The year winds down.... This poem is from EMBLEM:

DECEMBER 31st

All my undone actions wander

naked across the calendar,

a band of skinny hunter-gatherers,

blown snow scattered here and there,

stumbling toward a future

folded in the New Year I secure

with a pushpin: January’s picture

a painting from the 17^th century,

a still-life: skull and mirror,

spilled coinpurse and a flower.

A poem from EMBLEM for Columbus Day:

EVERYONE

Columbus thought he had discovered the Indies so he called the people he encountered Indians, but he was wrong; he had discovered the working class.

He took their sage,

not their advice;

it smoldered like rage

but smelled nice.

One of the Santa Maria's crew, avaricious and schooled in flattery, suggested to Columbus that he try calling them "the middle class." They seemed to like that just fine. They smiled. Why not? Sure. Sounds good.

Columbus ordered them given naugahyde and vinyl. Then he watched to see what they would make of it. It stuck to sweaty skin in summer and in winter it was cold as metal. It cracked, and several cut their buttocks on it.

Eventually they came around, though, when the buffalo were shot to hell, the beaver damned, and the deer and the antelope played out.

Like the real Indians, the real middle class was a world away.

Soon after his return, Columbus was imprisoned for his errors. The King and Queen concurred that these new subjects must forget their names, and never know their purpose to the empire. Thus, an edict went forth that there were no classes in the New World because

in the New World, everyone is Middle Class. Everyone.

Happy 78th Birthday, Leonard Cohen!

If I remember correctly, we were talking about his friend and mentor, the poet Irving Layton, whose work I encountered as a young man at a time when I really needed it. His poems of grief and anger showed me a way forward in a dark time. And of course Cohen's poems, which represented an alternative to the canonical modernists on the one hand and the Beats on the other, whom I found overbearing and loud. We talked a good while about poets and poetry and later about being grandfathers.

This photo was taken by Rick Friedman and belongs to the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

I've recently reread Cohen's The Book of Mercy to see if it would still move me as it once did. It does.

(Layton's work, admittedly older, often feels dated to me, as if arising from a cultural context, especially with regard to masculinity, that has passed.)

Look at Cohen's hands in the photo: time and again, in The Book of Mercy, head and heart come together in just that way. I close that book not with an urge to paraphrase or otherwise talk about it, but with gratitude.

Today's wood s lot has a good deal more depth in its treatment of Robert Bringhurst. Thank you to Mark Woods. 

I want to dedicate this post to the work of the Canadian poet, Robert Bringhurst. It is either the perfect example of our xenophobic poetic culture in the US, or else my own narrow-gauge attention to what is — in this case so gloriously — being written elsewhere in North America that I had not heard of him until recently. Now I am reading his Selected Poems from Copper Canyon, and I am completely in thrall to this body of work: serious and playful, political and spiritual, formal, lyrical, learned, and sublime. Here is his “These Poems, She Said”

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
                                       You are, he said,
beautiful.
                That is not love, she said rightly.

According to Kate Kelloway, writing in The Observer, Bringhurst “has the curiosity of a scientist. He never overindulges in emotion. His writing is at once lyrical and spartan. And yet he is witty. And while he has no taste for lamentation, many a poem catches, calmly, at the heart.”

You can find him reading on YouTube here and here.

Bringhurst is, as it happens, also the foremost typographer of our age, and his Elements of Typographic Design is considered mandatory reading for book and, now, web designers.

Here are three poems of mine from the most recent Manhattan Review:


COROLLARY

The body,

six feet

underground,

requires

six days

to break down.

Bulbs must wait

in warming loam

six months

or more. And so

the earth is vast,

love urgent.

PATRIMONY

1.

He is out of work.

We are out of money.

My mother's patience

makes him feel worse.

He has lost his temper

again and he is sorry.

Priests have told him

ever since he was a boy

to stop touching himself.

He hides the magazines,

thinks himself weak.

In the doorway of a plane,

you jump, you do not

shake and shit yourself,

kicked into the flak-lit

night the stench of you

like a thing already dead.

It is a long way down.

A lot can go wrong, so

he pretends to know

what a man and death is,

nothing under his feet

as percussive waves

of light explode around him

like shots of whiskey.

Later he makes believe

he is still the man he

can't remember, the boy

he can't remember.

Maybe there is another

life he was to have.

Maybe he was lazy

and missed his chance.

He wants to be the man

he imagines his wife

loves, the god his father

was to him, the god

he hopes his sons think

him. Complexion: Ruddy

it says on his license.

A doctor diagnoses him

with hypertension.

He loves but still believes

he is pretending.

2.

A son might hold a father

to account for certain

memories, for certain

understandings, to desire

anyone, or anything at all.

A lot can go wrong, so

he pretends to know

what a man and love is.

He may have to help himself

to his father's shame

for a time to understand.

Sometimes a long time.

And then, even if he turns,

if he rises and bathes

and dresses and shaves

and takes up his life at last,

he cannot say if that is

or is not forgiveness.

The much he must learn

becomes his life. There is

no might have been, no

otherwise or if only, only

the ground under his feet.

Elsewhere men continue

falling from the sky.

GLIMPSE AND RUMOR

See them before the door

closes, doing their jobs.

Papers to sign. Making

laws making money.

Changing the names

of streets, buildings, bridges.

Writing plausible tales.

Quick before the door closes.

Word is he’s back,

baptized in our amnesia.

Cain. Cain.

Wasn’t he one of Eve’s boys?

Yes, I heard that. Which

is his cubicle? He might be

a good man to know sometime.

This from Chris Lydon today. Reposting it here. These are conversations that shed light, serious inquiries into what has befallen us and speculations about how we might survive with our humanity intact.

Dearest Ones:

The ghost of Tony Judt, historian and prophet, hovers over the best conversations we've recorded this spring -- for all the reasons that Ill Fares the Land, Judt's parting sermon, hovers over the 2012 campaign and American life this Fourth of July.

The connecting thread that Tony Judt spun brilliantly is the common dread underlying both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party. It's an unfamiliar, almost unnameable anxiety -- that we don't recognize our country any more; that our imperial illusions are crashing and we're the last to get the joke; that the rough-and-tumble egalitarian premises we grew up with are being mocked by legislated inequality that must get worse; that the public conversation has died, and that all the semi-private buzzing on the Web doesn't make up.

"We cannot go on living like this," Judt wrote, and worse: "We simply do not know how to talk about these things any more."

Three main points stick out of the Judt diagnosis: (1) the enfeeblement of "social democracy" in the American Dream -- the slashing of taxes that enabled a distributed prosperity; (2) the old cult and social disease of private wealth which has infected the culture and the curriculum of the rising generation; and (3) the collapse of a reasonably inclusive and "ethically informed public conversation." Most people, he wrote "don't feel as though they are part of any conversation of significance."

Judt's prescriptions were all over the place. He said we must "theorize our better instincts," but also: "we need to act upon our intuitions of impending catastrophe." We need to recast our public conversation around measures of human well-being, and we need a new crop of defiantly self-reliant dissenters to keep it honest.

Ill Fares the Land -- from Oliver Goldsmith's couplet: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay" -- reads to me like the missing manual of the malaise in the land, a perfect outline for the Obama-Romney debates. On the chance that we won't hear these angles on the stump, we're taking Tony Judt's themes as a framework for conversations about the American condition in 2012 --

Happy Fourth!

Yours ever and ever,

Chris Lydon

http://www.radioopensource.org/