Bring me the sweat of Rafael Nadal

Anthony Lane writes in a recent New Yorker,

Hero worship, for all but a handful of Olympians, is the fleeting exception, whereas for tennis stars it’s the rule. Nadal, to his credit, looked delighted when he won the gold medal, but, as he tossed his wristbands to his fans, you could see, in their outstretched hands, a craving that no Olympics could ever sate: bring me the sweat of Rafael Nadal.

I wonder how many of his readers got the reference to Clive James's poem Bring Me The Sweat Of Gabriela Sabatini - 0.1%?

Every once in a while I'm tempted

Every once in a while I'm tempted to use a great phrase like "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" as the title of a poem, but doing so sets the reader's expectations very high and it's hard not be upstaged. Here's a Wallace Stevens poem, "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs", with the same problem.

Thomas Disch is dead; I hate the world

One of my favorite poets, Tom Disch, has died in apparent misery and despair. I don't know whether to feel grief or rage.


A poem of his from twenty years ago - not his best, but fitting enough:


In Memoriam

Nothing, no one, gives me rest
I have put it to the test
And it is not an idle jest
The life I live must lead to death
An emptiness and end of breath
Though still my heart beats in my breast
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

The streets are filled with cryers crying
No end of them, nor yet of dying
Some men may smile a little while
If sellers sell and some are buying
But they will join the rank and file
Who decorate our ancient Nile
No end of them, nor yet of dying

Memorials are built and then
Time silts a harbor, forms a fen
And tells its immemorial jest
To the worst as to the best
The world will be as it has been
I am feeling so depressed
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

Best post title ever nominee

here.

The Art of Losing

Roger Angell is the best prose writer about baseball. Here he quotes one of Elizabeth Bishop's greatest poems, One Art. Sadly he entirely misses Bishop's irony, the unbearable force driving the poem. Torre has (by the front office's standards anyway) lost and lost for years now, and his mastery of winning was questionable. It seems to me that in walking away from his players and millions more dollars than any other manager makes, and in attacking the team's ownership (and hence the team) in doing so, he has reached the pinnacle of losing.

Psalm 23 and Coolio

Odd juxtaposition - last week there was an article by James Wood in the New Yorker about Robert Alter's new translation of Psalms, with some interesting discussion of the famous 23rd. And this weekend Mrs. R. and I watched an episode of _Angel_ in which there's a snippet of the powerful "Gangster's Paradise" by Coolio (excellent video here). The song starts with the opening line of the 23rd Psalm, but except for the mordant "paradise" (and possibly something of gospel in the mournful chorus), God is conspicuously absent.

Elegy for Sergio Vieira de Mello

Four years ago, on 19 August 2003, twenty-two UN staff members serving in Iraq were killed by a suicide bomber. Among the dead was the leader of the humanitarian mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello. This as I recall was the first of many stunning tragedies in Iraq. I hadn't expected the invasion to turn out well, but I hadn't been prepared for something so horrible, and spent the next couple of days wandering around San Francisco feeling sad and angry and composing the following, which I post here because it's not getting any better sitting in a folder.



For Sérgio Vieira de Mello


Sérgio, it's been a week. I claim
the stranger's right to be growing more upset.
You're lying in state back home. It's winter there.
The trees must be restrained in splendor, the parrots'
cries in quieter Portuguese. But here
in San Francisco it's summer, not just in name;
girls in halter tops fill all the cafes
and Joseph Cornell stores on 24th,
Dolores Park's a beach of beautiful
male torsos and thighs, so many effortless
Michelangelos with faces of that rich
variety that men misname as race.

Sérgio, it's evening. I'm walking down
from Noe Valley to visit friends in the Mission.
Three ginkgos stand in front of an Irish pub,
The Liberties (as in Don't Be Taking, perhaps,
though Liberty Hill's not far away.) Amidst
the summer green are yellow hints of fall.
A few branches hang, broken and brown. Here
are pots of marigolds and foxglove. There
a manzanita's blossoms hang like pink
Chinese lanterns the size of nipples, a few
as red. A jacaranda, up here at least
the slenderest and loveliest of trees,
has lost its lilac blooms. The wilting rhyme
of the agapanthus stalks has been cut down.
Above, my country's flag is crossed with Castro's -
the field of stars on seven rainbow stripes.

Sérgio, perhaps you would have laughed -
a beggar - no, a homeless guy in a doorway,
autistic from hopelessness - by his side
his book of hours, a baby-blue pamphlet:
Some Basic Facts about the United Nations.
He must have picked it up for free downtown.
I hate the consciously inoffensive blue,
the trite coincidence, the pitiful man,
this magnificent beautiful city's failure to solve
the insoluble. Forgive the ugliness,
but this anger makes me want to puke.
Saddam, get of Hitler and Stalin, lives,
the spiteful madmen who killed you and your colleagues...
Arafat's New Year's "No" on peace to Clinton,
the sacrilegious green of Hamas's flag,
the "we wanna be a superpower" French,
Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, the neocons,
Bush's incuriosity - his complacent,
manipulated ignorance as good
as mendacity any day - "he often says
that life would be a lot easier if it were
a dictatorship." Even the dorky look
on the EMT's face as he carried an outraged child
from the skeletal bus the day that you were killed.
Seething, IQ plummeting, I've new
respect for all that you, with better grounds
for fury, accomplished in your life, and beyond.

Sérgio, you would have loved my friends,
Maarten and Chiara, too. I'd say
that they are people - smart and generous,
productive, in love - you could have been proud
to die for. But they wouldn't have asked, and you
didn't volunteer. Well, it's too late,
and better to think of happier things, like how
the other day my friends, out drinking, asked
for caipirinhas - in exchange for instructions, got
a round with Cuban rum in place of cachaça.
Going to bars with them is economical.
Strangers see them smile, hear them laugh,
and send us margaritas, a small blessing.

Sérgio, this neighborhood is rich
in people, poor in other ways - for San
Francisco, anyway. The dollar stores
are full. And here's a tall, sharp-spired church,
its unglassed windows boarded up and painted
gray, the great rose window slatted gray;
two motion-sensor lights point out the steps
are filthy - the only parishioners now are pigeons.
Chiseled into a column's base in German,
"Christ is the cornerstone."
                                            I think that we
should build new churches based on men like you -
not houses of worship - places to meet and plan
a better world. And here, more random luck,
La Iglesia del Buen Samaritano.
Light spills from the doorway. It's dusk. Late
for a home-cooked Italian dinner, I hurry by
and pass a lone Monarch fluttering north.

Bring Me The Sweat Of Gabriela Sabatini

The following is a poem by Clive James, taken (with an obvious emendation) from the web, since I haven't gotten my hands on a copy of his book yet, plus some commentary of sorts by link as an experiment.



Bring Me The Sweat Of Gabriela Sabatini


Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
For I know it tastes as pure as Malvern water,
Though laced with bright bubbles like the aqua minerale
That melted the kidney stones of Michelangelo,
As sunlight the snow in spring.

Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
In a green Lycurgus cup with a sprig of mint.
But add no sugar, the bitterness is what I want.
If I crave sweetness, I would be asking you to bring me
The tears of Annabel Croft.

So let me drink deep from the bitter cup.
Take it to her between any two points of the tie-break,
That she may shake above it her thick black hair,
A nocturne from which the droplets as they fall,
Flash like shooting stars.
And as their lustre becomes liqueur, let the full calyx
Be repeatedly carried to me.
Until I tell you to stop,
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini.

Something perfect

Your Face by Bill Plympton

Your face is like a song
Your sweet eyes whisper
And I want to sing along
Your features are in tune
Let's sing together
And turn every month to June
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only


Your lips with mine will rhyme
And when they touch me
It's a symphony divine
Your cheeks your nose your hair
Sing me a melody
A melody so rare
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only


This is great.

Even more here.


Update - see comments for corrected lyrics and the source performance.

Update, twelve years later in 2018: Per the comments below, "the song was composed and sung by Maureen McElheron".  Can't immediately find a primary reference.

A new verse, free

I learned a song somewhere or other - it's Rilkekind's favorite:

Up in the forest in a nest in a tree
Lived an old mother robin and her little chicks three.
"Chirp!" said the mother; "we chirp!" said the three;
And they chirped and were glad in their nest in the tree.

Out in the city in a cage in a zoo
Lived an old mother lion and her little cubs two.
"Roar!" said the mother; "we roar!" said the two;
And they roared and were glad in their cage in the zoo.

Down by the river on a bank in the sun
Lived an old mother toad and her little toad one.
"Croak!" said the mother; "I croak!" said the one;
And they croaked and were glad on their bank in the sun.

Well, the above is how I sing it, anyway. Rilkekind especially likes it when I roll the "r"s and do the first "chirp" etc. in a chest voice and the second in a head voice. No doubt I'll find a link to the melody one of these days.

Here's another verse I've started adding:

Out in the vacuum far away from the sun
Lived an old mother nothing and her little not none.
"Don't!" said the mother; "I won't!" said the none;
And they didn't and were glad far away from the sun.

Magical thinking, pewter

The other day I was doing the jumble puzzle in the paper because it was there, and unscrambled one entry into "pewter". I laughed, because Nancy Willard uses it either obsessively or perhaps out of an odd strategy to link poems by random words. Then a few days later Mrs. R's mother remarked about the door handles and other fixtures in the house we moved into a month ago that they had a pewter finish.

Rilkekind spends some time in a bouncer seat which reacts when he moves - fishes bubble and swim, melodies or sounds play. Lately though he seems to find the spectacle rather tiresome. He has not yet tired of the mobile on his crib. It plays Brahms's (slightly terrifying) "Lullaby" and rotates a small zoo of animals - but only for a short while, since it's wind-up. Rilkekind I think makes the same movements he uses in the bouncer seat when he's enjoying the mobile.


We make connections - sometimes that leads to strange results, sometimes not.

Virus

Rilkekind is fine now, but last week he got an infection and spent several days in the hospital. The various tests and procedures were upsetting to the three of us, and I spent a fair amount of time during them trying to calm him with all the songs I usually sing him. I read some of Park's _A Princess of Roumania_ while sitting by his elaborate hospital crib and was reminded by the text of the "Papa's going to buy you a mockingbird" song. Having gotten tired of everything else, and rather concerned he was going to associate "La belle est au jardin d'amour" with being poked with needles, I started singing him a version of the mockingbird song. Now I find myself walking around compulsively generating new verses, which I promptly forget.

Hush little baby, don't say a word
Daddy's going to buy you a mockingbird
And if that mockingbird don't sing
Daddy's going to buy you an elven ring
And if that elven ring don't shine
Daddy's going to buy you a popcorn mine
And if that popcorn mine don't yield
Daddy's going to buy you a poppy field
And if that poppy field don't bloom
Daddy's going to buy you a Chinese room
And if that Chinese room don't talk
Daddy's going to buy you a cliff of chalk
And if that cliff of chalk don't write
Daddy's going to buy you some dynamite
And if that dynamite should smoulder
Daddy's going to buy you the town of Boulder
And if that town should raise its fees
Daddy's going to buy you the seven seas
And if those seven seas don't part
Daddy's going to buy you a tell-tale heart
And if tell-tale heart don't beat
Daddy's going to buy you a fishing fleet
And if that fishing fleet don't catch lobster
Daddy's going to buy you a job as a mobster
And if the mafia don goes to jail
Daddy's going to buy you a plastic pail
And if that pail is full of sand
Daddy's going to buy you a marching band
And if that marching band's too loud
Daddy's going to buy you a fluffy cloud
And if that cloud should get hurricaney
Daddy's going to buy you the soul of Cheney
And if that soul does not exist
Daddy's going to buy you a hawk for your wrist
And if that hawk should fly away
Daddy's going to buy you a sunny day
And if that sunny day gets cloudy
Daddy's going to buy you a church by Gaudi
And if that church is too moderne
Daddy's going to buy you a ring at Cern
And if that ring don't 'celerate
Daddy's going to buy you a pearly gate
And if that gate should be too squeaky
Daddy's going to buy you the bones of Leakey
And if you find that too absurd
Daddy's going to buy you a mockingbird

I do something awful to a poem by Nancy Willard

I recently learned that the more moronic Red Sox fans refer to Mariano Rivera as "Fruit Bat". Coincidentally I started reading Nancy Willard's New and Selected Poems recently, having picked it up on the basis of reading a random page and loving the cover painting by Blake, and found a poem about a fruit bat.


The Fruit Bat

Because the air has darkened
like bruised fruit, you creep
down the bare branch

where you slept all light long,
gathered into yourself like a fig.
Little mandarin woman fleeing

under the stars on bound feet,
when your wings spring open
even you look surprised.

What are the raven's slick feathers
beside these pewter sails
raised in the foundry of your flesh,

burnished by light poured
from a wasted moon and a dipper
brimming with darkness?


This is a small, observational poem that doesn't do a lot for me. It seems a bit overwritten, as if it had aimed at haiku compactness but bulged out on a diet of adjectives. The contradiction between "creep" and "fleeing" bugged me, and anyway "creep" has a sense of body-to-the-ground that doesn't work here. Further, don't bats hang upside down, making the branch stuff nonsense? And "mandarin" is kind of random, isn't it? Then "poured ... dipper" doesn't work for me. And why is the moon "wasted"? And "burnish" means to polish by rubbing. Basically the last stanza has to grasp at significance and crumbles under the pressure.


The Fruit Bat

The air has darkened
like bruised fruit, so you sidle
down the leafless branch

where you slept all light,
gathered inward like a fig.
Wrapped in a plain shawl,

your feet to the stars,
when your warm wings spring open
you too look surprised.

The raven's feathers?
Crude beside these pewter sails
smelted in your flesh

from papaya juice
and the nectar of flowers
you see by starlight.


p.s. - probably superceded but amusing

Too peevish for poetry

The first poem in Wilbur's Collected Poems begins:

The Reader

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.

At "these days" I'm already wondering "so not next year?" and "is this worth munging the pentameter already?" And at "shaded" and "shadowed" I'm going, "huh? By 'a shaded light' you mean 'a lamp', right?"

But the fourth line is great.



Here are the first two stanzas of the opening poem in Timothy Steele's new book, Toward the Winter Solstice.

Daybreak, Benedict Canyon

Thick fog has filled the canyon overnight
And turned it to a sea of milky gray.
The steep-sloped chaparral and streets below
Are drowned from view; hilltops across the way
Form a low-lying archipelago
Upon the fog’s smothering gulfs and shoals.
The scene, in the uncertain pre-dawn light,
Recalls those Chinese landscapes on silk scrolls

In which mists haunt ravines, and clouds surround
Remote peaks fading to remoter skies.
The scene suggests, too, the apocalypse
The earth may suffer if sea levels rise.
This very deck might be a ghostly ship’s
And I a lone survivor, cast by fate
Out on a flood as lifeless and profound
As the one Noah had to navigate.

Here I'm saying:
Look, Tim (may I call you Tim?), you can't say "the apocalypse the earth may suffer", and "if sea levels rise" is metrically lame. But you really don't want to end a stanza on a weak-ass rhyme like "fate/navigate", esp. if you have to resort to prose like "As the one" to set it up. And the stanza I didn't quote - I can see it twirling around singing "I feel pretty" but it's not.

He chains me to that bed & he berates me

In the comments to a recent post, batailleseyes took me to task for ignoring the ending of the Bishop(?) poem I referred to, that is:

He chains me & berates me--
He chains me to that bed & he berates me.

Ok, the rhythm here is really striking:

-'-   -   -'-
-'-   --'--   -'-

but it's got a bit of the usual amphibrach comic flavor, which maybe doesn't help the "chain"-"berate" contrast out.

The rule I've just invented for deciding these matters is as follows: Imagine Ricardo Montalban in his Wrath-of-Khan finery declaiming the lines in question, and if they don't seem silly they're fine. Consider, for example, the ending of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill":

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

This passes, I don't think the title line does.


Thinking about repetition put me in mind of a favorite passage from the beginning of Paul Park's Soldiers of Paradise:

Two ponies pulled a sledge piled with gutted animals, and when the barbarian saw it, he spat, and touched his nose with the heel of his hand, and ducked his face down into his armpit. It is your ritual of hatred; seeing it for the first time, standing in the snow, I found it funny. My brother had climbed up onto the mule, and he was kicking his boots into its ribs, while I kicked its backside. "Look how he hates death," sang my brother, as the barbarian muttered and prayed. "He hates the sight of it." A strutwing goose trailed its beak along the snow from the back of the sledge, its feathers dripping blood. "He hates it," sang my brother.

Here's one more quote, from Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, a fantasy novel of unusual depth and vigor but the usual unevenness on every scale:

"My love," [he] said. Mumbled, slurred it. She saw death in his eyes, an abscess of loss that seemed to be leaving him almost blind, stripping his soul. "My love," he said again. "What have they done? See what they will make me do. Oh, see what they make me do!"

All Elizabeth Bishop, all the time

Following up on "Washington as a Surveyor", the New Yorker has gone Bishop, 24/7. Or anyway there are three poems under her name in the current issue. These are much less finished works, with (I suspect) rather more editorial input, and are in need of either more such or not being presented as poems. "In a Cheap Hotel..." begins:

In a cheap hotel
in a cheap city
Love held his prisoners                     or my love

at which point I knew I was looking at a mess. I've now got a bad feeling about The Uncollected Poems, but we'll see.

If I'm Gilbert, where's Sullivan?

It's easy to make Jackmormon laugh. See the comments for the title.

A remark about the verse: Mrs. R and I saw a production of The Mikado recently, and I've had the tit-willow meter in my head. I used pure amphibrachs (weak strong weak) with iambic closes to even lines (as Lewis Carroll did in "The Hunting of the Snark" and elsewhere). The 8th line however is irregular - "adjacent" is an amphibrach displaced by the leading "The", and "wall" is stressed against the meter - so hopefully the line comes across as almost all stressed syllables, the tone intended to be espressed being "I'm going to say this slowly and with a lot of emphasis so you catch my drift, ok?" Beyond that one tricksy bit the whole thing's in the setup.

Mrs. R just read Connie Willis's To Say Nothing About The Dog, and the Victorian era's apparently on my mind.

Washington as a Surveyor

So I'm reading the 5 Dec New Yorker, la di da, Hersh on Bush, Munro on wickedness, all the same stuff, flippity flippity, "Washington as a Surveyor", when I get kicked in the left kidney - it's by Elizabeth Bishop. Well, she's been dead for over a quarter century, but occasionally one sees a new poem pop up, what's the story on this one? Flip back to the front - nothing on the Contributors page (later I discover that Mark Strand's poem doesn't get him mentioned either). As far the New Yorker's concerned, it's just a poem by Elizabeth Bishop - they've published her before, why stop now? Ok, so it's listed at Vassar under "Notes and notebooks of drafts, dreams, and other observations".

Washington as a Surveyor

Lord, I discovered when I discovered love
That day a continent within the mind,
Unstable on the sea, boundaries unlined
Which now I slowly take the measure of.
The coast's determined, the mountains do not move;
Natural harbors and clear springs I find,
Shade trees and fruit trees, everything of its kind--
Even for an empire more resources than enough.
My favorite flowers, besides, some of each,
Yes, and wild animals who stand and stare;
Rivers that run beyond my present reach
The other way, and clouds that glitter in the air.
Love's flag quickly I planted on the beach
While I explored, but the one I love is not there.


Stream-of-consciousness comments:

Ok, so it's obviously by Bishop - the frank repetition of "discovered", the concern with geography and love, the use of form, the interest in history a la "Trollope's Journal", maybe some Herbert influence.

So it's a Petrarchan sonnet, well and good for a poem about love. If there's a turn though I don't get it, which is kind of a big minus - it makes the choice a bit arbitrary and artificial. On the other hand the form forces some interesting lines so fine.

This would be George Washington, who worked as a surveyor from his mid teens. Some of that work was in wilderness and counts as exploring. So the measured tone is apropos, the devotional opening too, and the interest in empire - but I'm not sure knowing the speaker adds that much. Maybe there's some illuminating historical detail about Washington's life I'm missing.

Am I missing echoes of Milton or Herbert? E.g., "everything of its kind" sounds like an allusion, and the sense of an innocent land with the unfrightened animals.

Nice going from "Unstable on the sea" to "favorite flowers" as the exploration is described. "The other way" is a strong cold note prefiguring the ending. "Besides", "Yes" seem like filler to satisfy the meter. The lines are in large part longer than ten syllables, which slows things down a tad. "That day" gets some odd emphasis. Why "quickly I planted"? This seems to make "Love's flag" a spondee and I guess avoids the plain iambs of "Love's flag I quickly planted on the beach". Regardless, it contrasts nicely with "slowly" earlier. I like "more resources than enough" - it gives the sense that one might expect "enough" but one's getting more than merited.

It's a lonely poem - a full continent to be explored in the name of love, and nobody's there to be found. The rivers run away out of reach for now, and after that the clouds glitter.

Back to "Lord" - is this Bishop speaking to God? "Why have I been given this rich, beautiful continent but no helpmeet?" Does the poem refer to a moment ("that day") of personal realization?

Ok, so some nice writing, strong beginning and end, no full control of the material or theme, some laxity in the middle, a better poem for the author's other poems - if I'd written this, I'd tell myself something "You rock, but this didn't quite gel, I couldn't stuff everything I wanted into the form or make it fully resonant." A good early Elizabeth Bishop poem, but not up to her extreme standards, hence its absence from The Complete Poems - still much more pleasurable than most poems in the New Yorker.

Update: via the comments, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box : Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, coming out in March 2006.

Walter Savage Landor's hard perfection

Ah what avails the sceptred race,
    Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
    Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
    May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
    I consecrate to thee.

Rose Aylmer is a famous little poem by a great poet of the narrowest possible accomplishment and the best possible middle name. The top google search for the poem contains an error - "A night of memories and sighs" (842 hits) instead of "A night of memories and of sighs" (102 hits). When I saw Joan Didion misquote the line in the same way here, my ears pricked up, because I remembered the main character in Vikram Seth's _A Suitable Boy_ making the same mistake in a graveyard on a date with a poet, who unhelpfully notes the essential extra "of" without saying why it matters. The line is easier to say (and recall) as pure iambic tetrameter, like the rest of the poem, but as written the nouns (esp. the latter two) are emphasized; the sudden heavy emotional weight causes the rhythm to stumble; the reader is forced to pause and consider the relationship between the latter two nouns and then back to "night" - just "a" night. It's a small and subtle point, but as good an example as any I can think of of the difficulty and rewards of reading poetry.

The looming presence of Yeats

I note this essay by John Drexel on Dana Gioia's Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry because it's interesting as well as amusingly obsessive, but mostly because Drexel writes "Yeats was a looming presence" from Ireland. Did Yeats loom? Here's what a looming presence looks like. Here's what the dictionary says about (the new-to-me noun form of) "loom":

A distorted, threatening appearance of something, as through fog or darkness.
[Perhaps of Scandinavian origin.]

(Note to self: based on the evidence of that essay, you don't know squat about Contemporary British Poetry - and you're not catching up at this rate, having not even read Hughes's last twenty years of work. Maybe in twenty years the important English writers of today will be winnowed enough to face...)