Five Lines / Issue 17
Lowland Hum's half measures, Gregg's adulthood, Auden's citizen, and poem based on Chopin Ballade No. 4. Also: what do we do with incomprehensible poetry?
Hello friends. 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. "he held the proper opinions for the time of year"
"The Unknown Citizen"
W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
What struck me about this poem when I read it recently in Sound and Sense was the many ways in which we evaluate ourselves and each other, and how so few of them really reveal anything of importance. Wystan (that's what the W stands for) runs through a series of seemingly important organizations that have gathered the necessary information on this citizen, all of whom have deemed him perfectly acceptable by their standards. The funny thing is that all of these standards tell us nothing about what kind of man this citizen was. He remains, at the end, Unknown. By modern definitions, he's a saint. But Wystan makes it painfully clear that, after all of these statistics, we know little more than we knew of him at the start.
I'm thinking about this in relation to our upcoming election year. The conversations are coming, I can feel it. And I think if recent years have taught us anything, it's that we need to define our lives by something other than our beliefs on public policy. It's one of many things that communicate very little about who we are to those who know only those things. The antidote for not knowing someone, of course, is curiosity. It's amazing what a few intentional questions, coupled with an actual relationship, can reveal about a person. And what questions and relationship will reveal is what we all have: agency.
Beyond the data gathered on all of us, we are all (with gratitude to good ol' Wendell) doing things that won't compute. You and I are not checks on a box, votes at the booth, opinions on a feed, or fodder for AI. We are humans. We can't forget that this year.
But beyond curiosity and agency, there's one other thing I think we're going to need.
In The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster), the boy Milo and his companions must restore the princesses Rhyme and Reason to the world. In the process, they must brave the Mountains of Ignorance, which are crawling with demons like the Terrible Trivium and the Gelatinous Giant. Just as they are about to get to Rhyme and Reason, with the demon horde advancing, they encounter a little old man called the Senses Taker who begins slowly gathering their information in triplicate.
The Senses Taker helps people "find what they're not looking for, hear what they're not listening for, run after what they're not chasing, and smell what isn't even there." In the process, he cackles, he will "steal your sense of purpose, take your sense of duty, destroy your sense of proportion."
So how do Milo and his friends escape?
"As long as you have the sound of laughter," he groaned unhappily, "I cannot take your sense of humor — and, with it, you've nothing to fear from me.”
I think Wystan might agree.
2. "I wonder what will take the place of desire."
“Adult”
Linda Gregg
I’ve come back to the country where I was happy
changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now.
I wonder what will take the place of desire.
I could be the ghost of my own life returning
to the places I lived best. Walking here and there,
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply.
Now I’m in my house listening to the owls calling
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again.
This is another gem from A Book of Luminous Things.
When we moved back in 2018 to my childhood home — "the country where I was happy" — there was a moment that I found myself in the basement apartment we were going to occupy, realizing what was actually happening. I was moving into my parent's basement. Never mind that it was temporary while I was working out employment, never mind that it was financially responsible, never mind that we'd lived a decade in our own places.
All I could think of was that this was where I spent many an afternoon surrounded by piles of LEGO, listening to Hank the Cowdog books on tape. This was where I scraped my arms up on the ping pong table while learning how to use roller skates. It was a surreal experience, almost out-of-body, and almost exactly like what Linda describes here. When we later determined that we would buy the place, committing to live here indefinitely, I had a similar sense of time contracting around me.
I wonder if all of our past selves are contained in us still, somehow, because they surface so easily at the slightest sound or smell, or tone of afternoon light. We are not only surrounded by ghosts, we are filled with them.
This is what I love about this poem — that it captures so clearly and simply an experience we have all shared to some extent. When we come back from our remembrances, we almost have to learn how to be human again in the present moment. We can't live in the past, but the past is never far from us. The exercise of remembrance can be a trap, it's true, or it can be a window into how much we have changed and how faithful our God has been through it all. Through all of the changes, He remains.
3. "My thoughts are like dust / That won’t land anywhere"
“Half Here” by Lowland Hum
From Self, With Love
I’m half here, darling
Half here
I don’t know where the rest of me is
I am half dressed
In my half best
And I give you a faraway kiss
I’m like a shadow
That slides ‘cross the back wall
I’ve been a ghost in my dreams
Unable, it seems, to touch anything
I just slip right through
In my half home
Where I half read
And just half of the meaning remains
Where the rest goes only God knows
With the laundry all half put away
I’m like the lost song
When it’s been so long
You can’t be sure if the tune
Familiar to you
Bears any resemblance to the one that’s true
I’m gliding on air with my hollow-eyed stare
My thoughts are like dust
That won’t land anywhere
I am half here, darling
Half here
I wish I had much more to give
Who knows how long
I’ll be half gone
I want to do more than half live
So yeah, I'm definitely leaning into this ghost deal now. I've been wanting to feature a song by Charlottesville duo Lowland Hum (Daniel and Lauren Goans), so here it is. Their album From Self, With Love carries a wintry vibe, but in a cozy way, like a conversation with an old friend over a hot cup of tea. It's another in a long line of what I like to call "albums in recovery," from artists trying to make sense of what the heck happened over the last four years.
Daniel and Lauren are a pair of exceptionally generous artists, and their lyrics and music are a breath of fresh air to me every time I listen. This song is paired together in the album with "Half Gone," and both songs carry this sense of missing something that is essential to us, of wanting it back, of not knowing what to do to get it back.
It's notable that at least some portion (half?) of this felt absence is related to our modern methods of communication, as Daniel sings in the latter tune: "Mind blurred by the image stream," and "Dam the thought flood / Get off adrenaline." Lauren sings of not being able to touch anything, of only being able to half-read, of scattered thoughts. The metaphors are particularly poignant: shadows, ghosts, lost songs, dust. Each of these bolsters the feeling of an insubstantial quality of a life lived only in our minds and not in our bodies, where we are.
But this is also the quality of life that settles over us these days, during the doldrums of winter. I'm writing this after nine whole days of not seeing the sun, of cold and sludgy weather, when a bit of cabin fever is nipping at all of us Wheelers crammed into our home. It's not a small house, but it sure feels small right now. I feel like I'm vacillating between disembodied and disgruntled these days, and some nights I feel this line from "Half Gone" deeply: "When I read a word of comfort / Eyes too tired to receive it."
In the middle of the fog, I need to know that I'm not alone and that it might take some time to come out of it. Daniel and Lauren offer that space, I think, and also point to a fuller life available somewhere ahead, in this "half prayer for a whole delivery."
4. “learn about the pine tree from the pine tree”
“Against Incomprehensible Poetry”
Czeslaw Milosz, To Begin Where I Am
Before I fully move on from my enjoyment of Czeslaw, I wanted to share a few thoughts from him on poetry. I finished out my readings of him with his essay collection, To Begin Where I Am, which includes his essay, "Against Incomprehensible Poetry."
What struck me about his topic of choice is that he calls his readers not to explicit meaning in poetry, but rather to a practice of presence which calls forth meaning out of the physical world around us.
"Western poetry has recently gone so far down the path of subjectivity that it has stopped acknowledging the laws of the object. It even appears to be proposing that all that exists is perception, and there is no objective world. In which case, one may say anything, for there is no control at all. But the Zen poet advises us to learn about the pine tree from the pine tree, about the bamboo from the bamboo, and this is an entirely different point of view....
... It is significant that in the poetry of the last few decades, especially in French poetry, the descriptive capacity has been disappearing. To call a table a table is far too simple. But after all, to compare poetry with painting again, Cézanne kept on repositioning his easel and painting the same pine tree, attempting to devour it with his eyes and mind, penetrating its lines and colors, whose multiplicity struck him as inexhaustible.”
In other essays, Czeslaw encourages those of us poets who deal specifically with nature to press into a sense of the "otherness" or alienation of the object of our poetry, as something that we ultimately have little claim over. In opposition to the authoritarian viewpoint that would take hold of the world and strip it for parts and profit, Czeslaw puts forward that the natural reality we face should place us squarely within our own limitations.
In other words: we are not in a position to make the rules. We cannot bend our worlds to our whims. We are here by someone else's pleasure and for someone else's purposes. Out of this pure grace, our poetry expands and reveals in ways far beyond our tiny frames of reference. We partake in the object of our poetry when we listen to it, instead of continually offer our perspective.
So what does this sort of poetry ask of us, then?
"Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous. I do not hide the fact that I seek in poems a revelation of reality, of what is known in Greek as epifaneia. This word used to mean, in the first instance, manifestation, the appearance of the Divinity among mortals, and also our recognition of the divine in an ordinary, familiar form, as for examples, in the form of a man. Epiphany thus interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons. A poem-epiphany tells about one moment-event, and this imposes a certain form."
Czeslaw has gifted me, among many other things,1 the idea of the poet as a secretary, with a responsibility to record what happens around him or her. Here, a step further in, I see another gift: that by way of that record we create, God somehow steps in. This is miracle, and this is grace. What an opportunity we have, those of us who work with our eyes and our words to mine meaning, to offer miracles to those around us!
"Sometimes the world loses its face. It becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different."
5. "Now I learn / it all over again, the song"
ballade
Chris Wheeler
So comes a time when nothing matters
more to me than silence and the eternal ache,
when voices still and murmurs cease
and the house settles with a sigh into its groove
and I, at its very center, am engulfed
in the guts of living, tactile things:
worn carpet and wide walls
and the piano bench creaking
beneath me like a limb, the tune
coaxed out from under these keys,
a shy animal, the one I remember playing
with when I was still me but younger.
Those are the only tunes I play now,
gauzy ghosts of old selves, one line
upon the last. I am haunted
and somehow still here on this bench,
singing ancient songs anew. I knew little
of love when I first learned to play, and yet so much
more than I do now. Now I learn
it all over again, the song stumbling
along in fits and starts, rivaled by
the creak of this old bench, perhaps a better
judge of what persistent love can do,
of what thanksgiving sounds like.
Here is the one poem I have managed to write in January.
Many of you know that I studied music in college. For my senior recital, along with works by Prokofiev and Liebermann, I worked on Chopin's fourth Ballade, a mammoth of a piece. I just knew, even then, that I was too young to be playing it. I had this sense I would be returning to this one in my 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond, and still be getting more out of it, still be striving to understand it.
I picked it up a few nights ago, and after stumbling through the final pages, was met with that same sense Linda was talking about in her poem -- of nostalgia, of time, of change, of who we have been and who we will be and who we are now all at once. What does remain when the passions of our past lives begin to fade, and we can't get my fingers around those arpeggios and flourishes?
I think the answer is: much. We are still here, the core of who we are, shaped by mercy love and thanksgiving (if we let ourselves be shaped). Our ghosts, as strange and disembodied as they may be, are often only there to whisper grace in our ears. See, child? Thus far He has brought you, and He will be with you now and evermore.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
I would be remiss if I didn't share this stray thought of Czeslaw’s that made me chortle, notable perhaps because chortling is not usually something one does while reading him: "A poet's maturation should be evaluated not only on the basis of what he has accomplished, but also on the amount of stupidity he has denied access to himself.”