[Robert E. Jordan]

Here is my favorite by John Hollander. I love the city, the city is my friend.

“A Lion Named Passion”
by
John Hollander – 1962

“…the girl had walked past several cages occupied by
other lions before she was seized by a lion named Passion.
It was from his cage that keepers recovered the body.”
--New York Times, May 16, 1958

Hungering on the gray plain of its birth
For the completion of the sunny cages
To hold all its unruly, stretching forth
Its longest streets and narrowest passages,
The growing city paws the yielding earth,
And rears its controlling stones. Its snarl damages
The dull, unruffled fabric of silences
In which the world is wrapped. The day advances
And shadows lengthen as their substances
Grow more erect and rigid, as low hearth
And high, stark tower rise beneath the glances
Of anxious, ordered Supervision. North
Bastion and eastern wall are joined, and fences
Are finished between the areas of Mirth
And the long swards of Mourning. Growth manages
At once vigor of spurts, and rigor of stages.

If not the Just City, then the Safe one: sea
And mountain torrent warded off, and all
The wildest monsters caged, that running free,
The most exposed and open children shall
Fear no consuming grasp. Thus the polity
Preserves its fast peace by the burial
Of these hot barbarous sparks whose fiery, bright
Eruption might disturb blackness of night
And temperateness of civil love. The light
Of day is light enough, calm, gray, cozy
And agreeable. And beasts? The lion might
Be said to dwell here, but so tamed is he,
Set working in the streets, say, with no fright
Incurred by these huge paws which turn with glee
A hydrant valve, while playing children sprawl
And splash to the bright spray, dribbling a shiny ball--

So innocent he is, his huge head, high
And chinny, pointed over his shoulder, more
A lion rampant, blazoned on the sky,
Than monster romping through the streets, with gore
Reddening his jaws; so kind of eye
And clear of gaze is that sweet beast, that door
Need never shut, nor window bar on him.
But look! Look there! One morning damp and dim
In thick, gray fog, or even while the slim
And gaily tigering shadows creep on by
The porch furniture on hot noons, see him
Advancing through the streets, with monstrous cry,
Half plea, half threat, dying in huff of flame!
This must be some new beast! As parents spy,
Safe, from behind parked cars, he damps his roar-
It is the little children he is making for!

When elders, not looking at each other, creep
Out of their hiding places, little men,
Little women, stare back, resentment deep
Inside their throats at what had always been
A Great Place for the Kids: infants asleep
And growing, boys and girls, all, all eaten,
Burned by the prickly heat of baby throbbing,
Already urging scratching hands; the sobbing
After certain hot hurts in childhood; stabbing
Pulses and flashing floods of summer that leap
Out, in the dusk of childhood, at youth, dabbing
At the old wounds from which fresh feelings seep.
"O help me! I am being done!" the bobbing
Hip and awakened leg, one day, from heap
Of melting body call. Done? No, undone!
Robbing the grave of first fruits, the beast feeds again.

Burning is being consumed by flaming beasts,
Rebellious and unappeasable. The wind
Of very early morning, finally, casts
A cool sweet quenching draught on hunger's end,
Those ashes and whitened bones. Each day, to lists
Of dead and sorely wounded are assigned
The tasks of memory. Mute crowds push by
The useless cages and restraining, high,
(But not retaining) walls. Against the sky
Only these ruins show at dawn, like masts,
Useless in ships becalmed, but hung with dry
Corpses, or like unheeded fruit that blasts
High in trees, wasted. Menacing, wild of eye,
The city, having missed its spring, now feasts,
Nastily, on itself. Jackals attend
The offal. And new cities raven and distend.

Bobby


[This message has been edited by Robert E. Jordan (edited August 02, 2004).]

[Michael Cantor]

Gawd, was that aimless and overwritten! I am not at all familiar with John Hollander, but I googled, and it appears he has a formidable reputation. I can't believe it was built on turgid ooze like this post.

Eight modifier/noun phrases crowd the first six lines, and after that I winced and skimmed. If this was posted on Met or the Deep End, I would assume we had a neophyte with a great ear, and comment:

- Superb rhyme scheme and slants, good meter and rhythm, dreadful content.

- Stop trying to sound poetical and portentous, and say something real - populate your city with actual people, not generic references. At least Sandburg had painted farm boys under the gas lamps, luring the women; and Whitman had entire workshops of actual human beings. This is all blah blah blah poetic blah blah blah poetic and on and on and on, and says nothing.

- Get rid of all those modifiers. Take them all out, and read the poem over to yourself. Look below:

Hungering on the plain of its birth
For the completion of the cages
To hold all its unruly, stretching forth
Its streets and passages,
The city paws its earth,
And rears its stones. Its snarl damages
The fabric of silences
In which the world is wrapped.

Doesn't it sound better already?

Michael Cantor



[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited August 02, 2004).]

[nyctom]

Uhm no.

[Michael Cantor]

Tom - Would you agree to, "less awful"?

[nyctom]

No, Michael. I think there's a workshop truism that modifiers must operate under a strict quota system--and that any poem, whatsoever, that goes over quota is ipso facto condemned. I think your "rewrite" drains the life out of the poem. There's something to be said for plain speech, but I wouldn't want to restrict my reading diet to JUST plain speech.

And I am not even a big (or little) fan of Hollander's poems--though I like his prosody book Rhyme's Reason very much.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Michael,

You forgot to remove "all" in L3:

To hold <strike>all</strike> its unruly, stretching forth

"All" shows up early in S2, at a line-end no less! Also, "that" and "thus" show up in that stanza!

I once used Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" to show the silliness of eliminating adjectives willy-nilly. On the other hand, adjectives like any other words can be used in silly ways. I'm not for decoration-for-decoration's sake. (Unless decoration is an important motif or theme for a particular poem.)

[Clay Stockton]

What Tom said re: modifiers, and Rhyme's Reason.

This much-anthologized piece of H.'s is also pretty good (and might get the crap kicked out of it on TDE as "light," or a "poem on poetry"):


Adam's Task


And Adam gave names to all cattle,
and to the fowl of the air, and to
every beast of the field . . .
Genesis 2:20


Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted
Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through
The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed,
Implex; thou, awagabu.

Every burrower, each flier
Came for the name he had to give:
Gay, first work, ever to be prior,
Not yet sunk to primitive.

Thou, verdle; thou, McFleery's pomma;
Thou; thou; thou--three types of grawl;
Thou, flisket; thou, kabasch; thou, comma-
Eared mashawk; thou, all; thou, all.

Were, in a fire of becoming,
Laboring to be burned away,
Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,
Would be a serious as play.

Thou, pambler; thou, rivarn; thou, greater
Wherret, and thou, lesser one;
Thou, sproal; thou, zant; thou, lily-eater.
Naming's over. Day is done.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Clay, that's more enjoyable that the heavy-handed poem Bobby posted.

But the more I read the poem Bobby posted, the better I think it is. I'm not finished making up my mind. I don't like the heavy-handedness of it, nor the convoluted syntax that opens up the poem, but if I can get past these knee-jerk reactions, I think I might appreciate it better...

[Robert E. Jordan]

Ah, all the experts. Tell me what you think the Hollander poem is saying.

Bobby

[This message has been edited by Robert E. Jordan (edited August 03, 2004).]

[Robert E. Jordan]

While you're thinking about that question, here is another one by John Hollander.

Pop quiz sometime Wednesday--be prepared.

Owl
by
John Hollander


Now that the owl-light--in the time between
Dog and wolf, as some call it--ends, we wait
As you alight on an unseen
Branch to interrogate


The listener and the rememberer;
Lost outlines heighten--as last colors fade--
The sounder darkness you confer
Upon the spruce's shade.


Deluded by the noonlight's wide display
Of everything, our vision floats through thin
Spaces of ill-illumined day:
How we are taken in


By what we take in with our roving eyes!
Your constant ones, if moved to track or trace,
Take their head with them, lantern-wise
Taking heed, keeping face


In the society of night, and keeping
Faith with the spirit of pure fixity
That sets the mind's great heart to leaping
At what you more than see.


Medusa's visage gazed our bodies to
Literal stone unshaded: your face, caught
In our glance widely eyes us through,
Astonishing our thought.


You who debated with the nightingale
The rectitude of northern wisdom, cold
Against the love-stuff of the tale
The laid-back south had told;


And yet who stood amid the lovely, thick
Leaves of the ivy, while in all their folly
The larks and thrushes sought the prick
And berries of the holly;


You who confounded the rapacious crow
Thus to be favored by the great sky-eyed
Queen of the air and all who know,
Now ever by her side;


With silent wing and interrogative
Cry in lieu of a merely charming song,
You sound the dark in which you live
Perched above right and wrong.


Resonance is not vacancy: although
He could hear nothing in your hollow howls
But woe and his own guilt, Thoreau
Rejoiced that there were owls.


Scattered and occasional questionings
With here and there too late a warning shout,
Wisdom arises on the wings
Of darkness and of doubt.


Where in day's vastnesses does truth reside?
In noon's uncompromising light and heat
When even our own shadows hide
Under our very feet?


Or in the hidden center of the quick
Resilient dark on which your narrowed sight
So pointedly alights to pick
Not the day, but the night,


Its fruitful flower, petaled a hundredfold?
Oh it is there, truth, with the poor blind prey
Trembling with prescience or cold
Waiting for how your way


Of well-tuned suddenness and certitude
Tight-strung and execution highly wrought
Leads to the pounced-on object, food
For something beyond thought,


By overlooking nothing, overseeing
In all the stillness hidden, tiny motions
Squirming with the life of being
Inferences and notions.


With patient agency the beak and claws
Of fierce sublime awareness pluck it clean
Deriving what for us are laws
Governing the unseen.


Under torn canvas we put out to sea
Trusting, though puzzled by what glows above,
To something like philosophy
To be the helmsman of


Life (but whose life?). Your lessons of the land,
Down-to-tree, then, if not -to-earth, indict
Our helplessness to understand
Just what we are at night.


Immensities of starlight told us lies
Of what and where we are; but, we allow,
Drunk with the Milky Way, our eyes
Are on the Wagon now,


Fugitive slaves, leaving despair for dread
As if in search of the cold, freeing North,
Keep gazing steadily ahead
Keep on Keep knowing forth


You urge us, as your silences address
The power that Minerva chose you for:
Great-winged, far-ranging consciousness
Now come to rest in your


Olympian attentiveness that finds
The affrighted heartbeat on the ground, perceives
The flutter of substances, the mind's
Life in the fallen leaves.