T.S. Eliot

Tonight was the final meeting of my summer book club, and it didn't disappoint. Neither did the words of T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets we discussed. I sometimes forget how much I miss discussion of great books and ideas until I am doing it and can't imagine how I did without before. Nevertheless, tonight was harmonious. We discussed everything from Shakespeare to Anglo-Catholicism to Terrence Malick and film, and everything in-between.

However, it seems strange to be commenting on something just as or after it has happened (a subject we discussed tonight), and so I am going to end this post here with a section from the Four Quartets, though it also seems a crime only to read a section.

IV 

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error,
The only home, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Perusing Through Post-Modern Poetry

On the advice of Aaron Belz (a professor and poet in California), I have been reading Graham Foust’s A Mouth in California. I must admit, it’s been slow going…

Foust relies heavily on taking the expected and turning it on its head – whether that is a common saying or a song lyric etc. He also plays quite a bit with what the “voice” of the poem is. This is shown through most of his titles - “Poem with Fear, As Half Awakened” gives the obvious rise of the question: “Wait…is the poet with fear or the poem?” And this is just the sort of question Foust wants you to ask. 

After reading many of his poems over and over again (some with more success than others) I finally came upon one that jumped out at me from the start (or at least on the second read).

POEM WITH TELEVISION

But first another picture of the world

                          <> 

I thought I saw you in

the mirror through the window.

You do

remember don't you.

Absence of evidence isn't an answer.

                          <>

I thought you saw me through

the window in the mirror.

You don't

remember do you.

Evidence of absence isn't an answer.

                          <>

What part of

"What part of no

don't you understand?"

don't you understand

on one more American-

money ugly morning,

busy-intersection

skittish in a bed?

                          <>

Greased, it would seem, what I call

what I used to call

belief slides through me.

Is it just me, or am I alone?

While reading this poem you can feel the infinite reflections of the television screen. It's like standing in a hall of mirrors, and forgetting which image is you and which the reflection. But at the end, just with the final line, all the mirrors are stripped away, all the noise of the television, and you stand there, naked, alone.

I'm not quite sure if this connection is a break through or a failing in the poet's form for just this poem, but I might just be beginning to enjoy Foust's style.

A Word Fitly Spoken

Sabbaths, 2007

V.

Those who use the world assuming
their knowledge is sufficient
destroy the world. The forest
is mangled for the sale
of a few sticks, or is bulldozed
into a stream and covered over
with the earth it once stood
upon. The stream turns foul,
killing the creatures that once
lived from it. Industrial humanity,
an alien species, lives by death.
In the clutter of facts, the destroyers
leave behind them one big story,
of the world and the world's end,
that they don't know. They know
names and little stories. But the names
of everything are not everything.
The story of everything, told,
is only a little story. They don't know
the languages of the birds
who pass northward, feeding
through the treetops early
in May, kept alive by knowledge
never to be said in words.
Hang down your head. This
is our hope: Words emerge
from silence, the silence remains.

~ Wendell Berry, Leavings