1269 Arts and sciences poems

Before Gilgamesh invented the kaleidoscope and Galileo the Rubik’s cube, before the scimitar-horned oryx went missing, before the tamarind trees went bare, before the stars’ eyelids were wrapped in tinfoil, before the leaves could gnaw on water, before electrons made donations, before the owl wore a mask, before the wind had a sound, before the moon had a name and the smoke a spine, before the tulips crossed their legs, before the tongue was armored, before the ghosts rode centaurs to riots, before cyberspace was culled and belly buttons sown to wombs, before the taste had an after, before intellect became property and thunder premeditated, before the New, New World, before a stone wished to be more than a stone, before we had a change of clothes, before the grass was color-blind, before the rivers lost their fingers, and the rain stopped teething, before the kings were all beheaded, the gravedigger neither young nor old, before a lion was still a lion, before the girls were all killed, before the trapeze gave way.        We hung           suspended in time by the arches of our curved feet and this tickled the gods, tickled them to death.        & I think our silence cut us loose, let us go falling from the doubt, secretly thrilled at the hems and ever so eager to break.

Last night I awoke knew That I should say goodbye now To these verses. That's how it always goes After a few years. They have to get out Into the world. It's not possible to keep them Forever! here under the roof. Poor things. They must set out for town. A few will be allowed to return later. But most of them are still hanging around out there. Who knows what will become of them. Before they Find their peace.

Our Box Henry hid    away. John Berryman’s Ol’ Henry sulked. I see his point—he was trying to put one over. It was that he thought that we thought he could do it that breaks our Henry out this-a-way. So, here he will come out and talk. All the world like a fool-bent lover once did see from Ol’ Henry’s side. Here comes a departure: hereafter, something falls out. Now, it might go fraught. Let us see how Box Henry, pried open for all to see, survives. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear and see. Once, with his black-face worn, John was glad all at the top. And he sang. Here, in this land where some strong be, let Box Henry grow in every head. From Dream Song 1

I At the Poem Society a black-haired man stands up to say “You make me sick with all your talk about restraint and mature talent! Haven’t you ever looked out the window at a painting by Matisse, Or did you always stay in hotels where there were too many spiders crawling on your visages? Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop, Or see a citizen split in two by the lightning? I am afraid you have never smiled at the hibernation Of bear cubs except that you saw in it some deep relation To human suffering and wishes, oh what a bunch of crackpots!” The black-haired man sits down, and the others shoot arrows at him. A blond man stands up and says, “He is right! Why should we be organized to defend the kingdom Of dullness? There are so many slimy people connected with poetry, Too, and people who know nothing about it! I am not recommending that poets like each other and organize to fight them, But simply that lightning should strike them.” Then the assembled mediocrities shot arrows at the blond-haired man. The chairman stood up on the platform, oh he was physically ugly! He was small-limbed and –boned and thought he was quite seductive, But he was bald with certain hideous black hairs, And his voice had the sound of water leaving a vaseline bathtub, And he said, “The subject for this evening’s discussion is poetry On the subject of love between swans.” And everyone threw candy hearts At the disgusting man, and they stuck to his bib and tucker, And he danced up and down on the platform in terrific glee And recited the poetry of his little friends—but the blond man stuck his head Out of a cloud and recited poems about the east and thunder, And the black-haired man moved through the stratosphere chanting Poems of the relationships between terrific prehistoric charcoal whales, And the slimy man with candy hearts sticking all over him Wilted away like a cigarette paper on which the bumblebees have urinated, And all the professors left the room to go back to their duty, And all that were left in the room were five or six poets And together they sang the new poem of the twentieth century Which, though influenced by Mallarmé, Shelley, Byron, and Whitman, Plus a million other poets, is still entirely original And is so exciting that it cannot be here repeated. You must go to the Poem Society and wait for it to happen. Once you have heard this poem you will not love any other, Once you have dreamed this dream you will be inconsolable, Once you have loved this dream you will be as one dead, Once you have visited the passages of this time’s great art! 2 “Oh to be seventeen years old Once again,” sang the red-haired man, “and not know that poetry Is ruled with the sceptre of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!” And the shouting persons battered his immortal body with stones And threw his primitive comedy into the sea From which it sang forth poems irrevocably blue. Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names? Yeats of the baleful influence, Auden of the baleful influence, Eliot of the baleful influence (Is Eliot a great poet? no one knows), Hardy, Stevens, Williams (is Hardy of our time?), Hopkins (is Hopkins of our time?), Rilke (is Rilke of our time?), Lorca (is Lorca of our time?), who is still of our time? Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, Éluard, Reverdy, French poets are still of our time, Pasternak and Mayakovsky, is Jouve of our time? Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island, Oh what worms they are! they wish to perfect their form. Yet could not these young men, put in another profession, Succeed admirably, say at sailing a ship? I do not doubt it, Sir, and I wish we could try them. (A plane flies over the ship holding a bomb but perhaps it will not drop the bomb, The young poets from the universities are staring anxiously at the skies, Oh they are remembering their days on the campus when they looked up to watch birds excrete, They are remembering the days they spent making their elegant poems.) Is there no voice to cry out from the wind and say what it is like to be the wind, To be roughed up by the trees and to bring music from the scattered houses And the stones, and to be in such intimate relationship with the sea That you cannot understand it? Is there no one who feels like a pair of pants? 3 Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. In the football stadium I also see him, He leaps through the frosty air at the maker of comparisons Between football and life and silently, silently strangles him! Here is the Strangler dressed in a cowboy suit Leaping from his horse to annihilate the students of myth! The Strangler’s ear is alert for the names of Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain, and Odysseus, And for poems addressed to Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Ezra Pound, and to personages no longer living Even in anyone’s thoughts—O Strangler the Strangler! He lies on his back in the waves of the Pacific Ocean. 4 Supposing that one walks out into the air On a fresh spring day and has the misfortune To encounter an article on modern poetry In New World Writing, or has the misfortune To see some examples of some of the poetry Written by the men with their eyes on the myth And the Missus and the midterms, in the Hudson Review, Or, if one is abroad, in Botteghe Oscure, Or indeed in Encounter, what is one to do With the rest of one’s day that lies blasted to ruins All bluely about one, what is one to do? O surely one cannot complain to the President, Nor even to the deans of Columbia College, Nor to T. S. Eliot, nor to Ezra Pound, And supposing one writes to the Princess Caetani, “Your poets are awful!” what good would it do? And supposing one goes to the Hudson Review With a package of matches and sets fire to the building? One ends up in prison with trial subscriptions To the Partisan, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review! 5 Sun out! perhaps there is a reason for the lack of poetry In these ill-contented souls, perhaps they need air! Blue air, fresh air, come in, I welcome you, you are an art student, Take off your cap and gown and sit down on the chair. Together we shall paint the poets—but no, air! perhaps you should go to them, quickly, Give them a little inspiration, they need it, perhaps they are out of breath, Give them a little inhuman company before they freeze the English language to death! (And rust their typewriters a little, be sea air! be noxious! kill them, if you must, but stop their poetry! I remember I saw you dancing on the surf on the Côte d’Azur, And I stopped, taking my hat off, but you did not remember me, Then afterwards you came to my room bearing a handful of orange flowers And we were together all through the summer night!) That we might go away together, it is so beautiful on the sea, there are a few white clouds in the sky! But no, air! you must go . . . Ah, stay! But she has departed and . . . Ugh! what poisonous fumes and clouds! what a suffocating atmosphere! Cough! whose are these hideous faces I see, what is this rigor Infecting the mind? where are the green Azores, Fond memories of childhood, and the pleasant orange trolleys, A girl’s face, red-white, and her breasts and calves, blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, fahrenheit Temperatures, dandelions, and trains, O blue?! Wind, wind, what is happening? Wind! I can’t see any bird but the gull, and I feel it should symbolize . . . Oh, pardon me, there’s a swan, one two three swans, a great white swan, hahaha how pretty they are! Smack! Oh! stop! help! yes, I see—disrespect for my superiors—forgive me, dear Zeus, nice Zeus, parabolic bird, O feathered excellence! white! There is Achilles too, and there’s Ulysses, I’ve always wanted to see them, And there is Helen of Troy, I suppose she is Zeus too, she’s so terribly pretty—hello, Zeus, my you are beautiful, Bang! One more mistake and I get thrown out of the Modern Poetry Association, help! Why aren’t there any adjectives around? Oh there are, there’s practically nothing else—look, here’s grey, utter,agonized, total, phenomenal, gracile, invidious, sundered, and fused, Elegant, absolute, pyramidal, and . . . Scream! but what can I describe with these words? States! States symbolized and divided by two, complex states, magic states, states of consciousness governed by an aroused sincerity, cockadoodle doo! Another bird! is it morning? Help! where am I? am I in the barnyard? oink oink, scratch, moo! Splash! My first lesson. “Look around you. What do you think and feel?”Uhhh. . . “Quickly!”This Connecticut landscape would have pleasedVermeer. Wham! A-Plus. “Congratulations!” I am promoted. OOOhhhhh I wish I were dead, what a headache! My second lesson: “Rewrite your first lesson line six hundred times. Try to make it into a magnetic field.” I can do it too. But my poor line! What a nightmare! Here comes a tremendous horse, Trojan, I presume. No, it’s my third lesson. “Look, look! Watch him, see what he’s doing? That’s what we want you to do. Of course it won’t be the same as his at first, but . . .” I demur. Is there no other way to fertilize minds? Bang! I give in . . . Already I see my name in two or three anthologies, a serving girl comes into the barn bringing me the anthologies, She is very pretty and I smile at her a little sadly, perhaps it is my last smile! Perhaps she will hit me! But no, she smiles in return, and she takes my hand. My hand, my hand! what is this strange thing I feel in my hand, on my arm, on my chest, my face—can it be . . . ? it is! AIR! Air, air, you’ve come back! Did you have any success? “What do you think?” I don’t know, air. You are so strong, air. And she breaks my chains of straw, and we walk down the road, behind us the hideous fumes! Soon we reach the seaside, she is a young art student who places her head on my shoulder, I kiss her warm red lips, and here is the Strangler, reading the KenyonReview! Good luck to you, Strangler! Goodbye, Helen! goodbye, fumes! goodbye, abstracted dried-up boys! goodbye, dead trees! goodbye, skunks! Goodbye, manure! goodbye, critical manicure! goodbye, you big fat men standing on the east coast as well as the west giving poems the test! farewell, Valéry’s stern dictum! Until tomorrow, then, scum floating on the surface of poetry! goodbye for a moment, refuse that happens to land in poetry’s boundaries! adieu, stale eggs teaching imbeciles poetry to bolster up your egos! adios, boring anomalies of these same stale eggs! Ah, but the scum is deep! Come, let me help you! and soon we pass into the clear blue water. Oh GOODBYE, castrati of poetry! farewell, stale pale skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop gloop!) until tomorrow, horrors! oh, farewell! Hello, sea! good morning, sea! hello, clarity and excitement, you great expanse of green— O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!

A cento I have some sad news for you I am but a symbol, a shadow cast on paper If only you knew how things look within me at the moment Trees covered in white blossom The remains of my physical self Do you really find my appearance so attractive? Darling, I have been telling an awful lot of lies lately If only I knew what you are doing now? Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street? Not a mermaid, but a lovely human being The whole thing reminds me of the man trying to rescue a birdcage from the burning house (I feel compelled to express myself poetically) I am not normally a hunter of relics, but ... It was this childhood scene ... (My mother ... ) All the while I kept thinking:her face has such a wild look ... as though she had never existed The fact is I have not yet seen her in daylight Distance must remain distance A few proud buildings; your lovely photograph I find this loss very hard to bear The bells are ringing, I don’t quite know why What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity Yesterday and today have been bad days This oceanic feeling, continuous inner monologues I said, “All the beautiful things I still have to say will have to remain unsaid,” and the writing table flooded

A cento I became a therapist against my will A strange feeling of forlornness, a feeling I could not have stood Painful isolation, quite steep and slanting A beautiful forest which had the one drawback of seeming never to end I have had to struggle so long I have always been frank with you, haven’t I? I wanted to explain the reason for my inaccessibility I am lying here on a short leash in this filthy hole So far I haven’t been locked up Several people point to gaps in my face where the little girl has been cut out She screams and screams without any self-control Ravaged by the heat and the blood-&-thunder melodrama Neither describable nor bearable I felt I had known her all my life

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. Genesis 4:9–12

Cain tended to break rules and saving the introduction of a principal character for episode 3 was the most signifcant early decision. Previously associated with both Cain and Fr. K, Adah had been away on a busi- ness trip for three months, returning to find diplomatic relations between her country and its bellicose neighbor in tatters. Staff writer James Ingram recalls the atmosphere in the room when they realized that the letters b, i, t, c, h, d, i, t, t, o were left over after Fr. K’s feverish definitions. “We just started opening windows and whooping at the world,” he says. “It was character defining. This was Adah in her own words wresting control idiot with her Whatever I’ve I’m probably that.” Not unlike accident” of later (punctuation free-for-all), we that the writers signifcance of      a coincidence. charged with a hysterical joint the male leads, desires for Adah, name her with back from the first breath. worked on since proudest of the famous “B- season favorite is naturally a may reflect now overlooked the so terrifying The episode is sexual tension, chorus from their hopes and their need to many names, <Doorbell.>   Adah in Burberry, bathed in hall light. Adah, rosebud torturer, co-author of overset thermometers. Adah, outshining hydrogen trinketry. Soothe their wrathful orphanhood then come hither, nutrient. Heavyweight statuette. Handbook for esh data & VAT theft; the lighthouse den where redemption inducts honey. Brunette A.D.D., ol’ mouthwash. Adahhhh! Tetchy demon & conventional Frenchwoman. Death, wishbone, horse- shoe. “Ditto, bitch.” to take ownership of her in some way or in one very specific way. Indeed there is an unabashed eroticism to the episode, albeit entirely set in the corridor, which saw early accusations of gratuity. The show would grow accustomed to courting controversy in this way, occasionally falling foul of the Bechdel test (a scene cut from episode 12 featured Adah in conversation with herself about the two male leads for half an hour). Halberg remains impenitent. “Adah isn’t just the love interest — that’s exactly what we wanted to send up in this show. She’s supposed to be the rudder, the only one with a handle on the situation who might do something about it.Of course Cain and Father K just spend the whole time drooling and lusting after her: they’re imbeciles.”

It is generally believed that the writers had to make the most of a low budget and that this led to the grim determination of writing through restriction, bottle episodes, and constraints. In reality the show was generously bankrolled by Thud, but several costly set pieces had been planned which depleted the kitty. Nevertheless, episode 4, comprising solely an intimate kitchen dialogue between Fr. K and Adah, remains a fan favorite. “It was one of the last things we shot,” recalls Halberg. “Kitty [Beaulieu, who plays Adah], had really got into the role by then which was important as we wanted to imply years of previous talk between them. They mics and I got every line so most completely gives the scene personal you’re overhear- neighbors wall.” Adah find that in the she has been no longer has and privileges a cleric. To be be excessively alcohol which points out, for Father K’s within their probes further. to fob her off both had contact them to whisper that it was al- inaudible. It that indecently atmosphere, as if ing your own through the is dismayed to three months away, Father K the obligations to function as bibulous is to fond of drinking is, as Adah hardly unusual line of work culture. She Father K tries by talking about — Tell me again how you were defrocked. — Overnight. — That’s half. — Bibulously. — That’s hardly uncharacteristic. — Alright. There are things we don’t fathom: the “noumenon.” — That’s better. Humor me. — March 5th, The Hour of Botheration: the invertebrates trashed the transept, uprooted the     boutonniere ... This     vermivorous, backhanded ordination... — Wood! — Bonded, drowned hobo. — Oh, Eden! Oh, heeded ode! — And faith? —N- No, th- th... H- h- h- h- h- h- h- —You’re crying. Why? — It’s all that’s left. Kantian philosophy (the noumenon is a posited thing, object, or event which is known, if it is known at all, without the use of the senses), but it soon emerges that a violent overthrow of the church has taken place, the transept vandalized, Father K (and, we suppose, his ilk) booted out and replaced by patsies during The Hour of Botheration. Its having been titled shows that the recent event has already passed into myth — a further indication that there is no planned resistance. This augurs very ill, and the look on Adah’s face as Father K sobs in her lap really says it all. She realizes that she will have to act as leader, as cheerleader, as mother, as father to the household.

But not before several undisputed stone-cold classics. This is why we keep writing about Cain: for all its self-indulgent flaws it just gets it so right sometimes. Every standard element is here: the gang is still drinking far too many cocktails in one sitting, Cain is a hypocrite, Adah exists only to be interpreted by the men, Father K is so borderline incoherent you almost wonder if he’s a malfunctioning robot. So what’s changed? I think it’s the widening of the lens, the micro to the macro. By this point they’ve all pretty much given up on their evening away from the overthrew and ing it in ruins puppet-board of means we can at what is hap- city, and it’s not demilitarized, to confirm the word as bond. grinding their with the recog- cial authorities is classes, walking university they took over, leav- with a useless directors. This look, once again, pening to their good. Officially this only stands emptiness of Everyone is teeth. Reasoning nized or unoffi- like attempting Cain, though broadsheet in dialogue, harbors tabloid thoughts. A doughnut of prurience. I had Adah misconstrued (5th/6th Manhattan). T/K: Her worth, her “no tent” theme. The red toothbrush threshing deconsecrated earth, boycotted labyrinths. Hot thin chef, overworked an- tihero of the bathysphere, I need you to be yourself today. Thoth went, font-born, on farmland. The mortar swiveled on the hill. Demilitarized, huh? Oh how vehe- ment, Heavenward. to plough a field with a toothbrush. The overworked chef had finally produced something delicious and, this week at least, it was a labyrinth we didn’t want to boycott. T/K is journalistic shorthand for “to come,” indicating a forthcoming addition to the text. (TK is a rare formation of letters and therefore would not be confused with continuous language as “to come” might). Thoth , one of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon, has either an ibis or a baboon head. Arbitrator of disputes between other gods and the system of writing.