Here’s something new(-ish) we can try, while we wait for our sessions to resume (whenever that may happen). I’ll try to upload a poem or two weekly, some from my archive of items we’ve discussed over the years, and other items I reckon you might find interesting. The page has a link below that allows you to post comments and questions, which I welcome and will respond to as I’m able. Let’s see how it goes . . .
Here are two poems by Amy Clampitt, for a promising start. Feel free to have your say, whether or not you’ve been attending out sessions. Enjoy!
Athena
BY AMY CLAMPITT
Force of reason, who shut up the shrill
foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon,
led whimpering to the cave they live in still,
beneath the rock your city foundered on:
who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing
(or seem to, or be about to) a kindlier tune:
mind that can make a scheme of anything—
a game, a grid, a system, a mere folder
in the universal file drawer: uncompromising
mediatrix, virgin married to the welfare
of the body politic: deific contradiction,
warbonnet-wearing olive-bearer, author
of the law’s delays, you who as talisman
and totem still wear the aegis, baleful
with Medusa’s scowl (though shrunken
and self-mummified, a Gorgon still): cool
guarantor of the averted look, the guide
of Perseus, who killed and could not kill
the thing he’d hounded to its source, the dread
thing-in-itself none can elude, whose counter-
feit we halfway hanker for: aware (gone mad
with clarity) we have invented all you stand for,
though we despise the artifice—a space to savor
horror, to pre-enact our own undoing in—
living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon.
The Kingfisher
BY AMY CLAMPITT
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud
they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming
beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening
of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed
by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled
the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street
found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,
acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell
me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”—
hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,
a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.
Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard
through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird
reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.
When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,
seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.
By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.
A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm
(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,
that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them
wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,
while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom
poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,
a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled
spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-
eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma
in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised
just then to have invented anything so fancy,
later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.
In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then
dead silence) later, she could not have said how many
spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,
how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one
insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down
screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;
a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color
of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow
through landscapes of untended memory: ardor
illuminating with its terrifying currency
now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista
but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.
By Jill Berger March 30, 2020 - 4:55 pm
Coffee at Dusk
Hello everyone. My thoughts about this poem.
The memories of a simple childhood and youth knowing only the joys and all encompassing amazements of each day hidden deep within our psyche are abruptly replaced by an unknown evil . The poem brings us back to memories of those joys with images of stars and fireflies. Light and dark as if mixed in a simple cup of coffee.
A thought provoking and symbolic poem for living life in all it’s fullness in each precious day
Thank you Bob
By Janet March 30, 2020 - 11:33 am
Amy Clampitt is a poet I do not know but I was curious as to her influences, the Classical World and Birds. With a little Googling I see she was a Librarian at the Audubon Society but where did she get her knowledge of the Classics? I would suggest during her early education – not what many young poets receive today I would suggest. I have to say I find her poetry enigmatic and shrouded in cryptic inferences – so not easy. So I appreciate your insights Amanda and Bob. Tell me more…
PS Bob if you are taking requests I’d love a taste of Louis McNeice!
By Bob March 30, 2020 - 12:47 pm
Hi, Janet! I don’t know anything about Clampitt’s education, but according to the Poetry Foundation she did study at Columbia, where she might have picked up a background in classics. Otherwise just a poet’s voracious reading habits? As I mentioned in my previous comment, her treatment of the figure of Athena takes in the really atavistic elements from Homeric tradition: when she’s gunning for you with her aegis she wields nearly all the horror of the gorgon and is as great a holy terror as her brother Mars (they have similar tastes in head-gear at least!). I imagine one of the broad themes of ‘Athena’ is how the modern world’s professed devotion to reason may conceal land-mines and time-bombs liable to go off in our faces. Reason itself conceals a violence done to the fabric of reality that, once inflicted, can’t be recalled.
‘The Kingfisher’ seems to do something similar from an ornithological, zoological angle . . . Dylan Thomas as bird of exotic plumage expiring of too much poetry (and whiskey) in a Manhattan bar. The arts themselves summon up kinds of violence that polite society tends to tip-toe around. The furor over Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and its atavistic cadences still resonates.
I shall produce some Louis MacNiece next. Thanks for the suggestion! Hope you’re keeping well.
By Amanda March 27, 2020 - 7:56 pm
Greetings to all,
Perseus gave Athena the head of Medusa to put on her shield. It could still be used as a weapon.
Where she says “living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon” is it our own image in the mirror? Maybe she is saying we are all evil, or all, also have the power to avert evil. In “living” we can at any moment be turned to stone. Or human beings have a frightening image, or a capacity for destruction. Could this capacity be used to create good, to forcefully create good through violent means.
Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia, brain swelling and fatty liver but no cirrhosis. He is a “symptom” of the group she is talking about, suggesting he is an example of some sort of vulnerability in that group. He is a “datum” a statistic, an anonymous number in the hospital’s data. From this tiny dot on a graph, he became very famous, through his work.
My favorite phrase is “the color of felicity afire,”
Two very challenging pieces.
By Bob March 27, 2020 - 8:44 pm
Clampitt’s asking the reader to remember how Athena, the god of reason, can be an absolutely harrowing presence. Reason is deadly: like the Gorgon’s stare, it has to immobilise (petrify?) what it would grasp.
in ‘The Kingfisher’, Thomas appears to be playing a kind of poet-in-the-middle kind of part. The worlds of city and jungle appear to swirl around him, as he’s about to slump off his barstool dead. He’s both a focus and an absence . . .
By Amanda March 27, 2020 - 9:24 pm
In “The Kingfisher” the poet is painting a picture with the colors of the birds and the sounds of the birds and the movement of the birds. It is a multi sensory poem, color, sound and motion. I really like the line “glancing like an arrow through landscapes of untended memory.” The color and movement is swift and stunning like the arrow. The memory is like the jungle.
The use of the word “quailed” is very interesting. Here the birds overlap with the people in this one particular word.
By Bob March 27, 2020 - 1:07 pm
Okay, let me start things rolling here. In ‘Athena’, have a look at how Clampitt balances the figures of Athena and the Medusa/Gorgon against each other. What might she be suggesting about the relationship between reason/unreason and order/disorder, and about how they sit in our minds?
Just a suggestion for ‘The Kingfisher’: how does Dylan Thomas (stanza 4) figure in the poem as a ‘symptomatic datum’?