Month: October 2007

The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov

I’m back to reading more of those collected works I bought many years ago thinking that I would find time to read them, but never did. Most of the time these were contemporary poets I discovered while majoring in poetry at UW and whose collected poems I bought when it appeared later.

Howard Nemerov probably belongs more to my father’s generation than mine since he fought in World War II. The difference is clear in the first section of The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, poems published in 1947. Eliot’s influence hangs over most of the poems with an almost palpable air of despair.

Many of the poems seem generic, but a few like this one:

FOR W_______ , WHO COMMANDED WELL

You try to fix your mind upon his death,
Which seemed it might, somehow, be relevant
To something you once thought, or did, or might
Imagine yourself thinking, doing. When?

It was, once, the most possible of dreams:
The hero acted it, philosophers
Could safely recommend it to the young;
It was acceptable, a theme for song.

And it was wrong? Daily the press commends
A rationed greed, the radio denies
That war is right, or wrong, or serious:
And money is being made, and the wheels go round,
And death is paying for itself: and so
It does not seem that anything was lost.

seem to give deeper meaning to the overall despair. Poems like this one remind us that Nemerov was a pilot in the WW II and was undoubtedly still trying to make sense of a country that seemed more intent on making up for economic sacrifices made during the war than on honoring those who sacrificed their lives.

This is also a major theme in one of my favorite novels, Catch-22, where it’s symbolized by Milo Minderbinder. I’m not sure whether society’s greed is an issue for everyone who fights in a war, but it was an issue for many of us who fought in Vietnam and came home to discover that we seemed to be the only ones making sacrifices. It’s hard not to admit that the very same thing is going on today.

Perhaps this poem means more to we “old-timers” raised to believe in “heroes” than to today’s younger generation who’ve too often seen “hero” equated with “victim,” as in he “died a hero,” than by reading Greek or Roman classics. Perhaps their view is closer to reality, but that doesn’t make it any easier for those of us raised with a different definition to accept that a friend’s loss was meaningless.

It’s not just people who are lost in combat; whole belief systems are swept away, and victims are left to try to make sense of a meaningless world.

The Eye Begins to See

I added a couple of new photo albums to the Gallery today. Of course, all of these photographs are photos I’ve used on this site before, so if you’re a long time user there’s nothing new to see. I’ve actually enjoyed creating these, though, as they’ve given me some new insights into my photography skills.

If you want to see something entirely different, though, I discovered that I was entitled to free web space on my ISP that I wasn’t using. I really haven’t discovered what I want to do there, but I spent some time with Apple’s iWeb and created a photo album over there that consists of hummingbird pictures that I downloaded from aperture onto iPhoto and then directly into an iWeb album. I can’t promise how long it will be there before I delete it and try something new, but it’s there for a little while at least. I’m not sure that I will ever be able to repeat the process, but the album does offer some hummingbird shots that have never appeared here before.

It turns out that my new pictures are often quite a bit better than pictures I originally posted on In a Dark Time. So, if I were making an album today most of the shots would be recent ones, not older ones.

John Daniel’s Common Ground

Somewhere in the past someone recommended or I read something that made me put John Daniel’s Common Ground on my Amazon wish list, and boy am I glad that I did. I read the whole 62 pages today, and ended up marking 11 poems that I really like, any one of which I could have cited as a poem well worth reading. Considering that both Denise Levertov and Wallace Stegner wrote recommendations for the book, I guess that’s not surprising.

Probably even more important, though, is that I share a common experience with Daniel, both having spent considerable time on both sides of Oregon’s Cascade mountains. Those experiences seem to have led us to very similar views of nature and man’s relationship to nature.

I was amazed that there was barely a single poem that I couldn’t identify with, a rarity even in those poets I most love. It’s impossible to show the many similarities without citing most of the book, but this poem

Ourselves

When the throaty calls of sandhill cranes
echo across the valley, when the rimrock flares
incandescent red, and the junipers
are flames of green on the shortgrass hills,

in that moment of last clear light
when the world seems ready to speak its name,
meet me in the field alongside the pond.
Without careers for once, without things to do,

without dreams or anger or the rattle of fears,
we’ll ask how it can be that we walk this ground
and know that we walk, alive in a world
that didn’t have to be beautiful, alive

in a world that doesn’t have to be.
With no answers, just ourselves and silence,
we’ll listen for the song that waits to be learned,
the song that moves through the passing light.

does as well as any single poem in the book of showing how similar our views are.

Thankfully, I’ve been blessed by many moments like this where nature seemed to speak to me directly, both through wildlife and the sheer beauty of the setting. It’s these kinds of moments that make all the effort of backpacking into the wilderness worthwhile. When backpacking there is no career, there is nothing to do — other than prepare a few simple meals.

During those long meditative walks you learn as much about yourself as you do about nature’s magnificence. You begin to learn the “sound of nature,” the great AUM that underlies existence.

Dugan’s Last Poems

I must admit I was beginning to tire a bit of Dugan’s Poems Seven by the time I finally finished it. Luckily, the last section entered some new areas, and Dugan’s sense of humor came to the fore, probably because by the time you reach eighty that’s about all you have left.

I seriously thought about citing a poem called “Another Cat Poem, To a Cat Person” but reconsidered when I recalled I still might need to ask for some technical assistance on updating my site.

Besides, this poem seems to have a more universal appeal and provides a cleaner answer to those who argue that America was founded on fundamental Christian principles:

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CORN IN AMERICAN HISTORY

After the Puritans landed at Provincetown
and the women washed their dirty clothes
their men marched to Truro to perform
their first political act: theft.
They stole the Indians’ corn
buried on Corn Hill, so why
is there no monument to them
or corn on Corn Hill in Truro?
For the same reason that there is no
working laundry in Provincetown:
Cleanliness is next to godliness,
thievery is next to Americanness,
and we must not publicize
that this country was made
by a bunch of dirty crooks.

I wish I’d found this poem while I was still teaching American Lit; I would have introduced it during that boring, beginning section when the texts introduced Puritan “literature,” which consisted almost solely of sermons and self-serving diaries.

I’m sure most students wouldn’t even recognize this as “poetry,” since it seems so different from what’s usually taught as poetry. In retrospect, this poem reminds me more of the Beat poets than traditional American poets. There’s an immediacy and grittiness usually lacking in popular poetry that can be found throughout Dugan’s poetry. It often seems to offer gnomic truths reminiscent of Emerson or Thoreau’s aphorisms, but, unfortunately, it lacks the rhythm and power that made Whitman’s re-statement of the same ideas unforgettable.