently in his own idiom, built up into a complete and coherent structure. It is like no other known quartet. It definitely adds to the literature or whatever we are to call articulate repertory of work written for four stringed instruments. It projects from the preceding borders and frontiers of quartet composition, and is highly satisfactory in so doing.

    Any study of Pound and music is inherently fraught with problems. Though he was able to play the clavichord, Pound never received formal training in music theory and lacked experience as a performer. As a composer, Pound has only one major work to his name, Le Testament de Villon, an opera first performed in 1926. By his own admission, Pound was also quite tone deaf, a fact not lost on his friends. Upon hearing of Pound’s work on Le Testament, William Carlos Williams joked, “Pound writing an opera? Why, he doesn’t know one note from another.”

    In his published criticism, Pound often responds to the music viscerally — the way it makes him “feel” — rather than formally. Except for the occasional “pizzicati” or “counterpoint,” his reviews are often devoid of technical terminology. He seems conscious of his own weaknesses and protects himself by couching his attacks in comments like, “at least I felt” and “seemed to me.” That his opinions often mirrored those of his musical advisors of the moment — George Antheil and Tibor Serly, in particular — has also not gone unnoticed by his critics.

    As I’ve never cared too much for most of The Cantos, my paper turned into a formal analysis of Bartok’s quartet, which really is a remarkable piece. The second movement, the Adagio Molto, is beautifully dissonant— one of those remarkable collisions of modernist invention and melody. People who “don’t like” post-Romantic music have surely never heard the Fifth.

  • Vendler and Stevens

    “Somnambulisma” by Wallace Stevens

    On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
    Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
    That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

    The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
    The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
    The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

    The generations of the bird are all
    By water washed away. They follow after.
    They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

    Without this bird that never settles, without
    Its generations that follow in their universe,
    The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

    Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
    To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
    They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

    In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
    Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
    Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

    Poet/scholar Helen Vendler, the 2004 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, last night gave her address, “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar,” which is as inspiring a defense of the arts as you’re likely to read.

    The arts present the whole uncensored human person–in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form–as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments–in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer–and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plainchant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion.

    The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived–as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure–a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany–but when Prufrock says, “I am not Prince Hamlet,” he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to every one who knows about the play.

    Wonderful stuff, and her inclusion of Stevens’ “Somnambulisma” is a brilliant touch.

  • Rilke’s “The Man Watching”

    Less than an hour until President Bush’s national address, and I’m too tired, too frustrated, and too stunned to think. I know that there’s not much lower on the blog food chain than posting a poem without comment, but, well, a friend sent this to me today, and it’s been a source of welcomed comfort. And besides, great poetry speaks for itself.

    The Man Watching
    by Rainer Maria Rilke

    I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
    so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
    that a storm is coming,
    and I hear the far-off fields say things
    I can’t bear without a friend,
    I can’t love without a sister

    The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
    across the woods and across time,
    and the world looks as if it had no age:
    the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    What we choose to fight is so tiny!
    What fights us is so great!
    If only we would let ourselves be dominated
    as things do by some immense storm,
    we would become strong too, and not need names.

    When we win it’s with small things,
    and the triumph itself makes us small.
    What is extraordinary and eternal
    does not want to be bent by us.
    I mean the Angel who appeared
    to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
    when the wrestler’s sinews
    grew long like metal strings,
    he felt them under his fingers
    like chords of deep music.

    Whoever was beaten by this Angel
    (who often simply declined the fight)
    went away proud and strengthened
    and great from that harsh hand,
    that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
    Winning does not tempt that man.
    This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
    by constantly greater beings.

    Okay, one comment . . . I’ll never write a line this good:

    the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    Read it out loud. There is so much dramatic force in those three nouns. The stanza, up until that point, is almost romantic — filled with images of a storm and a mythical landscape. But then you hit the word “seriousness,” and the tone, even the tempo of the line changes. The light, fluid reading is brought to a halt, and we’re forced to confront those words, individually and in relation to one another: “seriousness and weight and eternity.”

    A perfect poem for today, I think.

  • Let America Be America Again

    A friend just passed along this link, which made me laugh. Turns out that Laura Bush just cancelled a planned poetry celebration after learning that one of the invited speakers had encouraged his colleagues to use the event as an opportunity to publicly denounce war on Iraq.

    “It came to the attention of the First Lady’s Office that some invited guests want to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum,” a White House statement said. “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.”

    Why do I find this amusing? Because the event was intended to celebrate the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, and Langston Hughes — a homosexual, an atheist intellectual, and a radical Old Left Communist (grossly reductionist caricatures, but you get the point). Apparently Mrs. Bush thinks that readings of Whitman, Dickenson, and Hughes at the White House should be devoid of political content.

    Hopefully they’ll work out their differences real soon, though. I’d love to hear President Bush reading Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.” I mean, can you think of a more patriotic title for a poem?

  • Life at War

    If there’s such thing as a truly legitimate call for the use of art as a practical means to change the world, then it will probably never find a more sure voice than Denise Levertov’s. In the final throes of preparing for my final comprehensive exam, I found this poem, which was included in her 1966 collection, The Sorrow Dance. I couldn’t imagine a better blog for today.

    “Life at War” by Denise Levertov, 1966

    The disasters numb within us
    caught in the chest, rolling
    in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
    resembles lumps of raw dough

    weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
    Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
    Could I say of it, it overflows
    with bitterness . . . but no, as though

    its contents were simply balled into
    formless lumps, thus
    do I carry it about.’
    The same war

    continues.
    We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
    our lungs are pocked with it,
    the mucous membrane of our dreams
    coated with it, the imagination
    filmed over with the gray filth of it:

    the knowledge that humankind,

    delicate Man, whose flesh
    responds to a caress, whose eyes
    are flowers that perceive the stars,

    whose music excels the music of birds,
    whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
    whose understanding manifests designs
    fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

    still turns without surprise, with mere regret
    to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
    runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
    transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
    implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

    We are the humans, men who can make;
    whose language imagines mercy,
    lovingkindness; we have believed one another
    mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

    who do these acts, who convince ourselves
    it is necessary; these acts are done
    to our own flesh; burned human flesh
    is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

    Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
    in our bodies along with all we
    go on knowing of joy, of love;

    our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
    day and night,
    nothing we say has the not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
    nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
    the deep intelligence living at peace would have.