Five Lines / Issue 16
Simic's stark empire, LCD Soundsystem's toxic relationship, Tu Fu's winter storm, and one more from Czeslaw. Also: kisses from William Blake.
Hello loved ones, happy January. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. “Children’s fingerprints / On a frozen window,”
Children's fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.
An empire, I read somewhere,
Maintains itself through
The cruelty of its prisons.
Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet, Pulitzer Prize winner (and finalist two other years), poet laureate, all-around famous poet dude... you know, nbd. He happens to be one of five poets on my list for "discography reading" this year (meaning I'm going to try to read everything he's ever written, which will be impossible). He died almost exactly one year ago, on January 9, 2023.
I'm quite eager to read his work in full because so many of his poems, I hear, are short. Maybe it's that narrow January head-space working in me, but I don't think I'm going to start out the year in poetry with some long free verse stuff. I want morsels. But obviously, he didn't win all of these awards because his work is short, but because those morsels are powerfully tasty. He is a master of the minimalist poem, of imagery that expands your head and heart without expanding a line count.
The image here is stark, dude. I'm struck first by the fact that the subject of the poem — the child — is absent. We know she or he was there because we see the evidence. And isn't that what this becomes, almost like investigating a crime scene? Very quickly the starkness compounds: the fingerprints are "on a frozen window" in a "small schoolhouse." In three lines, Charles makes us feel the cold of that window, the emptiness of that schoolhouse, the longing of a child putting fingers to a window to look out at the wide world. It's a pitiful, gut-wrenching image.
But there's more starkness than just this starkest of stark images, because of how Charles then talks about it.
It is a surprise first, because he actually goes there, saying the quiet part out loud in such a breathtaking way. Maybe you thought this poem, when you first started, was going to be cute. It could be that Charles did too. He’s said about his poetry:
“When you start putting words on the page, an associative process takes over. And, all of a sudden, there are surprises. All of a sudden you say to yourself, ‘My God, how did this come into your head? Why is this on the page?’ I just simply go where it takes me.”
I think that’s instructive regarding our own poetic efforts — maybe the rabbit trails your mind is going down are not the wrong ones, but exactly the ones needed for this poem. There’s a measure of letting go of controlling the outcome that has to come into play in order for the poem to really materialize.
Then, it is a surprise because of his turn from just the act of noticing something in passing, capturing an image, to actually ascribing intent with the use of "cruelty," and malicious intent at that. And finally, it's a surprise because he says it so clinically, adding to the chilly nature of the first three lines with the researcher's tone of "I read somewhere," and the choice of the drab, dusty verb "maintains" to communicate his findings. It is devastatingly impersonal, inhuman, factual — which is precisely the point he is making.
As a reader, I am left with a moment of sudden, painful epiphany. The subject of the poem isn't the child after all. It isn't even the narrator/observer. It's the empire. And that's the whole problem.
2. “ring the alarm / Bore me and hold me and cling to my arm”
"I Can Change,"
LCD Soundsystem, from This Is Happening
Tell me a line, make it easy for me
Open your arms
Dance with me until I feel all right
It's good in the dark, good in the dark
But into the lover's light
Here comes another fight
So ring the alarm, ring the alarm
Bore me and hold me and cling to my arm
Here it comes, here it comes
And what you're asking me now, disastrous now
Hoping and hoping and hoping
The feeling goes away (away)
Never change, never change, never change...
This is why I fell in love, oh
Never change, never change, never change...
That's just who I fell in love with (in love)
Oh, this is the time, the very best time
So give me a line and take me home
Take me over
But dashing the hopes, dashing the hopes
And smashing the pride
The morning's got you on the ropes, oh
And love is a murderer, love is a murderer
But if she calls you tonight
Everything is all right, yeah, we know
And love is a curse shoved in a hearse
Love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry
And this is coming from me
But I can change, I can change, I can change...
If it helps you fall in love (fall in love)
But I can change, I can change, I can change...
If it helps you fall in love (in love)
Turn on the light, make it easy for me
Feel the divide, fumble in the kitchen 'til it's right
What an awful sight
But there's love in your eyes
Love in your eyes, love in your eyes
But maybe that's just your love of fights
All night
And I can change, I can change, I can change...
If it helps you fall in love (in love)...
I'm a total sucker for existential lyrics put to danceable beats. I think there's something really true about that odd coupling. It pulls at the beautiful craziness of life at the same time it questions it, effectively affirming a sort of desperate hopefulness.
And that's what James Murphy (the jack of all trades behind LCD Soundsystem) is doing here in these lyrics, describing a failing relationship in terms that make it crystal clear why it's failing. Despite the singer's desire for the object of his affections in the neon lights of an evening, he is unwilling to accept who she is when the light of day dawns, or even who she is becoming/growing into. And he is desperate to change who he is "if it helps you fall in love."
This is not a healthy way of approaching any relationships, obviously, but that's what this song is about: admitting the truth about the "us" of it, revealing that the sort of "love" that idolizes the other without letting them be human, or tries to become someone else to please the other, is actually not real love — it's a murderer, or a "curse / Shoved in a hearse," or one of my favorite exhausted and ironic lines from one of the best electronic dance-punk kings of tired irony: "Love is an open book to a verse / Of your bad poetry / And this is coming from me."
Love is indeed a messy, incredible, confusing, revealing thing. It is so hard. You cannot make it easier without removing everything it requires of you, which guts it of any meaning. There are few things more amazing and worth fighting for on this earth, especially if you learn to love who the other person is and is becoming, not who you want them to be. In the process, in giving them the space to grow (seeing them, as Bonhoeffer says, through the lens of Christ), you might find that you are growing too. The trick is in embracing the change as one who is not controlling it, but knows the One Who does.
3. “alone, I sing / To myself.”
“Snow Storm”
Tu Fu, from A Book of Luminous Things
Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts.
Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow scurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
Translated from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth
From 21st century dance-punk to 7th century Chinese verse, because it's my Substack and I do what I want.
Tu Fu was a contemporary of another famous Tang Dynasty-era poet you may have heard of, Li Po. I found this and a variety of others from him in Czeslaw Milosz's compendium of international poetry, A Book of Luminous Things, which I highly recommend.
Czeslaw's editorial note on this poem is simple: "Those of us who have experienced such evenings will recognize ourselves in that voice." Czeslaw's own poetry from this time period (late in his life) is like a really complex wine, dark red and sweetened with wistfulness and wisdom. It feels to me like the narrator of Ecclesiastes: tired, but poetically so, and with still so much worth saying. And that is I think why he chose to include Tu Fu's poem here, as an ode to winter as a season of the year and as a season of life.
And what a poem. The cold loneliness of the sweeping wind outside is only rivaled by that of the man inside, where the fire has gone out and his bottle of wine has been drunk to the dregs. The rhythm is short, a bit rough, the words matter of fact, the thoughts fragmented. In this particular vintage I get a whiff of Ecclesiastes 12 ("Of making many books there is no end...") It captures a midwinter vibe we all know, when you ask yourself that question, "Is all of this worth it?"
It is, friends. Your letters and words may not live much beyond you, but they have lived within you, and given life to those around you. And ultimately, your worth is not in your words. When this particular mood hits you this winter, remember that spring is not far behind.
4. "He who kisses the joy as it flies…"
“Eternity”
William Blake
"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
This was Percy's recitation poem for last school term. Here he is reciting it:
It struck me when I was listening to him that throughout my life I've spent way more time attempting to bind joys than trying to kiss them. I suppose it's a hazard of the job, trying to freeze the moments in amber enjambments. But I wonder if it's also a "middle-life" thing. Somehow in the middle you're either looking forward or back, but it's damnably difficult to be right where you are. The two seasons of life where you are most present, I think, are on opposite ends: childhood and old age.
Our little Digory is the most present kid I've ever seen, so wholehearted in everything he's doing. He always throwing himself (sometimes literally) into the moment he is inhabiting. My dad is in a wonderful space of his life too, where he's somehow able to find almost everything enjoyable. And you know what's cool? Because they live with us, these two "joy-kissers" get to hang out, Digory and Papa, on tractors and around the yard and over granola bars. Every time I see them now, I'm reminded of "Eternity."
I'm not totally sure what 2024 holds, but I'm hoping to take some cues from these folks and Billy Blake, and start kissing more of the moments as they fly by instead of desperately trying to pin them down.
5. "Breathe freely, you who suffered much."
“This World”
Czeslaw Milosz
It appears that it was all a misunderstanding,
What was only a trial run was taken serious.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror --
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.
There are so many good poems from Czeslaw still rolling around my mind and notebooks, overflowing into the new year with me. He doesn't leave the mind easily, and even when I'm not reading him, his presence looms in the background. Soon enough, other poets will begin to take up residence in my mind, but Czeslaw has left me quiet and a little haunted. He's a ghostly type of guy. By which I mean — you don't read Czeslaw. Czeslaw reads you.
This one is just... I mean. What is there to say? What newness we hope to make in our lives this year will never compare to what this old world will feel like when God shakes us forward and shakes us free into His newness. I need poems like this in the heart of winter (the Holy Saturday of the year), to remind me that being made new is not a concept, but a reality occurring within me, often just beyond my understanding, never of my own accord. Christ is alive, and we are raised with Him. As Mama Julian puts it: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
Well, it's because of you I've started reading Czeslaw. I usually tear up at almost everything he writes. He taps into that deep inconsolable longing we all have. I'm learning to become friends with that longing for now.
I bought his collected poems...is Luminous Things very different?
Also, I'm attending the Festival of Faith & Writing in April. At it, we have the option to join a lunch circle based on a discussion theme. I decided to join the one on reading & writing poetry as a spiritual practice. I'm excited!