[Kevin Corbett]

[quote=Jeff Holt;155393]

Originally Posted by Kevin Corbett

Jeff, that "Aubade" one is a good example of how I feel about this sort of poetry. I find it really quite disgusting. Especially lines like:

Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I think this is an insult against life itself, wherever it came from. If that's all this man can think about, let him have his misery.]

For anyone who read my original reply to this post, please know that I am detracting it because I realized that I found myself defending Larkin, and this thread, which needs no defending.

I can reduce everything important that I had to say to a simple question:
Keven, if this is truly how you really feel, then why do you keep posting on this thread?

Jeff, you're probably right. It doesn't need defending. It's just that I have felt despair myself---I'll admit that I even have clinical depression for which I take medication---and I wonder if despairing poetry isn't the best thing for one to read, even if it helps the writer exorcise his demons. But I am writing from my own perspective, and I realize not all people are as frail as me.

[Maryann Corbett]

Jeff, thanks from me also for your terrific contributions to this thread. It's a great service to us all.

Though Jeff has certainly earned a breather, anyone who'd like to add to the thread a while longer is welcome to do so. We have a bit of quiet time before the beginning of a new event on this board, so I think there's no need to curtail our enjoyment of this one just yet--although if Tim wishes to correct me, of course I am corrected.

What I especially enjoy about Josh Mehigan's dark poems, including the example Jeff has explicated, is that Josh avoids any kind of "anti-whine" reaction from the reader by carefully embodying the darkness in a third-person protagonist rather than a first-person narrator. An example permanently installed in my head is the triolet "Last Change at Reconciliation."

Another poet who is very good at dark, and tends to stay dark, is the late Richard Moore. Here's an excerpt from one of his sonnet sequences. It's unusual because it treats the coming of spring, the quintessentially hopeful subject, as hopeless.

With its great belly heaving, cracked and bruised
from the frost’s push, sore from the ice’s sting,
slowly the earth emerges into spring.
Under the brook-loud hills today, it oozed
at every step, and not a sod refused
my boot’s print. Long imprisoned waters swing
out over sunny meadows, glittering.
The dark tunnels beneath cave in, unused.

What if they do, father? See: dying sun,
striking across the hillsides, has begun
to shape with shadows every mound and hummock.
No one can guess what the deep frost has done.
From steps on the dry road, dark trickles run;
stiff gravel gives, like walking on a stomach.

One more pertinent tidbit: There's a lot of dark in the most recent issue of "Umbrella" with the "Gall" feature. Check out C.E. Chaffin's editorial.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

What Maryann says is right on the mark: the use of the third person helps a lot to remove the whine from poetry that articulates despair, as it points outside the self to the universal.

Thanks, Jeff, for initiating this very rich thread--so many fine poems that are new to me!--and for ending with this well-deserved tribute to Josh Mehigan. I remember meeting both of you at West Chester in 1997 as one of the pleasures that sold me on the conference and kept me going back every year, right up to the present. I love the blend of enclosed passion, discipline and craftsmanship in both of you, and the fact that when I read something by either one of you I'm a bit afraid, because I know that something is about to happen that could hurt, but that I wouldn't want to miss.

I want to post a poem of yours that exemplifies the blend I'm talking about:

Take Me

Jim rushes up to me and grabs my waist,
Hugging me like a son who's waited hours
To share a robin't nest he found today.
The state removed him from his home and placed
Him here for treatment. He still picks at sores,
Screams in his sleep, and bites to get his way.

Will you take me? he asks, flashing blue eyes
That earned him change when he was half this size.

As we step over lunch trays, Kenny sings
Over the unit's din, crying Take me!
I shake my head and look down. Jim still clings,
Chewing a paper plane. I vow I'll see
Each child this week. They curse, and Curtis flings
A sock that disappears in the debris.


That shake of the head and downward look says so much that could have been "over the top" in other hands, and the last line is perfect.

[Jeff Holt]

Rhina,

All I can say is thank you, thank you... You're amazing and wonderful, and I feel very fortunate to be your friend.

Maryann and Tim, thank you for allowing me to host/cohost this thread--it has been a great pleasure!

Kevin-thanks for clarifying where you were coming from. I understand now, and can relate in the sense that, if someone is feeling too fragile, despairing poetry probably is not the best thing to read. What I have found, though, is that if I am feeling down but not particularly fragile, reading poems such as those in this thread can cheer me up, largely because the otherwise intangible melancholy has been transformed into something beautiful. That's just how it works for me. But I completely respect whatever works (or doesn't work) for you.

Everyone, thank you so much for posting all of these poems! I am making a list of authors and specific poems to add to my reading list, which is one of the main things I hoped to get from this discussion.

Cheers!
Jeff

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks, Jeff, for this thread, which I have only had time to read through thoroughly now and have enjoyed immensely. Some great poems posted and a very high level of commentary. In particular, thanks for the wonderful portrait you have given us of Josh and also for your comments on his extraordinary villanelle.

I will return to this thread with fuller comments later, I hope, but in the meantime here's one by Anthony Hecht with the almost too apt title, "Despair", which I was surprised to see hadn't yet been quoted:

Sadness. The moist gray shawls of drifting sea-fog,
Salting scrub pine, drenching the cranberry bogs,
Erasing all but foreground, making a ghost
Of anyone who walks softly away;
And the faint, penitent psalmody of the ocean.

Gloom. It appears among the winter mountains
On rainy days. Or the tiled walls of the subway
In caged and aging light, in the steel scream
And echoing vault of the departing train,
The vacant platform, the yellow destitute silence.

But despair is another matter. Midafternoon
Washes the worn bank of a dry arroyo,
Its ocher crevices, unrelieved rusts,
Where a startled lizard pauses, nervous, exposed
To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine.

This is one by someone who has clearly been there. And the depiction of "despair" as a geographical place is a very telling one. It's also interesting that in a volume entitled The Darkness and the Light, he shows the light as being as potentially terrible as the darkness here.

[Catherine Chandler]

Thanks for that, Gregory. I was hoping someone would post it . . .

And thank you, Jeff, for leading the discussion.

[Ed Shacklee]

I had hesitated to post this one, as it uses the word 'despair' outright, but Gregory's post shows how wrong-headed that can be. Here's one by Edwin Muir:



The Late Wasp

You that through all the dying summer
Came every morning to our breakfast table,
A lonely bachelor mummer,
And fed on marmelade
So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able
To prise you from the sweet pit you had made, –
You and the earth have now grown older,
And your blue thoroughfares have felt a change;
They have grown colder;
And it is strange
How the familiar avenues of the air
Crumble now, crumble; the good air will not hold,
All cracked and perished with the cold;
And down you dive through nothing and through despair.

[Jan D. Hodge]

Though Jarrell’s name came up earlier in this thread, I have resisted posting this—the most despairing poem I know—until now, thinking it perhaps inappropriate. But in light of some of the recent postings, perhaps not. As 1st person, it might be open to the charge of “whining,” but I definitely respect its craft, the richly sustained metaphor, and the strategy of contrasting the child’s dream with the adult’s “reality." And I suspect many of us have thought this way at times.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90 North

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed: up the globe’s impossible sides
I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,
The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,
And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,
Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.

—Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence
Of the unbroken ice. I stand here,
The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare
At the North Pole . . .
At the North Pole . . . And now what? Why, go back.

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.
The world—my world spins on this final point
Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds
End in this whirlpool I at last discover.

And it is meaningless. In the child’s bed
After the night’s voyage, in that warm world
Where people work and suffer for the end
That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

I reached my North and it had meaning.
Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone—

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .--Randall Jarrell

[Tim Murphy]

Special thanks to Ed for the Muir poem, which shame on me, I didn't know.

[John Whitworth]

Well, I have to get in there about Larkin's 'Aubade'. I don't feel AT ALL that it is disgusting. What disgusts me is the jolly atheist, that's the fellow who's seen through all that God nonsense and is happy to believe that life ends - just like that. He reckons it's enough to believe in 'the human spirit' or something. Well, mate, it isn't. For me it isn't and if it is for you, then, in my opinion, you believe in fairy stories.

Chaps like the dreadful Dawkins are the chaps I have in mind.

Larkin's poem is about a state of mind, not about a settled belief. Larkin was, in some ways, a cheerful chap. Lugubriously cheerful. He was certainly funny.

I don't believe in God, but then I don't believe in man-made climate change either. But then who am I to think I am so clever? I could be wrong about both. I'd like to be wrong about the first which is, after all, a good deal more important.

Trust in God and take short views.