And the way that we write the nineteenth century on a piece of paper is we go “19” and then we do a special little thing on top. A nifty little thing that’s sort of like a little bug flying around the nineteenth century. And that’s called the “th.” It means “nineteenth” century. And that’s how we abbreviate the enormity of what happened.
But here’s a tip. If you say “nineteen hundreds” when you mean “nineteenth century,” you’re going to get in trouble with your dates. Because the nineteenth century is the eighteen hundreds. But! Don’t say “the eighteen hundreds.” People who say “the eighteen hundreds” are looked at in a special way by the people who say “the nineteenth century.” The people who use eighteen hundreds don’t know that. They don’t know that the people who say “nineteenth century” are looking askance at them. So please consider not saying “eighteen hundreds,” because the people who say “nineteenth century” will dismiss what you have to say. You can refer very knowingly to a specific decade of the nineteenth century— you can say, for instance, “the eighteen-eighties,” or even, extra-knowingly, “the eighties”—but never “the eighteen hundreds.”
So it’s the nineteenth century we’re talking about today. And on a timeline, it goes all the way from here—to here. Exactly one hundred years of pure poetry. And in that space of time, a lot happened. And after that time, in what is called the twentieth century, events became quite confused and nobody knew what they were doing. Rhyme went all to hell, and everything became a jumble.
And that’s why we like to talk about the nineteenth century, because it’s more fun, and everybody knows names like Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge—and Swinburne. And Tennyson. And Mr. Browning. And Mrs. Browning. And Arnold. And Emily Dickinson, of course. And Longfellow. And a bunch of other poets. The names just go on and on, because the nineteenth century was the century of English poetry. Coterminous with the flowering of the British empire was the flowering of the empire of English verse. And that is not what we will be talking about today.
Today we will just be talking about this moment right here. Right at the very end of the nineteenth century. The ends of centuries have a special meaning, as everybody who moves slowly toward them knows. Who was alive at the very end of the nineteenth cenury, at this last fleeting moment? Well, Swinburne was still alive. He was deaf, but he was still alive.
And there were some younger people chiming in. There were some people like Kipling. And Henley. And Patmore. And Alice Meynell. And Edmund Gosse. Gosse had met Tennyson and Swinburne, and he visited Walt Whitman before he died. He found Whitman sitting in an upstairs room in New Jersey. Clippings from various articles about himself were scattered on the floor. Every so often Whitman would fish up an article about himself and read a bit of it aloud.
So there was a lot going on there in the nineteenth century. And they lived their lives, and they wrote some poems, and then suddenly they bumped into the end of it. And they blasted through into 1901. That was the big moment, because then there they were in the twentieth century. When you’re in the twentieth century, it’s a whole different ball game. There are huge tropical plants dripping raw latex. There are giant pieces of diesel-powered earth-moving equipment. Turbines, huge hydroelectric projects. There’s dynamite blowing up over there. There are exotic shores that are lapped at by alien warm pale-blue crinkled Saran Wrap sheets of ocean. There’s neon, of course. Italy is a mess. Switzerland—who knows? France is a question mark. As is Austro-Hungary. It’s all up for grabs! And who conquers the twentieth century? Who takes it from here on in and says, I’ve got it, folks? I’ll take care of it, you don’t have to worry about it now. Who takes care of it? I’ll tell you who. The worst possible person, unfortunately. His name was Marinetti. The leader of the Futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Manic Phil, who marinated the twentieth century in his influence. Marinetti was aggressive, he wanted to change things, and he wanted to break things. He wanted old buildings leveled. He wanted Venice blown up. He was a great writer of manifestos. Or manifesti.
And one morning in 1909, Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto was published in Paris. The intellectuals opened the Figaro that morning, and there was this full page of authoritative promulgations. That said that the past was to be jettisoned. That Europe needed a new way of thinking. It was time to embrace steam and speed and power and war. The old ways were no good. Marinetti didn’t use the word “fascism,” but that’s what it led to. Futurism led directly to Mussolini and Hitler. It also led to modern poetry. The two roads diverged, but not so much. There was in Marinetti’s modernism a desire to stomp around heedlessly and a wish to sweep the counter clean. The ambitious guy poets really liked Marinetti.
And some of the girl poets liked the guy poets. Mina Loy, for example—that brilliant strange juxtaposer. She had her affair with Marinetti. As I’ve mentioned. And what happened then was that the gentleness, and the sharp eye, and the kind of lovely sexy anarchy of Mina Loy was conjoined with the machine-admiring bullying mechanistic destructiveness and manicness of Marinetti. And out of these two forces, Marinetti and Mina Loy, was begotten a young bully who talked loudly and sneered in public. His name was Ezra Pound. Sara Teasdale disliked Ezra Pound, and Ezra Pound disliked Sara Teasdale, so it was mutual.
And that’s what I want to talk to you about. I want to clarify the sweep of it all. And the grandeur of it all. And the tragic waste of it all. The perversion of talents. The discouragement of gifts. The misapplication of energies. And even so, the flowering of some really nice poems along the way.
LITTLE INJURY TODAY, actually. I was carrying my computer downstairs in order to continue the cleanup of my office, which is progressing well, although slowly. I thought if I get my computer out of there—my big old computer, not my laptop—I’ll be able to reach the next phase of cleaning. So I unhooked all the little machines that are connected to the big machine. I unhooked the power cord and the two external drives that I have, and the optical mouse with the little red eye in its belly, and the speakers, and the monitor, and the scanner, and the printer, and the keyboard, and I guess that’s it. I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can’t tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next.
So there I was. My computer was as if amputated—all of its ways of connecting to the world were gone, and it was just a black obelisk with a rich man’s name on it. It couldn’t reason, it couldn’t speak, it was imprisoned in its frozen memories, its self was in a state of suspension. It could not add anything to what it had done, or remember anything that it had done.
I lifted it carefully and I said aloud in the room, “Man, this sucker’s heavy.” When you think that there are plenty of laptops for sale that do most of what this thing does. But it’s still a good computer even now three years after I bought it.
So I carried it through various rooms, past various piles of books, and then I began walking down the stairs. And these stairs have something about them that makes me misjudge. Not for the first time I believed that my foot had reached the final stair when it hadn’t. I thought I was stepping down onto the floor but really I had one step to go. So my foot came down twice as hard as it should have and eight inches lower than it should have, very heavily, and I was thrown forward by my out-of-balance, almost toppling, landing. I was really falling. If I dropped the computer I could catch my fall. But I didn’t want to drop the computer. So I did a strange low dance of clutching the computer and running forward. I was like a mother chimp fleeing with her baby. I ran three forward-falling steps, and then my hand, holding the corner of the computer, collided with the edge of a doorjamb. I set the computer down hard. But I hadn’t let it fall.
Immediately I thought I’d broken my finger, which was bleeding and had no sensation. I went into the kitchen and stood at the
sink, and then I started to faint, so I went to the couch with some paper towels and lay down to bleed.
I held my hand in the air, and I kept testing my finger, wondering whether the bone in it was broken. I really didn’t want to go to a doctor and have them say, Ah-hah, we’ll X-ray it and give you a bone scan and a barium enema, just to be sure. No thank you. I have no health insurance. Death is my health insurance. So I lay there and breathed steadily, and after a while my finger stopped bleeding, and the feeling of mild shock passed, and my knuckle turned gray and then a bruised blue. And I knew that I was going to be fine, but that I might not be able to type for a while, which would give me a reprieve on writing my introduction. A great whimpery happiness passed through me like clear urine.
I COULDN’T THINK of who to call, so I called Roz’s cellphone and told her I’d stumbled on the stairs, and she arrived amazingly quickly and pulled up a chair and took the bunched-up paper towels away and looked at my finger. She is very good at taking care of a person who has hurt his finger. She had brought some bandages, and she bandaged me up. She said, “You probably need stitches. I can take you to the hospital.” I said no, no, I’ll just let the skin do what skin does.
Then I said I thought I would take a nap. Roz patted my shoulder, which felt good. Then she walked Smack and left.
I lay there wondering why I had fallen. Why am I in such a rush? Why can’t I just feel my way carefully down the last several steps? I’ve had problems with those steps before. You think the flat plane of the floor is there and your whole balance system has already compensated for the landing on the floor, and then it’s not there, and you fall. It’s a short fall, only eight inches, but it’s a forward fall.
And what if I’d hit my head? I thought, Poor Edna. That was how Edna St. Vincent Millay died, falling down the stairs alone. She’d written that embarrassingly bad propaganda poetry during the war, and she knew her singing days were done. She was drunk, and I wasn’t really. I’d just had two New-castles. Not drunk but not in a state of tip-top balance either. It’s not good to live alone when you fall down the stairs.
Vachel Lindsay died on the stairs, too, more or less. After drinking poison, Vachel Lindsay staggered up the basement stairs. His wife called, Is everything all right? He said no. And when Vachel Lindsay died Sara Teasdale was heartsick, and she drugged herself one night in the bathtub.
I fell asleep for about an hour with my bloody finger on my chest. Fortunately it was my left index finger. There were some small cuts on my right hand, but they also had stopped bleeding. I looked at the cuts for a while before I went to sleep.
WHEN I FIRST started reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry in college, I thought, There’s a problem here. There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it’s not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it’s full of untold particulars. For example, take my briefcase. Is there anything about death in my briefcase? Let me reach in, with my good hand, and I’ll feel around. Ah: a raisin. Will you look at that dusty raisin? Actually it may be a dried cranberry.
And what else? A yellow clamp to hold papers together. And a green clamp. Both useful. And a Cruzer USB Flash stick. And here’s a crumpled receipt from a car-repair place that says CUSTOMER STATES THERE IS A RATTLE NOISE UNDER VEHICLE. It’s been stamped P A I D in green ink with a woman’s initials in red. And here’s a small notebook with some passages from Dryden copied into it. And here’s a bubble pack of Pilot G2 Rolling Ball pens, with two pens left in it. And, what else? A crumpled sleeve for an Amtrak ticket. And a visitor badge with my name on it, and on the back it says: “This visitor badge can be used as an adhesive badge or non-adhesive badge.” And here’s an untwisted twist tie. And here’s a dime, and a penny, and a nickel. And a sixteen-pack of Duracell AA batteries. They say:
GREAT VALUE
GRANDE VALEUR
Six batteries left. And it turns out I’ve been carrying around a New York subway map and didn’t know it.
And that’s just one side pouch. So, anything about death in there? No! Well, yes. The Dryden couplet in the notebook is about death. It’s in what experts call iambic pentameter:
All human things are subject to decay
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.
But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.
On the other hand, maybe my briefcase is wrong. Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life’s warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They’re just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes. And we need poems to declare love, too. Which they do, over and over. I love you, or I love her, or I love him—love is behind a huge mass of poems—and that’s good. Because actually those are two truths that we should keep on thinking about for ourselves. I love you, and all the people I know and depend on are going to reach the end of their lives and when they go it’s completely unexpected even when part of you knew it was in the offing.
YOU CAN TAKE IT a step further and say, as Herrick did, “Gather ye rosebuds.” Go ahead, say it if you must. But know it’s a typo. It was supposed to be “Gather your rosebuds”— the “ye” was an abbreviation for “your” but with an “e” in place of the “r.” It was corrected to “your” in the second edition. So, yes, you can say enjoy the panoply now, friends, gather your rosebuds, make the best bouquet of them you can manage, use all the sprigs of baby’s breath you care to use, because time is on the march and you must, of course, “seize the day.”
But here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things—so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.
And yet if it hadn’t been wrongly translated as “seize” would we remember that line now? Probably not. “Pluck the day free”? No way. And would we have remembered “gather ye rosebuds” without the odd mistake of the “ye”? Probably not. It’s their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.
9
I WENT ON A BLUEBERRY-PICKING DATE with Tim and Tim’s new girlfriend Hannah and Hannah’s friend Marie. I kind of liked Marie. She wore flowing scarflike garments and some kind of weird perfume, and she knew a lot about Dorothy Parker. She stuck her head inside one of the taller blueberry bushes and then she said, “You know, the really good ones are deep inside.”
I said, “Are they?” I stuck my head in, and Marie was right. If you push your head way into the green shadow of the bush and then you look up, you’ll find amazing pendular arrangements of giant almost-black berries hanging everywhere. Nobody’s seen them but you. They’ve been there all along, growing an ever darker blue and ever more engorged with rainwater, and yet no previous pickers have found them because they did not know to push their whole head into the blueberry bush.
“You have the
gift,” I said. “But I don’t think you’re going to develop any feelings of affection for me. Am I right?”
“Let’s just pick blueberries,” she said. So we picked a whole lot of blueberries, and then the four of us walked to the water and smelled its mumbling muddy smell, and Tim suddenly held out his arms and said, “Look at this river!”
I said to Marie, “Can you give us a taste of some Dorothy P?”
Marie lifted both sides of her scarf and said:
Devil-gotten sinners,
Throwing back their heads,
Fiddling for their dinners,
Kissing for their beds.
We all went “Oooo.” Then Tim and Hannah began to walk back up toward the porch where you weighed the blueberries and left the right amount of money in a little wooden box. I made a tiny flinch of embarrassment as I saw the two of them hold hands. Marie and I walked behind them, not knowing what to do with our arms.
“So do you, ah, blame Walt Whitman for the death of rhyme?” Marie asked, conversationally.
I said, “Just because he said rhyming was intrinsically comic, that it was for inferior writers? No, that’s just Walt talking out his back hatch. Which he was wont to do. Rationalizing his own inabilities. He wrote some things of genius, and he made his own rules.” I paused. “What’s that odd rattling sound?”
The sun was dipping behind the trees, and a frizzle of wind had risen up from somewhere. We listened. The sound turned out to be coming from several small windmills that had begun turning. We walked up to one and looked at it.
“Looks to be made out of a beer can,” said Marie.
“You are right,” I said. It was a Pabst beer can, cut and fanned out to make a windmill. When it twirled, it frightened berry-eating birds away. “That was a nice stanza you said back there,” I said. “Some would say that it was trochaic trimeter, but they would be wrong in my opinion because it’s a four-beat line.”