Well Bottom Blues

Tie me to the chair first, honey. I’m a glutton for delicious torment. I’m reading all of Czeslaw Milosz which is not as emotionally fraught as reading through all of Louise Glück. I enjoy the change of tone, from feminine to masculine reflection, like one of those flip over bathroom mirrors. Much of Glück is too close to someone I care about. In fact I’ve dogeared any number of her poems and will give them that copy, hoping Louise might suggest some ways to write the poems they’re struggling to write.

Why do I submit myself to tackling this sort of reading? I’m retired and my only pastimes are reading and writing. There is so much I haven’t read and I’m getting quite old. Also, I’m someone who submitted myself to an intensive month of study of Ezra Pound under the stones of his daughter’s castle high in the Tirol, as a reward for returning and completing my bachelor’s. I also saw Venice, Rome (briefly: the ruins, the Spanish Steps and Trevi) and spent time in Madrid, Barcelona and Granada in the bargain. Like Shane MacGowan I rode the night train to Lorca. I guess it was worth the thousands of dollars that left me broke and unemployed after graduation.

Glück sits in a stack including Against Forgetting, although I’m writing a lot less poetry about the contemporary situation of the world, and under that Robinson Jeffers’ hefty Selected. I’m planning on rereading Jeffers because I write a great deal about nature although not on his epic scale. I loathe his species of inhumanism even as I begin to turn my back on the ugly, man-shaped ruin of the world. I just laid aside Cloud Mountain halfway through, thinking to read that and Jeffers together. I want to build a portal out of words through which to escape the worst of humanity and stand on the high granite counting clouds. Stop by sometime and share a bowl of wine.

I’m also reading Emily Wilson’s Iliad before I reread her Odyssey, all before I go see the damn movie. I’ve got the time and inclination so why not? Also, my first real book as a small child was a clothbound quarto illustrated children’s Iliad and Odyssey. This story and I go back over 60 years. I never thought anyone could make Book Two of The Iliad, that ponderous catalog like the begats, sing like Orpheus but Wilson does. The boys club of critics are popping up not just to comment on the movie but also on Wilson’s translation. Is it faithful to the Greek? I can’t answer that but I know this was an oral performance piece first and Wilson gives me that sense, the impulse to read aloud and strike a lyre, not a single clumsy step, faithful to the repetitions, and not any taint of Chapman. I don’t listen to the big boys. I read aloud her lines and listen to that.

So aren’t you special Mark, reading all of that but again I am retired. I read, I write, I walk in the forested parts of the park and do the necessary. My original retirement plan was to complete an MFA, but the lords of Louisiana took away free tuition for seniors and I didn’t have a spare $30,000, or the inclination for a 50 hour week as a free-ride graduate assistant right after retiring. At least I misread the instructions and ended up receiving copies of my recommendation letters which left me flabbergasted and flattered.

Instead of the university, I have my books.I’ll have to trust in myself, my library, the excellent guidance I did receive before I dropped out and that of certain, special undergrad professors, and the large language model I have assembled over the last 60 odd years. I’m still feeding that monster and I’m going to ride it to the end scattering poetry as I go.

When I told a poet and professor I know, not from that university, that I’d been accepted into the MFA, she said I hope you get a good book out of it. I’m still working on that. Maybe after I’m dead. Until then I read, write and revise my manuscripts. It keeps me mostly out of trouble, except for that one long manuscript entitled Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit, but you might have to wait to read that one until after I’m gone.