[mandolin]

One of the few good things about this job which has kept me from writing or doing more than lurk here the last couple of months is that it pays well -- and I've been able to get Tim's The Deed of Gift, Alicia's Archaic Smile, Rhina's Where Horizon's Go, Bob Mezey's Collected Poems, Sam Gwynn's No Word of Farewell, a couple of Wendy Cope's books, and more -- none of which I would have known existed without this site, and I am grateful for the introduction to a world of poetry I hadn't known existed.

But I've been very frustrated that I've been unable to get a copy of Davis's Devices and Desires, especially since I'll be in his sonnet workshop at Westchester (another discovery care of this site) and Tim had so highly recommended I read it. Well, today, on a lark, I looked once again at Amazon for the book, and it was in stock (hardcover) and has been shipped to me! The only difficulty is that it may not arrive before next Wednesday, in which case I won't have had a chance to read it before meeting Davis. In a way, it's almost worse now.

BTW, I'm settled in the new house and our project at work has been cancelled, just 2 months before its scheduled announcement to the world, so I'll have more time soon, either because I won't have a job or because I'll be working in a much less visible project with many fewer time-constraints. So I'll see some of you at Westchester, and be participating here again with the rest of you.

[Tim Murphy]

Mandolin, I'm delighted to hear of a Spherian acquiring all those books. See you next Wednesday.

[Tim Murphy]

Here's a thread on Dick Davis, our new guest lariat, from last year. For those of you who weren't here, I'm bringing it back to the fore, and over the next week I'll be adding several poems. Here's another sonnet, this one from the new book due in May.

Duchy and Shinks

Duchy and Shinks, my father's maiden aunts,
Lived at the seaside and kept house together:
They bicycled in every kind of weather
And looked across the waves to far-off France.
Routine had made their days a stately dance,
A spinsters' pas-de-deux, with every feather
Where it ought to be: no one asked them whether
They liked a life with nothing left to chance.

They showed me photographs of long ago--
Two English roses in a chorus line:
I said "They're lovely" as I sipped my tea.
They were too--at the Folies, second row,
Or down-stage, glittering in a grand design,
With every feather where it ought to be.

[A. E. Stallings]

How exciting that Dick is our guest lariat. I am a big fan. I also attended his sonnet seminar at Westchester, and I'd venture to say (being admittedly biased) it is probably the best class there.

One of the amazing things he does is meld a deep knowledge of the English tradition in poetry with a deep knowledge of what is, for most of us, the very exotic tradition of classical Persian poetry. Sometimes this is in forms, other times subject matter. He himself, though, came to the Persian first via FitzGerald, in one of the all-time great English translations.

This poem, from <u>A Kind of Love</u> (1991, University of Arkansas Press), never ceases to bowl me over. It is perhaps a bit long for an on-line forum, but worth it to read in full. He has marvellously wedded in it his Persian and English poetic roots: an homage to Omar Khayyam AND the FitzGerlad translation, in English rubaiyats of mutlisyllabic rimes that are Byronic in their virtuosity. (It is wise to keep in mind a British pronunciation, to have the rimes all work out...)

This also has that rare balance between humor and dead-serious, all the while light on its nimble feet. It is both a history of one poet's journey in the art (and translation), while also contrasting a literary Persian past with the political tumult of modern Iran.

A Letter to Omar

1.

I stood beside the ghastly tomb they built for you
And shuddered with vacarious, mute guilt for you;
Are concrete columns what they thought you meant?
I wanted wine, a glass turned down, drops spilt for you.

A sick child reads (his life is ot imperiled--
He sucks the candied death-wish of FitzGerald);
I was that child, and your translated words
Were poetry--the muse's gaudy herald.

Was it for you I answered that advertisement
Before I knew what coasting through one's thirties meant?
Is so I owe my wife and child to that
Old itch to get at what your Englished verses meant.

Thus in your land I doled out Shakespeare, Milton--
Decided I preferred sheep's cheese to stilton
But knew as much of Persia or Iran
As jet-lagged fat cats sluicing at the Hilton.

My language-teacher was a patient Persian Jew
(I pray that he survives), a techno-person who
Thought faith and verse vieux jeux; he thought me weird--
He learnt my loyalties and his aversion grew.

Love proved the most effective learning lure and not
His coaxing tact: my girl required the score and plot
--Explained in halting, pidgin syllables--
Of our first opera (which was--aptly--Turandot).

When I had said, in crabbed words bare of ornament,
What La Boheme, The Magic Flute and Norma meant
She married me; my Persian was still bad
But now I knew I knew what "nessun dorma" meant.

We set up home . . . but I feel more than sure you
Would nod assent to Dr. Johnson's poor view
Of tulip streaks (Damn all particulars...)
And I desist--I wouldn't want to bore you.


2

You left the busy trivia unspoken:
Haunted by vacancy, you saw unbroken
Miles of moonlight--time and the desert edge
The high-walled gardens, man's minute, brief token.

And if I reveled in your melancholy
(LIke mooching through the rain without a brolly)
It was the passion of your doubt I loved,
Your castigation of the bigot's folly.

Besides, what could be more perversely pleasant
To an ascetic, hungry adolescent
Than your insistent carpe diem cry
Of let conjecture go, embrace the present?

And all set out (I thought so then, I think so now)
In stanzas of such finely-wrought, distinct know-how
They were my touchstone of the art (it is
A taste our pretty literati think low-brow).

Such fierce uncertainty and such precision!
That fateful meter mated with a visio
Of such persuasive doubt. . . gradeur was your
Decisive statement of our indecision.

Dear poet-scholar, would-be alcoholic
(Well, is the wine--or is it not--symbolic?)
You would and would not recognize the place--
Succession now is quasi apostolic,

The palace is a kind of Moslem Deanery,
But government, despite this shift of scenery,
Stays as embattled as it ever was--
As individual, and as sanguinary.

The warring creeds still rage--each knows it's wholly right
And welcomes ways to wage the martyrs' holy fight;
You might not know the names of some new sects
But, as of old, the nation is bled slowly white.


3

Listen: "Death to the Yanks, out with their dollars!"
What revolution cares for poet-scholars?
What price evasive, private doubt beside
The public certainties of Ayatollahs?

And every faction would find you a traitor:
The country of the RUbaiyat's creator
Was fired like stubble as we packed our bags
And sought the province of its mild translator.

East Anglia!--where passionate agnostics
Can burn their strictly non-dogmatic joss-stickss,
And take time off from moody poetry
For letters, crosswords, long walks and acrostics.

Where mist and damp make most men non-committed,
Where both sides of most battles seem half-witted,
Where London is a world away and where
Even the gossips felt FitzGerald fitted.

He named his boat The Scandal (no misnomer . . .)
And fished the coast from Lowestoft round to Cromer.
One eye on his beloved Posh, and one
On you or Virgil, Calderon or Homer;

Then wrote his canny, kind, retiring letters
To literature's aggressive, loud go-getters--
Carlyle and others I forbear to name
Who had the nerve to think themselves his betters;

You were the problems (metrical, semantic)
From which he made an anglicized Romantic--
The perfect correspondent for his pen
(Inward, mid-century, and not too frantic);

As you are mine in this; it makes me really sick
To hear men say they find you crass or merely slick;
Both you and your translator stay my heroes--
Agnostic blessings on you both!
Sincerely, Dick.

November 1982

[Susan McLean]

Alicia, that "Letter to Omar" is delightful, not only reminiscent of Byron himself but also of Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron." The tone, the rueful wit, the perceptiveness are all very appealing--and those rhymes!

[Tim Murphy]

The poem that made me fall in love with Dick Davis was Uxor Vivamus (Wife, we shall live); if there's a better love poem written by anyone under 60, please send it to me:

Uxor Vivamus

The first night that I slept with you
And slept, I dreamt (these lines are true):
Now newly married we had moved
Into an unkempt house we loved--
The rooms were large, the floors of stone,
The garden gently overgrown
With sunflowers, flox, and mignonette--
All as we would have wished and yet
There was a shabby something there
Tainting the mild and windless air.
Where did it lurk? Alarmed we saw
The walls about us held the flaw--
They were of plaster, like gray chalk,
Porous and dead: it seemed our talk,
Our glances, even love, would die
With such indifference standing by.
Then, scarcely thinking what I did,
I chipped the plaster and it slid
In easy pieces to the floor.
It crumbled cleanly, more and more
Fell unresistingly away--
And there, beneath that deadening gray,
A fresco stood revealed: sky-blue
Predominated, for the view
Was an ebullient country scene,
The crowning of some pageant queen
Whose dress shone blue, and over all
The summer sky filled half the wall.
And so it was in every room,
The plaster's undistinguished gloom
Gave way to dances, festivals,
Processions, muted pastorals--
And everywhere that spacious blue:
I woke, and lying next to you
Knew all that I had dreamt was true.

[Tim Murphy]

Deborah Warren, from whom we'll shortly hear, was so imprudent as to post my sonnet "The Track of a Storm." And I responded that I would post my two favorite sonnets by my contemporaries. The simple way to begin with Dick Davis, our judge and visiting lariat, was simply to move this thread over from Mastery. Your other lariat, Tim

[Dick Davis]

One of the nicest things that can happen after publishing a poem is having it praised by someone whose work you really admire - Alicia and Tim, I'm very grateful for your comments, and especially as I admire your own work so much. But I get embarrassed by praise, though I love it as much as the next person, so let's move on!