Let the poet who has been not too long ago born make very sure of this, that no one cares to hear, in strained iambics, that he feels sprightly in spring, is uncomfortable when his sexual desires are ungratified, and that he has read about human brotherhood in last year’s magazines.
On the contrary, the young poet must show promise to as few as a dozen readers of producing “some entanglement of words so subtle, so crafty that they can be read or heard without yawning” after reading Pindar or Keats.
If he does so, he will find friendship “where he had little expected it” and will experience “delightful things . . . suddenly and with no other explanation.”
This was the prescription offered by Ezra Pound in 1911, in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.
I like especially that telling about brotherhood as written up in last year’s magazines. Finding thirty or twelve readers fits Pound’s idea of what’s worth doing. He pursued it all his life and became the guiding light of an era.
Mass on Wednesday
At mass this morning, sat next to a fellow my age, also an ex-priest, though I think he’d say inactive or resigned. Fine, no problem here. Now and then I’ve flirted with seeing myself as a priest once more, 41 years after I left that profession — rather, the ministry.
The mass celebrant, or presider as they say in these days of downgrading the priestly role, making him a sort of chairman of sacred proceedings, even as he has a more prominent role than in the old days of Latin mass with his back to us, absorbed in what he was doing, was leading us in the Hail Mary, a culmination of his short sermon-homily. He had begun proceedings with a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, which he worked into his talk as being what they sing at the famous shrine at Lourdes, France.
I did not join in because I had come for a quiet, meditative experience and was not in a reciting or singing frame of mind. But my seatmate didn’t either, he who once could be heard from across a church responding to the celebrant-presider, “And with your spirit” or whatever was called for. (Later he did the Our Father all right, I didn’t even do that today.)
He held off from the Hail Mary, I’m sure, because he resists Marian devotion as old church. He was a young priest at the time of Vatican Council II, as was I, and had absorbed Pope John 23rd’s aggiornamento thoroughly, as did I. Over the years I have slid back from that enthusiasm. He has not. I have become more tolerant, even transferring at times my enthusiasm to the old stuff as it’s been revived. He has not.
We both approach the Last Roundup. He’s looking poorly these days. I am not. He’s not a ranter, never was. But he apparently took it all to heart 40–50 years ago in a way I did not. I was like a Roman (yes!) candle, full of sound and fury, having very few unexpressed thoughts, judgments, and opinions. (Still are, you say? Fie!) He was more laid back and over the years has now and then surprised me by taking positions for granted that I have rethought and reassessed and sometimes abandoned.
We see little of each other these days and are unlikely to discuss our differences. We had arrived at church separately and left separately. His greeting at the handclasp of peace was correct but not warm. I take that as a sign of his weariness. Indeed, I know the feeling and have been at times delinquent in the warmth area. Elan vital escapes us senior citizens sometimes.
But you know what? We worshiped together. We took communion at the same mass. We sat and stood at the same time — neither of us kneels, and now I think of it, he stood almost not at all. We both look ahead to life everlasting in due time — not quite yet, if you don’t mind. All’s well that ends well, I always say. And this will end well.
Credo.
Reader D? She say: Ah, but I do like it. Especially the part about seeking a meditative experience at mass. So much folderal going on that there’s no time to think about what I came to think about.
The breakfast table challenge
Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading. Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one). Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.
Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I tell myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head), and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage.
Four days of the week I go to Kass at Trib or check out Dennis Byrne or Krauthammer and look for some crisply traditional raking of city, county, and state muck in either paper — especially Sun-Times, as by Tim Novak et al. and Fran Spielman, who gets more out of a Daley presser than any man or other woman I know about.
It’s getting worse. Size of paper I can live with, but boring biases and crippled imaginativeness I cannot. So I look around and today found something worth spilling coffee on. It’s, lo and behold, Our Sunday Visitor, which by definition is not a daily paper but is definitely a newspaper not a magazine and which I am receiving on a trial complimentary basis.
More later, I trust, with special attention to Russell Shaw’s columnizing. Its web site takes some study, but you can start here.
(Got a little anachronistic with these last few links, which were hardly available with this 2009 disquisition. Sorry.)
Morning becomes electric [sic]
The morning read has two parts I must add to yesterday’s Breakfast Challenge, pre– and at-breakfast. There’s coffee in both, but one is pre-walk, you see, the other after it. Difference is, at the 2nd you take in heavier food requiring digestion, at the 1st lighter that is not so demanding.
At the 1st, rather than imbibing newspaper-style stuff with coffee — one cup at most — you want what makes best use of your semiconscious state, such as poetry by Pound or, as now, criticism by Hugh Kenner.
His book on American fiction and poetry (A Homemade World, Morrow, 1975) lies now on the little reading table in the front room, far from PC and ‘Net. It’s a copy I picked up some time back, now with neat 5×8 1/2 paperback pages that come off in my hand, one by one. I keep it all together with a nice fat rubber band. This volume, to use the word loosely, is nothing to take on an “L” train.
Kenner contrasts Wallace Stevens the insurance exec with William Carlos Williams the GP — you gotta love a GP — who wrote a mere eight years apart, Dr. Williams coming later.
What he says about them, frankly, I’d be hard-pressed to tell in detail. I can say it includes this, that Stevens of Hartford saw poems as having something to say and saying it well or poorly, in that order (Kenner rated that the most egregious “misunderstanding” in literary history, of which he knows quite a lot), Williams of Camden the opposite. For Williams words are parts of a machine, for Stevens the maker of things we can believe in.
If that’s not perfectly clear, to use a Nixonian phrase (remember?) adopted by Obama, leaving out “perfectly,” try this, that as a Christian reader I got more to conjure with from Stevens than from Williams.
What does all this say? That I read something that I could not fully absorb but by which I was absorbed. Not to mention that I was warmed and satisfied, as I was by that single cup.
This is mainly — no, entirely — that Kenner is so smart and well-versed and articulate and word-wise that he could probably get my attention and absorption if he were discussing the national debt or nuclear fission.
I’d be entertained as I read along, taken up into something bigger than myself that I could take seriously, which, to return to yesterday’s Breakfast Table item, I do not ask of a newspaper. Of a newspaper I ask only to keep little gray cells going at a rate consistent with digesting cereal, prunes, and even eggs, the making of my true, main breakfast.
(Got a little anachronistic with these last few links, which were hardly available with this 2009 disquisition. Sorry.)
Blithe Spirit 