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Frogs, Toads, & Bats

Lyric poet Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner: nom-de-guerre Gertrud Kolmar, RIP


Frogs and toads and bats have had a special place in my heart for as long as I can remember. I love these beasties for their diversity, their versatility, their resilience, and for what they represent.

Beginning about two years ago — for reasons which go far beyond that lovely ghoul-haunted month meaning “8th month,” from the old ten-month Roman calendar, October — my interest in these creatures grew significantly. So that now, even after all the surreal strangeness and surprise and pain and mistakes of the past two years, these little living beasts of beauty remain as pure and pristine and beautiful to me as they ever were. What better time than mid-October to share this absolutely remarkable and pitch-perfect poem, written by an almost-forgotten writer named Gertrud Käthe Chodziesne (1894 — 1943), whose pseudonym was Gertrud Kolmar, a German poet of great power. I love animal poetry — and I’m not speaking hyperbolically when I say that this is truly one of my all-time favorite animal poems. It’s intimidatingly well-observed and evocative and gorgeous, with a delightful nod to Shakespeare in the very last line.


The Toad

The bluish twilight sinks with dripping dews,
Dragging behind its broad, rose-golden fringes.
Lone poplars stand out black on soft pale hues.
A tender birch dissolves to mist-gray tinges,
And apples roll like skulls toward the furrows.
The leaves, like crackling embers, fade to brown,
While ghostly lamps peer from a distant town.
White meadow fog brews beasts within their burrows.

I am the toad.
I love the stars of night.
The coals of sunset, evening’s ruddy load,
Smolder in purple ponds, barely alight.
Beneath the rainbarrel’s sodden wood
I crouch, low, fat, and wise.
My painful moon-eyes wait and brood
To view the sun’s demise.

I am the toad.
Whispering night is my abode.
A slender flute stirs
And sings in swaying reeds and sedge.
A velvet violinist whirrs
And fiddles at the field’s edge.
I listen, silent, from my soggy seat.
Then, pushing with my finger feet,
Beneath the rotten planks I creep.
Out of the morass, inch by inch I wind,
Like a thought that, buried deep,
Emerges from a muddled mind.
Through the weeds I hop and over gravel,
A dark and humble sense.
Over dew-soaked leaves I travel
Toward the black-green ivy by the fence.

I breathe and swim
upon a peaceful deep.
And from the garden’s rim,
With modest voice I peep
Among the feathered night, and rest
Defenseless. So be cruel —
Come kill me! Though to you I’m but a pest:
I am the toad. I wear a precious jewel.



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The Zen of Allen Ginsberg

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Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3rd, 1926, and died April 5th, 1997.

Today is his 88th birthday.

Ginsberg, along with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, is a preeminent figure in the 1950’s Beat Generation counterculture — i.e. the Beatniks — and if you’ve ever wondered what, precisely, these women and men stood for, it is really just the garden-variety, hippy-dippy, neo-Marxist’s dogma. Indeed, the following and more famous 1960’s hippy movement was a direct outgrowth of the Beats:

They opposed capitalism — or what they called “economic materialism” — sexual repression, military force, and all the other usual suspects.

In 1956, Ginsberg, already semi-famous, was catapulted into the international limelight, when his wildly popular poem “Howl” first appeared.

“Howl” is a long, sprawling, loose, baggy monster, only partly intelligible, in which Ginsberg bemoans, among other things, “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”

“Howl” is essentially a protracted denunciation of what Allen Ginsberg saw as the “destructive forces of capitalism” in the good old United States of America.

There is also the undeniable theme of non-conformity running throughout his most famous poem, and, for that matter, his entire oeuvre.

But the Ginsberg line I’ve always enjoyed most — and have quoted it here before — isn’t from “Howl” or any of his other poems. It’s from a 1986 interview he gave to the Newark Review. I trust you will find it as edifying as I do:

“We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re going to fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tell one’s friends about that?”

(Listen to him read this excerpt)

Happy Birthday, Irwin Allen Ginsberg, R.I.P.





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Greatest Living American Poet?

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Richard Purdy Wilbur — American poet and literary translator, second Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1987), two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1957 and again in 1989), New York City native who published his first poem when he was only eight-years-old — was born March 1st, 1921.

He is 93 years young today.

A good argument can be made that he is America’s greatest living poet.

I, for one, have been influenced by several of his poems.

He’s a formal (sometimes neo-formal) poet whose language is modern and almost always intelligible — a relative rarity in that bucal-fecal carnival called modern poetry.

Here’s a poem of his I first read many years ago, one that’s remained among my all-time favorites — a lesser-known poem, to be sure, every line of which rhymes — about a toad upon whom a freak accident falls. What’s always moved me most about this poem is the dignity that Richard Wilbur gives to his little guy:

Death of a Toad

A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.

The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,

Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.


Happy Birthday, Richard Wilbur.Screen Shot 2014-03-01 at 2.30.20 PM






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Kevin


Unknown



My name is Kevin. I’m Kevin Mathew Haas.
My last name does not rhyme with moss.
It does not rhyme with floss.
To say so makes me cross.
Many regard me as the motherfucking boss.
I enjoy a little of the sauce.
In fact, my last name — Haas —
rhymes with gauze.
(This should give you pause.)
It also rhymes with laws.
I, Kevin Mathew Haas,
liked The Wizard of Oz
but did not particularly care for Jaws,
which I saw when I was seven.
My name is Kevin.


Editors note: the preceding was a poem I wrote about my co-worker Kevin — the Bob Ross of bartending, the Meatloaf of mixology, the William Shakespeare of sauce-slinging, the Kenny Chesney of the craft cocktail.

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View Of A Pig

This was written by the late Ted Hughes, most famous, I think, for being the husband of Sylvia Plath:

The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.

I thumped it without feeling remorse.
One feels guilty insulting the dead,
Walking on graves. But this pig
Did not seem able to accuse.

It was too dead. Just so much
A poundage of lard and pork.
Its last dignity had entirely gone.
It was not a figure of fun.

Too dead now to pity.
To remember its life, din, stronghold
Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

Too deadly factual. Its weight
Oppressed me—how could it be moved?
And the trouble of cutting it up!
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s—
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.

Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished with.
I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.




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Friday Poem — by Thom Gunn

Nasturtium

Born in a sour waste lot
You labored up to light,
Bunching what strength you’d got
And running out of sight
Through a knot-hole at last,
To come forth into sun
As if without a past,
Done with it, re-begun.

Now street-side of the fence
You take a few green turns,
Nimble in nonchalance
Before your first flower burns.
From poverty and prison
And undernourishment
A prodigal has risen,
Self-spending, never spent.

Irregular yellow shell
And drooping spur behind…
Not rare but beautiful
— Street-handsome — as you wind
And leap, hold after hold,
A golden runaway,
Still running, strewing gold
From side to side all day.

—Thom Gunn 1929-2004

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Friday Poem

Forever Yours

He trudged into the desert, taking almost
nothing with him but water and a ghost-
ly old photo
of a lady beside the ocean.
That first night,
he lay above a dry creek bed. Below,
he heard vipers moving through the sand
with a side-winding motion,
and
he did not sleep.
He’d grown obsessed with the notion
of walking deep
and deeper into the wilderness. By
the third day, his lips were swollen and dry.
Now he was completely isolated,
surrounded by a desert that dominated
with its glittering sand
and
not high above, a sky so huge and blue
that it scared him to look too long upon.
There was nothing new
now under his sun. By now, his water was gone.
Day five, he quit moving altogether
and sat instead for hours, with his photo and leather
flask, coughing in the cool valley of a dune,
watching the daytime moon,
gibbous and gorged, roll by like an eroded stone.
The sky was biblical. The sun was white as bone.
Finally, on the evening of his sixth day,
when his strength had all but slipped away,
a willowy woman in a white dress appeared.
She had long black hair, which stirred in the xeric
air, and though his eyes were watery and bleared,
he knew for certain who it was. And so
it was that she beckoned him. He rose, sure but slow,
up from the ferric
and rust-colored sand,
as if this is what he’d been waiting for all
along. And,
leaving his shoes and other belongings
behind, he followed her into
the drifted dunes, beneath a sky of melting blue.
And that was it. Days later when they found his things,
they saw the photo half-buried in the sand.
It was a black-and-white of a black-
haired woman, very elegant, tall,
whose short life,
two years back,
had been eaten away in a strange
Patagonian land, below a mountain range.
That woman was his wife.

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Fascinating Facts, Curious Quotations

“The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.”

Said the surrealist Andre Breton, explaining the possible provenance of some of his strange and early literature.

Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925) was a Russian lyric poet who, at age 30, hung himself. Vladimir Mayakovsky, his contemporary and also a Russian poet, angrily and in print condemned Sergei Yesenin for his “cowardly” suicide. Five year before he, Mayakovsky, then shot himself.

The earliest hints of evolutionary theory can be found in Anaximander, Sixth Century, BC.

“A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.”

Said Ernest Hemingway of T.S. Eliot.

“We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.”

Said the Ex Muslim Wafa Sultan, correctly.

John Keats pronounced his own name with such a thick cockney accent that his friend Leigh Hunt nicknamed him “Junkets.”

Junkets evidently being the way “John Keats” sounded coming out of John Keats’s own mouth.

The “Wicked Bible,” from London, 1632, omitted the word not from the 7th Commandment:

Thou shalt commit adultery.

The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.

Said Voltaire.

Man is the only animal that knows he must die.

Said Voltaire.

A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

Said Samuel Butler.

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

Echoed Wittgenstein.

The English writer Anthony Burgess — most famous for his novella A Clockwork Orange, which Stanley Kubrick subsequently made into a movie — had eyesight so poor that he once accidentally walked into a bank in Stratford-on-Avon and ordered a drink!

Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

Said Lord Byron.

“The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum” an early French critic called Dostoevsky.

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon;
Where gott’st thou that goose look?

Wrote Shakespeare in Act 5, Scene III of Macbeth.

“Now, friend, what means thy change of countenance?”

Substituted one William Davenant, in a hacked-up version which nevertheless played for nearly a century.

Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 B.C., states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain….

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Spring

A reader reminded me that spring has just begun, and that in turn reminded me of a peculiar poem I’ve always liked, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), whose poetry is wildly erratic. This is Edna St. Vincent Millay at her best:

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

(Link)

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Ex High School Basketball Star

You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star.

Another nobody kid raised in a half-broken home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly care.

Yet you were inherently happy. Your smile burst across your face like a star shell. Happiness was in your bones, your blood, your ectomorphic body, not tall, but a natural-born athlete from head to toe.

The college coaches all went crazy for you, but your test scores were poor. You never quite made the grade. You served instead as a gunnery sergeant in the war: a gunner, a dead-eye.

But when you shook the high school rafters that late-autumn night, scoring seventy-eight points, shooting twenty-for-twenty in the second half, both sides of the bleachers erupting for your grace, the purity of your touch, your form, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing – you were beautiful.

When you won the 100 yard dash and the 220 against all the big-city boys, edging out by fractions two future Olympians – you were beautiful.

When, at thirty-two, you lied about your age and won a tryout with the Denver Nuggets and made it down to the final cut, still going strong, still a gunner, a sniper from the three-point line, then busted your ankle in a fall – you were beautiful.

And are you beautiful still in your oil-stained clothes, turning wrenches at the garage, your thin black fingers spiderlike among the parts? Do you still have that delicate touch?

Are you beautiful with your scuffed-up knuckles and your immutable smile, your snaggly teeth and skeletal face?

Are you beautiful in those filthy hightop sneakers and that jumpsuit mechanic uniform, your chocolate slab of forelock hanging lank across your cheek?

Are you beautiful in your small hometown, moving into middle-age, still so thin, so graceful-looking, filling in part-time at the cowboy hat store? Is your uncanny coordination fading with disuse? Your infallible sense of direction and time?

I saw you once, not long ago, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup on the fire escape of your tenement building. It was the middle of August. You wore a white tanktop and pleated gray slacks. You looked very elegant. The day was dying. The trees beyond stood iron-black against the sky. The staircases along the outer buildings were duplicated in isometric shadows across the orange brick walls. I was visiting a woman who lived across the street, and I could see you from her kitchen window. You sat on those metal steps for a long time. The sky flared and then emptied out into a draining reef – a reef of green. Darkness came. The first stars appeared. Still, you sat. You sat and sat, and after a while, the stars began to shoot and fall.