To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

April is poetry month.  Something that even this prosaic blogger remembers and likes to blog about every April.

Poetry speaks to the emotional beings that we are.  I did not realize the emotional appeal of poems until I was well into adulthood, as a working stiff in the US.  I went to a poetry reading.  The poet was a local boy who had made it big on the other coast.  As the middle-aged poet read lines from his poem, it hit me: This is what poetry is about!  Those lines spoke to me, which is what we expect from good poetry.

Since then, I have come to realize that when the right person reads a great poem, oh boy, it is as if the mysteries of the universe are being solved.  One word at a time, and one verse at a time.

We collectively experienced that when we listened to Amanda Gorman reading her poem at President Biden's inauguration.  When her reading ended, we wanted more.  Remember?

As Margaret Renkl writes in the NY Times:

Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.

Thank god, indeed!

The title of this post is from the final stanza of Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.   Ulysses reaches Calypso’s island, exhausted after a shipwreck.  The goddess Calypso offers herself to Ulysses and also promises him immortality.  Think about this: The most beautiful woman ever and immortality.

Ulysses turns down the offer.

He then heads to the high seas.  An unknown expanse of adventure.

Ulysses wanted to live a life that he would not regret.

Tennyson writes:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I wish us all well with the chances that we take, and may we never have to regret the chances we didn't, and don't, take!

Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall

But too much is falling here in Oregon.

The key word there is "some."  Not a whole lot, dammit!

It has been pouring here in the Valley.  The atmospheric river, as the weather folks call it, has been dumping water into the rivers here on land, and everywhere else.

The ground is super-saturated.  True to my father's engineering claim that water is an enemy for the bitumen, roads are rapidly becoming pothole avenues.  A little bit more rain and I will have to trade in my car for a boat.

The river is running brown, full, fast, and furious.  But, comforting it is to get a visual confirmation that my home is well above on a high ground.

April showers these are not; these are April downpours!

April is also poetry month.  Enjoy the poetry that Ella Fitzgerald sings so easily, smoothly, and emotionally.

Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much is falling in mine 
Into each heart some tears must fall 
But some day the sun will shine 

Some folks can lose the blues in their hearts 
But when I think of you another shower starts 
Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much is falling in mine 

Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much, too much is fallin' in mine 
Into each heart some tears must fall 
But some day the sun will shine 

Some folks can lose the blues in their heart 
But when I think of you another shower starts 
Into each life some rain must fall 
But too much is fallin' in mine 

Into each and every life some rain has got to fall 
But too much of that stuff is fallin' into mine 
And into each heart some tears got to fall 
And I know that someday that sun is bound to shine 

Some folks can lose the blues in their heart
But when I think of you another shower starts
Into each life some rain must fall
But too much is fallin' in mine

DAMN! April is the cruelest month

I looked up the news on the Pulitzers.  There is no way I could have ever expected this:

[Kendrick] Lamar is not only the first rapper to win the award since the Pulitzers expanded to music in 1943, but he is also the first winner who is not a classical or jazz musician.

A Pulitzer for a rapper. A Nobel for a singer-songwriter. The times they are a changin'.  Poetry and music, too, are rapidly being transformed like every other aspect of our lives.

I have heard the name Kendrick Lamar.  But, I have no idea about his music. A CNN opinion piece helps me out:

Lamar is providing anthems for revolutionary millennials across the country, in much the way that Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" sounded an anthem for the civil rights movement.
Like Simone, the roots of hip hop are absolutely political.

Damn!

I looked up a review of Lamars' album that the Pulitzer recognized:

Two of the most striking examples of this recur throughout “DAMN.” In one, Mr. Lamar samples Fox News commentators responding to his 2015 uplift anthem, “Alright,” with derision, including Geraldo Rivera’s suggesting that hip-hop is worse for black youth than racism (and Mr. Lamar addresses Mr. Rivera directly on “YAH.”).

Political, damn!

But, I am frankly at a loss to understand and appreciate this music.  I tried a couple of them, including this.  I suppose I might not know what it is all about, as much as I know not about most things in life?

At least this poem I can understand:

Source

April is not the cruellest month

April is National Poetry Month.

Did they choose this month in order to counter TS Eliot's "April is the cruellest month"? ;)

Here are thirty different things you can do to observe, celebrate, a month of poetry.

This prosaic person will sample a verse or two.

K. 453

By Karl Kirchwey

On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna's back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto theme

from his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He'd written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?

He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!

He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.

Poetry is dead. Oh, April is National Poetry Month!

This being National Poetry Month, it is as good a time as any to admit to this much: I rarely, if ever, read the poems in the New Yorker, whose contents I look forward to every week.  I do not find them remotely interesting or informative.  It is simply blah!

I loved poems when I was younger.  In English, yes. In Thamizh. And, even the ones we studied in the Sanskrit curriculum.  Even now, when I am in the mood for a poem, I do not turn to the New Yorker or anything contemporary.  Instead, it is the old ones that appeal to me.  They seem way more profound, and appealing to my emotions of that moment compared to the newer ones that are all flaky.  The rare times that I read anything contemporary, I think that maybe I, too, can become a poet.

Joseph Epstein writes about this in the WSJ:

Like so many people of my rapidly diminishing generation, I walk around with lines and entire passages from the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and others rattling around pleasantly in my head. But nearly all the poetry written since the years those poets wrote doesn't register, resonate, ring, do any of the elevating things that poetry is supposed to, and once indeed did, do.

When I read essays like this, I feel convinced, yet again, that despite all the non-conforming attitudes that I display, I am, at heart, a traditionalist.  A neo-traditionalist, as I sometimes describe myself.

Back in Bakersfield, I remember two poetry reading sessions that I attended.  Both were big time poets, and university professors as well.  But, I remember only one of them being awesome, and I even remember the name even after all these years: Frank Bidart.

Yes, Bidart being a native son registered in my memory, as did the controversy related to his sexualtity.    But, those were about Bidart the person about which I couldn't care less.  I remember being drawn into the poem he read.  It was in the old style of epic poems.  I wished that it wouldn't end and that Bidart would continue on.  But, yes, all good things do come to an end.

The other poet was Philip Levine, who had a much shorter drive to make, from Fresno.  I couldn't understand the poems he read, and couldn't wait for the event to end.  Interestingly enough, it seems that Levine is the more celebrated poet, even up to the rank of US Poet Laureate.

So, why is poetry dead?  In noting that "the poetry game is over, kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time" Epstein explains:

Years ago I wrote an essay on this subject called "Who Killed Poetry?," which stirred up beehives of poets in protest. I suggested that the academicization of poetry did a lot to help kill it; I also concluded that too much poetry was in production, with Gresham's Law relentlessly at work, in this instance the crappy driving out the second-rate. I also concluded that so many people who drifted into the writing of poetry didn't have very interesting minds: a family member dies, they saw a tree of unusual shape, a little-known Matisse painting excited them, so they take to their computers and trivialize the subject or experience by encasing it in a more or less complex contraption of verbal self-absorption currently called a poem.

Come to think of it, I think I didn't like Levine because his came across to me as word play, while Bidart gave me substantive matter to think about.

I shall, therefore, keep going back to the classics.  Some of my own posts reveal my preference for the kinds of poems that appeal to me:

• Back in April 2009, I blogged about Das war schön
• On life and death--a favored obsession of mine--in which I often refer to John Updike's Requiem
• This post on knowledge and wisdom is a twofer--Tennyson and Auden
• Rumi's advice on how to live
• The translation of the lyrics of one of my favorite Hindi film songs ever, from the movie Pyaasa (thirsty)
• A poem, which is almost an atheist anthem: The laws of god
• The young Russophile in me falling in love with Dr. Zhivago and why I cherish Pasternak's After the storm
• Faiz Ahmed Faiz's powerful poem on the freedom of speech
• This post where I admit to be an old-timer in such tastes and I quote Shakespeare
• A favorite of my father's: Abou Ben Adhem
• And, perhaps the one that I quote more often than any other poem, because of the political aspects that drive so much of my blog posts: e.e. cummings' next to of course god america i, which was one of my earliest posts after I restarted this blog in 2008.

Poetry forever!

Vijay, a classmate throughout the school days,
is now a poet/critic/writer

Poem of the day: The Waking

April is National Poetry Month.  So, no better time than now to read up a few poems ... I came across this one, by  Theodore Roethke, titled "The Waking" .... written a long time ago, in 1953, if I understand it correctly

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Das war schön!

This entire month I have been following the NYRB's poem of the day, in celebration of the National Poetry Month--in April, which is ironical when viewed against TS Eliot's "April is the cruelest month" :-)

I liked the poem that NYRB has for today:

K. 453

By Karl Kirchwey

On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna's back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto theme

from his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He'd written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?

He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!

He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.