After our long excursion into dimeter and trimeter over at Lariat, I found myself reading Bogan again this afternoon. Alan was certain he'd put up a Bogan thread here when he ran Mastery, but I can't find it. Born in '98 and died in '70, she was an immaculate poet, good at any line length, and particularly good in short lines. I think she's probably my favorite woman poet of the last century.

To Be Sung On The Water

Beautiful, my delight,
Pass, as we pass the wave.
Pass, as the mottled night
Leaves what it cannot save,
Scattering dark and bright.

Beautiful, pass and be
Less than the guiltless shade
To which our vows were said;
Less than the sound of the oar
To which our vows were made,--
Less than the sound of its blade
Dipping the stream once more.

To An Artist, To Take Heart

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride
Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.
Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare died,
Having endured them all.

The Daemon

Must I tell again
In the words I know
For the ears of men
The flesh, the blow?

Must I show outright
The bruise in the side,
The halt in the night
And how death cried?

Must I speak to the lot
Who little bore?
It said "Why not?"
It said "Once more."

The Young Mage

The young mage said:
Make free, make free,
With the wild eagles planing in the mountains,
And the serpent in the sea.

The young mage said:
Delight, delight,
In the vine's triumph over the marble
And the wind at night.

And he said: Hold
Fast to the leaves' silver
And the flower's gold.

And he said: Beware
Of the round web swinging from the angle
Of the steep stair,
And of the comet's hair.

Tim
Thanks for posting these. I didn't know them. My almost favourite Schubert song is Auf dem Wasser zu singen(To Be Sung On The Water.) I think she may have been influenced by it (song) although her poem is briefer and more contained than the German poem by Friedrich Von Stolberg.

I am busy just now but I look forward to reading these.
Janet

PS
I'm cooking and cleaning (lunch guests) but here to go on with for anyone who like me doesn't know this poet well.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ogan/bogan.htm

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 01, 2004).]

Good for you, Tim, it's about a time we had a real master on this thread. And Bogan is also my favorite woman poet of the century (and was Henri Coulette's)---much as I admire Bishop and Mew and Meynell and Anna Wickham and E.J. Scovell and Wendy Cope and a dozen more, none, I think, had the pure
lyric brilliance of Bogan. And you chose some of her most beautiful. You might also add her elegy for her brother, which reduces me to tears without fail.

Oh, and don't forget this one, called "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell"---

At midnight tears
Run into your ears

Worthy of Hank Williams, no? Or this one, "Cartography"--

As you lay in sleep
I saw the chart
Of artery and vein
Running from your heart,

Plain as the strenth
Marked upon the leaf
Along the length,
Mortal and brief,

Of your gaunt hand.
I saw it clear:
The wiry brand
Of the life we bear

Mapped like the great
Rivers that rise
Beyond our fate
And distant from our eyes.


And "Evening in the Sanatarium" and "Come, Sleep" and "Spirit's Song" and "Tears in Sleep" and "Second Song" and
"Question in a Field" and "The Crows" and and and and....
and I can't resist typing out one more, "Kept"---


Time for the wood, the clay,
The trumpery dolls, the toys
Now to be put away:
We are not girls and boys.

What are those rags we twist
Our hearts upon, or clutch
Hard in the sweating fist?
They are not worth so much.

But we must keep such things
Till we at length begin
To feel our nerves their strings,
Their dust, our blood within.

The dreadful painted bisque
Becomes our very cheek.
A doll's heart, faint at risk,
Within our breast grows weak.

Our hand the doll's, our tongue.

Time for the pretty clay,
Time for the straw, the wood.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.


And what the hell, here's that one about her brother, "To My Brother Killed: Haumont Wood: October, 1918"--


O you so long dead,
You masked and obscure,
I can tell you, all things endure:
The wine and the bread;

The marble quarried for the arch;
The iron become steel;
The spoke broken from the wheel;
The sweat of the long march;

The hay-stacks cut through like loaves
And the hundred flowers from the seed;
All things indeed
Though struck by the hooves

Of disaster, of time due,
Of fell loss and gain,
All things remain,
I can tell you, this is true.

Though burned down to stone
Though lost from the eye,
I can tell you, and not lie,--
Save of peace alone.




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 02, 2004).]

Tim:
I am not good at rankings -- I have a tendency to love the one I'm with -- but Bogan is mighty good. "Cartography," posted by Robert Mezey, is an old favorite of mine. The flow of the simile from vein to leaf to map to river is like the flow of blood, the flow of water, the flow of the speaker's powers of association, and more. Splendid.
RPW

Thanks, Robert, for typing in these wonderful poems. The problem with any discussion of Bogan is "Where do we start?"
She left us only about 100 poems, composed between 1923 and 1968. She is an intensely cerebral poet, in that there is no real sense of place, little imagery. What there is, is a purity of line and syntax which is dazzling and an over-riding grief that often borders on despair. The best of her poems are simply stripped to the bone. Though I'll confess that when it comes to the "deep image," the young mage poem and the poem to her brother leave all the American imitators of Neruda gasping in her dust.

I had never read Bogan or Francis until Dick Wilbur urged me to seek them out "in the middle of my journey." So although critics have cited both of them among my influences, that's not really true. I just marveled to see these wonderful voices manipulating the short line much as I try to do today--but fifty years before me.

Robert, I know little about Bogan's life. Perhaps you could share your thoughts on the person who gave birth to these wonderful verses.

Medusa

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, -- a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.


------------------
Steve Schroeder

"Medusa" is a good one. And there must be twenty or thirty more. But I wonder why her verse hasn't drawn any more attention on this thread. Everybody seems to want to talk about Thomas or Brooks, neither of whom are in Bogan's class.
Ah well, to each his own goo.

Robert
I am stunned by Bogan. I have not read enough of her and am still finding out about her. I agree she is beyond first rate.

Why is she excluded from some major anthologies of 20th century poetry?

I have had guests these last two days but I certainly intend to read as much of her as I can find.

I am always comforted to discover first rate women poets.
Janet

I must thank Tim for posting this thread. For this youngster, and I suspect for many others, Bogan's name is recognizable but her poems mostly unknown (thanks in part to the lack of anthologization that Janet mentions).

Fortunately, a quick trip to the used bookstore today produced an $8 copy of The Blue Estuaries, and even just a lunchtime's worth of reading demonstrates the gross injustice that she's not at least as well known as, say, Millay.

Yes, what about her life? Why isn't she a "celebrity" poet? The back flap says she was the poetry editor of the NYer for over forty years . . . so it's hard to understand why she's a bit obscure.

Anyway, thanks for the thread.

--CS


P.S. Same shelf at same bookstore provided copies of Mason & Jarman . . . pretty good shelf!

Janet and Clay,

Actually, Louise Bogan is well anthologized in the anthologies that count. Her fine work, much of which I like, is in both “The Norton Anthology of Poetry” and “The Norton Anthology of Modern poetry.” If you’re in one of the Norton Anthologies, you’ve arrived. My two copies are almost worn out from over reading.

Bobby


------------------
Visit Bobby's Urban Rage Poetry Page at:

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks

Bobby
I am in a different publishing stream. She is not in my English "international" anthologies. Neither is Hecht. I am poor. Our books cost twice as much and we pay shipping on top of the rest.
Janet

Whereas I am merely stupid, without excuses.

--CS

I'm glad she's in the Norton, but the Norton's a rotten anthology so it's no great matter. She is left out of most of the anthologies (along with Edgar Bowers, Miller Williams, Dick Barnes, Henri Coulette, Ted Kooser and a dozen other fine poets). Janet, I felt a little regretful speaking of Bogan in regard to other women; it does her a disservice to be put in that category. Bishop was right to refuse to allow her work in anthologies devoted to women poets. Bogan is not merely better than Millay, H.D., Graham, Rich etc etc but she is a good deal better than most of the men. I think she was better than Ted Roethke, a very good poet who was her lover for a while. She has not had a biography or a collection of letters, as far as I know. She did write an autobiography, which is well worth reading although not very revelatory. I don't know why she is not more highly regarded. The feminists have never taken her up (perhaps because she wrote a rather toughminded poem about women). Some of it is simply that her great virtues are not only unfashionable these days but in many quarters regarded as positively reactionary and contemptible--that is, a clear rational argument, lyric purity, formal elegance, and a refusal to spill her guts for the prurient reader. She would have been horrified by Sharon Old's poems. Just yesterday, as I was sorting and shelving books in my new house, I found an old battered copy of one of my early books in which I'd copied the following remarks by Bogan (I don't remember where I found them):
"The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there." (I had tucked this note into a copy of my sequence COUPLETS, of which it could not have been more apropos.)
Well, here's to you, Louise, wherever you are.



[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 04, 2004).]

Robert
Of course you are right about women artists. I am from the generation and a place (New Zealand) where women were patronised. (First women to get the vote but that was about as far as it went.) I remember being asked why I bothered to paint since all the great painters were men. I remember hearing the counter tenor Alfred Deller when I was becoming a singer and feeling that there was no hope. Of course I proved that wrong in England but my need to conform in order to succeed induced anorexia.
( It was easier in America even then.)

As a child I read about George Eliot and here in Australia we had a woman writer forced to call herself Henry Handel Richardson.

And then the organised conformists.

It is a knee jerk response for me even now.
I never joined a feminist organisation because of their narrowness but only a privileged few enjoy equal opportunity even today. I wear a wedding ring because I am still astonished that anyone can put up with me.

I so agree with Louise Bogan about the repressed narrative. I love Roethke. He's not in many English-based anthologies either.

I won't think of her as a woman poet. She is a poet.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 04, 2004).]

Here's the poem that gets her in trouble with women, written when she was twenty-six:

Women

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is a friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Actually, when you consider the situation of women in this country in 1923, it's a pretty fierce, proto-feminist manifesto, akin to say, a Langston Hughes decrying the passivity of the negro. Sam anthologizes it in his invaluable Penguin Pocket Anthology which includes many Spherians, unlike the rotten Norton Anthology.

Tim
I can identify with that even while it makes me a little angry. When I was that age I used to wonder why men put up with women. Now I wonder the opposite--with the exception of my husband and a few others.
Terrific poem.
Janet

Robert and Tim,

A reading from the “Book of Bobby.”

There is one anthology,
anthology is great,
and its name is Norton.
You will have no other anthology before it.

I’ll post some of hers that I like from the Nortons a little later.

Bobby

Ok, here are the Bogan poems. There are of course, other poems by her in the Nortons. These are my favorites, starting with "The Dream"

Bobby

The Dream
by
Louise Bogan - 1941

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.

Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a swound,
Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, something you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,
And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.

But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

Juan’s Song – 1923

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes--
Who is it, then, that love deceives?


Roman Fountain -1937

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.


Song For The Last Act – 1954
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden, There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.



------------------
Visit Bobby's Urban Rage Poetry Page at:

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks

Portrait


She has no need to fear the fall
Of harvest from the laddered reach
Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing
....... From the steep beach.

Nor hold to pain's effrontery
Her body's bulwark, stern and savage,
Nor be a glass, where to forsee
.......Another's ravage.

What she has gathered, and what lost,
She will not find to lose again.
She is possessed by time, who once
....... Was loved by men.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 05, 2004).]

The Frightened Man


In fear of the rich mouth
I kissed the thin,--
Even that was a trap
To snare me in.

Even she, so long
The frail, the scentless,
Is become strong,
And proves relentless.

O, forget her praise,
And how I sought her
Through a hazardous maze
By shafted water.

Tim,
Many thanks for starting this thread. Had read only one or two of LB's anthologised poems and look forward to exploring her strong and accomplished work in detail.
Margaret.

As I say, I'm glad she's in the Norton, but it's still a wretched anthology in a hundred different ways. And those poems it includes aren't bad--they're better than most poets' work--but they are not Bogan's best stuff. I used to have four or five Nortons in various editions--when I was teaching, they'd send them to me--but I've sold them or thrown them all away, good riddance.
And Tim is right about "Women"--it's a tough poem, and seems to be hard on women, but it's hard in the right way.
She was also a terrific epigrammatist; it's too bad she didn't write more of them. For example:

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom
And wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.

Or this:

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,
What most perturbs the mind:
The heart-rending homely people,
Or the horrible beautiful kind?



[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 05, 2004).]

Considering that this forum is four years old, I don't know how we have overlooked her so long. Bobby and Janet, those were all among the poems I considered for the first post on this thread. As I said, where to start? I imagine her inclusion in the Norton is the work of Mary Jo Salter, the only one of those editors whom I know. I think it is heartening to see the members posting eighteen of these poems. One of the most important services this forum can provide is to spread the word on neglected poets like Bogan or Mew or Daryush or Francis, all of whom wrote masterful poems.

Tim
The reason that I quite seriously think that this poem:

To Be Sung On The Water

Beautiful, my delight,
Pass, as we pass the wave.
Pass, as the mottled night
Leaves what it cannot save,
Scattering dark and bright.

Beautiful, pass and be
Less than the guiltless shade
To which our vows were said;
Less than the sound of the oar
To which our vows were made,--
Less than the sound of its blade
Dipping the stream once more.

was possibly inspired whether consciously or unconsciously by Schubert's song of the same title is that there are similarities quite apart from the theme. Although the song is in triple time (6/8) it resolves into two beats of three and glides smoothly through gentle ripples. The song was rather fashionable in concerts and on gramophone records at about the same time that Louise Bogan would have written this poem.

This is one of the few truly happy poems by Bogan that I have discovered. Of course there is Roman Fountain (thanks Bobby) and the love poems are powerful.
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 05, 2004).]

I've just pulled the first eight anthologies I could find on my shelves, and Bogan is included in six of them:

--Louis Untermeyer(ed), Modern American Poetry
--Hayden Carruth(ed), The Voice that Is Great Within Us
--Oscar Williams(ed), The Pocket Anthology of American Verse
--Ellen Bass(ed), No More Masks!
--Gioia, Mason, Schoerke (eds), 20th Century American Poetry
--The Norton Anthology of Women's Literature

These two do not include any of her work:
--F O Mattheissen (ed), The Oxford Book of American Verse
--Donald Hall(ed), Contemporary American Poetry

The Mattheissen only includes ONE 20th century female poet (Millay) and the Hall does not include any poets born before 1900.


That's not a bad rate of inclusion by any means of reckoning. And the No More Masks!--one of the first expressively "feminist" anthologies of poetry printed in the US--includes "Women."



[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited July 05, 2004).]

Tom
She's not in "The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English".

Those are American publications. It's so hard to cover the field.
Janet

The Williams and Untermeyer anthologies are old collections, and even Caruth's book has been around a long time. And Caruth is of an older generation that knew Bogan's verse.
I don't have time to go searching, but I'd bet she's not to be found in most of the recent anthologies. And in any case, her name doesn't come up often in contemporary discussions of the
important American poetry of the 20th century. She is, as they say, marginalized---and overshadowed by many inferiors.

She's in The Faber Book of 20C women's poetry (ed. F.Adcock, 1987) from which I cull

The Crows.

The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows' cry.

She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart's laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows,

Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.

Do like its rhythmic fluidity.

Margaret.

Margaret, you beat me to it! I think I first read her in the Faber anthology, alongside any number of other poets I wouldn't ever have heard of otherwise.

I love the anecdote Elizabeth Bishop recounts, in her memoir "Efforts of Affection," in which Marianne Moore goes to teach a workshop at the 92nd Street Y, and Miss Bogan shows up to take it, which rather unnerves Miss Moore.

Sally

Sally:

If I remember correctly, Brogan was teaching and Moore was the student. Moore had never participated as a "student" in a workshop, and peppered Brogan with very complicated questions about prosody. Apparently she was very impressed with Brogan as a teacher and told Bishop she learned a great deal. In any case, it is a charming story, don't you think?

It is, and you're absolutely right -- I had it backwards. I knew someone was unnerved!

Sally

Yes, absolutely right--but it's Bogan, not Brogan.

That's true. I used to know a Brogan. Whoops.

Interesting thread, Tim, thanks for initiating it. I admire Bogan briefly, in the way I would admire a finely carved ice sculpture. Then I turn back to the poets who (for me) manage the difficult feat of crossing over from admiration into love, Millay and Christina Rossetti, who have deep passion and real-world wisdom, in addition to technical prowess and poignancy.

Jennifer

Here's another, to make up for my poor memory for details:

Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle, --

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

Oh, and one more:

The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh --
Not the mind's avid substance -- still
Passionate beyond the will.


Sally