Monthly Archives: April 2023

April 5, 2023 Spotlight on T.S. Eliot’s Poem “The Song of the Jellicles” and Context for My Poem, “The Song of the Maltipoos”

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Spotlight on T.S. Eliot’s “The Song of the Jellicles” and Context for “The Song of the Maltipoos”:

Our dog, Stella, is an agile, six-year-old Maltipoo, who practically does back flips each morning for joy when her breakfast is presented. Until we adopted her a thirteen months ago, we had never heard of the Maltipoo (Maltese + Poodle) breed. The name cracks us up. Tim calls Stella “The Maltipoo Princess.” As she spent the first five years of her life in Houston, TX , is very finicky about rain and snow, loves comfort and waltzing for joy, I call her “The Southern Belle.”

One day, recently, as I brought Stella her breakfast, I thought of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Song of the Jellicles,” from his whimisically light collection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which was the inspiration for the long-running (possibly immortal) Broadway musical, “Cats”. Specifically, when I looked at Stella, I thought of the magical phrase “Terpsichorean powers.” The first time I ever heard of the name of this Goddess of Dance was in high school when I joined a small modern dance club called Terpsichore, and learned that she was the Greek Muse of Dance (and some say of lyric poetry as well, though most sources credit Erato or Euterpe for this function.)

The result? This light-hearted paeon to dancing in the moonlight by Eliot (itself inspired, to my ear, by the song “Buffalo Gals“) –and our Stella–inspired this rendition in honor of tonight’s Full Moon.

Stella in Scilla

(If you don’t already receive a poem each day in April via email but would like to, drop me a line at winonapoet@gmail.com.)

Happy Full Moon!

Until tomorrow, may you find a moment to kick up your heels!

LESLIE

Moon, St. Augustine, 2009 (Karla Schultz)

April 4, 2023 Spotlight on Poet Anthony Hecht and Context for My Poem, “A Drive in the Country”

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The mid-century formalists are perennial sources of delight and inspiration for me. Last April, I wrote about a couple of posts about some of them on this blog but had somehow neglected to mention Anthony Hecht (1923 to 2004).

Like many WW II veterans, Hecht often had a bleakness of vision but he combined it with an elegant, skillfully musical formal counterpoint that lifts his poems into some country of their own. One of my early favorites among his early poems comes from his first volume, A Summoning of Stones. It is called “Samuel Sewall,” and it delights me for its mordant wit and historical erudtion. Here are the first two lines:

Samuel Sewall, in a world of wigs,
Flouted opinion in his personal hair...

As you probably recall from Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” Sewall sat as judge at the infamous Salem Witch Trials. (In his later years, he apologized for that insanity. He also wrote an influential essay criticizing slavery.) Hecht’s poem leaves aside all broader issues and allows him to give voice to a pressing but personal concern touching personal expression versus the judgments of others in the Puritan world of 17th century Massachussetts. For me, it restores Sewall’s humanity even at it retains his sense of lofty entitlement to sit in judgment. (Marked by my participation in a high school production of Miller’s play, until I read Hecht’s poem I had seen Sewall not simply as a flawed human but as a species of officious monster.)

Other poems of Hecht, such as “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You Avoid It,” “Dover Bitch,” (a reply to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”) “More Light,” “The End of the Weekend,” and “The Ghost in the Martini” (which includes the delightful rhyming of “martini” with T.S. Eliot’s “Apeneck Sweeney”) are wonderful in a different way and much more celebrated, but none gives me more pleasure than this small historical moment imaginatively reconstituted.

Do you have a favorite among Hecht’s poems? If so, please let me know. I think his work is little read these days.

Context for Today’s Poem: “A Drive in the Country”

Spring is a long time coming is my corner of the world this year. Today we expect not only more rain but possible flooding. Today’s poem is an attempt to look clear-eyed at the current ugliness on the surface of the season and to perceive said unsettled ugliness as a necessary precondition of change and growth. I suppose the poem is a recognition of one more way that nature–planetary systems of growth, decay, revision, and rebirth–are wiser than I–as if this were not already apparent to me everyday!

(If you would like to receive the daily poem this April, but aren’t yet, drop me a line at winonapoet@gmail.com)

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 3, 2023 Spotlight on Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree”; The Poet’s Tarot by Two Sylvias Press; and Context for My Poem, “Almost Morning”

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Sylvia Plath has been an important influence on my own work since I first began reading her poems when I was sixteen. I have in mind to write some more about how I stumbled over her body of work and how dazzling I found it in a later post. For now, a little about a specific poem. (For a wonderful essay on Plath by Kim Bridgford, visit the Women Poets Timeline Project at Mezzo Cammin.)

For so many years, Plath’s poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” has remained with me, as powerful art will do. Written in 1961, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” was published that year in The New Yorker, and was one of seven poems published together in The New Yorker in the August 3, 1963 issue, about six months after her untimely death. I first read the poem in my treasured first edition copy of The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath (Ted Hughes, editor; Harper and Row, NY, 1981).

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” begins with these lines:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

As I understand it, the surface imagery was inspired by the view of a tree in the churchyard neighboring her dream house-turned-prison in the English countryside in Devon, but most of the description draws deeply from Plath’s own inner terrains.

In the decades since my first encounter with this poem, I have also discovered a light-hearted but serious creative tool, “The Poet’s Tarot,” published by Two Sylvias Press. On the last day of March, I idly drew one card from the deck, the major arcana card XVIII dedicated to Plath. Not surprisingly, this card correllates with The Moon in more traditional tarot decks, and is an indicator of deep emotions and psycholgical constructs, powerful but often at least partly submerged from conscious awareness. In other words, the card most attuned to Plath’s way of working as a poet. And I can tell her seminal poem was at the very back of my mind when I arose this morning to a view of the moon through tree branches.

Context for the Poem, “Almost Morning”:

Well, this is an absolutely accurate description of the setting moon this morning, seen from an upstairs window at my house in Minnesota, though only I would have seen it that way. The look of the actual moon was inflected through memories of my long-gone Grand Aunt Isabel, my paternal grandfather’s youngest sister, whose mittens of white rabbit fur I inherited during my last year of high school. (They were very warm. Two years later, they were consumed with relish by my roommate’s yearling beagle whose name was Karma.) Isabel’s generation vied with each other over furs, I recall, something I half-understood but that also terrified me in some kind of inarticulate way. I think this poem was an attempt at articulating that complicated not-quite nostalgia.

(To receive my poem via email, send me word at winonapoet@gmail.com.)

Until tomorrow morning,

LESLIE

April 2, 2023 Spotlight on W. H. Auden’s Poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts” and Context for My Poem, “The Big Oof”

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Pieter Brugel the Elder: “The Fall of Icarus” (1560), Musee des Beaux Arts, Brussels

This celebrated painting from the 16th century has inspired many other works of art, including Auden’s almost equally well-known poem from 1938. Auden’s poem has been a favorite of mine since I first encountered it in 1978, and I reread it often. As it is still protected by copyright, I will quote only the familiar first lines:

About suffering they were never wrong, 
the old Masters: how well they understood
its human position,....

If you would like a little context about this poem’s composition, you can read about it here.

This poem (and the painting and myth from which it derives) invite the contemplation of failure, specifically of the “pride goeth before a fall” variety. It is manifestly true that the most successful and productive people fail the most often–simple law of averages, the more one does, the more ‘oopses’ there are along the way–but these stalwart ones pick up and move on more readily, on most days, than I do, but I can say that I don’t always give up. (And I do derive a great deal of encouragement from art in general and ekphrastic poetry, in particular. In fact, I learned just now, in preparing background for this post, that David Bowie’s film from 1976, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” was inspired by the poem and the painting, both of which appear in the film. I am now going to seek out the film!)

(Note: I regret that my vestigial WordPress skills do not allow me to insert the French accent aigu where it should be, on the first ‘e’ of “musee.’ Mea culpa!)

Not Flying So High: Crow Feather in the Graveyard Snow

Context for My Poem, “The Big Oof”:

Among the many joys of daily life for me is stumbling upon a new word or new expression. Today, while chipping away at the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, I came across a term new to me, one I recognized immediately as one that describes a certain kind of public discomfort with which I am woefully familiar. The eponymous title for six lines of (somewhat sonorous) blank verse were fun for me to write, rather especially as that compositional time came in the wake this morning of a big thud of a rejection that I could have done without encountering today. That icky Icarus feeling, fortunately not fatal.

Ah, well! So it goes for me, and Icarus, and maybe sometimes for you, too? It must be the way we learn, darn it.

If you are one of those readers who elected to receive the daily poem via email, I would be interested to hear whether you have heard this new lingo, “The Big Oof,” before and if you think the slight poem I made captures its essence–or maybe misses the mark? If the latter, do tell me. I might wince a tad, but I want to know!

Wishing you a wince-free day,

LESLIE