I'll be fifty two weeks from today, and I've ordered some poetry to celebrate. Henry Gould's Stubborn Grew
is still on its way, but this morning (back in North Carolina with my family for the weekend!) I received Rhina Espaillat's Rehearsing Absence, Edgar Bowers's Collected Poems, and X. J. Kennedy's The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2001.
Motto Suitable for Embroidery
Failure is always partial: every tense--
future or past or present--is an arc
only, not the full circle, which must work
elsewhere its recompense.
Glutted with weeping of dismantled snow,
streams run disheveled, yielding grace to force;
but bide the season, and each chastened course
remembers how to flow.
Not that all things, concentric for our sakes,
feed us with order, but that order comes
against, around and over us, and hums
while mending what it breaks.
I like believing this unlikely tale,
or should I say believe it out of need,
or need belief, wherever it may lead
or how I partly fail.
Rhina Espaillat
The Poet is Reproved for his Complaint
Follow Baudelaire's advice.
Never think to please the nice
Or the sullen or the mob
Feeding like the armored crab
On the rotten or the stale.
Take for model the great whale
Diving in the depth for measure,
Leaping high and free for pleasure,
Skeleton to those who see
Neither joy nor mystery,
Who, too selfish, cross, or zealous,
Will not hear the voice of Eros.
Edgar Bowers
On Song
How odd that verse that's song
Should so displease the young.
They are so serious.
They hate all artifice
As standing in the way
Of mind's insistent say.
But to my mind what counts
Is language that surmounts
The message it must bear,
Steps back without a care
And, stone blind, yields the day
To bloodstream's reckless play.
X. J. Kennedy
Gack! I butchered the title of Rhina Espaillat's poem and a line of Edgar Bowers's. Fixed now.
