Weekly Poem – Page 3

“Yorick’s Reply” by Tom Disch

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A prop of Yorick’s skull currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Shakespeare exhibit. © 2014 Ryan Scott.

The rub. Milord? Then, if you please, a bit
To the back. Yes, there, just where the mud
Has scabbed to it. But still I want to know:
The rub? Who ever forfeited his sleep
For fear of dreams? Dreams vary here on Earth,
And so they may hereafter. Why be perplexed?
Life is a dream, as I have heard, and if
Our death’s another, may we well not hope
For dreams that correspond to what we wish?
I did—and I have dreamt of you, with all
Your sweet advantages. A mother mild
And coddling. True, she is a whore, but so’s
Ophelia, that’s nothing new. She loves
And, what is more, she needs you. If I were you,
I would simply poison Claudius.
Then all is square, and you can your coitus
Take with a bare whatever. I jest, Milord,
And do exceed my limit—or yours, at least.
You grimace. Think: if life’s a dream, our wishes
Matter. Conform yourself to what may be
And leave the rest to molder here with me.

A statue of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. — A statue of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Though best known today as a science fiction writer, Thomas Disch’s work spans a plethora of genres and mediums. In addition to being a pioneer in the field of “New Wave” science fiction, which sought to elevate the genre from its pulp roots, Disch also tried his hand at video games, collaborating with Electronic Arts in 1987 to create the text-based adventure game Amnesia, and theatre, as the author of a metafictional retelling of Ben-Hur and the critically acclaimed poem/monologue The Cardinal Detoxes. Born in 1940 in Iowa and raised in Minnesota, Disch moved to New York City in the 1950s, a city to which he would always return despite his constant travel and even short periods of time living in England, Spain, Rome, and Mexico. Disch published his first short story in 1962 and his first novel, The Genocides, in 1965, kicking off a long and prolific career that lasted until his death in 2008.

In his poetry, Disch sought to appeal to a different audience than that which read his fiction. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that this piece concerns not science fiction but Shakespeare, imagining the skull of the dead jester Yorick replying to Hamlet’s lamentations. Interestingly, Disch’s Yorick seems to be responding more to Hamlet’s famous “To be or not the be” monologue rather than what the Prince of Denmark actually says to the skull in the graveyard. The tone of the poem is mocking toward the young Hamlet, opening with a pun off his comment, “perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub” (Act Three, Scene One) and later urging the infamously indecisive hero to quit philosophizing and just kill his uncle already. Befitting a disembodied skull, Yorick is especially contemptuous of Hamlet’s dread of death, describing both life and what lies beyond as being dreams to be shaped by the mind. The former jester has not entirely forgotten his love for the child he once entertained, however, and ends the poem on a note of sympathy, exhorting Hamlet to let his fears lie dead with the past.

“Yorick’s Reply” was originally published in the fourth issue of Shenandoah’s thirty-eighth volume, printed in 1988. The poem is currently available in the latest collection of Disch’s poetry, About the Size of It.

“The Tulip-Flame” by Chloe Honum

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My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane
that winds around the hill, and a wide field
of tulips with a centered tulip-flame.

She rolls her brush through gray and adds the rain
in tiny flicks, glinting arrows of cold.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane.

Last year our mother died, as was her plan.
It’s simpler to imagine something could
have intervened. The centered tulip-flame

startles the scene; the surrounding ones are plain
pastels, while this one’s lit with a crimson fold.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane

of cobblestones, a watery terrain
of dripping flowers. Her strokes, elsewhere controlled,
flare out and fray around the tulip-flame

as if it were an accident, a stain,
a blaze in the mid-point of a wet field.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane,
a tulip field, and one astounding flame.

Chloe Honum grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and currently lives in Lenox, Massachusetts. She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. Her poems have appeared in places such as Poetry Magazine and The Paris Review, and she has been awarded a Ruth Lily Fellowship. Her first collection of poems, The Tulip-Flame, was published in 2013 and was selected as winner of the 2013 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. The collection is based on her personal life, and she uses rich imagery to portray subjects ranging from her mother’s suicide to the world of ballet. The poem was first published in Shenandoah, Volume 58, Number 3.

“The Tulip-Flame” paints a picture of the power that a glimpse of hope can have during the battle with depression. The poem is centered on the suicide of the narrator’s mother and its impact on the life of her family. Honum structures the poem as a villanelle, which appeals to the reader through its defining feature of repetition. In each stanza, the repetitions alternate, the first being “a hill and a lane” and the second “a centered tulip flame.” In the last stanza, the two phrases are repeated together. The repetitions create a soothing function that fits with the poems sorrow and ability to recover balance.

Honum uses the painting to symbolize the narrator’s emotional state following the tragedy. Through the painting, Honum brings depression to life as different images illustrate the stages of depression. The hill symbolizes an obstacle to her path. Her use of greyness represents death and despair, as the “glinting arrows of cold” shock the narrator with the realization of her mother’s suicide (5). The rain and water represent suffering and tears. These images provide the backdrop for a field of tulips. The tulips are colorless and plain, as depression has stripped the narrator of life and passion.

Yet, centered amongst these colorless figures is a tulip that resembles a flame. Amidst the gloomy setting lies one single object of color, astonishing, bright, and uncontained, but random, “as if were an accident, a stain” (16). The reader imagines that the narrator, fraught with depression, has found a flame of hope within herself, which cannot be explained. One can infer that perhaps to overcome the gloominess and difficulty within her life, the narrator must focus on the single point of hope. The mother resorted to suicide because of her failure to focus on hope, as the narrator suggests “the centered tulip flame” could have, but did not, intervene. However, the single tulip remains ablaze within the narrator’s heart in the midst of her mourning. As the central object of the poem, the tulip-flame represents the power of hope to bring passion back to life during hardships. After reading the poem, one is left with the sense that perhaps soon the entire field of flowers will burst into flames, unable to resist the radiance and immensity of the centered tulip-flame.

“Cyrano” by David Jauss

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A portrait of the historical Cyrano de Bergerac.

How we admire Cyrano’s suffering,
his noble silence, the purity
of a love kept secret, as he whispers

into the ear of his dying rival
It’s you she loves. Unwitnessed,
his lie wins him no praise, much less love

and thus we define goodness as a form
of privacy. But what if he believed
God was watching, as all-knowing and voyeuristic

as a moviegoer? An audience
taints every good act, a judge
corrupts it utterly. So faith

is the greatest obstacle
to virtue? I’m falling
through this though when I hear her,

a woman two rows down, weeping so loudly I suspect
a grief too personal to be expressed
except in public. Her shoulders

shudder with each sob, she whips
her head back and forth,
as if saying the word no over and over

to someone not there. Or is she
talking to her life? Sympathy
is one disguise curiosity wears:

if I comfort her, I wonder, would she tell me
the sorrow that sits down with her
each day for dinner, the pain

that makes her bed each morning?
I believe she would, and I’m tempted
to be the audience that would give her grief

its twist of pleasure. But I turn back
to the movie and try not to listen
as her sobs gradually subside. In an hour

we sit through twenty-seven minutes of darkness —
the black spaces between frames —
and though we can’t see it, we feel it

behind the images light casts
on the blank screen: the blue sky,
the green lawn, and Roxanne’s face,

beautifully ignorant, as Cyrano, now old
and dying, visits one last time,
his secret the only thing

holding him, and us, up.

A statue of the de Bergerac character with his comically-enlarged nose.

David Jauss is the author of four collections of short stories, two collections of poetry, and two books of essays, in addition to countless other stand-alone poems and stories published through a variety of literary journals. A native of Minnesota, Jauss studied at Southern Minnesota College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa. He taught Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock from 1980 to 2014, and has taught the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts since 1998. From 1981 to 1991 he was the editor for the literary journal Crazyhorse, and he is a member of the editorial board for Hunger Mountain: the Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal of Arts and Letters.

“Cyrano” was originally published in the first issue of Shenandoah’s forty-fifth volume, printed in spring 1995. The poem is also available in Jauss’s collection Improvising Rivers.

The poem revolves around an audience watching a film version of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac as a vehicle to explore themes of isolation, virtue, and, above all, witness. The narrator ponders on the seeming altruism of Cyrano’s actions and tries to apply his moral reflections to his own life. But this exploration of Cyrano’s morality is only a means for Jauss to reach the poem’s primary fascination: the notion of witness. In the narrator’s wonderings, even God is reconfigured as a voyeur whose omniscience potentially precludes any moral action. The narrator is snapped out of his borderline-blasphemy by the sobs of another audience member. Having been forced to witness this public display of extremely private emotions (“grief too personal to be expressed/ except in public” [17-18]), the narrator frames his reaction not in terms of empathy or concern but instead exhibits merely abstract curiosity, even dismissing sympathy as a “one disguise curiosity wears” (24). After briefly considering acting the audience to the woman’s sorrows, the narrator turns his attention back to the film, but finds that witnessing is not a voluntary act as he “[tries] not to listen/ as her sobs gradually subside” (31-32). After her sobs die down, the narrator returns his attention and the poem’s focus to the movie, where he notes the unseen emptiness that underlies and surrounds the flashing images of light projected onto the screen. The narrator closes the poem as it began, by focusing on Cyrano’s secret anguish that is consumed as entertainment to an audience about which de Bergerac can never know.

“Zombie Thanksgiving” by Lesley Wheeler

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I. That Corpse You Planted Last Year in Your Garden

November surprised us, Congress undone again,
whiff of dread in a drift of mothballed coats.
When we were children, we didn’t know we’d always
be children, that the sun would stoop every
year, suddenly reddening a crowd of houses.
Inside ours, mannequins sneered at unwary
looters and putrid hordes closed in.
Yet when we sat up late instead of packing,
cat on your thighs, iridescent pixels
mirrored in our glasses of beer, I could not
pull the plug. Neither asleep nor awake
but cosy with horror.
Oed’ und leer das TV.

Pittsburgh, unreal. I read for much of the drive
through the resentful Alleghenies.
Monsters crawl through the pentameter
of George Romero’s Waste Land.

Enmities buried last year in drifts
of wrapping paper, will they shrug off their ribbons?
The Monroeville Mall locks its doors with a snick
on the stroke of nine. Keep the undead hence,
whose gas-guzzlers veer from lane to lane.
Hypocrite reader trapped in the refrain.

Lesley Wheeler was born in New York, raised in New Jersey, and residing in Virginia since 1994. Wheeler has published several books including The Receptionist and Other Tales (Aqueduct, 2012), Heterotopia (Barrow Street, 2010), Heathen (C&R, 2009), Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920’s to the Present (Cornel, 2008), The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove (Tennessee, 2002). Wheeler also published the chapbook Scholarship Girl (Finishing Line, 2007) and coedited Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv (Red Hen, 2008). Her poetry collection, Radioland, will be published in 2015. Wheeler is currently the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.

Lesley Wheeler’s poem, “Zombie Thanksgiving”, delves into the concepts of lifelessness after life – the zombie experience, the apocalyptic nature of zombies, and the hopelessness of it all. Wheeler’s poem was published in Issue 29 of Fringe magazine. Her poem is comprised of five sections; each section is numbered and titled and delves into the zombie experience. Wheeler’s references to “The Waste Land” in this poem reveals that Eliot’s poem is, at its heart, a zombie poem. Wheeler’s poem, dense with allusions to Eliot’s, mirrors the form and the content of “The Waste Land”. Her poem as a whole includes dozens of references to Eliot’s, including the titles of her sections and her overall themes and structures. “Zombie Thanksgiving” portrays a family traveling during the Thanksgiving holiday, discussing the origins and implications of zombies.

This analysis will focus primarily on the Section I of Wheeler’s poem, “That Corpse You Planted Last Year in the Garden”, but the poem in its entirety can be found on the website for Fringe (http://sundresspublications.com/fringe/lit/longer-poetry/zombie-thanksgiving/). This section begins with a reference to the month of November, a parallel to Eliot’s mention of April in Section I of “The Waste Land”. Wheeler’s line walks the edges of wakefulness, “Neither asleep nor awake / but cosy with horror”. It reveals the limbo between life and death that a zombie occupies. The zombie has not traveled on to a world outside of our own, but also cannot quite occupy the same space on earth as the living. The following line, “Oed’ und leer das TV” refers to Eliot’s line “Oed’ und leer as Meer”, or “desolate and empty the sea”. Wheeler’s line plays on this, saying: “desolate and empty the TV”. This line portrays hopelessness and darkness of the world – where is emptiness found? Do the zombies occupy empty space or is it felt in the world of the living? Wheeler’s poem winds through the Allegheny Mountains and discusses the infectious notion of a zombie apocalypse during Thanksgiving. Wheeler’s allusions leave the reader questioning, is Eliot’s “The Waste Land” a zombie poem?

“The Suicide’s Soliloquy” by Abraham Lincoln

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Lincoln's tomb — Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, where “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” was published.

The following lines were said to have been found near the bones of a man supposed to have committed suicide, in a deep forest, on the Flat Branch of the Sangamon, sometime ago.

Here where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl
Or buzzards pick my bones.

No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens’ cry.

Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
Though I in hell should rue it!

Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never knew;
By friends consigned to misery
By hope deserted too?

To ease me of this power to think,
That through my bosom raves,
I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink,
And wallow in its waves.

Though devils yell, and burning chains
May waken long regret;
Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,
Will help me to forget.

Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night,
To take that fiery berth!
Think not with tales of hell to fright
Me, who am damn’d on earth!

Sweet steel! come forth from out your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!

Lincoln daguerreotype — An 1846 daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln.

Before he was elected the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was a failed lawyer who would occasionally wrote poetry for his friends. Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, his friend Joshua Speed mentioned to Lincoln’s biographer William Herndon that the President had once written a poem about suicide as he struggled through a period of deep depression. For over a century and a half, Lincoln scholars searched for the piece so long and so fruitlessly that many came to doubt that it even existed. In 2004, however, the Abraham Lincoln Association’s Spring Newsletter announced that freelance author Richard Lawrence Miller may have found the piece published in the April 25, 1838 edition of the Springfield newspaper The Sangamo Journal. The poem is anonymously authored (the Journal introduces the piece as having been found “near the bones of a man supposed to have committed suicide, in a deep forest”) but some Lincoln scholars have declared that the poem shares elements of meter, syntax, diction, and tone with other published Lincoln poems. Miller found the theme of the interplay between rationality and madness to be “especially Lincolnian in spirit.” Interestingly, the use of the word dagger might be another clue to the author’s identity: the term was not much in use in the 1830s but would be familiar to those who, like the future President, were intimate with the works of William Shakespeare. Abraham Lincoln was especially fascinated by the play Macbeth, which famously includes a scene in which the titular ruler is haunted by a spectral dagger.

Abraham Lincoln suffered from severe depression throughout his life, and in 1835 he suffered from suicidal urges following the death of a friend from typhoid. This poem, assuming it is in fact Lincoln’s work, perhaps reflects his later reminiscences about this period in his life. The author clearly has first-hand understanding of what today would be termed “clinical depression”: the references to the narrator never knowing pleasure and seeking escape from his own thoughts through self-destruction correspond strongly with modern psychologists’ understanding of the symptoms of depression.

The poem is similar to other mortality poems of the period, though even more melodramatic than most (the last stanza, in which the speaker continues to narrate his feelings after he has stabbed himself through the heart, is particularly painful). Aside from the historical curiosity of its authorship, the piece—with its glamourizing of suicide and its overwrought morbidity—does little to distinguish itself from other amateur poetry in the school of Poe. Sadly, this soliloquy does not manifest the same economy and inventiveness of language that makes the mature Lincoln’s speeches canonical masterpieces. The rhyming words are mostly monosyllabic and Lincoln seems unable to keep his own details straight: how can there be “ashes” if there is a “carcase” for the animals to scavenge? To a fault, the poem is self-reflective: not only is the speaker so self-absorbed that he does not even stop to consider the effects of his actions on his friends and loved ones, but the piece also does not meaningfully engage with the readers or force them to examine their own lives in any important way. Though certainly not a monumental achievement on any artistic level, this piece is nonetheless significant for what it reveals about the psyche and the very human frailty of this oft-mythologized president.