Incorporeal Works

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives,
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Poetry makes puzzles out of words, puzzles I have spent many happy hours trying to unravel, sometimes to my satisfaction, many times not, but the process, always pleasure, absorbs interest and makes distractions distant. The above six lines are from a poem by Wallace Stevens titled “Peter Quince at the Clavier“. I have been reading this poem at irregular intervals over thirty years. It still delights me, and confuses in fitful measures. The words flow like the wind, like the scarves of Susanna, the young woman bathing in the evening in a garden pool. Susanna’s story is in the apocryphal books of the Bible, attached to the Book of Daniel. A rousing story in itself, in Williams’s hands it acquires a sensuous music always rewarding to me.

Susanna is spied upon by a pair of old men whose lust is at odds with the dignity of age. She refuses their advances, is charged in revenge by them with a liason with a young man, and endures a public hearing. A searching cross examination of the old men by Daniel clears her, and condemns them.

So much for the material worked to a different purpose by Williams. His poem weaves musings on beauty, transitory nature, passion, memory and music, always music, the clavier of the title is the language of the poem. I have read that this poem has been set to music several times. I have heard none of the pieces, but it seems right that the music of these words should have been matched by notes, chords, measures to be heard as accompaniment to the poetry.

Susanna in her bath finds melody;

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of Springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

She leaves her bath, shivering in the winds that flow like her scarves, and in a blare of horn music, the elders are upon her. The noise of her attendant Byzantines sound like tambourines, but the accusations of the elders isolate Susanna from the regard of others.

There follows a meditation on beauty and mortality that reverses conventions on beauty and immortality;

Beauty is momentary in the mind –
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

Susanna’s physical beauty has taken on a life of its own and caused her near destruction, and through the intervention of Daniel taken the lives of the morally corrupt elders. In the mind, beauty is a concept no longer lived than the intellectual construct, definition, elucidation – cold words – formed in the mind. The physical blow that physical beauty can deal lives on, and is replicated in the beauty of Susanna’s successors.

Mortality claims the individuals, the maidens of the lines first listed here, but their celebration lives on, not as a quantitative thought, but as a moment in a long line of moments when beauty lives in the flesh, and is immortal.

This past Sunday, the Chattanooga Times Free Press carried an article on higher education and the job market. The title of the article was:  ” Liberal arts? Think again.” The reporter had interviewed a student who had graduated with an English B.A. last fall. She is still looking for a real job while she picks up service industry jobs. Educators scrambling for dollars themselves are reacting to shrinking markets for Humanities graduates and dwindling interest among students by emphasizing a “market-driven” approach to curricula and degree programs.

Where is Sir Francis Bacon when we need him? Among many other things he said about education, he asserted, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” Sir Francis would not have understood the merchandising of education. The liberal arts have been losing ground to technical and business courses for years. Some years ago I read that not a few English departments had dropped Shakespeare courses for general degree requirements. If an English major did not select a concentration in drama, or Elizabethan/Jacobean literature, there was no need  to take courses on W. Shakespeare. No Hamlet, no Romeo and Juliet, no King Lear - no Falstaff! - ah, never banish Jack Falstaff!

…banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish him not Harry’s company : banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.  - Henry IV, I

Indeed. Cold fish that Prince Hal - Harry - was, he would probably give a wintry smile at the demise of literature as important to higher education. Literature, along with history, art courses and the humanities all give “all the world” to students wanting a complete education, to learn readiness, conference, writing and all the context of western thought, education and civilization. Exact and exacting education is basic, not vocational training only.

Tuesday on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, the birthday of Harper Lee was observed, with a quotation from her book, To Kill a Mockingbird:

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird

For a number of nights lately, a bird has been singing in the middle of the night, outside our window. A bewildering variety of calls seem to be in the bird’s repertoire. We suspect this must be a mockingbird, famous for mimicking other birds’ songs. We have noticed daily a mockingbird flying in and out of a large holly bush along the front walk, ten feet or so from the bedroom window.

Such a comforting sound in the still watches of a dark night. And remarkable if there is a nest, and mockingbird youngsters survive the cats that live at our house, prowling the yard and depositing offerings of slain prey on the front step. We have seen no mockingbird corpses yet. Perhaps we will not. I hope we do not, it is still a sin for even a cat to kill a mockingbird.

Addendum: On Keillor’s page for Tuesday there is also a fine poem, “That Time of Year,” by Philip Appleman. Allusions to several poems about seasons of the year and seasons of our lives. I liked it.

On Saturday afternoon last week, as the biennial Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga was winding down, a panel discussion on publishing, marketing and dealing with criticism provided me with thoughts to consider. Authors Dorothy Allison, Roy Blount, Jr., Clyde Edgerton and Sam Pickering were led through the discussion by moderator Shannon Ravenal, editor and publisher.

The authors commented on the modest success they had in publishing and selling their work, as writers who worked from interests and drives quite personal, not necessarily marketable. As Roy Blount said, “I want to my books to sell well enough that they’ll let me publish another one.” Laughter and agreement from the others seconded that assertion.

I see what Blount meant. Few of the authors at this conference have had best sellers on the scale of those few writers who have hit the mega sales level, a tiny fraction on the order of NBA stars amongst millions of schoolboy basketball players. It is for this reason that almost all the authors at the conference have day jobs, usually in academia, which is also why they usually speak well and extemporaneously. Nothing like captive audiences of students to make you adept at speaking in public. It helps that most of them by defintion are southern by birth, raising or family history at least. An oral culture, the South, fostering narrative and wry remarks.

In this panel, as well as in other remarks throughout the weekend, the difference in sensibility of the Southerner compared to the Other Americans came up repeatedly, especially in regard to humor. In her luncheon address on Saturday, Jill McCorkle told the story of calling a poison control center in New England, where she lives and teaches now at Harvard and Bennington. In a confused moment early in the morning, McCorkle took her dog’s heartworm medicine instead of a prescription she had for herself. When she related this mistake to the call center worker, she was asked if any symptoms had presented. McCorkle offhandedly quipped, “Well, I keep wanting to scratch behind my ear with my hind leg.” The worker at the poison center was singularly unamused. Perhaps in the modern South a similar reaction would result, but it would be less likely.

The otherness of writing from a southern perspective perhaps helps fuel the stoicism of the authors present about their sales, and the puzzled criticisms from the North. The country as a whole has become more assimilated into a uniformity of reference, but the south preserves regionalism in writing, if not in commerce.

Living all my life here in East Tennessee, I have been an uneasy native of what we now call a “Red State,” dominated by a fierce and uncompromising mistrust of government’s power to alleviate economic suffering or limit business in any way. Taxes are seen as inherently evil, instead of being the price of civilization, as Oliver Wendell Holmes called them.

In alternate years, the Conference on Southern Literature gathers from the corners of the encrimsoned South other lonely strangers in a strange land. Call them liberals, progressives or persons of social conscience, they speak up with the assurance that stones will not rain upon them, excoriations will be absent and they are among friends.

One of the writers to be inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers this past weekend was Will Campbell, whose journey of thought, faith and activism has been chronicled by himself and others. Escorted across the stage to the lectern by Jill McCorkle, his aging body belied by the clear strong voice and sharp perceptions he addressed to the audience.

I knew that Campbell had been a unique figure in the tangled struggles of the South during the years of civil rights activism. I did not know that he had participated also in a sort of Underground Railroad escorting young men to Canada to escape participation in the Vietnam War. He told of driving carloads of such men to havens across the border, speaking to them of the problems they would face, not least being the irreversible separation from all they knew as home. For southerners, especially - Campbell is a Mississippian and many of the refugees were also - such separation was wrenching, however conscience made it necessary.

Campbell spoke of one such young man, sadness in every line of his face, who picked up a guitar and began to sing his own song expressing this loss. Will Campbell, across forty years and still in command of his memory began to quote the lyrics there on the stage of the Tivoli, faultlessly, and the words were some I knew quite well, and so knew the name of the young man. The song was “Mississippi, You’re on My Mind,” by Jesse Winchester. I have some of that now no longer young man’s recordings, including that one:

I think I see a wagon rutted road
With the weeds growing tall between the tracks
And along one side runs a rusty barbed wire fence
And beyond that sits an old tar paper shack

That is the first stanza. Will Campbell rolled out almost all the rest of the song.

I was in the South still, and it was home, indeed.

The final day of the Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga was marked by some serious thoughts on writing as well as some hilarity and dark humor about the necessity of marketing oneself for writers who actually want to sell some books.

The lunchtime address by Jill McCorkle focused on the liberating effect of writers, including young children just exploring language’s borders, given the freedom of unfettered expression. McCorkle leavened with humor a serious point on this subject by telling of allowing her young son five minutes at the end of each school day, once she got him home, to utter a continuous stream of every dirty, profane and obscene word he knew, all the while bouncing on the leather couch - the boy was in elementary school at the time, so the jungle gym tactic helped his creative flow.

In the morning, a panel discussion picked over the differences between facts, and the recreation of feeling for the unfolding of those facts, which is the function of fiction or narrative.

I have been to all but one of the biennial conferences here, starting with the intial outing, where Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, Walker Percy and other figures whose names were so familiar came to Chattanooga. This will be one of the most memorable, not for the showmanship - although with so many accomplished teachers there is much of that - but for the thoughtfulness of the commentary in between the wry and pungent remarks.

A great three days.

The Chattanooga Arts and Education Council began the three-day biennial literature conference today, with inductions and readings by eight writers. We attended, and heard fiction and poetry read by the authors, notably Rita Dove, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, served as the youngest and first African-American Poet Laureate of the U.S., and of the State of Virginia, where she now teaches at the University of Virginia. A strong and expressive speaker, she was just the primus inter pares of the assembled writers today, all of whom impressed us tremendously.

The next two days will see presentations of awards with readings from the writers, as well as discussion panels on a variety of subjects. A great way to end the week and start the weekend.

From Aaron McCollough’s blog, I Endure. Here he is quoting from John Keats regarding poetry, used in Aaron’s poetry class discussion back in September

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…

…the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout…

In short, Keats presents “Mysteries, doubts” as worth examining for themselves, shaped by poetic art to elicit complex reactions from the reader, without reference to orderly classification by logical strictures. It is this that gives all art its power.

Citing King Lear as an example makes me say, YES! I have always thought that play achieved its overpowering majesty by the language itself, the imagery and pace and complexity, all bent to tell a story without any redeeming moral or quiet little insight. As Kent sums up, in the final accounting of dead daughters, betrayed fathers and sons, “All’s cheerless, dark and deadly.” Except that if the actors are equal to the material, the audience does not feel that way.

That is poetry. Glory from despair and destruction, art’s alchemy.