Louise Gluck's Piercing Poetry

The January 11, 2013 issue of Entertainment Weekly contains Jeff Giles' one page review ("Love, Loss, The Whole Damn Thing") of Louise Gluck's poetry anthology Poems 1962-2012. Giles declares, "Louise Gluck is my favorite non-dead poet. She's spent 50 years obsessed with our differing capacities for love and joy, and our grasping, tentative stabs at understanding life, never mind death. Gluck can be severe. But the flashes of beauty in her writing are more profound because they are clearly hard-won."

Here is an excerpt from her 2004 poem "October":

Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal--
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher--

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

Here is one more tasty, bittersweet Gluck morsel: "in childhood, I thought/that pain meant/I was not loved./It meant I loved."

Remembering Tupac Shakur, the Thug Life Poet

"What you feed us, as seeds, grows and blows up in your face. That's Thug Life."--Tupac Shakur

Tupac Shakur tattooed "Thug Life" on his abdomen and many people probably assume that he did this because he knew that he was a thug or at least he felt that being a thug was a basic part of his nature.

Tupac Shakur was a sensitive, fatalistic poet. He saw death all around him, he foresaw his own death and yet he spoke passionately about life. He was not describing himself as a thug or glorifying being a thug but rather he used "Thug Life" as an acronym meaning "The Hate U Gave Little Infants F---- Everybody."

Tupac Shakur was crude, vulgar and violent.

Tupac Shakur was compassionate, lyrical and someone who knew that violence was not the ultimate answer even though he lived a life of violence before dying a violent death.

It is so easy and tempting to apply a label to everyone and everything. This is good. That is bad.

Life is not lived in Manichean shades of pure light and pure darkness; while pure good and pure evil do exist, most of the world is bathed in shades of gray.

Who was the real Tupac Shakur? Is there even a simple, direct response to that question or is the only valid response complex and multilayered?

In "Dear Mama," Shakur paid tribute to the most important woman in his life:

To keep me happy there's no limit to the things you did
And all my childhood memories
Are full of all the sweet things you did for me
And even though I act craaazy
I gotta thank the Lord that you made me
There are no words that can express how I feel
You never kept a secret, always stayed real
And I appreciate, how you raised me
And all the extra love that you gave me
I wish I could take the pain away
If you can make it through the night there's a brighter day
Everything will be alright if ya hold on
It's a struggle everyday, gotta roll on
And there's no way I can pay you back
But my plan is to show you that I understand
You are appreciated

In "Keep Ya Head Up," Shakur extended that theme to include all women:

And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don't we'll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies

Here is an excerpt from Shakur's song/poem "So Many Tears":

Lord, I suffered through the years, and shed so many tears...
Lord, I lost so many peers, and shed so many tears
Now I'm lost and I'm weary, so many tears
I'm suicidal, so don't stand near me
My every move is a calculated step, to bring me closer
to embrace an early death, now there's nothin' left
There was no mercy on the streets, I couldn't rest
I'm barely standin', bout to go to pieces, screamin' peace
And though my soul was deleted, I couldn't see it
I had my mind full of demons tryin' to break free
They planted seeds and they hatched, sparkin' the flame
inside my brain like a match, such a dirty game
No memories, just a misery
Paintin' a picture of my enemies killin' me, in my sleep
Will I survive til the mo'nin', to see the sun
Please Lord forgive me for my sins, cause here I come...

Shakur's pain is palpable; you hear it in your ears, you feel it in your throat, it pumps through your heart.

The lyrics express such raw emotion, stripped of any pretense, exposing his vulnerabilities, doubts and fears.

Yet...this sensitive poet inflicted pain on others and went to prison for his crimes.

Tupac Shakur was just 25 years old when he was murdered. If he had lived to be 35 or 45 or 55, would he have risen to become an even greater poet or would he have descended deeper into violence?

Or would his life have continued to defy categorization?

appreciating e.e. cummings

E.E. Cummings is not the greatest poet of all-time or even the greatest poet of the 20th century but he wrote with a distinctive voice that still resonates and that sets him apart from any other poet. From his earliest poetic efforts, Cummings forged his own path, bending--no, breaking, shattering and obliterating--grammatical and syntactical customs; his poems featured few or no capitalized letters, syncopated rhythms, stylized word spellings and stanza structures that challenged both typesetters and readers. Cummings' unique style defied poetic orthodoxy much like Salvador Dali's now-iconic painting "The Persistence of Memory" defied painting orthodoxy; Dali presented ordinary objects as part of a grand surrealistic vision and his twisted clocks force us to confront the mystery of time and existence, while Cummings' oddly shaped stanzas force us to focus on the meaning of each carefully chosen word: you cannot casually read a Cummings poem, just like you cannot casually view a Dali painting; in both cases you must interact with the art and let the art interact with your mind and your emotions. Through careful and disciplined manipulation of form, Cummings demanded the reader's full attention; free verse requires that the writer not let freedom descend into chaos and that the reader must concentrate in order to understand the writer's message.

This is my favorite Cummings poem:

if up's the word;and a world grows greener
minute by second and most by more-
if death is the loser and life is the winner
(and beggars are rich but misers are poor)
-let's touch the sky:
with a to and a fro
(and a here there where)and away we go

in even the laziest creature among us
a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir-
now dull eyes are keen and now keen eyes are keener
(for young is the year,for young is the year)
-let's touch the sky:
with a great(and a gay
and a steep)deep rush through amazing day

it's brains without hearts have set saint against sinner;
put gain over gladness and joy under care-
let's do as an earth which can never do wrong does
(minute by second and most by more)
-let's touch the sky:
with a strange(and a true)
and a climbing fall into far near blue

if beggars are rich(and a robin will sing his
robin a song)but misers are poor-
let's love until noone could quite be(and young is
the year,dear)as living as i'm and as you're
-let's touch the sky:
with a you and a me
and an every(who's any who's some)one who's we

I love the couplet "in even the laziest creature among us/a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir"; it conjures two images for me: one image is that of a seemingly "slow" person who shines and thrives if someone takes the time to patiently teach him and the other image is of a person who retains his wisdom even after enduring 12 years of being force-fed all of the "knowledge" that the American public education system purports to dispense. Cummings saw that there is inherent wisdom--and worth--inside every person, regardless of that person's seemingly "lazy" disposition and regardless of the way that certain experiences may have dulled that wisdom/concealed that worth.

Cummings' poetry challenges readers in a way that was once widely considered enchanting but his reputation has not grown after his passing, perhaps because readers no longer want to be challenged. Cummings anticipated that his writings--and what he called "The New Art" in general--might not be well received by some audiences. During a Harvard commencement address that he delivered in 1915 at just 20 years of age, Cummings presciently predicted that the "fakirs and fanatics" would not view with favor works of art that explore methods, emotions and concepts that fall outside of the norm. In an article titled "Make it Newish" (May 2005, Harper's Magazine), Wyatt Mason explains, "Cummings had come to issue a corrective to an audience ignorant of any error."

Cummings hoped that society would embrace art that challenges preconceptions and that reveals new ways to look at the world but society instead lurched in the opposite direction. More than 30 years ago, Jerzy Kosinski lamented how much people rely on "The constant companionship of distracting devices" and he warned that we are becoming a nation of "videots." Kosinski decried what we would now call "reality" TV before the concept had even devolved into its current form and he told interviewer David Sohn, "I look at the children who spend five or six hours watching television every day, and I notice that when in groups they cannot interact with each other. They are terrified of each other; they develop secondary anxiety characteristics. They want to watch, they don't want to be spoken to. They want to watch, they don't want to talk. They want to watch, they don't want to be asked questions or singled out."

"Videots" will not take the time or expend the effort to untangle Cummings' unorthodox poetic structures; they will not read slowly enough and with enough concentration to discern the method underlying what superficially seems like random, chaotic madness. Cummings sought poetic/artistic truth and such a quest is out of step with a society that values "reality" TV over poetry, artistry or truth.

After describing Cummings' compositional methods, Mason's article discusses three major biographies of Cummings. Mason considers Charles Norman's The Magic-Maker "an affectionate profile" but notes that its objectivity is somewhat compromised due to the heavy influence that Cummings exerted on the composition of the book's final draft. Mason praises Richard S. Kennedy's Dreams in the Mirror for not only being exhaustively researched but also for being very well written. Mason finds strong evidence of plagiarism in Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's E.E. Cummings: a biography; Mason demonstrates that Sawyer-Laucanno used Kennedy's research without proper attribution and even directly lifted several passages from Kennedy's book while only making very slight changes to the text. Few crimes are more destructive than theft; no community can tolerate rampant theft, which is why even in the animal kingdom thiefs are treated quite harshly: it is understandable--if a bit extreme to civilized minds--why some societies sanction that a thief's hands should be cut off. The theft of someone's ideas/intellectual property is particularly egregious; such theft deeply violates the victim and reveals the moral emptiness of the victimizer. Mason notes how ironic it is that deception runs rampant throughout a book about a writer who was so devoted to artistic truth and so passionate about creating unique works. Mason soberly ponders what this means:

It tells us that we are drowning in information--unreliable information, shoddy information, wrong information. It tells us that, as a culture, literary or otherwise, we are letting our ignorance lead us. Ignorance is nothing more than an indifference to what is before us; we have only to pay attention--and we are paying attention in a way, but to pretty noise, the newer the better. Pound knew this, and Cummings knew this, and they tried to devise a means by which we might pay better attention to our world. The pictured caves of the Dordogne marked by prehistoric hands; the tattered verses once sung by a girl with a lyre; a tapestry that tells of a thousand-year-old battle upon which a certain comet may be seen, bright as any star: these delicate things are evidence, proofs that others like us looked at the world once. These are the sources of ourselves, our truest fossil record. The Modernists feared we were burying this record and, with that burial, losing what was best in us under waves of what was worst. They set out to help us remember. But, of course, Modernism failed. It never had a chance.

Put even more simply, one could note that there are hundreds of cable/satellite TV channels available but most of them broadcast nothing more than "pretty noise, the newer the better." U.S. Chess Champion/philosophy professor Stuart Rachels expresses a similar sentiment in different words, decrying America's "deeply engrained anti-intellectualism." That anti-intellectualism explains why "Modernism...never had a chance"; our society does not train people to savor the joys of thinking and the merits of sustained concentration: anything that cannot be tweeted in 140 characters or less must not be important--or so we have been told (brainwashed).