Emerson the stylist I honor, the maker of phrases immaculate and sound. Emerson the etymologist who proposed that Every word was once a poem. Emerson with his unfailing bias for developing an argument through apothegm, pith, maxim, a flurry of gists. I admire Emerson for his knowledge that utterance is place enough and how he accorded language its rightful physicality and elemental power. And how his essays are like growing organisms that respond, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, now to this barrier, now to some other, drawing the reader into the spell, seducing us by narrative unpredictability: what facet will be cut next? We cannot guess; we press on. Emerson’s great exemplars from Plutarch to Empedocles and Heraclitus, from Eckermann and Dugald Stewart to Montaigne and the Upanishads, from de Staël to Hafez and Swedenborg, had all been gleaned so thoroughly that their necessary ideas and forms became a part of Emerson; or rather blended, coalesced into Emerson, so that they were less referents than reflexes, less without or within than of. Like a Monroe Doctrine of the mind: You who would have that idea or image, take it, for it is your own to begin with. Whoever would simply say what he thinks, name what he knows, is sovereign, and stands at the centre. If words are stones that we arrange into cairns and columns and palaces of thought, then Emerson was a master mason.
I cherish the Emerson who found his exemplary self-reliant man in Henry Thoreau. Insist on yourself; never imitate— this his confrere Thoreau embodied to a fault. Writing of Plato, Emerson unwittingly sketched Thoreau: He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, ‘There is also the divine.’ And, in yet another context, not long after meeting this son of a pencil maker, he noted The one thing of value in the world is the active soul; in Henry he had his vivid model—nature vivre— and rampant doppelgänger from whom he could take his measure, and against whose works and manner he could refine his concept of nature itself, and of wisdom, purity of will, defiance, justice, destiny, health, value, life, death, the rigorous universe in toto. His moving elegy for Thoreau exfoliates by its own rationale, just as did the man himself. No opposition or ridicule had any weight with him, Emerson remembered. He remarked how Thoreau chose to be rich by making his wants few. He even insisted, with a straight face, that as an ichthyologist Henry was so skilled that the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water. The wonder is he didn’t claim that they conversed in watery whispers. Thoreau was Emerson’s most true brother, and harshest mirror. When they argued they argued with the full force of their affections, and they held each other to high standards of honesty and kinship. I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact … wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.
I celebrate, then, the Emerson who said that friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed, and who realized All lives, all friendships are momentary and therefore pitched himself heart and soul into the lives of those who called him friend.
I celebrate the man who so simply proposed Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. Meaning: We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen.
I celebrate the curiosity that led Emerson, on one of his daily walks to Roxbury to visit the grave of his first wife, to open her coffin and look at her perished body. If thoughts are actions, actions are externalized thoughts. How did what he saw there in the dwarf wooden ketch direct his intellectual voyage thereafter? I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin is what he recorded. Was it morbidity, curiosity? Emerson himself, the great analyst of gesture and philosopher of synecdoche, offers no commentary on this singular moment. He wanted to know something. And presumably he found out. If you celebrate asset, you celebrate method. Commentators have, over the years, viewed this incident with solemn disbelief. Some have proposed it never happened, that it was a dream, a nightmare even. It was not a dream. It was a loving scientist gazing upon an undeniable truth in his search for freedom and its own undeniable truths. Of lovers he wrote, When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. I honor Emerson’s breaching the coffin and fathoming Ellen Tucker’s corpse.
I celebrate the man who wrote I admire answers to which no answer can be made.
The man who wrote Pretension never wrote an Iliad. Who wrote of one of his friends who had difficulty writing with any concision that he should be made effective by being tapped by a good suction-pump.
The man who predicted When the rudder is invented for the balloon, railroads will be superseded.
The man who knew that envy is ignorance.
I celebrate his common human fear of being a fraud and that they would find me out. The raw mind of the man, its spontaneous sincerity. His vulnerability so tersely bared. I take my hat off to the Emerson who endured unheated winter lecture halls and the sometimes indifferent, hostile and even hissing audiences, as he traveled the circuit for months on end, presenting his talks, reading his work, assaying his ideas before whoever would come to listen. Who carried on despite the mixed notices. Whose physical strength against the witless, withering rigors of the road was admirable. Who asked What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. I honor the depths of his depressions which made his moments of ecstasy that much more elevated.
The primary wisdom is intuition, whilst all subordinate teachings are tuition, he stated; one of his unveering convictions was that all we can truly know is understood through experience, gathered from the visceral engagement, learned from watching the peony explode into June whiteness and then wither brown under the July sun, eventually to be buried under December snow, and from that seen sequence infer one’s own process, mortality, lot. I celebrate Emerson the intuitionist, the man of seasoned instinct. The man who considered most universities hostile to the development of the minds of the young, insofar as they kept those minds away from primary experience, from the field, where things are really realized.
I respect his Pythagoreanist proposal that fundamental truths cannot finally be stated, but are discovered only through nuance, through metaphor, through natural emblem. In so many of his greatest essays the truth comes forth in this manner: between the hard rocky truisms, between the immaculate verities, between the disparate lines. Emerson who understood that in the synapse the blaze of electric transfer happens.
I commemorate 25th May 1803 when he was born and 27th April 1882 when, having taken his daily constitutional though ailing from a chest cold, and being caught in a sudden rainshower, he arrived home drenched, a fever ensuing, and though his son pled with him to rest in bed he continued to work in his study during the days that followed, maintaining the same unswayable routine by which he’d led his entire remarkable life, until the pneumonia bested him. The bell in the Unitarian Church of Concord tolled seventy-nine times that night, one stroke for each of his generous years, a death-knell embodying the fused contradictories of grief and revelry.
I celebrate the many Emersons and the one Emerson. What is life, but the angle of vision? he asked himself. I celebrate the man who would always ask.
Marianne Moore. Photograph by Roger Mayne. Courtesy Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, New York.
For M. Moore
Cole Swensen
Such animals as
All over word
wish
if
after
It alters
or: its afters’ only altar with such minute meanders
we know it changed her, that she left altered
that she lived altered and left here
is all there is of the animal. It’s almost locked in place, a pacing and a perpendicular heaven that hasn’t, that has not, that does not have
fish chameleon wasp weather must
winter the horse, the housing of the carp, carapace of concern concerning her concentric love for vermin, the ermine, the asp. Wasp won’t thee but will will:
forgetting tha
t there is in woman
a quality of mind
which as an instinctive manifestation
is unsafe,
and wonders just for whom, what him, and how soon
but that it would
soon
turn.
I think we love people for what they love. Ms. M. and her pocket zoo, heart made of zippers, opening out like one of those makeup cases women take travelling that expand in all directions at once. Consider the opossum. I can’t picture Marianne Moore wearing makeup. Ms. Moore did not wear makeup. Consider the horse, the mouse, the house that gets contorted into a heart. Ms. Moore did not go in much for travel. A few times to Europe, a few times west and her hat there at the end of her hand and her hand, all hasp
to so many perhaps you know first
what the creature’s named and then you hold—how many of them had she held. Not the giraffe, the elephant, the bat in broad daylight, the bat, all mouse with its own elaborated house and its own horse and out there in the sun.
1.: Early on, invented forms. Take, for instance, the fish.: wade/ through black jade/an/injured fan.
Precise, planned to step like a spine, so rigorous and diligence never counts but exactly knows. To be read whole or first “lines” only or the first two. At times caving/curving in, symmetrically, like the spine of a well-read book seen end-on: “Injudicious Gardening,” “To a Chameleon” or steadily, unpredictably laddering, “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “To the Peacock of France.” Let it precise, pare off any end and in it nip.
“I was trying to be honorable and not steal things.”
(is governed by gravity)
“Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”
(like symmetry)
if honor be
exactitude, an implication of biology and warily, a splice of light that spares the selves, the pares the rest to emergent else. Where then find strife? And what then bind through stealth?
2.: Rhyme, wound tight; spring in the step, fight in the clock and often off: “craven/frighten/certain”; “waist/crest”; they tighten: “star/ hair”; “enough/proof”; “faith/death.” Again, whose and yes, we get it but whom? (the proof was partial and the faith given conquered:
God be praised for conquering faith … 2.5: “I like Gilbert & Sullivan.” Inseparable directions
with unequal determinance and inclinations that will not rest innumerous. Will conquer us. G. M. Hopkins brings in tea. How often do you think she had tea? I’ve always thought frequently, but now feel I may be or at least must have been entirely mistrued. She could have done anything with the butt ends of her afternoons.
She haunted the Brooklyn Zoo. This we know. But we don’t know what she thought. How much was shock. It should have been all and it was, if nothing else, not.
Octopus.
Snail.
Eight-fold
Owl.
Mouse-skin bellows.
Ostrich.
Ghost.
Cast an own. Come an ox. Add a wild (a feral) truce, a Persian thought, an undefined Bordeaux.
Holding equal court with Ben Jonson, Jackie Robinson, Captain John Smith and Melchior Vulpius.
She was angrier than you would have thought from the pictures. Some spare feminist constructions and “To Military Progress” and perfectly happy in New York.
we’ve grown all apart
though half the word is after
when asked at the age of 20
what she’d like to be, answered
a painter.
gold thread from straw and have heard men say:
“There is a feminine temperament in direct contrast to ours,
which makes her do these things. shift of chin, the eye
slips on. someone enters the library in a wedge of light,
a shower of dust [If I, like Solomon, …
could have my wish—
“What I write, as I have said before, could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.”
I was recently reading an essay in which the author went to great length to establish Marianne Moore as an “American poet”—or rather was using her particularities, her eccentricities really (which should have defeated his point right there), to sketch a floorplan of “American-ness.” I wonder if she would have noticed, thought it mattered, thought it existed. Liked England, it’s said. Oh yes. (My brother, the doctor … ) (My mother, the dead.) It’s its hardness, all that solid ground, the concrete both and not metaphorical that’s supposed to be so American, the quick twist, brisk thrust, trust. She moved through her world on trust. Who would ever know if this (what am I saying) is truth or just, or if the air in Sweden is sweeter as she says or if the ermine really would rather be dead
than spotted.
Chameleon.
Fire laid upon
She’s walking across a room.
an emerald as long as an ire.
She’s walking across a room with an inverted glass in her hand and in the glass, a spider, escorting it “home,” sealed at the bottom, of course, with a postcard.
From whom. A three-cornered hat. A hat with three corners that, in my mind
she is always connected with Joseph Cornell. It’s the love of things that’s common. Or the love of the loss of as well as the loss of and the sense of love as an intransitive verb. Collect cows, dolls, matchbooks, matches, spiders, crows, I think she had a “thing” about “home.”
She’s walking across a room. It’s dinnertime. Who are the logical (the inevitable) guests? Table for four. She says she said: Joseph Cornell, Emily Dickinson, Gerard de Nerval and Marianne Moore. But Marianne is late tonight, more spiders than usual or the elephants uncommonly insistent. Natural habitat: botanical gardens, dimestores (Joe at elbow, suggesting this or that). Definitely the type to poise rubber snakes in cupboards, laundry baskets. Tried it on E. Dickinson, who cried when she touched it and found it wasn’t real.
But sound curved
a hand
holding a hand that’s holding a hand. What do you call them?
“Experiments in rhythm, exercises in composition.”
and what do you mean by enough.
Let us.
3.: for love that will gaze an eagle blind. If blindness be fusion, there and only there was decision. Note in the above quotation the invention of the verb. Animals with moving fur. The blur of animals in motion. Blinding. If sight incites distinction, discretion, dissection. (Gerard is shaking his head, saying, “no, this is not a pet,” and “I think you understand.”)
what we have here built
(in which there are hounds with waists
I must not wish
it comes to this
lit
with piercing glances into the life of things
“My interest in La Fontaine originated entirely independent of content.”
I have always wanted to enter
a room and find the animals
already there and staring
out the windows.
(Every mind is a house.
(Who did you let
did you
answer the
in/door we invent new animals in our
most desperate moments that dissolve on solid ground
one found
one had fed
and had therefore led the life of
(anything you feed you will come to love) giraffe, antelope,
egret, absent,
pear
where
are you going my going what are you doing to the door?
What snow? No, let us.
Old Poets, Old Poems:
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robert Creeley
FOR YEARS I’VE HELD to Ezra Pound’s insistence, “What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee/ What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage … ” These lines argued a sense of value I found securing to my mind and habits, making the familiar fina
lly an unequivocal place where I might feel both legitimate and welcome. It would be impossible indeed to say that all worlds are in that way made or that we are not a far more complex persuasion of possibilities and tastes, proposing and reacting much as tides ceaselessly increase and ebb. But returning now to a poet and poetry I once must have taken as a benchmark for the art, I find myself, as it were, coming home.
Edwin Arlington Robinson, in fact, came from a town, Head Tide, Maine, where my mother and her sister, my aunt Bernice, used to help their blind grandfather manage the crossing of an often swift brook by means of the stepping stones. Just up on the hill from there is the surviving schoolhouse, still modest and determined in its white paint, and that is where my mother went first to school. I have a photo of her (and wonder who could have taken it) at ten with her lunch pail, backed against the great trunk of a pine tree, before she goes off to learn.
I have never been able to feel at home with Robert Frost, and one of my own memories of school days is the time I am asked to leave the room for mocking his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s curious that I so distrusted a poet so skilled in his craft and so persuasive in his themes. Yet even his poem “Birches” was suspect to me, not because he didn’t know how such swinging of birches is accomplished but for the way he contests the located feeling with ironic homily, an unexpected smugness of ownership as if such lore could be only one’s own. In Maine there is a lovely way of avoiding resolution for another person’s choices, avoiding the opinion or advice that says simply, “This is the way to do it.” Those who have wondered at Robinson’s characteristic ambivalence in such a situation, or his persistent demur always, faced with such judgments, might well consider the way persons have long thought in Maine and also spoken.
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