Category Archives: poetry

a note to the previous

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The title of my last ramble was taken from a sixteenth century poem by the Englishman, John Davies. “Nosce Teipsum,” know thyself, interestingly, is misspelled at the Poetry Foundation website, here. I used Davies’ spelling, itself perhaps a variant of the popular aphorism nosce te ipsum, because my general subject was Christian humanism. Davies (1569–1626) was a courtier and a lawyer, not a professional poet. Almost all his poetry belongs to the early part of his life, before he bacame embroiled in public affairs. He sought and gained the favor of Queen Elizabeth, who appointed him to various public offices. After the Queen’s death he served among the delegation that brought James VI of Scotland to England to be king.

“Nosce Teipsum” is a long philosophical poem that is sometimes regarded as a compendium of Elizabethan knowledge. It is hardly that, but it is a profoundly conventional poem, essayistic, of that species of sixteenth century English poetry that C. S. Lewis called drab. It has two claims to fame, its early use of the decasyllabic quatrain (which Davies didn’t invent) a verse form sometimes known as the elegaic measure because of Gray’s later use of it in his famous elegy. But Davies’ poem is better known for the three quatrains that conclude its first section, subtitled “Of Humane Knowledge”:

I know my bodi’s of so fraile a kind,
    As force without, feauers within can kill;
    I know the heauenly nature of my minde,
    But tis corrupted both in wit and will:

I know my Soule hath power to know all things,
    Yet is she blinde and ignorant in all;
    I know I am one of Nature’s little kings,
    Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life’s a paine and but a span,
    I know my Sense is mockt with euery thing:
    And to conclude, I know myself a Man,
    Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.

Immediately prior to these stanzas, the poet avers: “My selfe am Center of my circling thought, / Only my selfe I studie, learne, and know,” in lines that suggest an acquaintance with Montaigne. But by 1599, the year of the publication of “Nosce Teipsum,” this idea, like the sentiments that follow it in the poem, was part of the conventional conception of Human nature about which philosophers from Descartes to Locke and Berkeley mused. A later, and better known, example is Pope’s aphorism:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

My point is not to argue for the correctness or the venerability of the caveat, though Davies invokes Socrates as an originator. I mean rather to allude to Davies’ poem as a typical product of Christian humanism in his time, not so beautiful or monumental as the 1559 Book of Common Prayer or the English Bible (KJV 1611) or so influential and original as the Institutes of John Calvin (1536), but perhaps more typical because more ordinary. In the first section of the poem Davies’ theme is the limits of human knowledge; in the second, the immortality of the soul. In both sections he draws upon a variety of classical and biblical sources in a manner thoroughly commonplace in his time.

The stone whose photograph I have used at the head of this post and the last may be found in a small garden in New Harmony, Indiana that contains the grave of Paul Tillich. I have referenced it once before, here, and noted its proximity to the Roofless Church, designed by Phillip Johnson.

Sidney’s reference to Anchises calls up a moment in Virgil’s Aeneid after all is lost and the city has been destroyed. Aeneas escapes carrying his father, Anchises on his back and leading his son, Ascanius, by the hand. His wife, Creusa, is unable to keep up with them and falls behind. When Aeneas searches for her after satisfying himself that his father and son are safely hidden, he finds that she has been killed. There follows a tender conversation between the living Aeneas and Creusa’s ghost. (Aeneid, II, 705–795)

Shelby Stephenson

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My old friend, Shelby Stephenson, is the new Poet Laureate of North Carolina. The N&O story covering his installation last Monday offers a clip of the poet reading from his long poem Fiddledeedee, first published in 2001 and reissued just last month by Press 53 in Winston Salem. It was a good choice for that Audience, describing in moving cadences the springs of his imagination.

Shelby’s accomplishments are many: a dozen or so published books and countless magazine publications; thirty-one years as editor of Pembroke Magazine at UNC Pembroke, where he rose to the rank of full professor over a long and illustrious academic career; winning the Bellday Prize and the North Carolina Award for Literature; induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, to name just a few.

We met, I think, in 1978, when the Stephensons moved to Southern Pines, NC, where they remained for many years before moving back to Johnston County and the farm where Shelby grew up. I have eaten oysters and barbecue, sung songs, argued about poetry and philosophy, jogged, commiserated, and more with Shelby Stephenson over the years. We’ve lived a long way from one another for a long time now. But if you are fortunate enough to have such a friend as Shelby, you don’t let time or distance deprive you of the friendship. I’m happy for him now, and I very much hope our paths cross again before long.

And I may have been the first person to write about Shelby’s poetry. He has always said that I was. Maybe the best way for me to recognize his present achievement is to reprint what I wrote. The piece pretty much explains its own circumstances: Shelby and Sam Ragan reading together at the Southern Pines Library. Sam Ragan would be named Poet Laureate of North Carolina in 1982 and hold the laureateship until his death in 1996, the last of the NC Laureates to receive a lifetime appointment. Here is what I wrote about them both almost thirty-seven years ago, as published in the Southern Pines Pilot on April 26, 1978.

* * *

It is a mournful truth that poetry, perhaps the eldest of the arts, has never made its fortune in the modern world. Our time, which has seen the elevation in prestige and economic value of professions which would have seemed unlikely of success in the last century, has seen the decline of poets in influence and social regard.

But poetry has by no means died. Sturdy souls that they are, poets have simply gone underground. Their works are to be seen, of course, in the few major-house publications which print serious verse and in a small group of surviving prestige literary magazines. But in the main poets are writing for the thousands of independent publishers and literary magazines which have grown up in the last ten years, publishers like Moore of Durham, magazines with names like Vantage Point, Aspect, The Stone. These for the most part have limited circulation, a decided regional or individualistic feel and an anti-slick, anti-establishment voice.

COSMEP, the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, maintains a traveling bookstore representing little magazines from all across the country. This store, called the COSMEP Van Project, has been in our area this week.

To celebrate the project’s arrival, the Sandhills Arts Council sponsored a poetry reading last Sunday in the Southern Pines Library combined with a tour of the book van. Poets Sam Ragan and Shelby Stephenson read from their own works, many of which have appeared in works printed by small presses.

Sam Ragan explained that the difference between a major and a minor poet was that the major poet would never use the word “rue,” as minor poets do, and that major poets always read from their own works as he and Shelby Stephenson did.

Sam Ragan is well known as a writer and publisher, perhaps less well known as a poet. This is unfortunate, for his verse possesses great beauty and economy of expression. It is a reticent poetry, depending upon unadorned images, things in themselves, which sometimes gather into landscapes.

I can see through the tree’s limbs.
Beyond the girl
In the green bathing suit,
Beyond the sea oats and sand,
Where the sea rolls,
Breaking white, as far out
As where fishing boat
Sits motionless in the sun.

Mr. Ragan quotes William Faulkner about the literary art, saying that he wishes to arrest time in his verses, which he thinks of as frozen moments. This is the lyric impulse, and it suggests iconic poetry dominated by visual imagery. A survey of the poet’s recent book, To the Water’s Edge, will reveal much that is visual, but the first interest in these poems is in the play of the poet’s mind over the objects and events of memory and perception.

Driving down No. 1 at night
The headlights catch the gleam Of beer cans,
They look like cat’s eyes.

When lilacs last in the junkyard bloomed.

This passage opens “Notes On the Margins of Our Times,” a poem made of vignettes from the social history of the sixties, each moralized with a fragment of familiar verse, song, or speech, sometimes quoted, sometimes paraphrased. The landscape of this poem is an inward one, finally, through which things pass sometimes unaltered from themselves, sometimes changed by ironies sensitive or sensible:

Do not go bojangles into that good night.

Sam Ragan’s poetry is invested with a love of common things and common order, against which the horrific, the startling, the grotesque, assume proportions assigned by common sense:

It was a bad trip,
And when he couldn’t fly
They picked up his body
Where it had splintered on the sidewalk.

Flights of fancy, always understated, stand out in relief, too, from the general steadiness as when in “Sandhill Summer” the poet imagines the surging of an ancient sea in the sound of wind in tall pines. “I sleep,” he says, “in the shadow of ghost winds.”

Shelby Stephenson’s verse is heavier and sweeter than Sam Ragan’s. Mr. Stephenson likes long sentences and heavy rhythms rich with words and sometimes thick with music. Here are some lines from “Winter Ritual,” a poem about hog killing.

Hog tails hang down after the maul.
Men swill homemade scuppernong brandy,
Rake thick sleeves across mouths
Cutting the sun’s slash on the tin barn-roof—

Someone has speculated that musical English poetry tends to fall into the’ patterns of Anglo-Saxon. True or not, the first line of this passage is an almost Anglo-Saxon line, with its alliterative linkages and dual syntactic units breaking it into half-lines. The rest of the passage is heavily consonantal and assonant, and the whole demands to be intoned rather than merely read. Here, a complex boyhood experience of violence and death is also creative, and the adult poet examining the childhood memories from hog-killing days seems most of all to find it all intoxicating, the blood and meat, the sausage and entrails, the swilling and the boiling-strong stuff for a small boy.

The primary emotion animating Mr. Stephenson’s verse is nostalgia, but there is in it such a tempering of humor and good sense that the poems generally avoid sentimentality. One poem, “Goat Pills,” talks about castrating a goat named Billy—without any Freudian confusion. It is always clear that the goat is a goat, and as such he is the main actor in a comedy of violent high-spirits which ends as he runs up the hood of Uncle’s Buick spraying goat pills all over the place:

striking handles and knobs, discovering places Uncle says
we cannot find
when he messes up the seat
of his Palm Beach pants on one, just one!

In this poem, too, the children save the goat pills in bottles and dispense them as hangover medicine to unsuspecting uncles and cousins. Never a dull moment down on the farm.

Together with a strong feeling for the land and its influences in the lives of men and women who live daily with it, there is in Shelby Stephenson’s verse a recognizable strain of frontier humor of the kind one associates with Twain and Faulkner. For these poems too, are boyhood poems, whose lessons are enhanced for us readers by the poet’s pose of innocence, accepting all experience almost without judgment. Nonetheless the boy is not forever; nor is the farm. In a poem entitled “Clematis Post” Stephenson talks of how a basketball post serves in succeeding decades of his life as a post for cleaning game and as a makeshift trellis. In the midst of dying there is life.

Hidden in my growing a growing is.
Every spring the turning leaves
scrape from brown-dry stems the hanging scraps of winter.

Sam Ragan reads as he speaks, with generous literacy, but also with the gentle cadences of eastern North Carolina. Shelby Stephenson closes his eyes and sings. One may read them for himself in the literary magazines, but there is a wealth of other poetry in the listening, which reference to text fails to disclose—a fact which strengthens this writer’s conviction that poetry is language for the ear.

We were glad to entertain the COSMEP Van Project and to celebrate its presence with a reading by two fine North Carolina poets.

* * *

In 2005 Shelby inscribed a copy of Fiddledeedee to Kathleen and me when we visited him and Linda on their farm near Benson, NC, south of Raleigh. I own most of Shelby’s books by now, but I’m still partial to his first, Middle Creek Poems. And my favorite lines of Shelby’s are those I’ve quoted from the poem “Clematis Post,” which he included in that 1979 collection. Maybe Shelby likes those lines as well. He published that poem again in abbreviated form in his 2013 chapbook, Play My Music Anyhow, with the title, “All That’s Left.” His newest book is called The Hunger of Freedom. My copy should arrive from Amazon tomorrow. I look forward to finding out what else is left.

Ein tag im Jahr . . .

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Here’s a memory from my time in North Carolina. I associate it in my mind’s imaginary with All Souls’ Day, Allerseelen in German: the title of a song I used to sing. That time when the year starts to sink from late autumn into winter and we recall the names and ways and times of absent friends and loved ones. We recall the feel of them, too, and the feel of the world with them in it, as figured in my memory by the song of the French horn in the last of Richard Straus’s Last Songs. A time of last things in that sense, before Advent arrives with its heavy script.

I was on my way home from a two-day meeting at the Quail Roost Conference Center about this time of year, I think, in 1975. My way took me through Chapel Hill, which then still had a little of the village about it. On impulse I decided to stop at The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street. By then I had better than ten years’ experience of the place, known by those of us who loved it as “The Intimate.” I went there whenever I could, sometimes looking for something specific, sometimes to browse, sometimes just to soak up the atmosphere.

It was about five o’clock when I walked in. The day outside just gone to twilight, warming to a muted sunset that sat folded like a well-worn rug on the horizon. As I entered, the chill outside gave way to a wonderfully shabby interior of wooden floors and jerry-built bookshelves, stairs that creaked as someone walked up to the mezzanine. Like many another college-town bookshop, The Intimate did a big textbook business, supplying UNC and Duke students, but also dealt in trade books. I looked about me to see what was new since I had last been in.

On a table in front of me was a stack of newsprint catalogs form Marboro’s in New York, a scattering of remaindered art books, and a few copies of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, the edition with the pink cover. I picked up the top copy because I didn’t own it and thought I’d buy it to add to my small but growing collection of non graduate school books. As I opened it my eye fell upon “A Song for Simeon,” a poem I didn’t know well then, my education to that point having focused my attention on Eliot’s earlier work, particularly “The Wasteland.” I read the opening lines:

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

In autumn 1975 I was barely thirty-eight. That Eliot poem in that setting gave me an intimation of mortality that was new. But the surprising thing was that no chill emanated from it. The moment was in feeling altogether welcome and welcoming. I had been given a brief but direct experience of passing divinity, of standing where there is no place that doesn’t see you, as Rilke put it, in which life and death fall away and there is only the real thing left, just now, just for now. My heart burned within me as surely as John Wesley’s had at Aldersgate.

But my experience carried with it no conviction of salvation. Such a thing was as remote from my mind as yesterday’s news. I have experienced other hierophanies. Each has left its print. As I drove home in the early darkness of that long ago November day with my newly acquired Collected Poems wrapped tight in a paper sack on the seat beside me, I carried with me a new and as yet wordless apprehension of the fragility and wonder of the world

—and it was well.

in memoriam

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For a long time I refused to believe that the world had changed on September 11, 2001. I now think I was wrong, though I still feel no solidarity with the belief that “they” attacked us because “they” hate “our” freedom. But I’m not going to make a list of the ways I now think the world has changed. I’m rather going to observe that it’s sometimes well to remember what was there before, without embellishment or romantic enhancement. The thumbnail on the left links to a photograph of the World Trade Center towers as they appeared to one photographer in March, 2001. No drama, no klieg lights. I have included it as a rather large file for the sake of clarity (Source: Wikipedia Commons).

The towers’ presence in this memorial bespeaks an absence as profound as that which sent me in search of the poetry of my country twelve years ago, words from Carl Sandburg, William Allen White, Henry Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln, James Agee, Martin Luther King, Walt Whitman, the prince of all our poets. They speak of a once and future republic, of our collective triumphs and our failures, from which they (mostly) do not shrink. They do not speak with one voice. I grew up singing Lowell’s hymn in response to the Mexican-American War right along side “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” each of which has had its jingoistic uses.

But there is poetry in the memory of those great towers. I experienced them for the first time as a disembarked subway passenger, walking a board path through the great hollow darkness underneath them building, here and there lit with fires in big oil drums and the sparks from toiling arc welders. That memory shades their absence for me now. I may one day see the new Center, but it will not replace the former in my mind or do anything to fill the hole in the world that the absence of the towers inscribes upon my mental landscape. For that I can only mourn.

But I reached for poetry for a reason more profound than mourning, and I am thinking as I reach for it now of a sentence of the late Richard Rorty’s: “[I]t is only those who agree with Hölderlin that ‘what abides was founded by poets’ who are still capable of liberal hope.”† For Rorty, our country’s founding poet was Walt Whitman. Perhaps it is not by accident that at the center of my reflections twelve years ago I found these lines from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Whitman believed in democracy. He thought democracy held the key to human flourishing and human happiness. And not mere political democracy, but social democracy shaped and guided by social justice, wherein the goods of this life are available to the least as to the great. Utopian, perhaps; flawed, certainly. But it is the dream that built our cities, our systems of transportation, our schools, colleges, libraries and other cultural institutions, our networks of homes and businesses, and much, much more without which the people perish.

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Rorty reminds us that Emerson distinguished between the party of memory and the party of hope. I think of Whitman returning to Brooklyn at twilight and how his imaging of his beloved New York is parceled into persons, some his human countrymen, some their built works before him and behind him on the water and in time. I am mostly of the party of hope. For me the absent towers of the World Trade Center furnish their parts towards the soul of the republic of my dreams, still to be achieved.

†In Achieving Our Country, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998) 139-140.