“Like an ermine mantle tossed over someone’s shoulder”

April 30, 2013May 1, 2013 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

This week, I’m departing from Shakespeare only to find him again in a short poem, “While Reading Hamlet” (1909), by Anna Akhmatova, the foremost Russian poet of the twentieth century. She’s perhaps best known for her long cycle Requiem, an outcry against Stalinist oppression, which claimed the lives of two of her three husbands.

This little poem is much lighter in tone, though the menace of the cemetery lingers. I wrestle with reading poems in translation, because to me it tends to feel almost like voyeurism, peeking in at something I don’t really have the right to know about or understand. No-one can speak all languages, though, polyglots notwithstanding, and so I must resign myself to translation if I want to read Milosz or Szymborska or Rimbaud or the great Anna Akhmatova.

I’m reading from my copy of the Norton edition of Akhmatova’s poems translated by Lyn Coffin; you can find it here.

Fast Read: Matthew Quick, Silver Linings Playbook

April 29, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

My husband and I have been out together, sans bebe, a grand total of once this year, and it was to see Silver Linings Playbook. We were surprised that Bradley Cooper can really act (though we shouldn’t have been — he’s hilarious in Wet Hot American Summer) and agreed that Jennifer Lawrence is pretty rad. As we left the theater, we talked about how we felt like we’d seen a good movie; not a flick, not an art-house piece (we like those too), but a good solid movie.

So we bought the book.

I zipped through it in about two and a half hours on Saturday night (can you tell we have a toddler?). It’s different from the movie, of course; Pat Peoples is more disturbed and more interesting the book, but I think the other characters—particularly Pat’s father and Tiffany—are fleshed out more in the movie.

Still, the book is an engaging picture of mental illness and the glories and lows of fandom, with some very funny passages to boot. Lit geeks will love Pat’s short reviews of classic American novels. My favorite:

Maybe Puritans were simply dumber than modern people, but I cannot believe how long it took those seventeenth-century Bostonians to figure out that their spiritual leader knocked up the local hussy. [. . .] I know we were assigned Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter back in high school, and if I had known the book was filled with so much sex and espionage, I might have read it when I was sixteen. (Matthew Quick, Silver Linings Playbook, 57)

A quick read, with short chapters; might be perfect for beach season, especially if you’re taking turns chasing a toddler.

“Sweet love, renew thy force”

April 23, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

After the awful and exhausting events of last week, I felt drained just contemplating the search for this week’s poem. Then I realized that today is the Bard’s birthday, and my dear Aunt Rita’s, and the choice was clear.

A sonnet!

Who doesn’t love fourteen lines of love poetry? I’ve taught the sonnets whenever I could, and students are always amazed at just how much meaning Will packs into those lines (and that the first cycle is addressed to a man — that’s mind-blowing to them, and perhaps unsurprising, since some editions “regularize” the pronouns in the earlier poem. Don’t get me started.).

My favorite is 116, which we asked a friend to read at our wedding, and which is probably one of the five most famous. I remember hearing it (or rather, part of it) first in Sense and Sensibility (adapted by Emma Thompson, bless her, and directed by Ang Lee), and that’s one of my favorite literary combinations.

But that’s not the first time I heard a sonnet. I can precisely date my first memory of one of the poems: my tenth birthday. At the time, my father was working out of state, but he and my uncle (my mother’s brother) took the time to sit in my uncle’s kitchen and record a tape (yes, I’m that old) of songs and poems for me. I treasure it; it’s on my desk as we speak. My uncle played the guitar and my dad attempted the drums, and they both sang and read. Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, and even a few originals made it on to the tape. I listen to it every year on my birthday, but it’s been so long that I can hear clips of the tape in my mind if I choose to. The banter and the squeaky chair are hilarious.

My father is an excellent reader (more on that some other time), and so I’m choosing to memorize the sonnet he read for me, “Sonnet 6–Number 56,” as he corrected himself.

William Shakespeare

Sonnet 56

Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,
To-morrow sharp’ned in his former might:
So, love, be thou: although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fullness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness:
Let this sad int’rim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;
As call it winter, which being full of care
Makes summer’s welcome thrice more wish’d, more rare.

Happy birthday Shakespeare!

On Watertown

April 22, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

The Os At Home

On Thursday night, I was up late. As I finished brushing my teeth, I heard a boom, and then another. I texted my neighbors to be sure I wasn’t hearing things, and then, when I heard the third explosion, I woke up my husband: “I think something bad is happening.”

Almost immediately, we heard rapid gunfire. We raced to check that the doors and windows were locked, and my husband smelled something burning as he re-shut the front door.

Over the next few hours, we took turns watching the side windows and comforting our son (not quite two) as the search helicopters flew low over our neighborhood. By 2:00am, state police had cruisers parked across the street, which was a great relief to us.

Still, we knew that even with all the official resources directed at our town, the police couldn’t be on every side street, and so, in the…

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“Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

April 16, 2013April 16, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

After we turned the television off last night, and let the quiet seep in, we were no less sad, but we had the space to feel the sadness of the day, and great thankfulness and joy in our ordinary lives.

Walt Whitman

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

“Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind”

April 10, 2013April 17, 2013 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

I don’t have anything new or insightful to say about death.

In the last five years, I’ve dealt with death by reading poetry. First I read poems to choose the ones other people would read at the funeral. Then I kept reading. I’ve read elegies and sonnets. I’ve read poems about the dead who died too young, about dead poets, about dead lovers, dead friends. And I’ve read poems that aren’t, ostensibly, about death, but that speak to me about the dead anyway.

Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. Two poems that have meant something particular to me are “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman, and “Lycidas,” by Milton, of course (despite his egotism, the last twenty lines are amazing). I’ll be re-reading them tomorrow.

And I read “Dirge Without Words” by Edna St. Vincent Millay last week. I love Millay’s work, but I’d never read this poem before, and in its rage and futility and acknowledgment of all the customary tropes, it’s perfect.

“Silver dust, / lifted from the earth”

April 2, 2013 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

It is, perhaps, premature to offer a spring poem from my chair in New England. But the crocuses are blooming — yesterday we counted twenty-one next to the garage — and I wish I had an orchard (romantic, I know, and all the orchard-growers out there will tell me how much work I’d be in for), so this week I’m reading “Pear Tree,” by the Imagist poet H.D. (less mysteriously, Hilda Doolittle).

And, with a pithiness that I hope befits the poet, that’s that.

“Your hands hold roses always in a way that says / They are not only yours”

March 26, 2013 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

The end of a long story of mine is that I own the poetry collection of someone I loved very deeply and who died much too young. In the beginning I kept our collections separate, and thought that someday I’d try to read through them as a way to work through my grief. But over time the project receded, and our collections have melded together so thoroughly that often I don’t know the provenance of a particular book.

This morning, my little son, H, and I were looking over the shelves to find a poem to work on this week, and I was drawn to Richard Wilbur’s New and Collected Poems (1989), which won the Pulitzer (Wilbur’s second). It’s a thick volume, and I found several promising poems, full of sly wit and concrete images, but nothing that shook me by the shoulders and said “This one!”

Until, that is, as my son fell asleep in my arms, I read the title of the last section: The Beautiful Changes, the title of Wilbur’s first book of poetry, published in 1947, when he was twenty-six (oh, to have the touch of genius!). My hands shook a little; I know these poems, “Cicadas” and “O.” I’ve read poems that talk to them.

And the last poem in the book, in the collection, is “The Beautiful Changes,” and it expresses, for me, what has happened since I lost this person I loved, whose fingers turned these very pages. Through the madness and the crushing weight of sorrow, the images that I cannot un-see, life and consolation reached out and found me.

I knew, without looking, that if I opened the inside back cover, I’d find three angular initials, and that they wouldn’t be mine.

But now the poem is ours.