Or look at-- let me look at a second--
"The Elephant is Slow to Mate," the D.H. Lawrence
poem, to speak of gush.
This one has the cadences of--
what is the-- oh God, I cannot remember the name of a stride
rhythm.
A kind of Joplin-stride rhythm.
There's a kind of cadence with a very short step in it
that's a wonderful musical element in this poem,
and I'll read it, and you'll see how it works.
This poem is predicated on a design that greatly dilates
something and works up your need to hear
the orgasmic moment revealed.
Right from the title, he's telling you
he's going to emphasize the slow,
but if there's an elephant mating in the offing,
you want to see it.
So he plays on that disposition, that thing
we want when we come into the poem, that we also are waiting.
"The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate.
He finds a female, they show no haste.
They wait for the sympathy in their vast, shy hearts slowly,
slowly to rouse as they loiter--"
Now look at how much stuff is going to come after this "as."
This "as," this long thing-- that's
a trail-- that's going to follow the "as" down to word
is all connotation.
To use the fancy word for a delay
is it's not only loitering, but it comprehends
dashing in panic, which also manages
to feel like delay or slowness, because
of the perspective of long stretches of time
in which something else isn't happening.
It's really interesting that panic--
dash in panic could participate in the delay--
half of the poem-- but it does.
They-- excuse me.
"--for the sympathy in their vast, shy hearts slowly,
slowly to rouse as they loiter along the river-beds and drink
and browse and dash in panic through the brake--"
Not an accident to pick a noun like that there,
which means two things and conjures up the verb.
"--and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake together,
without a word."
So now, there's the part where you know-- as Lawrence always
is-- that he's conjuring up the figure of the human
to some extent, because after all, who would have expected
elephants to have words?
But "sleep together without a word"
can't help but bring us into question.
"So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret
at last, hiding their fire."
Now at that moment, you may feel massively disappointed.
I do, but he has some more plays to manage for us.
In fact, much of-- in this poem--
much of the famous Lawrencian excess,
that all of this "great hot elephant heart"
stuff, and desire, and "hiding their fire,"
all that stuff is all now being used
in the service of a design, and you'll
see how even that is self-ironizing
to a certain extent, is self-conscious,
is part of the design.
So that all the-- even to repeat the word "great" as much
as he does, or bigness is constantly
repeated throughout the poem.
That's part of pumping up your sense of don't delay any
longer, you don't-- give us the big moment.
"Oldest they are--" and now he's going
into the moral realm which really disappoints us,
if we were panting to see something pornographic
in the elephant world.
"Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts,
so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.
They do not snatch, they do not tear--"
like us, implicitly, right?
They do not snatch, even "snatch" has its freight.
"They do not snatch, they do not tear.
Their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood."
And then, you do get it, but you get it in a touch.
I mean, to have a flood in a touch,
it's this extraordinary conjunction of two things.
I mean, you've almost relinquished the chance
of being flooded with this elephant cum, whatever
this orgasmic moment.
I mean, flood is no accident.
The sheer dimension of this animal
is part of what pumps up your expectation.
So "flood" is the word.
It's no accident, but the delicacy that would put that
next to "touch," and that would--
even in the course of talking about "moon-tides," I mean,
he's not only pulled back in time,
so that part of the loitering can even comprehend the dashing
and panic, such that this dilation of time can include
dashings and sleepings and wakings.
He's pulled back into a totally different time perspective.
You feel there's almost--
it's almost paleontological or something,
given an elephant's aspect.
So there's that wonderment that you feel at
has being able to do that to your sense of time.
And at the same time, that mimics,
in many ways, your expectations about a huge animal,
about bigness in space.
This bigness in time and bigness in space
are cooperating to do things, having
to do also with your own breathlessness and expectations
in reading.
And so, administering that in the reader
is the poem's real, savvy territory.
Even things like "full repast" is nice,
once that time thing starts operating.
What repast would mean, of course, it means meal,
but there's a past in there.
And we talked in the class the other day
about crypt words in poems, and this
is another kind of-- this is a kind of stowaway word, where
at the literal level, "past" isn't intended,
but there is this whiff of it, of time,
the temporal past inside.
And since "oldest they are" is the beginning of that stanza.
The kinds of subtleties about ending and expectation--
you can see it in a tiny way in the little two lines
at the bottom of the page from Paul Valéry.
It's part of a wonderful--
Valéry has these wonderful meditations on perception
and conception.
The conceptual and perceptual worlds, I'd say.
He's really interested in the ways in which intelligence is
figured forth by the five senses,
that is the one big sense that makes so many claims
for thinking, it's constantly informed by the five other
senses in Valéry.
And he's working that out, he's working out thinking
in a very materialistic way.
It's really interesting to read him if you're a poet.
I actually find his book, Poems in the Rough,
to be much more interesting than his more famous essays
on poetry and art.
But in a way, you can see they're prose poems--
these poems in the rough.
So it's hard to separate out--
he's partly interested in retaxonomizing, these worlds
that we so handily separate into prose or poetry
criticism or poetry.
Animal, vegetable, mineral, everything.
And look at this little description of pain.
I mean, actually, you got to love the first one too
which is about visual, because the visual and the sonic
are both played here.
Let me just do the first one, too, quickly.
"The color of a thing is that--" he loves to use science,
he departs from a point--
he uses a point of departure no one can argue with.
And then, it bursts into flower, into a realm you never
would have foreseen, just because he nags it,
he hangs onto it the way Rilke hangs onto something.
And what makes him great is he works at it
longer than other people do.
He won't let it go until it yields forth
its uncontainability somehow.
"The color of a thing is that one which, out of all colors,
the thing repels and cannot assimilate."
Now this is based on the fact that the tan color is not
in the table, it's reflected back to the eye from the table.
The color is not in the thing, it's reflected off the thing,
and then, the senses glean it.
"The color of a thing is that one which, out of all colors,
the thing repels and cannot assimilate.
High heaven refuses blue, returning azure to the retina.
All summer long, the leaves hold in the red."
Isn't that great?
You feel fall in there, and because
on the color wheel, their position--
green and red are opposites.
There's this wonderful sense of an opposite
being buried inside the leaf.
"High heaven refuses blue, returning azure to the retina.
All summer long, the leaves hold in the red."
And here's the third stage that still boggles my mind.
I still not can entirely get the two halves of my brain
around this next one, and I love it most of all of them.
"Charcoal gobbles everything."
That works on so many levels, I cannot even begin to say it,
but you feel it.
"To our senses, things offer only their rejections.
We know them by their refuse.
Perfume is what the flowers throw away.
Perhaps, we can only know of their people
by what they eliminate, by what their substance will not
accept.
If you are good, it is because you retain your evil.
If you blaze, hurling off sparkles and lightnings,
then your sorrow, gloom, and stupidity
are keeping house inside you.
They are more you, more yours, than your brilliance.
Your genius is everything you are not."
[LAUGHTER]
He's so wonderful.
But you see how every step by step,
he gets you to a place you would have said was impossible,
it's a self contradiction, and yet, he earned it.
It's amazing what he does.
So look at the one about music and pain.
"Pain is musical," and he's very precise.
He's a scientist.
Look at the vocabulary of music here, the precision.
"Pain is musical, we can almost speak of it in musical terms.
There are sharps and flats--" Indeed we do,
but when the doctor asks you what kind of pain you have,
you have to become a wine taster in responding,
it's like how to find the words for my pain, my special pain.
"There are sharps and flats, andantes and furiosos--"
Isn't it great thinking about what kind of pain that means?
I mean, when you imagine what it means?
"--andantes and furiosos, sustained notes, rests,
arpeggios, progressions, sudden silences too."
The astonishing and brilliant thing in here
is that "rests" is buried in the line,
and "sudden silences" is at the end,
and it takes a discerning reader to remember the distinction
between the two.
A lesser writer, a lesser reader will pass them off--
pass it off as a reiteration, it isn't.
There's a mortal difference between the two, right?
A rest is an orchestrated--
it's a part of the music.
It's written in, and it's surrounded by music.
A sudden silence is the end of the music.
So the end-- at this end is--
in pain's terms-- that's death.
The rest in a pain is something else.
It's a little relief.
The two were actually quite opposed to each other,
not synonyms.
And you know that he could make you so discerning,
that he could make you such a gustatory specialist,
that you could taste the flavor of the difference.
And that it would be about pain, about life,
about life and death, ultimately here.
It's amazing, and such a little implement-- it's a two-line--
one and a half lines, it's a little device, really,
a figurative device.
But it unlocks it--
and very precisely used-- but it unlocks this uncontainability.
You get a totally different character at work
in Alan Dugan with "Love Song: I and Thou."
Most people know this poem, I'll just race through it,
because it's patent.
I think how it works, but it's fun.
Love song-- First of all, there's
"Love Song: I and Thou," which makes
you think you're going to be in the realms of the sacred.
Again, how the writer sets you up for a fall,
really, to have your mind changed.
Because "I and Thou," it's the era of Buber
and all the faintly spiritual senses of human communication
and contact.
"Love Song: I and Thou."
"Nothing is plumb, level, or square.
The studs are bowed.
The joists are shaky by nature, no piece fits any other piece
without a gap or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing like maggots.
By Christ, I am no carpenter.
I built the roof for myself, the walls for myself,
the floors for myself, and got hung up in it myself.
I danced with a purple thumb at this house-warming,
drunk with my prime whiskey, rage.
Oh, I spat rage's nails into the frame-up of my work, it held.
It settled plumb, level, solid, square and true
for that great moment.
Then, it screamed and went on through skewing as wrong
the other way.
God damned it.
This is hell, but I planned it.
I sawed it, I nailed it, and I will
live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm to the left-hand crosspiece,
but I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right, a help, a love, a you, a wife."
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, there's two or three turns in this poem.
Big turns, you know, where you think
you're going to get relief, and then, it skews on through.
And there's a lot of self-knowing,
the nailing himself up, and a lot
of knowing about how endearing a proposal
this might be to any candidate.
And then, rhetorically speaking, what happens
is that the rhetorical balances in the poem
have extra energy, because he administers them so well.
There's gorgeous rhetoric.
I mean, he-- a sentence or a stretch of the poem,
a section of the poem will build on the pieces of rhetoric.
You feel carpentry at work in this poem.
I mean, just rhetorical structures,
how phrases are made parallel and build one after the other.
"I built the roof for myself, the walls for myself,
the floors for myself, and got hung up in it myself,"
which is also a figure of Christ, right?
And then, the way that "plumb, level, solid, square, and true"
calls back the first line.
And now, we're in the second half of the poem,
so we think, oh, this is going to be
the half where things go well.
But it isn't.
It's just a passing moment, the way the present is right
between the past and the future.
You're going to skew on through.
And then, that trail of four little phrases at the end, also
rhetorically parallel, just hammering the proposal out
makes great rhetorical force.
Not to mention, "a you," which marries an indefinite article
with what is, presumably, a very specific address,
and also carries with it a little bit of insult. You
know, anyone will do, I just need another hammer.
Yeah.
I'm ready for you.
Is it?
There's a prize, but he can-- the man can write, or could.
Similarly, look at Julio Cortázar quickly.
I don't want to--
I know it's already after five, so I shouldn't.
But you can read "Lines of the Hand" on your own.
This is one in which--
this is a little prose poem in which he sends you
on all kinds of wrong trails.
You think you're going to be in the happy land of this cartoon
character, he makes it a cartoon character,
and it turns very mortal in the very last word,
and not till that last word.
This line comes out, it does all kinds
of cartoonesque impossible things.
So you don't think you're in any-- it's carefree,
it's constantly attracted to the women in its arbitrary
path, the shapely women in its path to the docks,
and it gets on the ship.
And you think it's all accidental,
even when there's a guy there who's
unhappy and drinking cognac.
And then, this line goes up his leg,
as it went down the leg of the most beautiful woman
on the bus, getting there.
And it comes up his arm, and the end is "finds shelter
in the palm of the right hand, which
is just beginning to close around the butt of a revolver."
And then, you remember where you started,
"From a letter thrown on a table,
a line comes," which goes through the city.
And so, he sets you up not to take seriously,
the questions of consequentiality,
because it seems arbitrary where the line goes.
It's sort of accidental, it's happy go lucky.
But in the end, "revolver" circles you back
to the beginning, in an odd way.
Is such that that line of writing--
In fact, the title requires you to think
of the lines of the hand as not only the writer's line coming
out of a letter and going out into the world,
but fate lines, love lines, fortune-tellers lines.
But "revolver" is a wonderful--
is revolver in Spanish the same as in English?
It is, isn't it?
Yeah, so it has that same wonderful--
sending you round.
Now that-- "What time is it" also does a similar thing.
There's this odd-- there are a couple of these poems I'll just
sketch.
I'm not going to read them.
I know it's time, really, to tie things up here, so
as not to weary you.
But "What time is it" and "On the Lawn at the Villa,"
and maybe even "Rainy Forests of Northern California"
are poems that suspend their endings,
that fail to deliver a wallop, when you
had been prepared for a wallop.
And that too is a strategy for ending.
It's just the opposite strategy, but it
is as powerful in its own way.
I mean, I'm just going to read the Louis Simpson quickly, not
go into details about how it misleads
us or things like that, and then, what it delivers.
But you'll get the sense of it immediately
as an emotional force, because you so want something
to happen that doesn't happen.
It becomes, even a moral force as it happens in this poem, "On
the Lawn at the Villa."
This is a speaker--
who it soon becomes plain--
is not the poet who's writing the poem.
Many contemporary American poems, it's almost impossible
to separate out the poet's voice from the voice of the narrator,
and you're not supposed to separate them out.
Whereas here, it's a very distinct narrator, also
with pretensions to writerlyness.
He talks cozily with the reader about art,
and becomes really distasteful to you
in the course of his coziness.
"On the lawn at the villa.
That's the way to start, eh, reader?
We know where we stand, somewhere expensive.
You and I, imperturbes, as Walt would say,
before the diversions of wealth, you and I engagés."
Now first of all, Walt is probably Walt Whitman.
And to use him in this service as the one who says
"imperturbes" and "engagés," as though those were French
affectations that Walt strewed around for decorative
purposes-- it's true that there's a lot of French
in "Leaves of Grass."
It's a surprising truth, but this--
Simpson uses it in this character's voice
to be a sort of literary affectation.
And OK.
So then, he begins again.
He's done his little attempt to be
Walt. "On the lawn at the villa set
a manufacturer of explosives, his wife from Paris,
and a young man named Bruno."
Here, we're almost-- what is it?
Hemingway maybe, there's some other thing going on.
"And myself, being American, willing
to talk to these malefactors, the manufacturer of explosives,
and so on, but somehow superior.
By that, I mean democratic.
It's complicated, being an American, having
the money and the bad conscience,
both at the same time.
Perhaps after all, this is not the right subject for a poem."
So he starts again.
"We were all sitting there paralyzed in the hot Tuscan
afternoon, and the bodies of the machine-gun crew
were draped over the balcony.
So we sat there all afternoon."
Isn't it amazing how powerful that deflating last line is?
Just, aargh, you want to throttle the guy.
It makes you feel murderous.
Because he turns-- the thing that, of course, most matter--
what is it-- going to most momentously matter
to any reader with a soul, is what's
the state of those bodies?
The bodies of the machine-gun crew
draped like decoration, in his scenario.
Draped over the balcony, but are they dead?
I mean, it's in a way bad enough they're there,
but it matters mortally to us.
Are they dead?
Well, nothing could matter more to semantic moral field
of the poem.
And yet, that's the thing that he steadfastly
won't address throughout the whole poem,
and that becomes Simpson's way of making a comment.
He is refusing to give the wallop at the end.
It's really a brilliant move.
And one of the most forceful endings
in American poetry in its withholding, in it's
not delivering what we expect or crave.
I recommend you read all these.
They're quite wonderful.
Maybe, the most fun is the little excerpt from Beckett.
You know it's just--
to read Beckett-- my advice is read Beckett like a poet.
Love his paragraphs, treat them as things that build
and release.
This is a particularly beautiful one because what--
the long trail arrives at something so cathartic.
"Watt, reflecting on this, heard a little voice say, Mr. Knott,
having once known a man who was bitten by a dog, in the leg,
and having once known another man who was scratched by a cat,
in the nose, and having once known a fine healthy woman who
was butted by a goat, in the loins,
and having once known another man who was disemboweled
by a bull, in the bowels, and having once
frequented a canon who was kicked
by a horse, in the crotch, is shy of dogs,
and other four-footed friends, about the place,
and of his inarticulate biped brothers and sisters in God
hardly less so--"
Now you think he's moving to the human, right?
Inarticulate, but human.
But instead, look "for he once--" and indeed,
he adds more humans in the men-of-the-cloth category.
So you think it's a continuation of human reference from before,
when the canon appeared.
But no, that's the turn of a surprise.
"--of his inarticulate biped brothers and sisters in God
hardly less so, for he once knew a missionary who was trampled
to death by an ostrich, in the stomach--"
Trampled to death by an ostrich in the stomach,
the rhetorical parallels require that he put some body part
there, but to be trampled to death by--
the organ becomes so inconsequential then.
There's some hilarity in his understanding
that setting up those parallels makes
us see how impossible it is.
"He once knew a missionary who was trampled
to death by an ostrich, in the stomach,
and he once knew a priest who, on leaving
with a sigh of relief the chapel where he had served mass,
with his own hands, to more than a hundred persons,
was shat on, from above, by a dove, in the eye."
[LAUGHTER]
That's purely rhetorical build-up and release,
ingenious work.
It happens in prose too, so I don't
mean to make this the exclusive territory of poetry.
Now, you know I started with that Emo Philips,
I got to tell you the other one, the unspeakable one.
This will go in the library forever, but so be it.
I've been salting most of my life
and love good salts elsewhere.
And this is one of the ones that tips me over
into uncontrolability whenever I hear it unexpectedly.
My friends would fuck anything that moved, but I never saw
any reason to limit myself--
[LAUGHTER]
--which withholds beautifully, I think.
No analysis, if you'll forgive.
The pun is adequate to the occasion,
but I could analyze the hell out of it.
Being a respectable lecturer instead,
I'm going to end on these four lines from John Frederick Nims.
"For the-- Finally for its sense of the joy of the thing.
I mean, in the end, it's about where the true wealth lies,
not in calculations, of that sense,
of numbers about where profit comes from in art,
but in immersion, in the thing that produces the value for us.
And in this case, there's a kind of joy in not calculating.
Luckily in the end, there are always more arses at work
than those of literary criticism."
This isn't "Ars Poetica."
Notice to-- just as I read this, and I'll let the poem have
the last word, and we'll be done--
how many senses of layer there are, how many layers of layer.
There's the layer of eggs which is foremost or most
superficial in the metaphorical field of the poem, that layer.
But a lay, of course, as Bob Dylan told us or made famous,
is the layer is also--
is both the lover and the singer of a song.
A lay is a poem or a song.
So all of those are at work here, "Ars Poetica."
"The goose that laid the golden egg died looking up its crotch,
to find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well?
Don't watch."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]