The obligations are beginning to pile up: lots of editing, a few workshops and readings on the horizon, my continuing slog into The Conversation. Today I hope to finish a chunk of editing as well as a chunk of my Donne chapter. But I also have band practice and soccer-match driving, a thicket of raspberries to wade through, lawn mowing, bread baking, and so on and so on and so on. You must be tired of rereading this repetitive list.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have nothing to do. But I cannot sit in my chair and write all day. Then I would get fat and ill. True, yanking a bad push mower over five acres of grass counteracts the fatness and the illness, but it wastes so much time. I could be writing.

Ay yi yi: the circular comedies of the underemployed anxious poet.

Meanwhile, Donne glowers from the cover of his biography. "Quit this fretfull Complaint," he remarks. Woolf snorts and lights another cigarette, while Homer ambles down the beach and vanishes among the rocks.

I haven't given you a Milly Jourdain poem since May, so here is another pair. The second is, I think, my favorite of all of her poems. I like it so much that I've decided to include it in The Conversation. I hope Milly would be pleased.

The Huntsman 

Milly Jourdain 

We drove along the narrow lane, all dark
With sodden leaves and mud, and paused to see
The misty vale, between the leafless trees. 

Then all at once we heard the thud of hoofs,
And close to us some horses galloped by;
With passionate strength and heaving flanks they passed. 

When they had gone, the earth seemed very still;
Only the trampled road and brambles torn,
And on the grassy side some deep hoof-marks.


Watching the Meet 

Milly Jourdain 

The air is still so new and fresh and cold,
It makes a warm excitement in our hearts
To drive beside the sad and lonely fields.
And now we see a wider space of road
Where groups of horsemen moving restlessly
Are waiting for the quiet-footed hounds.
The hounds come swiftly, covering the way
Like foaming water surging round our feet.
And then with cries and sound of cracking whips
All, all are gone: the distant beat of hoofs
Like trailing smoke of dreams, comes fitfully
To tell how near they were a moment past.
But we see only winter trees again,
And turning homewards meet a drifting rain.

I love the image of the hounds as surging foam, I love the dramatic leap and release of this poem, and I love the way in which the weather conditions are folded into that drama. The poem has a Doppler-effect change in intensity, which is deft and natural. It pleases me every time I read it. 

A quiet morning, dim and foggy. The heavy-headed tomato plants sag into the mulch. No birds sing. Tires hiss on the road, and slow rain drips from the eaves. Everyone else is still asleep, except for the kitten, who is stalking a helpless wind-up rat.

I will be writing about John Donne again, and baking bread. I feel as if I have become an extraordinarily dull correspondent, and I apologize. Life is repetitive. I don't do much that is new, though I did recently read someone else's essay about avant-garde poetry, and I didn't understand either the hinting tone of the article or the poetry itself. Maybe I'm stupider than a real intellectual, but I equate posturing with chicanery. Perhaps I'm wrong.

All I know is that I cannot bear artists who scoff at emotional attachment, who base their creations on cynicism and ridicule.

Sorry about missing yesterday's post. I've been distracted: my parents are visiting, I had a gig last night, and I was preparing for my son's birthday, which is today. All of these things are interrelated as my parents specifically planned their visit in order to overlap with the gig and the birthday. And because they had never seen me perform anything other than classical music, I was somewhat worried about how comfortable they'd be at the show. It turned out that they were thrilled. From the stage I could see my mom beaming through the entire performance, and this was such a joy.

And now today our James is nineteen years old. I think about what he has become, and I am at a loss for words. He is so confident and capable, so patient and hilarious, so charming. This time last year I was prepping myself to endure his departure to college. Now I can say that college was exactly the step he needed to take. He is becoming an exemplary man. He doesn't need me to take care of him. But he loves me anyway.

Last night's gig at the Red Maple Inn was so much fun. To the amusement of the bass player, I revealed that this was the very first time I had ever played in a bar. The opportunity doesn't come up much for classical violinists. The rest of the band has played in bars since they were 15 and talk as if they never want to do it again. But I could tell they were having a good time. We ended up playing the blues way more than we usually do, and I've got to say: playing the blues on the violin is a seductive thrill. It's true that a large proportion of our audience was drunk, but it was still enjoyable to be performing for people who weren't 110 years old and sitting in lawn chairs. One guy even danced. And he only had one leg.

Local Death (1905)

Dawn Potter

Mary M., deaf and dumb girl, age 38 yrs,

is the victim of flames.

Parents returned home to find her

lying in the throes of death.

This is one of the most pathetic accidents

that have ever happened in Fayette County.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse-history-in-progress of southwestern Pennsylvania]

It's time for the summer's first canning project: I'll be putting up a batch of dilly beans, in between making a lemon layer cake for a friend who's catering a canoe-building workshop. I'll probably also be baking bread, and I know I'll be driving the kid to work and soccer camp. But I love a cooking day. I'd like think that I'll be working on a poem while the canner boils or the frosting sets, but we'll see.

I spent much of yesterday with Donne. He is very exhausting. Here's a bit of what I wrote, and I hope it's true.

***

Lucille Clifton’s poem “sorrows” opens with “who would believe them winged,” an unpunctuated, uncapitalized line that is a clear, straightforward question. Her sentence doesn’t require punctuation or capitalization to convey what Frost called “the sound of sense.” In contrast, John Donne relies on ornate, heavy-handed punctuation to demarcate the sentences in “The Triple Foole.” Nevertheless, at first reading I’m not always convinced that what Donne has marked out as a sentence is, in the OED’s terms, “complete in itself as the expression of a thought.”

But what is “the expression of a thought”? My own thoughts are frequently clotted, unclear, and ambiguous; and it seems that Donne may have felt the same about his, for not much in “The Triple Foole” can be called straightforward. Let’s look at the opening sentence and track how the speaker moves grammatically through his own perplexity.

I am two fooles, I know,

For loving, and for saying so

            In whining Poëtry;

But where’s that wiseman, that would not be I,

            If she would not deny?

            The sentence breaks neatly into halves. The first section, which ends at the semicolon, lays out a claim (“I am two fooles, I know”) and follows with supporting reasons. Foole 1 is foolish “For loving,” and Foole 2 is foolish “for saying so / In whining Poëtry.” Thus far, the sentence seems to express a coherent thought “complete in itself.”

            But after the semicolon, things get stranger. As the sentence shifts from a statement to a question, the speaker lays out a series of linked but incongruous phrases. “But where’s that wiseman,” he asks. Immediately he undercuts the question with the self-deprecating “that would not be I.” Or should I read this as an excuse rather than as modesty? Suddenly I find myself not entirely trusting this speaker. What is he trying to evade? The sentence continues, deepening my confusion. “If she would not deny?” Deny what? Are words missing here? The sentence feels as if it’s been chopped off mid-phrase. Typically, “deny” would be followed by a noun phrase or a dependent clause: for instance, deny my love, deny that I am a foole. As it is, the question leaves me hanging. I don’t understand what’s going on. All I know is that I am confused, suspicious of the speaker, and curious about this enigmatic “she,” this mysterious “deny.”

            “The Triple Foole” is an early seventeenth-century poem. No doubt there’s a scholarly edition that would translate its archaic sentences into contemporary English, lifting my spirits and erasing my puzzlement. But even though I honor such scholarship, I  want to argue for the value of coming to a poem as it exists, unadorned, on the page. I think it’s important to meet a difficult poem on your own ground, to rely on your own wits and reactions as you wrestle with it.

Are my reactions to this sentence “correct”? If I were faced with a multiple-choice question about “The Triple Foole,” I’d probably get the answer wrong. But when I ask myself what I’ve learned, I see that I’ve made an important discovery. Pushing myself to look closely at the structure of the sentence has also pushed me look closely at the structure of a thought. And what I’ve learned is that, for some poets, sentences really do seem to mirror thoughts. Clear or confused, simple or complex, Donne’s thoughts unwind as his sentences unwind. When I read his lines, I feel as if I am wandering along the pathways of his brain, at one moment basking in his rational neatness, at another drowning in his tortuous evasions. “Donne felt his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose,” writes A. S. Byatt. Now I know what she means.

[from a draft chapter of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014)]