A Vision of Heaven and Hell

[John Cole]

Below, X. J. Kennedy's little sonnet (I hope Andy Fox likes this one better than the New Yorker poems).


Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought


Nothing in Heaven functions as it ought:
Peter's bifocals, blindly sat on, crack;
His gates lurch wide with the cackle of a cock,
Not turn with a hush of gold as Milton had thought;
Gangs of the slaughtered innocents keep huffing
The nimbus off the Venerable Bede
Like that of an old dandelion gone to seed;
And the beatific choir keep breaking up, coughing.

But Hell, sleek Hell, hath no freewheeling part:
None takes his own sweet time, none quickens pace.
Ask anyone, "How come you here, poor heart?"—
And he will slot a quarter through his face.
You'll hear an instant click, a tear will start
Imprinted with an abstract of his case.

[Zeno]

You silly romantic John.

I enjoyed the poem. Thanks for posting it.

Is that Joan of Arc in your avatar? <------Note question mark.

On another obtuse issue that I feel compelled to broach: I visited Andy, and Rick also, in LA sometime back. You came up in our discussions. I will only say that I hope all is well and that it is a pleasure to have you back and posting. You were missed.

-Zeno

[andyfox]

I like it.

I think what keeps me from loving poetry is the boastfulness of it: look how clever I am in my use of words, how arty, and how deep my meaning. While I haven't seen a great many of the movies you listed in your other post, some of the ones on there I have seen also seem to regale in this pretentiousness. I'm all for Art and Artists but let's face it, lots of Art is a cover for bullsh*t.

Then again . . .

At the Gene Autry Museum here in L.A. (where else would a Gene Autry Musuem be?) there is an exhibit on Sergio Leone's movies. I went today and enjoyed it. Now if anyone was ever over the top Arty with a capital A, it was Leone. Yet I loved his movies (especially TGTB&TU and Once Upon a Time in The West/America). Maybe because they poked fun at America's classic westerns and their pretentiousness and their pretending to be real history (as opposed to reel history?).

Anyway, to make my case against the New Yorker poems, here's one from the curernt (Aug 8/15) edition entitled "Naked", which I offer without further comment:

Take off your shoes, he said,
and hurl them into the sea.
Take off that satin shirt
and hand it to me,
and it had better fit, he said,
or you're f*cking dead.
Take off those gray cords
and hope your're my size.
Take off the underpants
and pull them over your eyes,
and, blind, take off each sock
while waggling your cock,
ignoring the laughs I gift you
in this ghastly hour--
for you, that is, he said,
before laughing some more
and slapping me on the rump
commanding me to jump.
Higher! Higher! he shouted
and I heard a gun click
as sweat bubbled out of me
and I began to get sick.
Stop that or I f*cking shoot!
You disgusting brute!
He kicked me in the balls
till I doubled up.
Stand up straight! he roared.
You contemptuous pup!
And he hit me on the head
with the gun till I bled.
More mess! he bellowed.
You're worse than a pig.
Then he handed me a spade
and ordered me to dig.

[MMMMMM]

Andy, I have long disliked the poems selected by The New Yorker (so much so, in fact, that I haven't looked at them in recent years;-)).

I wonder now if--Howard Moss, is that his name?--is still the editor.

To love poetry, you have to discover really good poetry. Otherwise it is often like bad rap or pop music.

Really good art of any kind is rare and therefore the more lovable when truly found.

[MMMMMM]

That poem definitely gets better as it goes along.

[John Cole]

Note that heaven sounds very much like earth, and that Kennedy uses near rhyme in the octet, for that little bit of imperfection and perfect rhyme in the sestet when he describes hell as mechanical and rigid.

[John Cole]

Yes, Zeno, it's Joan of Arc. And some days are worse than others, but I've been fortunate to have the great support of family, friends, and colleagues. Thank you for asking.

[John Cole]

Andy,

Once Upon a Time in the West is terrific, and the DVD's commetary does a fine job of tracing many of the allusions and homages in the film. I think, though, that Leone obviously loved some of the great Westerns.

Now about that poem. Who knows? Over the past few years I've had the opportunity to meet quite a few poets who publish frequently in the New Yorker, among them, Rosanna Warren (Robert Penn Warren's daughter), Seamus Heaney, Henri Cole, Galway Kinnell, Richard Wilbur, and Edward Hirsch. None of these were pretentious at all, but they are among the finest poets working today. A good, readable work on poetry is Ed Hirsch's How to Read a Poem; you might enjoy it in one of your reading lifetimes.

[MMMMMM]

Yes, quite interesting. It was the much less than perfect meter which caught my eye, rather than the imperfect rhyme; towards the end, though, both "fall" into place quite neatly.

A sort of an upside-downing of Richard Bach's quote of Chiang in JLS ("Heaven is being perfect").

[andyfox]

I read a work entitled, or similar to, How To Read a Poem. It failed to take. My tastes in poetry run to e e cummings and Ogden Nash. Sorry.