April 2018
David Graham
grahamd@ripon.edu
grahamd@ripon.edu
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I confess I’ve never understood the antipathy some poets and editors have toward “poems about poetry.” We poets spend our lives reading, discussing, and pondering the art we love, so why in the world wouldn’t we write from such reflections from time to time? Naturally, any theme can be done well or badly, but I rebel in spirit against any blanket dismissal of a single one of them. And so throughout my life I have written poems about poetry, other poets, and specific poems. My motives have included homage, exploration, complaint, self-doubt, and in fact most of the common reasons why anyone writes a poem.
“Long Overdue Note to My College Professor...” is an older poem, based on an even older memory. In it I recount a specific class in which we were studying Yeats, during which the professor had some sort of emotional breakdown and found it hard to continue. Weaving allusions to Yeats throughout, I reflect on the difference between what I thought at the time, and what I thought twenty years later, when I had been teaching for many years myself. Teaching poetry for so many years had made me understand both Yeats and the student/professor relationship quite differently. My conclusion may or may not be the correct one, but it points to the fact that great poetry can sometimes take a long time to sink in.
My poem “Lying in a Hammock...” is addressed to the late James Wright, author of the classic lyric of self-doubt, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Wright was an early and deep influence on me. My poem is larded with allusions to Wright’s poem and conducts what I hope is a gentle critique of a poem I still very much love despite some misgivings.
In my Poetic License column this month I continue my survey of memorable poetry readings and readers with memories of Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin reading in Worcester, MA, the capital city of poetry aloud. After this, I have at least two more columns I would like to present on the general topic of poetry performance. Stay tuned.
“Long Overdue Note to My College Professor...” is an older poem, based on an even older memory. In it I recount a specific class in which we were studying Yeats, during which the professor had some sort of emotional breakdown and found it hard to continue. Weaving allusions to Yeats throughout, I reflect on the difference between what I thought at the time, and what I thought twenty years later, when I had been teaching for many years myself. Teaching poetry for so many years had made me understand both Yeats and the student/professor relationship quite differently. My conclusion may or may not be the correct one, but it points to the fact that great poetry can sometimes take a long time to sink in.
My poem “Lying in a Hammock...” is addressed to the late James Wright, author of the classic lyric of self-doubt, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Wright was an early and deep influence on me. My poem is larded with allusions to Wright’s poem and conducts what I hope is a gentle critique of a poem I still very much love despite some misgivings.
In my Poetic License column this month I continue my survey of memorable poetry readings and readers with memories of Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin reading in Worcester, MA, the capital city of poetry aloud. After this, I have at least two more columns I would like to present on the general topic of poetry performance. Stay tuned.
Long Overdue Note To My College Professor
Who Broke Down And Cried One Morning In 1974
While Teaching Yeats
At long last I know what you mean.
That was no country for any man,
that classroom with its fluorescent rows
of groggy juniors equal in fear
and indifference. We were in
no one's arms but yours, and you split
open like a shell to reveal
the raw jelly inside. We froze,
thinking it was family woe,
maybe an old back injury
acting up, perhaps even fear
of tenure's blank guillotine.
Maybe so, maybe so. Now I
think it was us, our practiced slouch,
our gaze blank and pitiless as
the clock itching toward hour's end.
We weren't about to love Yeats
on your say-so. We were thinking
grades, thinking lunch, thinking firelight
playing upon a girlfriend's skin,
and we were thinking them so hard
we couldn't feel what you said
Yeats felt. So in piteous rage
at our held breaths, our cautious nods,
you wept. And we didn't know how
to be anything but polite
about it. You stammered, halted,
and stood bent over the lectern
in pain. We studied our notes. We
glanced at the swaying trees outside
while you cried silently into,
over, and about our silence.
--originally published in Stutter Monk. Flume Press, 2000.
Lying in a Hammock Far from William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
--James Wright
Oh, James, you’re not over my head and neither is
there a bronze butterfly asleep on the black trunk.
If anything you’re under my head like a stone pillow
I’ve chosen to sleep on most of my life. You’re hard
to hate, with your broody genius, your green shadows,
even your corny piles of horse manure aflame
like cartoon gold. I’d like to think you shoveled
some shit in your day, but I don’t know if you ever
got out of that hammock to toss a bale of hay down
from the loft, or if you chipped ice from the black
rubber ice bucket on a cold Sunday morning so the horse
of the real could drink. I don’t even know if butterflies
sleep—did you? Or was that just another scarf
to drape gorgeously across your old scars? Maybe
you wasted your life and maybe not, but is that even
the point? Your poems were water on my roots
and I wasn’t the only one. I don’t know a damn thing
about you, really. The one time I heard you give
a reading you were dead sober, maybe hungover,
and to my chagrin dull as the dust on the windowsills,
which did not blaze up in a shaft of pure sun. It just
lay there exactly like the dust we are and shall be.
When I went up to shake your hand afterward
and offer my teacup of praise, you just looked at me
like a hawk in a dead oak regards a rusted bit of wire.
Long Overdue Note To My College Professor
Who Broke Down And Cried One Morning In 1974
While Teaching Yeats
At long last I know what you mean.
That was no country for any man,
that classroom with its fluorescent rows
of groggy juniors equal in fear
and indifference. We were in
no one's arms but yours, and you split
open like a shell to reveal
the raw jelly inside. We froze,
thinking it was family woe,
maybe an old back injury
acting up, perhaps even fear
of tenure's blank guillotine.
Maybe so, maybe so. Now I
think it was us, our practiced slouch,
our gaze blank and pitiless as
the clock itching toward hour's end.
We weren't about to love Yeats
on your say-so. We were thinking
grades, thinking lunch, thinking firelight
playing upon a girlfriend's skin,
and we were thinking them so hard
we couldn't feel what you said
Yeats felt. So in piteous rage
at our held breaths, our cautious nods,
you wept. And we didn't know how
to be anything but polite
about it. You stammered, halted,
and stood bent over the lectern
in pain. We studied our notes. We
glanced at the swaying trees outside
while you cried silently into,
over, and about our silence.
--originally published in Stutter Monk. Flume Press, 2000.
Lying in a Hammock Far from William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
--James Wright
Oh, James, you’re not over my head and neither is
there a bronze butterfly asleep on the black trunk.
If anything you’re under my head like a stone pillow
I’ve chosen to sleep on most of my life. You’re hard
to hate, with your broody genius, your green shadows,
even your corny piles of horse manure aflame
like cartoon gold. I’d like to think you shoveled
some shit in your day, but I don’t know if you ever
got out of that hammock to toss a bale of hay down
from the loft, or if you chipped ice from the black
rubber ice bucket on a cold Sunday morning so the horse
of the real could drink. I don’t even know if butterflies
sleep—did you? Or was that just another scarf
to drape gorgeously across your old scars? Maybe
you wasted your life and maybe not, but is that even
the point? Your poems were water on my roots
and I wasn’t the only one. I don’t know a damn thing
about you, really. The one time I heard you give
a reading you were dead sober, maybe hungover,
and to my chagrin dull as the dust on the windowsills,
which did not blaze up in a shaft of pure sun. It just
lay there exactly like the dust we are and shall be.
When I went up to shake your hand afterward
and offer my teacup of praise, you just looked at me
like a hawk in a dead oak regards a rusted bit of wire.
©2018 David Graham
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