Let's Read A Few Fuckin Poems Vol #1
John Ashberry's "At North Farm" (1983) & Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese," (2004) "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen (1918) & Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind." (1530's)
John Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017)
I was given the poem “At North Farm” by John Ashbery to read in my first year of University. Introduction to Poetry. Poetry 101.
At the time, and like now, I know little to nothing about poetry except I like it. Poets have to choose their words very carefully because each word is positively freighted with different potential meanings. I’m not usually one for metaphors, poems about geese & shit, which is ironic given that Mary Oliver’s 2004 poem “Wild Geese” is my favourite poem ever. I like to read it when I am sad. And I am frequently sad:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The family of things. The family. Of things. What a lovely idea. That we can belong to something far greater than just he nuclear family - though I don’t knock the nuclear family. Some of my happiest days were ones when I had a Mom and Dad living under the same roof as me.
Anyway I was given this poem to read in Introduction to Poetry. Poetry 101.
It’s amazing I noticed anything considering how drunk I was in those days (I used to bring Gin or Vodka to class and swig it out of a water bottle cuz it’s easier to conceal clear liquor). but the first thing I noticed was that it was a reverse Petrarchan sonnet. Shakespeare used the Petrarchan structure for his sonnets, and it worked for him. But maybe John Ashbery was drunk and did it backwards.
A Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave, eight lines, followed by a break, then a sestet, a six-line conclusion.
The Petrarchan sonnet is so closely linked to Shakespeare due to the latter’s use of the Petrarchan structure in his 154 sonnets published in 1609, all written to some unknown, unnamed, probably younger person, perhaps a boy,
Shakespeare’s sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt was a witty man, and his sonnet “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,” penned in the 1530s, is a ribald satirical arrow slung at he upper crust of London and Rome:
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
But enough of the ancien regime, eh?. I wanna read newer stuff! Written by newer poets! Still gay, of course. I mean no offence, I am only pointing out that a great many poets preferred romantic relationships with men.
First published in 1984 in The New Yorker, and written the year before, this is John Ashbery at his finest:
At North Farm
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
So, immediately we can see that it begins with a sestet and concludes with an octave. As far as technical details, that’s as far as I wanna go because there us so much more to this poem than “gasp! he reversed the Petrarchan sonnet!”
I think the poem is meant to be read at different parts of one’s life. At different ages. Take those first two lines. As a kid I would have thought the “someone” was Santa Clause, racing towards my chimney to “[g]ive [me] the thing he has for [me]?
No I think it’s death, especially given the emotional volta of the concluding octave.
“Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal.”
Is this a critique of Reaganomics, where farmers were paid to sell their crops to the government until (or if) international prices returned to normal rates? Or have we arrived in some kind of hellish outpost where “birds darken the sky?”
Yes. I think it’s death. The dish of milk set out at night is metaphorical. It is one of the many things we do to stave off death another day, week, month.
North Farm is death. It’s not heaven or hell, it’s purgatorial. Nothing grows here despite evidence of a recent boon crop. Why else would the granaries be bursting with meal?
I have always loved the idea of death as a physical being, sent to earth to find us, Let us say, for fun, that your death has been dropped from the sky and landed in the Alps. Travelling at incredible speed, day or night, he is going to have a hell of a time catching up with you.
And, as Ashbery points out, he may not even recognize you. It’s like that film Collateral. Death has a lot of stops to make. So perhaps if you leave a meal out for him, or a bowl of milk, he will spare you for a night or two.
Meanwhile we think of him And of our own mortality. Both “sometimes and always, with mixed feelings.”
John Ashbery died on September 3rd 2017.
Now, during the height of WWI, or what was then called The Great War, Wilfred Owen was convalescing in a hospital (if he’d just remained there one week longer he’d have lived). From his Wikiepedia page: “Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war.”
Anyway, disgusted by the carnage wrought, especially gas warfare, Owen had read Jessie Pope’s “Who’s For The Game?” which was a jingoistic call-to-arms. While the opening lines are okay:
Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Pope goes on to admit that the war “won’t be a picnic – not much” but that England’s men should go on to fight the German’s and “come back with a crutch” and some minor bruises. Pope was either unaware of gas warfare or underestimated its devastating effects.
From his hospital bed, Owen wrote a letter home containing the poem and a quick note, telling her that the poem was a retort to “Jessie Pope, et al.”
“Here is a gas poem done yesterday,” he wrote, “(which is not private, but not final).” meaning if he’d lived, he likely would have tinkered a bit more with it, undergone a few drafts. I think the poem in its current state is perfect. It’s just too bad he had to die for the poem to be so perfectly wrought.
Note the strange rhyming scheme, which may be meant to mirror the disorientation the soldier feels during war. Instead of ABAB, it is A, follow by a near-rhyme. The entire poem follows this scheme save for the final line, by which point Owen realizes he is meeting the man he killed yesterday. But look at hat rhyme-scheme:
1. scaped, scooped
2. groined, groaned
3. stirred, stared
Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.1
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”
Consummate skill. Such a well-wrought poem.
Like the 1941 death of John Gillespie Magee Jr., who penned “High Flight” at just 19 years old, who knows what contributions to literature these men would have made had they survived the wars that took them from us.
Fuck war.
On June 2 1910. Compson of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury has decided to kill himself. He cannot get along with these rude & arrogant northerners with their clubs and groups and cliques.
Remembering his grandfather giving him the watch that now sits on his nightstand, Quentin puts the watch on - for the last time, for this is the day he is going to kill himself - & recalls what his grandaddy said about war:
No battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Amen.
By the end of the day Quentin will be dead, just like his grandfather.
I suppose one day we will all be dead. But the idea is to let life and let light in.
“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.”
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This is the point where Owen realizes he himself is dead.