[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
I'm Decca and I are coming to you live in the Stanford campus.
Come keep them free to this holy temple after they read.
[Music]
To the apple grove and the altar smoking with frankincests.
Here cold water ripples through the apple branches.
The lawn is shadowed in roses.
And from trembling leaves, an enchanted sleep descends.
Here is a meadow where the horses graze,
spring flowers in their bloom, and light winds breathe softly.
Here keep risks after gathering.
Pour into golden cups as in a feast.
Nectar lavishly mingled with joys.
[Music]
Thank you, Sappho.
Thank you for calling the goddess down on us.
That Sappho from Lesbos, 6th century BC
who would rather see the lovely step of her friend and
Victoria and the radiant sparkle of her face
than all the war chariots in Lydia and soldiers battling in shining bronze.
Some say an army of horsemen, other say foot soldiers.
Still others of fleet is the fairest thing on this stark earth.
I say it is whatever one loves.
How kipperas slightly remind me now of anictoria,
Tonshi of the many colored sandal.
Many crowns of violets, roses, and crocuses together.
You said before me.
And many scented wreaths made from blossoms around your soft throat.
With pure sweet oil, you anointed me.
And on a soft gentle bed, you quench your desire.
No holy sight we left uncovered.
No grove.
Dance or sound.
Welcome my friends.
What is it?
The 25th, 26th, 27th installment of entitled opinions?
Not sure.
This should be a very interesting show.
I have decka with me in the studio.
Those of you who follow this program with any regularity know,
that decka's show at the Cafe Bohemian comes on after entitled opinions
and goes from 6 to 9 on Tuesdays, featuring the best world music you'll hear anywhere.
I walked in here one Tuesday a month ago.
It was Valentine's Day.
And decka ever so casually asked me if I was going to do love poetry that day.
It was a beautiful idea which frankly had not crossed my mind.
So I asked her if she would join me on air for a love poetry session.
Call it entitled opinions belated Valentine's show.
decka thanks for accepting my invitation.
Well thank you for inviting me to join you Robert.
It's nice to be here to discuss something other than music.
That's true.
And I have to say sadly it's something like a farewell show for us
for at least a quarter because of baseball season starting.
And your regular slot from 6 to 9 on Tuesdays is going to be taken over by KZSU's baseball broadcast.
And I don't know.
I mean I'm going to be applying for my regular slot next quarter.
And that means that you won't be following me anymore.
And that I won't be seeing you week in and week out as I use to maybe until next year.
We know if the weather keeps continuing to be bad. I'll be here all the time because when it rains,
the game gets rained out. I'm here.
I'm glad to hear that. I should also mention that the baseball is actually going to affect it entitled opinions by reducing it by 10 minutes because they need to take over the studio and go on air at 550.
And well you know out of one hour you say that that 10 minutes is not much.
But I have to say that it worries me because my experience with these shows is that they get, they pick up steam as they go along.
And the last 10 minutes are the most intense.
And I also want to mention to our listeners that entitled opinions is not going to air until April 4th.
We're going to take a break during the interim period.
So our next broadcast is going to be indeed on April 4th.
Are you going to continue next quarter with another time saw you think?
No, I'm going to apply for the Tuesday spot to fill in whenever baseball isn't on.
I like my Tuesday nights spots so I was trying to keep it.
Well thanks for the idea of having a love poetry show deck.
Do you want to do an opening salvo or I guess our plan is to, it's a little bit like Christmas, a little Christmas tree here because I don't know what poems you brought.
You don't know what poems I brought along and they're all kind of wrapped up.
And we're going to open them one by one for ourselves and for our listeners and it's going to be something of a surprise.
So you know, salvo is a hard act to follow.
So anything after that is going to be kind of anticlimactic but I'll do my best.
The Italians say "woon vony needs you" and "maitad de la serada" of good start is half of the way there.
So you gave me a couple of your poems.
I mean I'd be happy to start.
I'll start.
Okay go ahead.
The first one I'm going to read I think is appropriate for me to start with because it's about what the word "love" means.
And it's from Margaret Atwood.
It's entitled Variations on the Word Love.
This is a word we use to plug holes with.
It's the right size for those warm blanks and speech.
But those red heart-shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts.
Add lace and you can sell it.
We insert it also into the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions.
There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word "love".
You can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too.
How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard?
As for the weed seedlings, nosing their troughs snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love, love, sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives and salute.
Then there's the two of us.
This word is far too short for us.
It is only four letters.
Two sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear.
This word is not enough, but it will have to do.
It's a single vowel in this metallic silence.
A mouth that says "oh" again and again in wonder and pain.
A breath, a finger grip on a cliffside.
You can hold on or let go.
A single vowel in this metallic silence.
That's the verse that jumped out at me the most, you know.
Well, the thing I love about this poem and I use the word "love about this poem" is the word itself.
I think it's gotten very undervalued.
In many cases it seems like you almost need to invent a new word to describe real love.
Yeah, and that's what poetry does, not only for the word "love", but I think in many ways it's vocation is to restore the same power
to so many fundamental words that are always in constant circulation through journalism media, those magazines that she's referring to.
And there's this constant corrosive effect on the power of residents that words fundamental words have.
I think it's poem, poems above all that use words in a way that bring about a kind of healing process and a regenerative sort of effect that it has.
So I'm all with you there when you're talking about that word and the most overused word.
Because I mean it seems like I don't want to use the same word for a dessert that I use for how I feel about my husband.
And I think I agree with you that poetry is a way to sort of reclaim the original power of what these words are and to put them in a context that gives them the respect and the meaning that they deserve.
Now another, I wanted to start with an Italian poem where there are of course the word "is amor" or "amori".
And it's going to be a poem from Dante because I thought that there's no way we could do a...
a show on love poetry and not bring Dante into the picture of who had one of the ones that was idealized in literary history for his woman Beatrice.
And he wrote an autobiography about his meeting with Beatrice when he was nine years old and then again at 18 years old.
And the poems that he wrote for as a lyric poem before he became the author of the Divine Comedy, The Scrante Epic.
But even in the Divine Comedy it's Beatrice who is the mediator, the one who leads him really from the state of sin to a vision of God in the final analysis.
But she was a real woman in Florence and of course he never talked to her but that didn't prevent him from giving expression to what would be the purest...
One of the purest forms of idealized love that we have in the tradition.
And I know that idealization has a lot of problems. I think the Margaret Atwood poem, there's some tension there.
You know about this prehistory of what love has been in the Western world where there's this overestimation of the erotic object if you want to speak Freudian language.
And that's certainly the case. And there's a poem from Dante's Vita nova, this autobiography I was referring to where Beatrice is not yet dead. She'll die about a year after he writes this poem.
And she's walking down the streets of Florence and she's taken on almost a kind of Christlike powers of salvific powers of dispensing grace all around her where wherever she goes.
And I'll just mention...let me read it in English before I read it in Italian so that we'll see what it's all about.
So gentle and so honest appears my lady when she greets others.
I want to say there are the grief in Italian the word is saluta.
"Kandela l'a al-Thru" is saluta.
The word saluta in Italian means greeting but it also means salvation is clearly playing on these two connotations of the word.
So gentle and so honest appears my lady when she greets others at every tongue trembling becomes mute and eyes do not dare look on her.
She passes by hearing herself praised, benignly dressed in humility.
And she seems a thing come from heaven to earth to show forth a miracle.
She appears so pleasing to who looks on her that through the eyes she sends a sweetness to the heart that cannot be known by who has never felt it.
And it seems that from her face moves a soft spirit full of love that goes straight to the soul saying, "Sai."
"Kandela l'a al-Thru" is saluta.
"El la siva sentendo cilauda revenin yemente de milta vestuuta."
"E par que ciana coz avenuuta de chalo in tera amiracul mostrade."
"Mostrade cipia cien de aquila mira que d'appel yoc qui unadol cet al-Koré,
"contender non la proque en ombla prova."
"E par que d'alas walaab yasimova uno speedito suave, penda morre que vadichendo ala
nema so speeda."
What you can't get in the English, many things you can't get in the English, but what you can't get through the word "Sai" is this Italian sauce speeda, which even in the pronunciation of it, you can see this intake and out giving a breath and in the Sai, which is also the Sai of inspiration through which she kind of inhabits him and produces this poem in such a way that although this poem ends on this sauce speeda,
it's actually the beginning in some senses of the poem because it's through that sigh of inspiration that this poem is generated.
"That's really beautiful. And it's interesting that you picked this particular one which is sort of about the idealizing of this woman that he glimpses because one of the ones that I have is exactly the same theme, but it's very much updated and it reads clearly the same thing.
It's true love by Robert Penn Warren."
"In silence the heart raves, it utter words meaningless that never had a meaning. I was ten, skinny, redheaded, freckled, and a big black bewick driven by a big grown boy with an ectai, she sat in front of the drugstore, sipping something through a straw. There was nothing like beauty. It stops your heart.
It thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It makes you feel dirty. I need a hot bath. I leaned against the telephone pole and watched. I thought I would die if she saw me. How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?"
Two years later she smiled at me. She named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.
Her grown brothers walked with the bent knee swagger of horsemen. They were slick faced, told jokes in the barbershop, "Did not work."
Their father was what is called a drunkard. Whatever he was stayed on the third floor of the big white farmhouse under the maples for 25 years. He never came down. They brought everything up to him.
I did not know what a mortgage was. His wife was a good Christian woman and prayed. When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing an old tailcoat, the pleated shirt yellowing. The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. They were engraved invitations. It was so fashionable. I thought I would cry.
I lay in bed that night and wondered if she would cry when something was done to her. The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered. She never came back. A family sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now. But I know she is beautiful forever and lives in a beautiful house far away. She called my name once. I did not even know she knew it.
I have to believe that Robert Penn Warren had the background. There are really too many parallels. It is quite uncanny.
Yeah, he must have. When you were reading yours, I was thinking, "Wow, it is amazing. We would pick the poems we did." It is very similar.
Here on the street, like in Dante's case, Dante speaks about seeing her for the first time when he was nine years old. He is 10.
When he sees her again, she knows who he is. She offers her greeting. This is also her salvation.
The same way that this girl or woman says his name, what I do not understand is why he goes on with all... It seems like two poems to me.
The first part has this quintessential lyric, idealizing drive. The second part seems to descend into some very odd... I mean the ideal is the mortgage and tells the story which deliberately seems to contaminate that emotion of pure enchantment.
It is also sort of a reality check. He is idealizing her, but he is seeing her in the real world. He realizes that she is not a princess. She lives in a dysfunctional family with how is this going to be foreclosed and how to work brothers.
And in spite of that, he still loves her.
He lives in a beautiful house far away. Maybe it is that kind of beauty which is not of the world. Even though she is in the world, maybe the beauty is not of it.
Yes, she transcends the mortgage and the beauty and goes on someplace better.
When I teach Dante and undergraduate, how can he possibly love when we talk to him? I said, "Well, it is all there in the appearance of something transpires in the vision. It is visionary."
And associated with beauty somehow.
Well, I have a poem deck up by Sir Thomas Wyatt, 16th century, early 16th century, and it was hard to choose one of the several beautiful poems, Thomas Wyatt is left behind.
But I really couldn't resist the day flee from me.
Vay flee from me that sometimes did me seek with naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek that now are wild, and do not remember that sometimes they put themselves in danger to take bread at my hand.
And now they range, busily seeking with a continual change.
Thank you, and I could be fortunate to have been otherwise twenty times better, but once in special.
In thin array after a pleasant guise, when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall.
And she, meek up in her arms long and small. Therewith all sweetly did me kiss, and softly said, "Dear Heart, how like you this?"
It was no dream I lay broad waking, but all is turned through my gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaking.
And I have leave to go of her goodness, and she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I am so kindly, I am served, I would think, know what she hath deserved."
This is obviously a love form after the fact of the enchantment.
And it is very hard to translate the emotion that worked here into concepts.
I think the idea that he refers to this woman in the plural, "they flee from me," that sometimes did me seek with that comparison with birds that presume their birds that come to take bread at my hand.
And then this turn from a dream into a strange fashion of forsaking.
And how she goes on to new novel things.
While he stays behind still bewildered by the betrayal of that experience of transcendence, that love poetry so much about it.
If we were saying before that it belongs to another order, reality clearly, it also is profoundly vulnerable.
And these will a lot of hurt.
Wouldn't you say that a lot of love poetry that we all tend to read has to do more with the hurt than the kind of moment of sheer inspiration that you get in Dante or the true love of Robert Penn Warren?
Oh, absolutely. I think that pain is a great muse.
And when you are happy, it is almost difficult to tear yourself away from the object of your happiness and right.
When you are heartbroken, writing about your misery is such a wonderful outlet.
And there are so many powerful emotions that you can get out on paper.
And so much love poetry is about love that has either been forsaken or in a lot of cases just died.
There is this whole realm of, you know, I love you, dear dead person, poetry.
And strangely enough, it seems like most of the poetry that I found that was written by women, especially women before the 20th century, was very much about being unhappy in love.
And about misery and being forsaken or having their love not returned or even not even noticed.
Yeah, and if it didn't have this tragic possibility always, we think I don't think it would have the same kind of intensity.
And let me tell you what bothers me about a lot of people who never read poetry except when they fall in love.
And then they think that they are poets and they start writing poetry and maybe they read a little bit of poetry.
And then the moment is very short lasting and they never go back to poetry again.
Yeah.
So I guess the real poets are the ones who have an almost unconditional allegiance to those special moments.
And not of love, then of some kind of ecstatic experience of being alive and then will hold on to it even if it means lamenting.
You know, it's the fact that it can't be recuperated sometimes.
I would say that being a real poet means that you can write about something other than love.
If all you can write about is love, you're not a poet, you work for Hallmark.
Well, if you can write about rocks and nightmares and a cup of coffee and make it sound beautiful, you're a poet.
Well, that's true. Although there are traditions in the West, for example, Petroc.
He wrote about other things in love, but he has his whole collection of lyric poetry where it's the absolute rule that they all have to be about love for.
They all have to be love poems as such because that was where poetry stick and disclaims most decisively.
Which gets into the whole realm of, is there such a thing as a universal love poem?
Because I think love is a really personal thing.
In many ways, love poem is like a scary movie.
If a scary movie doesn't tap into your particular fear, it's not going to scare you.
If a love poem doesn't address what you think love is or the kind of relationships that you have, does it really work for you?
I agree with that, but I also wonder why so many love poems that come to us from antiquity or the Middle Ages from worlds that are so different from Mars can still, that we can still know what they're talking about when we read them.
Even though the sensibilities have changed, the horizon of references have changed.
So there has to be something in there that does tap into a universal sentiment, no?
Well, I mean, we can still understand them, but I know that there are poems that I understand as being beautiful.
The words are glorious.
The sentiments are understandable, but they don't remind me of me and how I feel and how my relationships are.
And so I can appreciate them as it works of art, but I don't take them into my heart and go, wow, this is my life here.
So another quick question before we read another poem, is there something gendered about this seeing in a poem something that speaks to you personally?
Is it equally a male author's poem or a woman authored poem that can do it?
I don't think it's the gender of the writer.
I think it's the situation and the type of poem that it is.
I mean, I've never been, you know, not on a white horse and lady fair kind of woman.
So the poetry where the woman is this, you know, fragile, beautiful creature and the man is this, you know, protector doesn't really address my life.
And I also don't really respond to, you know, pastoral, but you collick poetry because I'm a city girl.
So poetry about, you know, my love met me in a garden.
I can appreciate it for being beautiful, but it's not my life.
I've never met my love in a garden. I meet my love at jazz clubs.
Yeah.
Well, you have another one for us?
Yeah, speaking of meeting my love at jazz clubs.
This is, this is Jukebox Love Song by Langston Hughes.
And I chose this one specifically because it's a city poem.
And it's, it's the kind of poem that I really understand because it addresses a world that I am familiar with.
I could take the Harlem Knight and wrap it around you, take the neon lights and make a crown,
take the Lennox Avenue Buses, taxis, subways.
And for your love song, tone their rumble down, take Harlem's heartbeat, make a drum beat, put it on a record, let it whirl.
And while we listen to it play, dance with you till day, dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.
Now I read this and think, okay, who would not want to be his sweet brown Harlem girl?
This just sounds so sexy and loving and warm.
And it's, it's, this is the kind of love poetry that I understand because as I say, I've never been romance in a garden.
And I don't think I want to.
Right.
But again, I think what the common motif is devotion.
It's a poem that expresses the kind of devotion.
No?
I'm not really voting in the sense of true mesmerization, not fixation for say, but a complete being unto.
Yeah, there's, there is a certain amount of that.
It's, it's not quite as overt as, you know, some of the ones that actually, you know, use phrases like imperious princess of the night sort of thing.
He does obviously have a certain sense of adoration for her, which I think is, is really sort of sweet and warm.
Well, I'm going to try one out on you now, to give you again, the other side, which is a poem that has repound transcribes from the history of Chinese poetry in a very different world.
I think it's coming from, let's see, I'm looking here.
It doesn't seem to give a date, but nevertheless, we're, it's called the river merchants wife, a letter.
And it's in the voice of a, of the wife who's writing a letter to her husband who's gone off on a, what we would call a business trip.
And it reads as follows, while my hair was still cut straight across my forehead, I played about the front gate pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse.
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chopkan, two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At 14, I married my Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall, called two a thousand times, I never looked back.
At 15, I stopped scowling.
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At 16 you departed, you went into far koto-yen by the river of swirling eddies, and you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now the moss has grown, the different mosses, too deep to clear them away.
The leaves fall early this autumn in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August, over the grass in the west garden.
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river kiang, please let me know beforehand.
I will come out to meet you as far as Chofu-sa.
It's not a jazz bar, it's not harm them.
It's not certainly not our environment in any way, but there's something about an image like the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
Climbing the lookout, the river of the swirling eddies, they manage to transcend these local cultural context that we identify ourselves in.
That's a part of the power tree, the power poetry as well.
It's interesting because I'm looking through love poetry.
There are quite a few poems about missing the one that you love.
I hadn't come across this one.
This is very evocative.
I have to admit.
It's amazing how she starts out at a young girl.
He marries him at 14.
It's obviously in a range marriage.
She was bashful, called to a thousand times.
She never ages.
She scowled for a whole year and at 15 she stopped scowling.
Then at 16 he departed and she's already feeling mortality.
She leaves that have turned yellow with August, coming on of the autumn.
Already at her age at 16 she can feel this mortality, which then is the basis for this dedication that she would have to match her money.
What's exceptional about this poem is that it's a beautiful love form within the context of marriage.
It's very difficult in the Western tradition to reconcile romantic passion with marriage,
per se.
That's another thing I really like about this poem.
I did find a couple of poems about being happily married, but they were all so smart me.
I couldn't bring any of them in.
Yeah, well there you go.
It's in front of them.
I was looking for one.
I have something from that noise bleeding in.
I don't know if it's going on air or not.
I hear strange poundings in the background.
This is also on the theme of being away from the one you love.
This is Pablo Neruda.
It's called "Don't go far off not even for a day."
Don't go far off not even for a day because I don't know how to say it.
A day is long and I will be waiting for you as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else.
A sleep.
Don't leave me even for an hour because then the little drops of anguish will all run together.
The smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach.
May your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest.
Because in that moment you'll have gone so far all wander lazily all over the earth asking,
"Will you come back? Will you leave me here? Dying?"
That's raw. Beautiful.
And this one, I've always loved this one because when you are madly in love with someone and they're apart from you,
I mean obviously for a second or a moment it's fine, but when they're gone for a week or two,
you begin to feel like the empty train station waiting for the train to pull in
and you begin to wonder are they ever coming back?
And this is one of those poems that I remember reading years ago and it's always stuck in my mind
it's just being very honest and truthful about certain kinds of love.
Yeah, but again I would say that the distance, the fear of separation,
not even for a day, that poetry and the love-passion feeds also off of the obstacles that keep
two lovers from having perfect union all the time and if it were not for that which love poetry often
amends separation, even rejection so far.
In other words it nourishes itself on that which sometimes it's lamenting.
Take a poem that it's a poem in French, I'm not even going to read the English because I think it's more in the music
than anything else is called Lupombeha-Bol by Apolinae, French poet of the early 20th century.
And it's basically that the Mirabót Bridge is a bridge in Paris and the poem is about how
along with the river that flows under the Mirabót, so do our loves and so does everything in time.
I chose it mostly for it so not really actually.
So, as a poem in the book of Lupombeha-Bol is the fourth time of the year, the first time of the year, the first time of the year.
Lupombeha-Bol is the first time of the year, the third time of the year, the third time of the year.
So, the first time of the year, the first time of the year, the first time of the year.
Lupombeha-Bol is the first time of the year.
I have another one that I was going to read for it so no already also.
I think it's also a matrimony poem, but it's by Edgar Allan Poe.
Beautiful, Poe Anabelle Lee.
There was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea that a maiden there lived to Mume No by the name of Anabelle Lee.
And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child in this kingdom by the sea, but we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Anabelle Lee.
With a love that the winged serifs of heaven coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that long ago in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out a cloud by night, chilling my Anabelle Lee, so that her high-born kinsman came and bore her away from me to shut her up in a sepulcher in this kingdom by the sea.
The angels not half so happy in heaven went envying her and me.
Yes, that was the reason, as all men know in this kingdom by the sea, that the wind came out of a cloud, chilling and killing my Anabelle Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we, of many far wiser than we, and neither the angels in heaven above,
nor the demons down under the sea, can ever disever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Anabelle Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Anabelle Lee, and the stars never rise, but I see the bright eyes of the beautiful Anabelle Lee.
And so, all the night tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life, and my bride, in her sepulcher there by the sea, in her tomb by the side of the sea.
The poet, I think, is a very undressed, amazed poet.
I have to admit, I have never liked this.
It's just, it's a two-sing-song for you.
It's a little sing-songy, but it's just too depressing.
And it's one of those poems that I've never thought it was entirely successful at conveying the kind of love that lives unto death.
And I realize that it's a very beautiful poem, and many people think it's extraordinary.
It's just never had any resonance for me.
Well, I find that if you're going to read poems aloud, some of them work very beautifully if you're reading them silently,
but they don't necessarily read that well aloud.
I kind of like, and I'm liking more and more as time goes on, these kind of heavily rhymed kind of poems that do have that under the surface of this sing-song,
and I, if they, or even catch, sometimes even catch quality, that there's an undercurrent of real darkness and despair, and that it's the rhyme scheme that keeps it afloat.
And yet, as you're saying, it's depressing.
The story is so depressing that if one were to write such a poem in another kind of mode where it didn't flow along through the rhymes, and then it might even be unbearable.
So that's why I think it works.
Do you think that poetry isn't meant to be read silently or meant to be read out loud?
I think poetry has its origins in music or that music has its origins in poetry, and that the fur, this is what Ezra Pound said, by the way,
that the further poetry drifts away from music, the more it falls away from its essence.
And I think the abandonment of rhyme in modern poetry is very mixed blessing, and still some of my favorite modern content, even contemporary poems,
are those that can use rhyme if only in very subtle ways.
Because I think rhyme music rhythm is what gives poetry as power of enchantment.
And a poetry doesn't have the power to enchant, then those poets should be writing prose.
Now, I know we live in a completely disenchanted age, and that a poetry of enchantment can be consumed and ring very false when it's placed side by side with a kind of grim reality.
But I think even the lengths and huge poem that it manages within a disenchanted world to spy out and find the terms of a poetic enchantment.
Do you have an enchanting poem for us here at Deco?
To a heavonant enchanting, you may be asking for quite a lot.
Let me see what I got here.
I have a whole stack of poetry. We're not possibly going to be able to get to it.
You have some Dickinson as well, though.
I do have some Dickinson.
Yes, it's a... let me see if I can find it here.
Okay, I seem to drop Dickinson somewhere along the line.
Oh, yes, this one. Do you think this one's enchanting?
Well, I don't know it. I mean, it's your poem. I have some... I brought some Dickinson myself as well.
So why don't we try this one to think the one that you brought, and if it doesn't work, I'll read one.
We can have dueling Dickinson.
This is if you were coming in the fall.
If you were coming in the fall, I'd brush the summer by with a half a smile and half a spurn as housewives do a fly.
If I could see you in a year, I'd wind the months in balls and put them in separate drawers until their time the falls.
If only centuries delayed, I'd count them on my hand, subtracting till my fingers dropped in two van demons land.
If certain when this life was out, that yours and mine should be, I'd toss life yonder like a rind and taste eternity.
But now, I'll ignorant of length of times uncertain wing, it goes me like the goblin bee that will not state its sting.
I think, yeah, beautiful.
In fact, I was going to almost read that one myself. There were so many to choose from in Emily Dickinson's love poetry.
But she has a lot of bees when her love poems are the figure of the bee comes out a lot like in the one you read.
Here's another one.
Did the hair belt loose her girdle to the lover bee?
Would the bee, the hair belt, hallow, much as formally?
Did the paradise persuaded yield her moat of pearl?
Would the Eden be an Eden, or the Earl an Earl?
Come slowly, Eden, lips, unused to thee, bashful, sip thy jasmines as the fainting bee, reaching late his flower, round her chamber humps.
Counts his neckdars, enters, and is lost in bombs.
Okay, that was enchanting.
Yeah, this from a woman who's the experience of love was entirely in the realm of the imagination, as far as we know.
The moon is distant from the sea, and yet with amber hands she leads him docile as a boy along appointed sands.
He never misses a degree, obedient to her eye.
He comes just so far toward the town, just so far goes away.
O, sing your thine, the amber hand, and mine the distant sea, obedient to the least command thine eyes that pose on me.
I think it's a remarkable poem where, of course, the analogy is of the tides, the relationship between the moon and the sea, and how the moon will lead the sea up the shore, just so far up the appointed sands, and never enough to get to the town.
The moon goes back and always to this degree, and this becomes the point of comparison for the relationship between her and her senior, as he calls him, where he is the moon, the amber hand, and she's the sea obedient to the least command thine eyes that pose on me.
Yeah, there's nothing like Emily.
One more, Deka. We have time.
I'm going to go here. This is one of my favorite loved poems, and it's almost the anti-love poem.
It's Billy Collins, who was a US poet laureate in 2000, and I think he's a marvelous poet, and this is called litany, and he begins with a quote from,
I'm assuming he's a French poet named Jacques Cricción, that begins, "You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet, and the wine."
"You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet, and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass, and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight."
However, they were not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter or the house of cards, and you are certainly not the pinescented air. There is no way you are the pinescented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show you that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boat house.
It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of the rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees, and the blind woman's teacup, but don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and somehow the wine.
This is a whole sort of genre of love poetry that I find really endearing, which is love poetry with a sense of humor.
Because for me, the best relationships are the ones where you have fun with each other, where it is not always about passion and romance about making each other laugh.
I am madly in love with my husband and one of the reasons I am is because he makes me laugh every day.
This poem reminds me of our relationship because we don't take each other too seriously and we joke around.
This is a wonderful example of making your partner smile at the end of the day.
I agree with that. How did you discover Billy Collins?
Through the wonders of NPR.
I think it was all things considered one time, and I fell in love with him and his works, and I bought every book of his I could find, and that's the problem of his poems, just because every time I read it, I smile.
Do you read a lot of poetry?
Probably more than the average person. I have to be in a mood to read poetry, and when I am, I read nothing but. I just devour it.
You read a lot of novels as well.
I do.
You actually got your degree in literature, is that right?
No, I have a degree in classics, classics in art history.
Classics in art history, great.
His soul was taking you back to that.
The soul was taking me back to that, and I had considered bringing in some saffo, but I decided against it.
I'm glad you did, but I could.
It was my opening. I was not going to give her to you.
I'm not going to give her to you, but I brought her.
I know that you have to be in a mood to read poetry, and when I stay away from it for extended periods of time, and then I go back to it, I said, why would I read anything other than poetry?
That there is something nourishing about poetry and literature and gender that you don't get from.
You certainly don't get in the same degree from other forms of writing.
I think it's very true.
For me, poetry is very much like music.
There is certain music I want to hear when I'm in a certain mood.
I don't want to listen to Miles Davis. I want to listen to Chopin.
Poetry is like that. There is a mood where nothing but poetry will satisfy me.
Then there are moods where I'll pick up poetry and go, I want something with a plot to just escape into.
Well, of course, you can be in moods for certain kinds of poems, certain kinds of poetry.
There are poetry that's like Miles Davis, and there is poetry that's like Chopin on the other hand.
That's very true.
One of my favorite poets that is Dylan Thomas, for precisely the reason I was talking about a few minutes ago,
a few minutes ago, which is the sheer power of enchantment.
Some people, especially academics, say, "Well, he had his big vogue in the 60s and early 70s.
Dylan Thomas was the poet, a quintessential poet."
Then you know how these tastes are so mercurial, especially in the academic world.
It's been at least a couple of decades where he's no longer has this kind of cachet that he used to.
They say, "Well, it's all in the effects and the musicality.
There's no substance there, there's no message and no prophetic voice."
But that doesn't bother me at all because if I'm going to read a poem out loud to a person,
the first poet I'll choose is Dylan Thomas, precisely because he wrote his poems in that kind of musical.
This is what I'm not sure is a love poem that I chose.
It's a poem called The Seed at Zero, which like all Dylan Thomas poems, very difficult to figure out what it's really saying.
But I think from the images, my impression at least is that it's about the injunction not to consummate,
not to have a sexual consummation until you go through the sacramental ritual institutions of asking for the girl's hand,
going through the father, the keeper of the key and so forth.
But I could be wrong about that.
But it's called Seed at Zero.
The seed at zero shall not storm that town of ghosts, the trodden womb with her rampart to his tapping.
No god and hero tumble down like a tower on the town, dumbly and divinely stumbling over the man waging line.
The seed at zero shall not storm that town of ghosts, the man waged womb with her rampart to his tapping.
No god and hero tumble down like a tower on the town, dumbly and divinely leaping over the war-bearing line.
Through the rampart of the sky shall the star-flanked seed be riddled, manna for the rumbling ground, quickening for the riddled sea.
Settled on a virgin stronghold, he shall grapple with the guard and the keeper of the key.
The poem goes on, but I'll just stop there.
I'll stop there.
I am not going to be wrong.
I'm not going to be wrong.
I have to admit I have no idea what that's about.
Well, Dylan Thomas, the commentary, I don't know.
I don't mean to suggest a commentary is superfluous,
but I think it justifies itself.
It's own musicality.
I've studied the poem enough to think that he have to grapple with the guard
and the keeper of the key, whoever is the guardian of the girl or the young woman.
And that in the end, the keeper of the key is the loser of the key at a certain point.
It's no longer the keeper, but the loser.
And that there's a town of ghosts.
And in any case, I would just probably leave it uncommented.
Well, we have time for one more from you, Decca.
Oh, dear.
See, Carl Sandberg.
I did.
That's a very short one.
I think I'm actually going to read something from Maya Angelou, because it's --
this is a love poem, but it's not about male-female love.
It's about love as universal concept.
We, on a custom to courage, exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness,
and to love leaves its high, holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.
Love arrives, and in its train come ecstices, old memories of pleasure, ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity, and the flesh of love's light we dare to be brave.
And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be.
And it is only love which sets us free.
Very nice, yeah.
Now I'm sure that could be applied to -- which is a whole different realm.
God as love, love poetry.
But I take this -- since I don't do God, I take this to be more of a --
we all need to sort of look after each other, and if you don't have love, what do you have sort of feeling?
Yeah, but it is touched by an angel.
Yes, it is.
Well, Deka, you see how quickly the time has gone.
We are here at the top of the hour now.
It is time for your show.
So what I thought I would leave our listeners with an actual love song, in the real sense of song.
It is actually a Turkish singer named Seabed Jan.
And you don't have to know what she is saying.
I think it all comes out and just the voice itself.
So thanks very much for coming on.
Thank you for inviting me.
It is a wonderful time.
Likewise, and I want to remind our listeners that entitled opinion is going to take a little break,
and we will be back on air on April 4th, and we will see you then.
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