HAMATREYA

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint, Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood. Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying, “’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s. How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees! How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!
I fancy these pure waters and the flags Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize; And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.”
Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.
They added ridge to valley, brook to pond,
And sighed for all that bounded their domain;
“This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat.
The land is well,—lies fairly to the south.
’Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back, To find the sitfast acres where you left them.”
Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds Him to his land, a lump of mould the more. Hear what the Earth say:—
EARTH-SONG
“Mine and yours; Mine, not yours. Earth endures; Stars abide—

Shine down in the old sea; Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much, Such have I never seen.
“The lawyer’s deed
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail,
Forevermore.
“Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley, Mound and flood.
But the heritors?—
Fled like the flood’s foam. The lawyer and the laws, And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.
“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?”
When I heard the Earth-song
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave. 

Emerson uses a combination of unrhymed iambic pentameter, short lines, and iambic heptameter. Whatever or which “devises” he uses to construct the poem, I think is unimportant. What is amazing in this poem is that we hear a voice that is such a contrast to the sermonizing, often conflated, convoluted, impossible to read tones of most of his essays. I was “forced” to read Nature a few days ago; handed this poem without an identified author, I would never have guessed Emerson! Never. 

This poem is a little miracle. Where did this poem come from? After a night of reading a Hindu text, did he wake up and this just pour out of him? Did a conversation with Henry David have some influence? Several years would pass before Whitman would send Emerson a copy of Leaves of Grass. Unlike the stilted vocabulary and circular sentences that seem to me to be the essence of Emerson, this poem has crystal clarity. I’m almost certain that Whitman and Sandburg read Hamatreya at some point in their careers. I can identify two dozen of their poems that are influence by both the form and the message.  I’ve always avoided Emerson when possible, never admired his prose. Thoreau, who I hold as the Greatest American Writer, overshadows him completely in breath and depth of thought.

Much Ado About Nothing

Seventeen years ago I was a middle school English teacher in what would now be called a high-poverty, high-risk-of-failure school district in Ohio. This was before American teachers had Curriculum Standards, and High Stakes Testing data to tell them that their students were being “Left Behind.” Somehow, without any testing data, I figured out that my fourteen-year-old students weren’t getting enough to eat, talked and wrote about a lot of crime and violence in their daily lives and needed an education of the highest quality to move on in life.

The school’s reading textbooks were expensive and lavashly colorful. They were also very large and very heavy, difficult to carry and filled with dull, boring stories that no one would ever choose to read, even if stranded on a desert island. They apparently were designed by a committee in Texas whose goal was to instill a deep hatred for literature and the English language in the young.

And so I locked the textbooks up in a cabinet and started teaching with the goal of reaching Shakespeare. I partnered with another English teacher, bought a lot of supplemental materials and books and spent late nights at the copying machine.

What do you need to know to really enjoy Shakespeare’s language? The answer is a a lot of stuff. We started with Ovid and Mythology. Then we moved on to the Romans and the Latin language. The kids loved the Cambridge Latin Course http://amzn.to/1z2WZAT. We did all of Unit One occasionally wearing togas. Latin built their confidence in being able to translate unfamiliar sentence structure. Next, we immersed the students in Medieval and Renaissance history and daily life. We cooked a Medieval Feast using recipes from The Medieval Baker’s Daughter by Madeleine Pelner Cosman http://amzn.to/1BkYKf4.

We started exploring Shakespeare with Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo and Juliet. The kids loved the violence, thought the ending was stupid, and maybe didn’t mind memorizing the Palmer’s Sonnet as much as they said they did.

And then I made a major mistake. I scheduled a field trip to the local Renaissance festival for our 120 students. An hour after we arrived I noticed that most of our girls were walking around with roses. Romeo and Juliet had inspired one of our shortest thirteen year old boys to steal $234 of flowers from the shop at the festival. As I was explaining to the flower stand owner that I hadn’t brought my checkbook, my partner teacher arrived with two of our girls and a fully costumed Shakespeare holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose. The two girls had started a loud name-calling fist fight with each other during his performance. He had bravely left the stage to attempt to break them apart, receiving a sound punch in the nose for his efforts.Total immersion in the period was working a little too well that day!

Not in the least discouraged, we moved on to Branagh’s Much Ado and found that this sunny adaptation had depths that touched my young student’s lives. Hateful siblings, fathers whose tempers quickly turned to abuse and violence, shyness and uncertain feelings about who to love and who is loved, these were emotions my students understood far better than the idealized romance of Romeo and Juliet. They liked the play, demanded to see it again immediately. Bantered Beatrice and Benedick’s lines to each other. Dogberryed at me endlessly and talked on and on about its characters, injustice, deceit. It was without a doubt one of the happiest times of my life. I had, at least for those kids, saved the English language and its greatest writer from that Texas textbook committee.

The Problem of Normativity

What is the Problem of Normativity? Which philosopher from the course do you think has the best response to it?

A normative statement is an opinion or value judgement that, because it is not a statement of fact - such as x + y = y + x —cannot be proved. The Problem of Normativity is that my aunt, for example, might state that I ought to get my hair cut, or vote for candidate X, but she would so state because trimmed hair and voting for party X are norms in my family. My next door neighbor might state that I would look best with a more casual haircut and that I should vote for party Y because those are the norms in her family. Both women would be unable to prove that their specific examples of normativity met the same standard of permanence and validity as 2 + 2 = 4.

I find that I am most comfortable in the company of the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume who stated, “Apart from mathematics we know nothing for certain. But we have to live: and to live is to act. All actions have to be based on assumptions about reality.” Why assumptions? Hume shared the basic premise of the empiricists - Locke, Berkeley — that our knowledge of anything outside ourselves can only be derived from experience - our own or the experience of someone else. We can never know with absolute certainty what exists beyond ourselves. Certainty of the facts, is not available to us. “We can only deal in hopeful probabilities.”

Our actions, Hume thought, are driven by our feelings and our passions. I have found that Hume is right, my reason is slave to my passions. Therefore, my best course is to develop an informed heart. Since what I can experience myself directly is limited, I must depend for guidance mainly on the experience of others - several thousand years of books, novels, music, theatre — the long record of mankind’s quest not for certainty, not for a list of rules or norms, but for an informed heart that acts in hopeful probabilities.

Professor Bonevac stated that in the 1970’s “normativity — ought, should, good, bad, evil, right, wrong, virtuous,vicious, just, and unjust--returned to the center of the philosophical dance floor.” He spends his final lectures discussing the two 20th century politicians, Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. In clear opposition to David Hume’s philosophy, the discussion is in fact deceptive argument framed in absolute certainties, not hopeful probabilities. He sets up the vague term “Socialism” as a straw dog to defend these two figureheads of heartless conservative politics. This might be an effective strategy to convince a student who believes that Certainty is possible or who is informed only by a limited compassion for humanity.

The straw dog, “Socialism” does not hold. Kindly Sweden plods along. My quality of life is greatly enhanced by Medicare. Bonevac supports his argument with false data, stating that Reagan’s policies created twenty million jobs, when in fact during his terms only 203,486 jobs were created. Reagan and Thatcher’s policies did in fact help give the final push to the already rotting totalitarian Soviet Union, but we must remember also that Stalin aided in the fall of Hitler while murdering millions of his own people. Ronald Reagan reversed America’s progress toward racial and economic equality by blessing Racism as a vote getting tool—clearly not the action of an informed heart. Reagan’s racist fear-mongering strategies to gain and hold power are still used daily and completely successfully by the Republican party. Reagan’s influence on Bush and Clinton’s economic policies resulted inevitably in the Great Recession that has destroyed the American middle class and enhanced the power of the rich to control public policy for their private benefit. Thatcher institutionalized economic policies that have greatly weakened Europe’s capacity to recover from the Great Recession. Perhaps most tragically, she redefined compassion in government as a synonym for weakness, a redefinition that has caused much unnecessary suffering throughout Europe. 

While it is clear that Reagan and Thatcher equate Normativity with Absolute Certainty. This may not necessarily be true of Bonevac. In his last lecture, Professor Bonevac held up his priced baseball and stated, “does it (my ownership) result from a set of institutions that together respect basic liberties, grant people equal opportunities, and make the poor as well-off as possible. Again, I have no idea how to begin answering that question.” Given Professor Bonevac’s choice of 20th Century heroes, we must assume that statement to be true.

John Boehner, the dark and orange

John Boehner, the dark and orange

From Cincinnati, of all cities known as the Queen,
Out of your father’s tavern, the small businessman’s dream,
Came you, O orangey tanned John, the cause of our despair.
Your stubbornness, calumniated tongue,and slicked down hair,
Entrapped our country in unescapable political mire,
While you profited mightily from the corporate empire.
You listened not to men whose souls burned for the good,
But harkened to the dead tea party hearts made of wood,
Now when families of Latin folk are safe, you curse and rant
“Sue Obama, Sue Obama” Dark orange Boehner, recant, recant.

O, John, hater of ObamaCare, give up your evil Republican ways,
And pass bills for common folk that will lengthen their days.

Three more annotations

9.  The last paragraphs of the Ithaca episode of James Joyces’ Ulysses

--------------------------------------------------------------

“He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?”

------------------------------------------------------------

This is my favorite passage from Ulysses. Leopold Bloom has finally gone to bed.

These lines are the final words of the Ithaca episode, the last section before the word “Yes” that begins Molly Bloom’s long affirmation of human existence.

Ulysses happened to me when I was sixteen, for the next eight years the book was always with me. Then life happened. I put the book aside but so much of it remained inside my head that I think I may have always processed language using Joyce’s model. Reading Joyce, I re-learned language.

Pun, rhyme, image - there is music in a word. Joyce makes words-music. Any word, all words. He jams them together, misspells them, rhyme layers of meaning into sentences that are meant to never end. “Auks and rocs” and “roc’ auk’s egg”  have a sea rhythm for Sinbad to sail on and a cradle rhythm - Leopold Bloom is going to bed. How many times have I laid down in my bed as Finbad the Failer or the mystical Xinbad the Phthailer? 

10. 

Shakespeare — Epilogue from the Tempest

Prospero:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,

Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands:

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

This happened to me - watching The Tempest I decided to let go of the work that had occupied my time and substance for forty-some years and retire from teaching. At that moment I shared Prospero’s plea to the audience to release him:

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

,“what strength I have's mine own,/ Which is most faint” 

This is one of Shakespeare’s last plays and I think must reflect his own thoughts about his work. Heard aloud, it is a long breath, a long, quiet, sigh at the end of a task.

These final lines end the Tempest, which taken as a whole is in my opinion is the most beautiful and profound nature poem ever written. No writer has described man’s position in nature as completely as Shakespeare. All the of issues of our relationship with the natural world are dealt with so subtilely that we hardly notice that the magic Shakespeare enchants us with is actually the rise of science, the rend between nature and man was already clear to him four hundred years before global warming.  

I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

Prospero has found his place in nature and can retire to rest.

11. 

Elizabeth Bishop -The Fish

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/fish-2

This poem happened to me as I was preparing  lesson plans for a ninth grade class. I decided to include the poem in the weeks lessons. It was simple, easy to read and would interest any students who were fishermen or women. That week I taught the poem, reading it aloud five times —I had five classes— and hearing it read by ten, maybe fifth-teen during the day, I realized that it was an extraordinary piece of craftsmanship. 

Long slender lines, designed to guide the breath of the reader reads. 

The simple report of what the poet’s I can see. Imagery that is so clear  plain stated similes— wallpaper, a peony, tinfoil, a beard… This is like that is enough and we see the fish as if we were holding in our own hand.

The poem is a lesson in seeing, in visual literacy, that which is once seen with Bishop eyes, we are capable of seeing again.

Finally, there is the echo of Shakespeare in the last lines, “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow/and I let the fish go.” My favorite poems are the poems that bring me back to my place in nature. Bishop has caught the fish, and the fish has caught her, the circle is closed again.

12.

Henry David Thoreau —

(This is the song Thoreau sang as he built his cabin on Walden pond.)

“So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, —

Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings --

The arts and sciences,

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows

Is all that any body knows.”

Throughout my life, whenever I am discouraged by the actions of my fellow Americans, when I am in dark despair for my country’s soul, I remember that Henry David Thoreau is my countryman and will be my great-great-grandchildren’s countryman long after the disgrace that is today’s Republican party is a footnote in history and Ronald Reagan’s stature is removed from the Capital and recycled for dog food cans.

Thoreau and David Hume would have gotten along very well, at least in philosophical conversations. This little song has essentially the same message Hume’s most famous quote, “Apart from mathematics we know nothing for certain. But we have to live: and to live is to act. All actions have to be based on assumptions about reality. We can only deal in hopeful probabilities.”

Thoreau was a man of millions of words and thousands of famous opinions. Yet, no one who knows his work well would disagree that he never claimed certainty for his thoughts. They were his observations of the world, well and cleverly expressed,  just common sense. There is a poetry in common sense that can be found no where else. At the end of the day, great poetry guides us back to our place in nature. 

“The wind that blows/Is all that any body knows.”

The Problem of Normativity Revisited

What is the Problem of Normativity? Which philosopher from the course do you think has the best response to it?

A normative statement is an opinion or value judgement that, because it is not a statement of fact - such as x + y = y + x —cannot be proved. The Problem of Normativity is that my aunt, for example, might state that I ought to get my hair cut, or vote for candidate X, but she would so state because trimmed hair and voting for party X are norms in my family. My next door neighbor might state that I would look best with a more casual haircut and that I should vote for party Y because those are the norms in her family. Both women would be unable to prove that their specific examples of normativity met the same standard of permanence and validity as 2 + 2 = 4.

I find that I am most comfortable in the company of the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume who stated, “Apart from mathematics we know nothing for certain. But we have to live: and to live is to act. All actions have to be based on assumptions about reality.” Why assumptions? Hume shared the basic premise of the empiricists - Locke, Berkeley — that our knowledge of anything outside ourselves can only be derived from experience - our own or the experience of someone else. We can never know with absolute certainty what exists beyond ourselves. Certainty of the facts, is not available to us. “We can only deal in hopeful probabilities.”

Our actions, Hume thought, are driven by our feelings and our passions. I have found that Hume is right, my reason is slave to my passions. Therefore, my best course is to develop an informed heart. Since what I can experience myself directly is limited, I must depend for guidance mainly on the experience of others - several thousand years of books, novels, music, theatre — the long record of mankind’s quest not for certainty, not for a list of rules or norms, but for an informed heart that acts in hopeful probabilities.

Professor Bonevac stated that in the 1970’s “normativity — ought, should, good, bad, evil, right, wrong, virtuous,vicious, just, and unjust--returned to the center of the philosophical dance floor.” He spends his final lectures discussing the two 20th century politicians, Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. The discussion is in fact deceptive argument framed in absolute certainties, not hopeful probabilities. He sets up the vague term “Socialism” as a straw dog to defend these two figureheads of heartless conservative politics. This might be an effective strategy to convince a student who believes that Certainty is possible or who is informed only by a limited compassion for humanity.

The straw dog, “Socialism” does not hold. Kindly Sweden plods along. My quality of life is greatly enhanced by Medicare. Bonevac supports his argument with false data, stating that Reagan’s policies created twenty million jobs, when in fact during his terms only 203,486 jobs were created. Reagan and Thatcher’s policies did in fact help give the final push to the already rotting totalitarian Soviet Union, but we must remember also that Stalin aided in the fall of Hitler while murdering millions of his own people. Ronald Reagan halted America’s progress toward racial and economic equality by blessing Racism as a vote getting tool—clearly not the action of an informed heart. Reagan’s racist fear-mongering strategies to gain and hold power are still used daily and completely successfully by the Republican party. Reagan’s influence on Bush and Clinton’s economic policies resulted inevitably in the Great Recession that has destroyed the American middle class and enhanced the power of the rich to control public policy for their private benefit. Thatcher institutionalized economic policies that have greatly weakened Europe’s capacity to recover from the Great Recession. Perhaps most tragically, she redefined compassion in government as a synonym for weakness, a redefinition that has caused much unnecessary suffering throughout Europe.

In his last lecture, Professor Bonevac held up his priced baseball and stated, “does it (my ownership) result from a set of institutions that together respect basic liberties, grant people equal opportunities, and make the poor as well-off as possible. Again, I have no idea how to begin answering that question.” Given Professor Bonevac’s choice of 20th Century heroes, we must assume that statement to be true.

The Greatest Parodies Of All Time

The greatest parodies of all time where created by the writers of Monty Python. To judge the weight of my argument I beg the reader’s indulgence to give three minutes of your time to view the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4mENrAnq4
After which you will be well versed in the poetry of Ewan McTeagle, the Scottish Poet. The Python poetry quoted here is from the following link:http://www.heretical.com/miscella/mppoetry.html

Few scholars have argued that McTeagle’s poems are parodies of the the filthy, dirty poems of Robert Burns, McTeagle would not have stooped so low as to parody Burns’ disgusting “Ode to Haggis.” Yes, McTeagle was a Scot, but his poetry is a parody of Poetry itself! A parody not just of Poetry, but a parody of all of Civilization and of the act of creating any form of art.

As we read the poem, “Lend us a quid till the end of the week” we realize that it is the whole system of monetary exchange that is being made fun of. Usury, printing, the mores of human community are treated with distain and waggishness.

Lend us a quid till the end of the week.
If you could see your way
To lending me sixpence
I could at least buy a newspaper.
That's not much to ask anyone.

In McTeagle’s work we see a simplicity that defies all efforts to parse. We are confronted with a persona that has returned to mankind’s most basic needs. His parody of all love poetry, “To Ma Own Beloved Mary” cannot in anyway be compared to the sonnets of Shakespeare or Shelly. It casts aside all pretense. It shatters all illusions of the civilized lover. There is no rhyme, no subtext, no metaphor, no hidden music to enchant the reader. All that remains is brute, primal need.

To Ma’ Own Beloved Mary.
A poem on her 17th birthday'

Lend us a couple of bob till Thursday
I'm absolutely skint
But I'm expecting a postal order
And I can pay you back
As soon as it comes.

After reading McTeagle’s, one wonders if one can ever return to Homer, to Shakespeare or Dr. Zeus? Has McTeagle’s brutal parody of all art, all language, spoiled the very thought of Poetry forever?

Can parody enlighten or enliven the original? NO! No, indeed, I frankly caution any reader of this essay never to venture into McTeague’s longest and most complex work,’'What's twenty quid to the bloody Midland Bank?'

Henry Reed’s “Chard Whitlow” provides new insight’s into Eliot’s gloomy Four Quartets, lightens Eliot’s darkness, and provides the reader a new prospective to Eliot’s work.  Stevie Smith’s “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock” is a fine poem that stands by itself as part of a larger conversation about the act of thinking and writing. Ewan McTeagle is the dark force, the great destroyer, he and the Pythons would take us back to the pre-stone age, begging in grunts to each other to borrow a bone to whack our neighbor’s chickens with. A bone that would likely never be repaid on Thursday!

A Poem Is Something That Happens To You

1. Why I Do Not Have a Favorite Poem

— Jim Mills

A poem is something that happens to you without intention or choice.

Backing  out of your garage, you hit the building and knock off your sideview mirror. The rest of the day you see things differently.  

Whitman is like that. 

Who would get up in the morning and say - 

I think I’ll meet someone today 

With a strange voice 

That I’ll never forget, 

Someone who will give me a vision

That I didn’t ask for, 

That I can’t escape from:

So wild, so hopeful.

You don’t happen to Whitman.

Whitman happens to you.

You are tired. 

You stumble around the kitchen late at night trying to get a glass of water, 

You drop the water bottle, step on the glass, your foot is bleeding.  

You would never make a plan to have that wound.

Shakespeare is like that. 

You would never choose to know 

The world is that cruel, that horrible, 

That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. 

You only meant to go to a play or do your reading assignment 

And you will never be the same again.

You can read Poetry, 

and close read Poetry 

and turn Poetry inside out and shake Poetry,  

but a poem, a poem is something that happens to you.

Annotation: This is one of my poems. It’s about how I think about poetry. The poems I’m including below are poems that happened to me.

2. Mercurio and Queen Mab

http://www.monologuearchive.com/s/shakespeare_067.html

Annotation: My theme is poems that happened to me, that left a mark or an open wound. This is the only great, complex, technically perfect poem in my anthology. I’ve never found another group of words that described the passions of youth, lust, and wonder beyond the bounds of physics. This is love as magic. This is the music you don’t want to hear, proof that love is, in fact, only a madness.

3. Edna St. Vincent Millay  Conscientious Objector 

http://www.twcnet.edu/cschutz/history-web-links/history-web-links-us-1914-1945/conscientious-objector-by-edna-st-vincent-millay/

Annotation: This poem happened to me when I was sixteen and the war in Vietnam was beginning. There is an undeniable rightness to her simple resolution, a truth that could not be denied. The poem a great technical achievement. It is not great verse, but  it has a great courageous voice that quietly speaks what has to be spoken. 

The universal draft was in effect. The war was growing rapidly. At sixteen, I had to decide whether or not a duty to country compelled a duty to kill. More than any other influence, the voice in this poem persuaded my decision.

4. Nine Charms against the Hunter - David Wagoner

http://aflockoffools.tumblr.com/post/34459346155/nine-charms-against-the-hunter-david-wagoner

Much of my youth was well-spent walking in the woods. I was there to be in that part of life that is not a city. I had no thought that the woods were also a place to hunt, to kill for sport. I came across this poem, in fact, before I ever met anyone whose lifestyle included guns and hunting. Damn poem. I never walk the woods with quite the same peace again.

I think Wagoner intended that his reader, some very specific hunter — hear  a voice that is compassionate, cautionary, a voice that wants to protect him and warn him of the sacredness of life and of the danger of not treating life as if it is not sacred.

5. Gary Snyder Long Hair

http://www.wenaus.com/poetry/gs-longhair.html

Annotation: “And deer bound through my hair” is a mad image. This is a mad poem. Was it drug induced? Inspired? Is this a Shaman’s vision? I’ve never experienced mind altering chemicals, but from first reading this strange poem has had a dream-like effect on me. Deer are coming out of  the walls. I submitted this poem with an essay for this course. My readers simply didn’t get it, gave me low scores. The poem had no effect on them. For me, it’s a spiritual experience, a hymn that I sing when I need to be one with my nature, when I need to see myself as a part of the whole.

6. Walt Whitman - I think I could turn and live with animals

http://www.all-creatures.org/poetry/ar-I-think-I.html

Annotation: Remember, my theme is poems that happened to me. I was a secondary English teacher. This poem was printed in a textbook intended to be read by high school freshmen. My teachers’ edition had a nice worksheet of questions that I could copy and send home as homework. My staff  included creationists, fundamentalists, and before school prayer groups. 

This poem happened to me at my desk. Whitman sings of evolution: “I wonder where they get those tokens, /Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?”

How do explain I that the poem definitely does not praise religion. Do I tell them the truth about the stallion, the sexual images, and the final lines that clearly state he sees himself as beyond the animal? He is Walt Whitman and he is very dangerous to your peace of mind.

Nope, I decided this poem is not for freshmen.

7. Carl Sandburg - The People, Yes

http://glenavalon.com/peopleyes.html

Annotation: Sandburg’s voice is not an imitation of the voice of Walt Whitman. Squint your eyes and the lines may look the same. Whitman sings at an eternal pitch. Sandburg sings of the here and now where there is common wisdom to be gained and work to be done today. The butcher, the school teacher, the labor, cannot be Walt Whitman; we can all be Carl Sandburg. We can do our tasks, raise our kids, grow the food, and be proud. And we can vote. Sandburg reminds us that we have a vote in how things turn out. That that vote is precious, we have to think about it and protect it from those who will themselves to be powerful. 

This poem happened to me when Kennedy was President. I think, no I’m sure,  this poem had also happened to John Kennedy and his brother when they were younger. I taught this poem as often and as well as I could during the thirty years I was in a classroom. I hope someone is teaching it today. 

8. Stephen Spender - I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241980

Annotation: 

This is the poem that happened like a bad argument. I like it and then I really don’t like it. Still upsets me.

Spender was very young when he wrote this poem. His friends, Auden especially, intended on changing English poetry and they succeeded. I was very young when I read it. As I read the first two verses, I thought it was about living fully; it inspired me to seek a quiet life, study the classics, seek firm competence. The first two verses inspire that kind of full and meaningful life. 

But the final verse names, without naming, heroes who could never have or will exist. Although I was very young, I knew that last verse was a fiction, a fake, just plain wrong. 

I had read Homer. Odysseus was a very competent man, but really just a guy who managed to get through the day and get home to his family. The heroes who the last verse describes — “Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.” — guys like Achilles, they never made it home and left a lot of destruction in their path. Is the vivid air really signed with his honour? Or is he just a lesson to be learned?

The Common Good

First let’s take care of the definitions: Top-Down government in 2014 is defined as the current “welfare state” which provides support for citizens who are elderly, poor, or disadvantaged and includes programs for the “common good” such as federal support of education, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, and also includes government regulation of business and industry with the aim to protect the common good and encourage economic growth by building infrastructure. The course describes FDR as a top-down president along with Marx and Rousseau. The comparison is an extremely poor one, but more on that latter.

Bottom-up government is defined in 2014 as limited government with the expectation that the common good is best served by free unregulated markets, and with the belief that top-down governance such as Social Security, Medicare, and regulation inhibits the common good by producing citizens who are “takers” instead of producers. The Tea Party praises the idea and laments the current state of the nation. Ronald Reagan’s ideology expressed the principal but not the practice of botton-up government. 

These are current definitions and usage. The words and terms would have had very different meanings to FDR, Kennedy, or Johnson, who were practical men motivated by the circumstances of their times and not by ideology, rather by common sense and compassion. 

To address the question was Kennedy bottom-up or top-down? Clearly neither one by current definition. He did lower taxes for the wealthy, on the advice of John Kenneth Galbraith who had been an advisor to FDR. 

“In a 1962 address to Congress, John F. Kennedy said, “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”

reduction of the tax rate “will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget.”

The decision was made out of a practical understanding of the circumstances of the times, on advice of a practical economist and not out of ideology. 

In addition, he also said, ”One of the great things about this country has been that our most extraordinary accomplishments have not come from the government down, or from the top down, but have come from the bottom up.” This was a statement of an undeniable fact rather than an idealogical statement about the possible limits of role of government.

Kennedy was an intelligent, practical leader. Informed and influenced by Michael Harrington’s, "The Other America” his administration began exploring measures to reduce the level of poverty in America, at the time over 20%. After his death the basic strategies were refined and expanded into Johnson’s War on Poverty. 

Kennedy’s actions were motivated by two moral principles that are absent from today’s bottom-up/top-down politicians — justice and compassion. Principles outlined by John Rawls in Justice as Fairness:

“It should be noted that the second principle holds that an inequality is allowed only if there is reason to believe that the practice with the inequality, or resulting in it, will work for the ad-vantage of every party engaging in it. Here it is important to stress that every party must gain from the inequality. “ — Justice as Fairness (Source: Philosophical Review Vol. LXVII. 1958.)

The terms, “bottom-up/top-down” define a current political problem created by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the Republican party. Both Reagan and Clinton designed programs that were short-sighted. Programs that immediately benefited their their wealthy supporters, but were not designed for or had any concern for future prospretity and justice. 

Kennedy’s philosophy of leadership was moral, practical, and concerned with long-term goals. His policies answered directly to the needs of his time, but were designed with a concern for their impact on the future. Although much of what he envisioned was reshaped by Johnson, the basic foundation remained after his death — a vision of a flexible government, unhampered by the narrow ideologies that paralyze us today. A government  that empowers the greatest number of citizens without reducing opportunity for the ambitious. Fairness of opportunity lead him to support the civil rights movement. The programs he proposed in regulation, education, and infrastructure were practical, and far-sighted. They were meant to expand education and opportunity for all and to reduce poverty and suffering for generations to come. His programs were design to achieve practical, long-term goals, not idealogical statements of top-down or bottom-up ideology.

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings

Gary Snyder's poem “Long Hair” departs from customary language and gets somewhere that thrills and engages! 
http://www.wenaus.com/poetry/gs-longhair.html

Nature poems can be silly - Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud among a host of daffodils and then dancing with them. Wordsworth fails to convince. However, there are a few poems that are transformative, that bring new insights about my place in the universe. Moving my viewpoint from my little life to awareness of the Life around me is difficult. It doesn’t happen that often, yet, I remember the first time I read Gary Snyder’s “Long Hair” I couldn’t get out of my chair. I had to pause and read it again before I could go on with my day. Something had changed. 

The images and the language are a bit mad. It begins, “Once every year, the Deer catch human beings” and matter-of-factly describes a plot devised by the deer to take over the world. The plainly stated nature of the first section appears to be fantasy, not poetry. And then in a burst of short lines, we go racing with the deer and stop abruptly. 

This is where Snyder captures me:
“Deer spoor and crisscross dusty tracks
Are in the house: and coming out the walls:

And deer bound through my hair.”

And everything, as he predicted, changes and I am seeing where I am in the universe differently, more than for the moments that I am reading, but later also.

An algorithm that detects a vengeful or broken heart?

I'm grateful that evaluation wasn’t handed over to a computer program as it was in another of my Edx courses, Ideas of the 20th Century. I’m assuming that a human reader will at some point need to put up with my scribbling thoughts. Computer evaluation was a profoundly emotionally jarring experience! I wasn’t aware that my essay would never be seen by human eyes, and only learned that it had been evaluated by an algorithm when I was notified of the grade (B+). I had spent several hours composing my thoughts, and it mattered whether or not at least a couple of other humans who were dealing with the same ideas read them. Instead, an algorithm had analyzed their form, grammar and average number of syllables used and determined that my essay was an okay bunch of digits. I stared at the grade, and became very angry, the meaning of my thoughts - -was reduced to meaninglessness. I longed for someone to comment that my ideas were stupid and I must be a bleeding heart liberal!

And so dear Reader, I present to, the hopefully human you, three sonnets that we can spend some time thinking about together. First, one by Shakespeare Sonnet 141. It’s famous for its bite and complexity. The critic Don Patterson thinks that it somehow proves that Shakespeare was conflicted by lust, and the sonnet expressed disgust for women. Patterson belongs to the devision of English majors who adventure far from the text and are perhaps paid by the word. I find that there is delight and insight at hearing this sonnet read well. It is banter, “You’re not a beauty but I love you anyway.” mixed perhaps with a bit of revenge for some pain caused. The imagery is complex and  best of all  even after many readings there remains the mystery, the question of does the reader really know what is going on in this relationship - Love play, or love hurt?

SONNET 141

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,

For they in thee a thousand errors note; 

But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,

Who in despite of view is pleased to dote;
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted,

Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone, 

Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited

To any sensual feast with thee alone:

But my five wits nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,

Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man, 

Thy proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to be:

Only my plague thus far I count my gain,

That she that makes me sin awards me pain.

The second sonnet by Edna St.Vincent Millay builds images for the reader’s eye slowly - rain, tide, snow, leaves - ending with a remarkably empty room. This sonnet is a simple, solitary meditation. The final couplet reveals an emotional moment shared by all of us at some point in life. This isn’t banter, revenge, or courtship; it’s love and loss well stated.

“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”

TIME does not bring relief; you all have lied

    Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

 I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

     I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

    And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

     Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear

    To go,—so with his memory they brim!

And entering with relief some quiet place

    Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Millay was quite capable of complexity, as the following sonnet illustrates. The poet is riding on a subway train, facing someone reading a newspaper. Millay builds the scene slowly with just a few strokes but the result is vivid. After reading Sonnet 141 we can’t be sure of the poet’s feelings for the woman he’s addressing. Is she unattractive, or is he playing with her. Is he hurt, shamed or seeking revenge? Millay’s sonnet leaves the reader with the same problem. Does the sonnet say, “ I wouldn't care if you dropped dead” or is she saying that at news of his death she would be so overwhelmed that she would have to wait until she was alone to allow herself to feel it. The sonnet has the odor of revenge but the embedded mystery of its meaning suggests the possibility of profound love.

“If I should learn, in some quite casual way”

IF I should learn, in some quite casual way,

    That you were gone, not to return again—

Read from the back-page of a paper, say,

    Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

    And such a street (so are the papers filled)

A hurrying man—who happened to be you—

    At noon to-day had happened to be killed,

I should not cry aloud—I could not cry

    Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—

I should but watch the station lights rush by

    With a more careful interest on my face,

Or raise my eyes and read with greater care

Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Perhaps some day a computer algorithm will be written that can discern the subtle mysteries of the subtext of these sonnets and give them a B+. Perhaps unknown to me my MacBook is deeply in love with my cheating ChromeBook that has secretly been exchanging files with my iPad late at night. Can there be an algorithm that detects a vengeful or broken heart? 

Manners

How you deliver the message is a matter of manners. If the message is particularly strong, something the listener doesn’t want to hear, then manners must dictate the form. The poem is addressed to anyone who has picked up a weapon and decided to go into the wild with the purpose of killing an animal for game. David Wagoner chose to address a hunter, politely but with the firm cautionary voice of a stern Shaman. 

He speaks nine charms to delay the hunter from killing an animal for game and make him aware of the consequences of the hunt. The severity of each charm builds as the poem progresses. Numbering, verse separations and comments on the poem below are mine, not Wagoner’s.

Nine Charms against the Hunter - David Wagoner

1. (Wagoner forces a long breath punctuated with the quick breath after the dash.)

In the last bar on the way to your wild game,

May the last beer tilt you over among friends

And keep your there till sundown—failing that,

2. (Soft consonants)

A breakdown on the road, ditching you gently 

Where you may hunt for lights and a telephone.

3. (Soft consonants)

Or may your smell go everywhere through the brush, 

Upwind or crosswind.

4. (The fourth charm follows the short quieter lines with a loud crunch!)

May your feet come down 

Invariably crunching loudly on dry sticks.

5. (After four short sentences a long series breaks the mood with soft vowels ending with exploding “B” of buck fever.)

Or may whatever crosses your hairlines—

The flank of elk or moose, the scut of a deer,

The blurring haunch of a bear, or another hunter

Gaping along his sights at the likes of you—

May they catch you napping or freeze you with buck fever. 

6. (Soft rhythm in the first line to prepare the reader for the “knock” in the second line.)

Or if you fire, may the stock butting your shoulder

Knock you awake around your bones as you miss,

7. (Lots of  hard consonants - d,r,s,k,t’s to punch out the rhythm.)

 Or then and there, may the noise pour through your mind 

Imaginary deaths to redden your daydreams:

Dazed animals sprawling forward on dead leaves, 

Thrashing and kicking, spilling themselves as long

As you could wish, as hard, as game,

8. (The P,L,L,U,G punctuate the like stabbing the animal.)

And then, if you need it, imaginary skinning,

Plucking of liver and lights, unraveling guts,

Beheading trophies to your heart’s content.

9. (The slow rhythm of the first three lines prepare the listener for the final image.)

Or if these charms have failed and the death is real,

May it fatten you, hour by hour, for the trapped hunter 

Whose dull knife beats the inside of your chest.

The first five charms have mild consequences - drinking with friends, fumbling in the dark looking for help,  the hunter’s smell warning off the animals, or falling asleep. But the sixth charm knocks the hunters bones awake, and the message becomes deeper, drilling down toward the final truth - the trapped hunter, Death, beating out his time inside the chest.

This week Professor Pinsky provided examples of poems whose messages were shaped into their forms, Ben Jonson, or whose shape was determined by the message, Walt Whitman.  David Wagoner’s “Nine Charms against the Hunter” is a case of message and form welted together. What seems at first to be quiet and conversational, becomes a profound challenge to the listener worldview.   Wagoner’s intent is a Shaman’s intent-  to cause a magical change in the listener’s understanding of the world. 

Wagoner is a writer sincerely influenced by Christian thought and belief. He is a Christian Naturalist. Reading his poems, I am reminded of Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Sun. Wagoner intends the hunter/reader to be brought to conviction, to change his path, to be transformed by the magic of the words, to form a new relationship with nature.  

The poem is a quiet, one-sided conversation. A difficult warning spoken politely. What is not heard has gone before. I imagine two men sitting in a bar or dinner; one announces that he will be going hunting tonight. The second man is older, during his life was has hunted. I knows the details. Moments before the animals’ death, force that must be used to finish the kill, remove the head; for him the game is no longer game; he at some point connected his little life to a larger awareness of what is alive. 

Is it strange to say, that I experience the poem as an expression of deepest friendship for the hunter? A poem is a song sung in the music of voice and words. On first reading, I experienced the poem as magical song. I was changed. I saw things differently. I had found a friend who would speak the truth to me.