No more sinecure unto death

Prosaic I am, yes.
But, I love the idea of poems.

Having a book of poems around is like having flowers on the table.

Like playing an old LP on a sunny afternoon.
Like having coffee with cheesecake.
Or better yet, having coffee with cheesecake while listening to an opera LP on a sunny afternoon in a room with a bunch of flowers in a vase.

But, prosaic I am.
Some of us are born that way.

Yet, from time to time, I seek out poems.
With my "indefinite tenure" having been revoked, 

I needed something to channel my emotions.

That's what poems are for.

Now you know why I seek out poems.

But, don't forget that prosaic I am.

With Tenure
by David Lehman

If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
and attending the annual convention
of writing instructors in St. Louis
and railing against tenure,
saying tenure
is a ladder whose rungs slip out
from under the scholar as he climbs
upwards to empty heaven
by the angels abandoned
for tenure killeth the spirit
(with tenure no man becomes master)
Texts are unwritten with tenure,
under the microscope, sous rature
it turneth the scholar into a drone
decayed the pipe in his jacket's breast pocket.
Hamlet was not written with tenure,
nor were written Schubert's lieder
nor Manet's Olympia painted with tenure.
No man of genius rises by tenure
Nor woman (I see you smile).
Picasso came not by tenure
nor Charlie Parker;
Came not by tenure Wallace Stevens
Not by tenure Marcel Proust
Nor Turner by tenure
With tenure hath only the mediocre
a sinecure unto death. Unto death, I say!
WITH TENURE
Nature is constipated the sap doesn't flow
With tenure the classroom is empty
et in academia ego
the ketchup is stuck inside the bottle
the letter goes unanswered the bell doesn't ring.

Make America Again

e.e. cummings said it best for, and on behalf of, people like me::

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water


And "Let America be America Again" by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!                          

I am not the only one who worries about forgetting!

I wonder why I am on this theme.

What was I saying?

Ah, yes, I wonder why I am on this theme.

What was I saying? ;)

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Forget-me-not

On Tamil poems, Kannadasan, and ... mental disorder?

All it takes is a casual comment by a friend for me to turn nerdy.  Houston, I have a problem!

At dinner table conversations (well, other than when I dine alone, that is!) I often find myself consciously staying away from a nerdy seriousness.  After all, social conversations are not classroom seminars, though, ironically, often academic seminars feel like they are dinner table conversations!

So, anyway, a friend commented about the poetry in Indian movie songs, "i like the old ones... Only tamil poetry a lot more" I wanted to launch, yet again, into that frustration of mine that I can rarely ever find anything like a book-reading or poetry evening in Chennai anymore, when I visit India.  It is a shame that a culture with a rich literature past has practically abandoned prose and poetry in everyday life that has been transformed into a never-ending pursuit of material comforts and entertainment.

My schooling didn't prepare me to appreciate poems.  Thankfully, that has not prevented me from exploring at least a little bit of poetry.  One poet, whose mastery always amazed me when young--and more so now-- was Kannadasan.

While famous as a lyricist for movies, Kannadasan, to me, was a poet in the old traditions--highly creative in being able to distill the emotions and mysteries of our existence into verses.  Great poets are able to get to those emotions inside, even if we didn't know we had them in us.

Thus, a few minutes after the friend made those comments, given my interest in autoethnography, the nerd in me wondered whether researchers have tried to psychoanalyze Kannadasan via his writings.  After all, even from my own writings, a friend concluded that I am charming, attractive, witty, seeking millionaire beauties, ... nah!  Anyway, Kannadasan seems to be a prime candidate for such analysis given the quantity of his work and with his sharp deviations from the norm of the day.  Stories were in plenty about his fondness for alcohol, drugs, women, and whatever else, while always producing nothing but brilliant literature, sometimes produced within minutes.

Which is how my quest ended with this article, "The seeds of creativity and the soil of poet Kannadasan," in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry.

The web is phenomenal.  It is truly the oracle that the old societies wished they had--you ask questions and the web answers. And to think that I accessed this essay via the US' National Institute of Health!  I have to be careful when I describe this as "mind blowing" in case any of those psychiatrists then come after me :)

The essay, published two years ago, is exactly what I was after:

It is proposed to study the extraordinary creativity of poet Kannadasan, who lived from 1927 to 1981, with regard to the psychiatric factors. He was an outstanding poet, lyricist, novelist, journalist and devout writer of Hindu philosophy. He was the "Kavi Arasu" (poet laureate) of Tamil Nadu and recipient of the first National Film Award for the best lyrics of Tamil in 1969 and Gnanpith Award of the Sahitya Akademi for his historic novel about the Chera kingdom (the present Kerala state) in 1980.
Kannadasan was a prolific writer of varied interests; he has 3000 lyrics and the scripts of more than a dozen films to his credit. His religious writings include “Meaningful Hinduism” with an introduction by Jagadguru Sankaracharya Chandrashekarar Swamigal, whose orations Kannadasan compiled as a book “God's Voice,” an exposition of the Bhagvad Gita, some translations of short works of Adi Sankara, the epic of Jesus and more than 40 books of poems, dramas and plays. Kannadasan's autobiography deals extensively with his political activities and there is also a biography written by his close associate, relative and friend, Thiru Muthiah.
The creative genius of Kannadasan is assessed by analyzing his life and works. 

How did the oracle know that I would look for this?

On analyzing Kannadasan's biographic and autobiographic details, we can reach the indisputable diagnosis of cyclothymic temperamental disorder.

So, was Kannadasan's genius a result of this disorder?  Without the disorder, would Kannadasan have been as prosaic as I am?  If he hadn't suffered from this temperamental disorder, would Kannadasan have been even more prolific than he was?

The essay does not address those questions.  The author does note the creative process in Kannadasan's own words:

Kannadasan introspects:
“Whenever I sit to write I don′t feel I am writing. An unknown energy, force possesses me. A new sensation arises from head to foot when new words, new similes fall in. There is gooseflesh without my knowledge. Telling becomes bliss.”

It certainly was bliss for lesser mortals like me to listen to his lyrics that were masterfully rendered by musicians.  

In a previous entry on Kannadasan, I included this piece:

Wonderful lyrics by the poet Kannadasan, this includes the following lines:

வாழ்க்கை என்றால் ஆயிரம் இருக்கும்
வாசல்தோறும் வேதனை இருக்கும்
வந்த துன்பம் எது என்றலும்
வாடி நின்றால் ஓய்வதில்லை
உனக்கும் கிழே உள்ளவர் கோடி
நினைத்து பார்த்து நிம்மதி தேடு

Easier said than done!

Here are a couple more from my many favorites by Kannadasan:

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

What the Chairman Told Tom

From "Why Live Without Writing" in the latest issue of Poetry

 Basil Bunting, angry English member of the circle of the equally angry Ezra Pound, offers a portrait of the skeptic in his poem-monologue, “What the Chairman Told Tom”:

Poetry? It’s a hobby.

I run model trains.

Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It’s not work. You dont sweat.

Nobody pays for it.

You could advertise soap.

Art, that’s opera; or repertory—

The Desert Song.

Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week—

married, aren’t you?—

you’ve got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor

in the face

if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it’s poetry, anyhow?

My ten year old 

can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,

a car, vouchers,

but I’m an accountant.

They do what I tell them,

my company.

What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,

it’s unhealthy.

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They’re Reds, addicts,

all delinquents.

What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher,

he ought to know.

Go and find work.

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.