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  • The Milosz Century

    Posted on by David
    Czeslaw Milosz, 1911 – 2004

    Czeslaw Milosz is the first of four Nobel laureates who, were they still living, would be celebrating their centenary this year. His birthday is on June 30th. (The other three are: William Golding, on September 19th, Odysseus Elytis, on November 2nd, and Naguib Mahfouz, on December 11th.)

    I don’t know quite how I discovered Czeslaw Milosz. I was an undergraduate, studying music at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, learning about roommates, practicing piano, trying to grasp German augmented fourths and the rules of voice leading, and engaged in all those fumbling efforts to be – or rather, to become – a livable self. Such touching self-involvement – I blush to remember it. Somewhere in the exhausting midst of it all, books had become, for me, both aphrodisiac and sedative: such expanses as opened out between their covers gave me almost the physical sensation of a perpetual flight over a sharp drop. Then again, they settled me, anchored me against the native loneliness common to all head-prone children. Drifting the library stacks, putting my clammy fingerprints on the spines of as many books as possible –nothing better.

    It was probably thus that I found Milosz. (He was certainly not assigned reading. I remember bringing one of his poems to a tutorial with one of my English professors, a woman well respected in the department.  She hadn’t heard of him.  I am ever re-learning that not everyone shares my idiosyncratic projects.) The first book of his I read was Unattainable Earth (1986). What fascinated, I think, was that, for a man with such a strange, dark-hued name, he wrote poetry of such apparent transparency, using sentences with clear syntax, easy-to-grasp logic, so that I consistently imagined I understood him.  Occasionally, it seemed he was transcribing my own thoughts.  Like this, which, if taken in at half-glance, and far more indulgently rendered, could have come from my journal at the time:

    Who will assure me that I perceive the world the same way other people do?  It is not improbable that I am a deviation from a norm, an oddity, a mutation, and that I have no access to what they experience.  And if that is the case, what right do I have to pronounce general opinions on man, history, the difference between good and evil, society, systems; as if I did not guess that my difference, though hidden, influences my judgements, changes proportions?

    Unattainable Earth, p. 64

    Twenty years out, I am reading Unattainable Earth once again.  I didn’t, I now realize, get him at all.  Milosz once made the observation (I can’t place the reference off hand) that American students were incapable of grasping, either spiritually or intellectually, Eastern Europe in the 20th century.  My own example would not have disabused him of this impression.  What did I know of cruelty on the scale of apocalypse? Of rubbing one’s eyes awake after the Nazi nightmare, only to be assaulted by the cold, day-lit horror of Soviet occupation? Of betrayals, both craven and coerced? Of the relocation of entire populations from ancestral lands to lands unsympathetic, even hostile, foreign in both language and culture? What know I now, whose learning, all of it, has arisen from the sea of privilege in which I swim? My earnest panting after self-discovery would have been as bewildering to him as would be for me his relentless referencing of every article of his life, even sex, even his dreams, onto the grid of history. Milosz’s century was not mine.

    Yet, for all the limitations of my internal resources, some spare nerve in my system remained responsive to his work.  This nerve hummed to its austerity, which was really just the garb put on by chastened ecstasy, for there was always a sense in his poetry that life ought to be given over to unchecked joy, were it not for exigencies.  I kept reading.  I read The Captive Mind (1951), his classic work on the seduction of totalitarianism and its effects on the minds of intellectuals whose raison d’etre is supposedly to think clearly.  I read his autobiographical novel, The Issa Valley.  Of the poems I read at that time, I remember especially “Ars Poetica?”, found in his Selected Poems – nine quatrains, the final two particularly disturbing:

    The purpose of poetry is to remind us
    how difficult it is to remain just one person,
    for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
    and invisible guests come in and out at will.

    What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
    as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
    under unbearable duress and only with the hope
    that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

    What, I wondered, could it mean for a poet to write a poem whose status as a poem he repudiates, suggesting that a real poem is something far more perilous than the words he’s arranged here?  Such a formulation could only come from a soul whose world has shattered.

    “Ars Poetica?” was written in 1968, during Milosz’s first decade as professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. One of his most often cited poems, “Dedication”, was written in Warsaw in 1945, and makes for the later a bleak, umbrous backdrop.

    DEDICATION

    You whom I could not save
    Listen to me.
    Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
    I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
    I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

    What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
    You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
    Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;
    Blind force with accomplished shape.

    Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
    Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;
    And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
    When I am talking with you.

    What is poetry which does not save
    Nations or people?
    A connivance with official lies,
    A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
    Readings for sophomore girls.
    That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
    That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
    In this and only this I find salvation.

    They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
    To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
    I put this book here for you, who once lived
    So that you should visit us no more.

    There, in the second stanza, was the word I came to associate with Milosz – “epoch”.  In memory, it seemed to turn up in every second poem.  A kind of Biblical grandeur adheres to it, a suggestion of sublimity, and God knows I was all for the sublime in those years (still am, for that matter). But I didn’t know the half of what that word held.

    I learned what an “epoch” was in seventh grade.  I went to a school affiliated with the Christian reformed church, Calvinist to the core. Somehow I got it into my daft, adolescent head that I needed to challenge the going wisdom about evolution, to demonstrate how gripping the handles of creationism, if nothing else, showed a lack of imagination. I had a teacher wise enough to let me stage a debate with a girl in my class who would defend the religious party line. So I commenced my ardent research, learning about the Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene. Unimaginable stretches of time characterized by tectonic shifts, the ebb and flow of prehistoric seas, the layering of rock and the formation of the fossil record. Epochs. All dreamily abstract.

    What I didn’t know is that the tectonic shifts of an epoch can mean the invasion of your country, the subsequent occupation, and the brutal subjugation of you and everyone you know, that it can mean the systematic stripping of all the salient features of your culture, the shredding of your identity, and the murder of your family.  All of which can leave you – let’s say your a survivor – vulnerable to the nostalgic invocation of earlier epochs, with their manor houses and hunting parks, their centers of learning, their Jews.  In other words, an epoch frames what happens to you, to your ancestors, your successors, and what happens can be catastrophe. Milosz’s century was not my century, and yet we were, in a sense, living along side one another, he at Berkeley, me at St. Olaf. And this, somehow, mattered to me.  When he died in 2004, it was as if one of the great guides had left, and, as part of that leaving, had left me to my own devices with only this, that I would do well to be awake to my century.  As always, much was at stake.


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  • Derek Walcott won’t save you (part 3)

    Posted on by David

    A certain fatigue can set in when reading too much Derek Walcott at a go, like contending with a twice-too-large serving of boeuf bourguignon.  The impression I sometimes get of him is that of a 19th century novelist who, do to a fluke paper shortage, decided to funnel his torrential sensibilities into poetry. Middlemarch filed into iambic pentameter.  Or Moby Dick. Here are the opening lines of chapter 22 of his 1974 autobiographical poem, Another Life.


    Miasma, acedia, the enervations of damp,
    as the teeth of the mould gnaw, greening the carious stump
    of the beaten, corrugated silver of the marsh light,
    where the red heron hides, without a secret,
    as the cordage of mangrove tightens
    bland water to bland sky
    heavy and sodden as canvas,
    where the pirogue foundered with its caved-in stomach
    (a hulk, trying hard to look like
    a paleolithic, half-gnawed memory of pre-history)
    as the too green acid grasses set the salt teeth on edge,
    acids and russets and water-colored water,
    let the historian go mad there
    from thirst.  Slowly the water rat takes up its reed pen
    and scribbles. Leasurely, the egret
    on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph.

     

    There is an over-stuffedness about this, like the house of a lottery millionaire crazed for magnificence. The gift is formidable.  I particularly love lines five through seven, “as the cordage of mangrove tightens/bland water to bland sky/ heavy and sodden as canvas,”.  But by the time I reach line fourteen, with the historian gone mad from thirst, and realize I have been reading an actual sentence, I am quite out of breath.

    V. S. Naipaul famously wrote, “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.”  Walcott writes as if his life depended on proving this statement false. He has made it his ultimate concern to carry The Caribbean before the world, as if shouldering its golden palanquin alone, saying “Here. Here is our indispensable presence.”  But, like a skilled diplomat, he is as involved with the culture he is addressing as with the culture he is presenting. And so, a dynamic tension advances on his nerves, directing his pen (one almost imagines it a quill): On the one hand he has insisted that a life in St. Lucia is all his poetry requires. The narrator of his his 2004 book, The Prodigal, is told that Paris will change his life.  His response:

    I like my life.

     

    You think here is enough?

    For me it is.

    Fine.

    Anyway I can see Martinique from here.

    On the other hand, he has repudiated the “Black Word” movement, a stance towards writing espoused by the literary descendants of Langston Hughes, who believed it was critical for black writers to eschew the European tradition at every turn and blaze their own formal and linguistic trail.  Walcott cites his own melting pot ancestry – Dutch and British as well as African – as evidence that Tennyson and Yeats are his inheritance as much as the African jungle. A lover of The Islands, it is Europe’s ear he cherishes.

    Walcott’s childhood home on Chausse Road, Castries, St. Lucia

    Sam’s question, “Why is Derek Walcott considered so great?”  is now, I believe, stalking its answer:  I would propose that this ambivalence – his home, a twenty-seven mile by fourteen mile  reprieve from Caribbean waters, held up against the legacy of Auden – is at the core of his strength as a poet.  Far from dividing his art, making him half-hearted in either direction, it has given him a singleness of purpose.  His outsized ambition could perhaps best be described as a West Indian iteration of Stephen Dedelus’s famous battle cry near the end of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Such rhetoric is naturally vulnerable to grandiloquence, but if his poems occasionally succumb, it is the error of a gifted boy from the provinces singing too loudly in the King’s church.  In this, it participates in a universal drama. It is one of the central tasks of our lives to press for certain reconciliations: between who we are and who we wish we were, what we are and what we could be, where we are, where we imagine it is better to be, and where, at last, we are most ourselves. And, in the course of these spiritual negotiations, can it be said we are, any of us, really alive if we don’t sing sometimes too loudly?

    Here, from the thirteenth chapter of The Prodigal, is Walcott at his most moving . This passage comes after the narrator has journeyed to Europe, fast on the heals of self-understanding, and has returned at last to his island home.

     

    So has it come to this, to have to choose?
    The chafe of the breakers’ moving marbles,
    their lucent and commodious statuary
    of turbulent stasis, changing repetition
    of drizzling spray that glazes your eyes
    like the marble miracles of the Villa Borghese?
    Do not diminish in my memory
    villages of absolutely no importance,
    the rattleing bridge over the stone-bright river,
    un-ornate churches, chapels in the provinces
    of light-exhausted Europe. Hoard, cherish
    your negligible existence, your unrecorded history
    of unambitious syntax, your clean pools
    of unpolluted light over close stones.

     


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  • Derek Walcott won’t save you (part 2)

    Posted on by David

    Taking my cue from Mark Strand, I decided I would read through Walcott’s Selected Poems, a volume I had been picking at for some time.  For a while, it went everywhere with me.  I remember – it was sometime during the summer of 2008 – sweating by the window of one of the coffee shops I sometimes frequent.  Management at this particular spot kept the temperature in the room roughly equivalent to the inside of the dessert case, so it was either freeze or sweat.  A friend stopped in and sat with me for a few minutes.  He picked up my Walcott and said, “Ah.  Derek Walcott.  I suppose all dutiful poetry readers have an obligation to read him at some point.”  This is how he talks.

    “He’s fantastic.” I said, more out of defense than conviction.

    “I see.”

    I quickly assessed that it would not be worth the effort to speak as a grown-up would and ask him why he felt so archly dismissive of Walcott. So, the conversation shifted to other, transient subjects, quickly assuming the cadences of our familiar banter.  As amusing as this can sometimes be, I often find it wearing.  In such irony-burdened badinage, in which words are ramped up to mean more than they say, one usually ends up saying so much less than on one means. On this particular afternoon, stewing by the window past which joggers paraded, watching the breath of the other patrons condense in the artificially frigid air, feeling slightly resentful at my friend’s infringement on my limited time, I found myself growing less and less inclined to continue what was passing for a conversation.  When at last he left, I again opened my book and read the following:

     

    I sang of  quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,
    who never ascended in an elevator,
    who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,

    never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter,
    whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water
    (which is not for this book, which will remain unknown

    and unread by him).  I sang the only slaughter
    that brought him delight, and that from necessity –
    of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.

     

    Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” But some  poetry has more the effect of a masterfully placed acupuncture needle, causing a gentle but decisive release in the flow of one’s energy.  Often, in the moment, there is not much more to say about it than this.  One can return to it, examine how such an effect was arranged for by the poet.  How such an effect is actually achieved, if it is, may be an even more interesting question, though ultimately less literary, for it pertains to how a reader receives the text.  What, as it were, he does with the poem after he’s eaten it. The power of poetry – when it has power – has more to do with one’s digestion than one’s frontal lobes.

    Reading this, the opening lines of the final chapter of Omeros, I felt just such a release, hardly noticable, though noticable still, a slackening, if for only that moment, of all that was forced and artificial and taxing in life.  Here was language that was direct, rippling with meaning, meaning, but no doubleness, almost without irony.

    Almost.  It isn’t apparent at first.  Then one hears the summoning bell of the sixth and seventh lines. The poet asks his reader to come to for a moment. We’ll return forthwith to the list, the elegiac enumeration of the elements of this “song”.  But here, he nudges the reader out of the poetic dream, briefly, and  just enough to become aware of reading a book.  This one, without Achille’s drowning in it.  Achille – You weren’t thinking he isn’t real, were you?  Time enough to fall back on that position after putting it down and returning to your coffeehouse window, your companions, unknown and freezing, and whatever upcoming tasks you believe are limiting your time. – Achille never will.  And you may infer from this that he will never read any book. Partly because he is the poet’s creation, that about which he “sang”.  But also because  he created him as a contrast to the reader, whose circumstances as a reader, especially a reader of poetry, would be unimaginable to him.

    Derek Walcott is, perhaps more than any other major living poet, obsessed with how place impacts identity.  His poetic voice is endlessly questioning a certain concept of self (and self-worth) by drawing the subject’s surroundings, often sun-shot and Caribbean, but sometimes alien (read “European”), close about him, carefully examining what he’s been left with, what he’s been left without, and how this positions him in the world.  It could be partly this about Walcott that  bothers my dismissive friend, as he has little patience for people who didn’t somehow spring from Zeus’s head “knowing who they are.”  To allow such uncertainty to remain a poetic goad across a lifetime he would, I suspect, see as pure silliness.  Add to this the distant thunder of Walcott’s anger, the condensation of moral reckoning that forms around the edges of his rhetoric, and you’ll see my friend hightailing it out of there.  Even in this fragment, every word is Janus faced, pointing at the subject, inviting the reader’s love, and pointing back at the reader, subtly requiring something in return: Name everyone you know who hasn’t ridden an elevator. Don’t leave anyone out.  In Achille’s world there is no need of a passport, unlike in the divided and anxious world you likely inhabit.  If you are reading this poem you are well educated, and therefore almost certainly wealthy enough to have been served by wait staff, possibly even by waiters with Achille’s skin color and social standing.  He will not have been among them.  And now, let’s talk about slaughter. By the end of the poem, we stand, not accused, but confronted. The affection we have for this character – he repudiates our ready admiration – does not come free.  It asks a price not so glibly obviated by liberalism or “social responsibility”. Rather, like all great poetry, it asks that we take our own measure. “Quiet Achille,” he calls him.  How quiet, I wonder, are you? How quiet I?


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  • “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow: Easter of God.”

    Posted on by David

    This week I had intended to publish the follow-up to my last post, about Derek Walcott.  But Holy Week has been its usual drama queen self, and no matter how I try to air out my religious sensibility, I’m always brought to my knees by its rapturous tragedy.  Consequently, another poet has been knocking about in my skull, clamoring to be heard: the lyrical and tragic-eyed Odysseus Elytis.  So, Walcott can wait another week.

    For some reason, I always associate Easter with Greece.  I love to prepare Greek food for the feast.  Two years ago, I made an enormous lamb pie baked in a crust of Greek bread (We ate it all week.  Making moderate amounts is difficult for me).  Sam makes tzoureki, a Greek braided bread, not unlike Jewish challa, with red-painted Easter eggs baked into the pleats.

    This year, Easter dinner will be, not Greek, but Italian, featuring a rustico casserole of cubed lamb tossed with herbs, garlic, tomatoes and  Parmigiano-Reggiano, layered with thinly sliced new potatoes.  I probably won’t be able to resist trading out the third cup of water the recipe calls for to be added before putting it into the oven with with wine.  As crusty as the potatoes will get, and as meltingly tender the lamb, Elytis, in spirit, is scowling at these plans.  What his country suffered at the hands of the Italians during World War II, the humiliation of foreign occupation, mass killings, rapes and starvation, would likely cause my cooking this year to catch in his throat. His experience as an officer in the heroic Albanian Campaign that resisted the Italian invasion of Greece became the genesis of the poem that marked the turning point in his career:  Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign (1945). In a letter to the translator Kimon Friar, Elytis wrote of its origins:

    ‘A kind of “metaphysical modesty” dominated me. The virtues I found embodied and living in my comrades formed in synthesis a brave young man of heroic stature, one whom I saw in every period of our history. They had killed him a thousand times, and a thousand times he had sprung up again, breathing and alive. His was no doubt the measure and worth of our civilization, compounded of his love not of death but of life. It was with his love of Freedom that he recreated life out of the stuff of death.”

    And so he wrote this magnificent cycle, fourteen stanzas, in honor of this imagined, composite, fallen soldier.  Without a trace of club-footed allegory, Elytis produced one of the most evocative Easter poems I know.  Here is the final stanza in Friar’s translation.

     

    Now the dream in the blood throbs more swiftly
    The truest moment of the world rings out:
    Liberty,
    Greeks show the way in the darkness:
    LIBERTY
    For you the eyes of the sun shall fill with tears of joy.

    Rainbow-beaten shores fall into the water
    Ships with open-sails voyage on the meadows
    The most innocent girls
    Run naked in men’s eyes
    And modesty shouts from behind the hedge
    Boys! There is no other earth more beautiful

    The truest moment of the world rings out!

    With a morning stride on the growing grass
    He is continually ascending;
    Around him those passions glow that once
    Were lost in the solitude of sin;
    Passions flame up, the neighbours of his heart;
    Birds greet him, they seem to him his companions
    ‘Birds, my dear birds, this is where death ends!’
    ‘Comrades, my dear comrades, this is where life begins!’
    The dew of heavenly beauty glistens in his hair.

    Bells of crystal are ringing far away
    Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow: the Easter of God!

     

    Odysseus Elytis, made a Nobel Laureate in 1979, died in 1996.  This year, he would have turned one hundred.  Many regard him as the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century. Greece is making a great fuss over him this year, and as his birthday, November 2, approaches, I will almost certainly be publishing more posts on him.  But for now, this Easter greeting.

     

    Odysseus Elytis

     


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  • Derek Walcott won’t save you (part 1)

    Posted on by David
    Derek Walcott

    This morning I told Sam I was going to be writing a post on Derek Walcott.  “I don’t understand why he’s considered so great,” he said.  “With the exception of that one poem about the birds, the poems of his I’ve come across have seemed so specifically about the Caribbean.  What does he have to say to an ordinary guy living in Denver?”  Sam is one of the most avid readers of poetry I know, actually much more skilled at it than I, so his question warrants a serious attempt at a response.

    I’ll begin by mentioning another poet altogether: Three years ago I had the opportunity to meet Mark Strand.  For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Strand is one of America’s preeminent poets.  Born in 1934, he is a member of what I would call a golden generation of American poets born between 1920 and 1940 which includes W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Galway Kinnell, Adrianne Rich, and Charles Simic, all of them born between 1920 and 1940.  There were great poets before them, and there are many fine younger poets at work now, but something in America’s water between the two world wars yielded an unprecedented effulgence of poetic genius.

    Mark Strand

    At 75, Mark Strand radiated upon those of us gathered his pronounced Clint Eastwood brand of handsomeness, the kind that insists on reminding you of its owner’s age. How much trust does one allot for the work of a tall handsome poet? On the one hand, physical beauty makes no difference at all.  Only the words matter, the words, how they are arranged, and to what end.  On the other hand, one can’t help wondering what tangled vines it helped clear for him from the universal jungle’s narrow and precarious path.  As if to illustrate, he told a personal anecdote that could not have happened to just anyone.  He told a story about meeting Auden:

    During Strand’s time as a student at Antioch University, W. H. Auden visited the campus, and the privilege fell to him to usher the great poet around. At the end of the day, Auden, Strand, his wife, and a friend went to the friend’s apartment for a glass of brandy.  Only problem, the friend had but three glasses.  It was decide that Wystan Hugh and Mark would share a glass.  The brandy was poured.  Auden took a sip.  Then, from the opposite side of the glass, Mark took a sip.  Auden rotated the glass to sip form where Mark’s lips had been.  Mark turned the glass, seeking an unsullied portion of the rim, whereupon Auden again placed his lips on the same coordinates.  And so it went, Auden’s lips pursuing, Strand’s  pursued.  All around the glass.

    A story like this holds several thrills.  First, there is the delight in the way the mind makes meaning.  It is the delight a poet takes in raising the mundane to the level of, if not truth, than at least wit.  Marvelous, isn’t it, that something as archetypal and untamed as the erotic chase can be channeled into a few drinks from a brandy glass.  The world seems better for this, more beautiful. Or at least more manageable.

    W. H. Auden

    Then there is the pleasure of its subject: It is a story about Auden for God’s sake! One of my first poetic idols.  So this is how, in one instance, the great man operated without paper and pen.  And there I was, mere feet away from someone who had known him. My narcissism positively quivered in the reflected glow.

    Finally, it was Mark Strand, one of America’s finest, doing the telling.  Mark Strand, to whom Harold Bloom gives over a loving section of his new book, The Anatomy of Influence. The story humanized him, as it humanized Auden.  It humanized him, but how glamorously!  Before winning the Pulitzer Prize, before becoming Poet Laureate, this man shared an escapade, if only small-scaled and symbolic, with the man who wrote The Shield of Achilles. Me? Today, I ate an egg sandwich.

    I asked Mr. Strand which poets he loved the most.  “Derek Walcott.”  Not a moment’s hesitation.  In his opinion, Derek Walcott is the greatest living poet in English (a position that I would argue once belonged to Auden).  “His use of language is…Shakespearean.”

    By coincidence, I had recently purchased Walcott’s Selected Poems (2007).  I had sniffed at it, read some poems, read lines or stanzas from others.  But, taking Strand’s cue, I decided to dive in and read it from cover to cover.

    I was not a Walcott virgin.  Back in 1992 or 1993, after he won the Nobel Prize, I went straight to the Denver Public Library and checked out his volume, The Fortunate Traveler (1981).  I copied out some of the poems (I’ve always loved doing this), including what became, and remains, one of my favorites, “The Season of Phantasmal Peace”. It is the “poem about the birds” Sam cited as the exception to his general impression of Walcott’s work. Not surprising. It is one of the high points of poetry in English.  It begins: “Then all the nations of birds lifted together/the huge net of the shadows of this earth/in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,/ stitching and crossing it.”

    When I got to the section from The Fortunate Traveler in Selected Poems, I discovered that the very first poem in this section, entitled “Piano Practice”, is dedicated to none other than Mark Strand! At one and a half pages, it is what would be for most poets a poem of medium length.  For Walcott it is positively concise.  It begins with three wonderful lines: “April, in another fortnight, metropolitan April./A drizzle glazes the museum’s entrance,/like their eyes when they leave you, equivocating spring!”

    On a hunch, I reached for my copy of Strand’s New Selected Poems, flipped through the pages.  I knew it had to be there.  Sure enough.  There, on page 243, from his 1998 volume, Blizzard for One, was, in seventeen lines of iambic hexameter, “The View”, for — Derek Walcott.

    More on Walcott, Strand, Auden, and a go at Sam’s question in my next post.


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