HIS OWN LIFE
The italicized portions of this poem are drawn from the account by the Roman historian Tacitus of the suicide of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.–A.D. 65), the Stoic philosopher, writer, playwright, and tutor to the emperor Nero.
CAĞALOĞLU
The Cağaloğlu hamam, or public bath, in Istanbul was given to the city in 1741 by Sultan Mehmet I. It is a wonder of Ottoman architecture and has been constantly in use since it was built.
OVID’S FAREWELL
Ovid himself, in the single mysterious reference he made to the cause of his exile from Rome, spoke of “carmen et error”—his poem (the slyly erotic Ars Amatoria) and a mistake. It used to be thought that by the latter was meant he had witnessed some sexual “indiscretion” committed by Augustus’s promiscuous daughter Julia—whose behavior finally led the emperor to act on his stern laws against adultery and have her banished as well. But I prefer the argument by recent historians that what Ovid had actually witnessed was a political conspiracy against the emperor of which Julia was a (perhaps unwitting) part.
Among the facts about Ovid’s life we do know for certain are that he had an older brother, who died suddenly when still relatively young, and that his third and beloved wife was named Fabia. It is to her that this poem is purportedly addressed, on the night before he is to leave for the bleak, freezing penal settlement at Tomis, on the Black Sea near the mouth of the Danube, among the barbaric Getae.
The Kid (Capricorn) and the Bear (Ursa Major), Hercules and the Serpent, are constellations.
AN ESSAY ON FRIENDSHIP
Jean Renoir’s film La Règle du jeu appeared in 1939. The two friends of mine mentioned are the sculptor Natalie Charkow Hollander and the novelist James McCourt.
TATTOOS
The first and third sections are anecdotal and symmetrical in their matching design of patterned and rhymed stanzas. The middle section is different, a discursive run of syllabics that speculates on the practice and theory of tattooing, of ornamenting the body.
The first section is set in Chicago in the late 1960s. Three raw recruits, or boots, from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center get drunk one night and end up at the local tattoo parlor—or tat shack, as it’s called. Flashes are those predesigned emblems one can choose. A sleeve is a tattooed scene that covers one’s entire arm, wrist to shoulder. The third sailor gets one of these, and by flexing a muscle or moving his arm, he can make the tattooed underwater scene come to a strange life. I should add that the first of the recruits has what used to be called “unspoken desires” for the second.
The third section takes place in late-nineteenth-century New Zealand. Maori chieftains used to have extraordinary facial tattoos, geometrical patterns that covered their whole heads, as a symbol of their authority. Authority has always depended on impressing one’s friends and frightening one’s enemies, and these tattoos were meant to do just that. In the poem, a chieftain’s eldest son is having one of these tattoos cut in. Toward the end of the procedure, the pain is so great that he lapses into a delirium in which he reimagines the Maori creation myth—which holds that Father Sky and Mother Earth were once a single entity, driven apart by the sons they carried in the darkness their combined bodies had created.
SORROW IN 1944
“Sorrow” is the name Cio-Cio-San gives to her child by Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton in Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. Abandoned by her lover, who with his new American wife plans to take the three-year-old child with him back to his homeland, Butterfly is preparing to commit suicide when the boy rushes to her side. She takes him in her arms and begs that he never know his mother killed herself for his sake. Before blindfolding him, she asks that he take one last look at her face so that a trace of it will remain in his memory.
The poem imagines that boy decades later, living in San Francisco and having himself fallen in love with a Japanese-American girl who has been interned in a Wyoming camp during the war. Frank—improbably described in the opera as being a blond, blue-eyed child—has escaped the fate of fellow Japanese-Americans, perhaps all the more to be haunted by a past he can only dimly recall. Dwight Eisenhower’s brother Milton, as director of the War Relocation Authority, supervised the transfer of Japanese-American citizens to remote work camps. After 1942, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were, for alleged security reasons, forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast. They were first taken to “assembly centers”—often fairgrounds or racing tracks—and later assigned to one of the ten relocation centers. Heart Mountain, a treeless plain between Powell and Cody, near the Shoshone Rover, eventually housed 14,000 people in hastily constructed barrack buildings, where the internees organized a school system, a newspaper and movie houses, farming crews, sports teams, and scout troops. Not until December 1944 did the Supreme Court declare it illegal to hold American citizens in camps against their will.
In the sequence’s third and tenth sonnets, which both view the story through the lens of Japanese legend, for the final couplet I have substituted a rhymed tanka.
THREE OVERTURES
Each of the poem’s three sections is named for a famous overture—by, respectively, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Suppé.
GOING BACK TO BED
“The old pilgrim” is Dante, in Purgatorio XXVI.
FULL CAUSE OF WEEPING
The title is from King Lear II.iv.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
New poems in this book were first published in The American Scholar, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, Raritan, The Times Literary Supplement, The Warwick Review; in Art and Artists, edited by Emily Fragos (Knopf, 2012); in March Was Made of Yarn, edited by Elmer Luke and David Karashima (Vintage, 2012); in Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and in my Seven Mozart Librettos (Norton, 2010). Susan Bianconi, Deborah Garrison, Jeffrey Posternak, and the Knopf production team have all been stalwart friends of this book and of its grateful author.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. D. McClatchy is the author of seven collections of poetry, and of three collections of prose. He has edited numerous other books, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and has written a number of opera libretti that have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, where he served as president from 2009 to 2012. McClatchy teaches at Yale University and is editor of The Yale Review.
ALSO BY J. D. MCCLATCHY
POETRY
Scenes from Another Life | 1981
Stars Principal | 1986
The Rest of the Way | 1990
Ten Commandments | 1998
Hazmat | 2002
Division of Spoils | 2003
Mercury Dressing | 2011
ESSAYS
White Paper | 1989
Twenty Questions | 1998
American Writers at Home | 2004
AS EDITOR
Anne Sexton: The Poet and Her Critics | 1978
Recitative: Prose by James Merrill | 1986
Poets on Painters | 1988
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry | 1990, 2003
Woman in White: Poems by Emily Dickinson | 1991
The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry | 1996
Christmas Poems (with John Hollander) | 1999
Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings | 2000
On Wings of Song | 2000
Love Speaks Its Name | 2001
Poems of the Sea | 2001
Bright Pages: Yale Writers, 1701–2001 | 2001
Horace: The Odes | 2002
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems | 2003
Poets of the Civil War | 2005
Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater | 2007
The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal | 2008
The Four Seasons | 2008
Thornt
on Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948 | 2009
Anthony Hecht: Selected Poems | 2011
Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings | 2011
W. S. Merwin: Collected Poems | 2013
(WITH STEPHEN YENSER)
James Merrill: Collected Poems | 2001
James Merrill: Collected Novels and Plays | 2002
James Merrill: Collected Prose | 2004
James Merrill: The Changing Light at Sandover | 2006
James Merrill: Selected Poems | 2008
AS TRANSLATOR
The Magic Flute | 2000, 2006
Carmen | 2001
Seven Mozart Librettos | 2010
The Bartered Bride | 2011
The Barber of Seville | 2012
LIBRETTI
A Question of Taste | 1989
Mario and the Magician | 1994
Orpheus Descending | 1994
Emmeline | 1996
1984 (with Thomas Meehan) | 2005
Our Town | 2006
Miss Lonelyhearts | 2006
Grendel (with Julie Taymor) | 2006
The Secret Agent | 2011
Vincent | 2011
Little Nemo in Slumberland | 2012
My Friend’s Story | 2013
Dolores Claiborne | 2013
The Death of Webern | 2013
The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me | 2013
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