Well, gosh, you don't often see a real dog fight over a poem. Looky here, here, here, and here! And then I got dragged into it! Well, actually, I stepped in it—I love Nemerov even when he writes about football—and now I'm going to wade deeper. Holy mixed metaphors!
First, from my godlike perspective, Michaela Cooper's right about nearly everything in this little dustup (though it is pretty damned hard to trace those antecedents), and I'm not just saying that because I don't want her mad at me. It's what she's wrong about that interests me and that I'm going to twist to my own purposes. You see, as gorgeous as the poem is, even when (properly) tricked out in Liberty's robes, Aaron Haspel's right about this much: it's just another version of the Wheel of Fortune. Boethius, not Vanna White, but still cliché.
And that's not a problem, anymore than it's a problem that Milton intended to teach what seems to me a repugnant religion, or that Yeats was a fool. I upset some people a few weeks ago claiming that poets (me included) are just entertainers: "Of course we can choose whom we entertain, and while the more ambitious of us try to mix some instruction into the delight we try to give, but who of us has done the hard work to actually develop the knowledge and wisdom behind that instruction?" Should have left out that "but." Or the "while." Good thing it's just a blog, huh?
And it's a good thing most poets are just poets. We don't, by virtue of the work we do as poets, have any special insight into much of anything besides verbal music. In fact, if we work hard enough to be worth a damn at that, it's unlikely that any but the most exceptional of us will be particularly good at anything else. What poet, other than Goethe and maybe Milton (Areopagitica), has made any significant contribution to natural science, philosophy, political thought, economics, painting, mathematics, music, architecture, or even other verbal fictions such as the novel?
So why—and how—does it matter what a poem says? Too late tonight to try to answer that, but here's the last two sections of Howard Nemerov's "Watching Football on TV":
VI
Passing and catching overcome the world,
The hard condition of the world, they do
Human intention honor in the world.
A football wants to wobble, that's its shape
And nature, and to make it spiral true
's a triumph in itself, to make it hit
The patterning receiver on the hands
The instant he looks back, well, that's to be
For the time being in a state of grace,
And move the viewers in their living rooms
To lost nostalgic visions of themselves
As in an earlier, other world where grim
Fate in the form of gravity may be
Not merely overcome, but overcome
Casually and with style, and that is grace.
VII
Each year brings rookies and makes veterans,
The have their dead by now, their wounded as well,
They have Immortals in a Hall of Fame,
They have the stories of the tribe, the plays
And instant replays many times replayed.
But even fame will tire of its fame,
And immortality itself will fall asleep.
It's taken many years, but yet in time,
To old men crouched before the ikon's changes,
Changes become reminders, all the games
Are blended in one vast remembered game
Of similar images simultaneous
And superposed; nothing surprises us
Nor can delight, though we see the tight end
Stagger into the end zone again again.
10:11:45 PM 
|
|
