Briareus Writes a Poem

Generally, Yahoo may be relied upon to filter spam, but today,
one spam got through the filter, and I perhaps unwisely
read it. Below the usual subject line, advertising
cheap diet pills (not Viagra this time), I read:
"Like an old soldier, wakeful, in his tent!
And so I gaze avidly
Down the road, at Cypress Gardens, a woman
Against which we have been projected? What . . .
This drizzling three-day January thaw,
And piled up at the base of the columns
In a single floral stroke,
their bellies, they're out cold, instantaneously
XVI. Laying a Ghost: The Jeannette and the Fram
on their own little seat cushions, wearing soft caps
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Away, my songs, must we go
Swaying in unison beneath the snow,
Toward the still dab of white that oscillates
Against this sky no longer of our world.
Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
to try that, to hold a terrifying beast
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
That desire has ever built, have approached"
This seems to be a ragout of lines of verse harvested from all over the Net--
I've identified one line of Robert Pack
and one of Victor Hugo. I haven't enough ambition to investigate all of them...
The effect is as though the Hechatoncheires, the hundred-handed, fifty-headed
giants of Greek myth, wrote a poem in idiot imitation of their betters.
How like the Web they are--incalculably strong, inarguable, ferocious,
grasping, thoughtless, seizing fragments and bits for a ridiculous
but high-sounding omelette of words. And yet, how like
certain poems by John Ashbery or Leslie Scalapino the result is...

The Acrobat

Her name is Marie--the papier-mache acrobat : her career remains unknown.
My erstwhile housemate informs me that she received Marie as a gift years ago--more than that we still do not know.

An End in View; Natural Narcissism; My Acrobat

I slipped Disc 10 of the audio version of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise this morning. Nemirovksy's skill, and her complex compassion for her characters, has not failed. Since she died in 1942--in the camps--she was in no sense a post-Holocaust or post-Nazi writer: she declines to demonize the German soldiers who occupy the second novel in the "suite" as they occupy the little country town--I wonder if she would have felt that luxury if she had walked out of the camps, or even if she had learned of their horrors from the safety of England or America in 1945. It is a salutary lesson for us: before they became a byword--a trite byword--for repression and evil, German soldiers were men.
And I feel the sorrow one does on finishing a great and important book for the first time. There is no recovery of that first naivete: it is like the uneasy transition from the "crush" to liking or love or indifference.
I drew my class--sleepy on a Friday--through poems by Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith. I made a case for the true Romantic's benign narcissism: leaving the crowded highway of satire and social verse (Pope's Rape of the Lock, Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Crabbe's great narratives) for the lone poppy in the field, the solo vista over sleeping London, seeking the self mirrored in nature. It is interesting to see how loud and persistent that subjectivism is...
Seated in a miniature Adirondack chair that makes the base of a lamp in my kitchen is a mystifying figure--a jointed papier-mache woman, left behind by my former housemate years ago. For some time, she was seated a little precariously inside a papier-mache mold of my friend Rachel's foot, where she jostled for space with Maurice Sendak monsters and stale candied almonds. Now her repose has more dignity, undercut only by her casual attire. Looked at casually, she seems naked, or clothed in the least underthings, but I realized a few months ago that her clothing--painted on--is a faded acrobat's outfit. From this and from her fixed papier-mache coiffure, she could be a hundred years old. What was she?--an exile from a jointed circus? Too frail for dedicated children's play, she must have been created for display--but what?

Good nights and days, Irene

Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise is accompanying me on my daily jaunts to Hartford--as new as the translation is, there is already a recorded version on CD. No single work of fiction has impressed me as thoroughly and as deeply since I first read War and Peace. Have I read her equal, and Tolstoy's equal, in these intervening years? of course--but Nemirovsky is for me, as for most of the world, a discovery, and encountering her has the delight of the unexpected. The first novel of two that she completed in what was to have been a five-novel sequence depicts the flight of several people, singles, couples, and families, from Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Nemirovsky's deft management of the shifts in the narrative from the collective to the particular, her quick, mercurial, razor-sure creations of and delineations of character are not less than dazzling.
And this is another of the Nazi murders: she died in the camps in 1942. Russian-Jewish by extraction, she thought and felt and wrote as a French woman. This is the very essence of the crude, stupid, reductive racism of the Nazis: Nemirovsky's uniqueness is dismissed for an accident of birth that did not define her. How many more Nemirovskys did the Nazis murder? the Stalinist purges? It's all very well, with Gray, to mope for "mute inglorious Miltons"--but his poor shepherd-boys and thwarted lights died in their beds.