A young lady of deep reflection am I.
I make extracts of homilies, pound my scales,
while Lizzy and Jane, hard at work, catch the eye
of gallant lads with lots of land. To such males
of fortune, we trade my sisters’ pretty bodies.
My goods weren’t good enough for my own cousin,
though I’d have picked him over those London dandies.
To me, living with just one idiot doesn’t
sound so bad. He would never think to explore
what I keep inside books bound as Fordyce’s Sermons
To Young Ladies, or, by Miss Hannah More,
Strictures on the Modern System of Young Women’s
Education. Open those tomes from which I cite
my platitudes, and you’ll find extracts, all right–
of Malthus, Blake, the Philosophy of Right.
I know just for what those wild Frenchmen fight.
Category Archives: verse and worse
entropy
We are off to Scandinavia until August 26, and I do not intend to post from there. Meanwhile, I leave you with a kind of “e-book”–about half of my long, narrative, formal poem entitled Entropy, now lightly illustrated and formatted to be read easily online. Click here to have a look.
I wrote Entropy in 1999-2001 but have been revising it lately. (I’m not quite finished with the revisions, and that’s why the end is not yet online.) I submitted it to many publishers’ contests in 2001-2003. It was selected as a finalist three times, but the odds against actually winning–and being published–seemed very low. Meanwhile, I found it difficult to find journals that would even consider running excerpts from a long, plot-driven poem. Hence I am happy to give it away here.
Entropy could be better, and if it were, it would be published by now. In that sense, I have no complaints or regrets. However, I was slightly frustrated that no one mentioned either the plot or the philosophy of the poem in all the correspondence that I received. Every comment, whether positive or critical, concerned the imagery. This response bolstered my prejudice that contemporary poetry is often too narrowly concerned with lyric–with first-person descriptions of images that have emotional significance for the writer. If Entropy has virtues, they are the rather elaborate, original, and (I hope) suspenseful plot; the dozen major characters; and the philosophical structure. This is not lyric.
Entropy posits a fairly serious metaphysics, such as might be argued by a philosopher who sought the truth about our world. It embodies that theory in an invented mythology, with a god to personify each major principle of the system. I don’t like allegory, which is conceptual, static, and sterile. Therefore, Entropy puts the myth into motion by introducing contingencies, ambiguities, conflicts, human beings with hopes and despairs: in short, the elements of plot. The metaphysics itself explains why it might be worthwhile to make a plot out of an invented metaphysics.
I have decided to explain some of this structure, without saying so much as to foreclose alternative interpretations, in an “afterword” that is also available via the main page.
“The Storm”
Here is a great, if difficult, war poem. It’s from the first page of La Bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), a book that Eugenio Montale began in fascist and Nazi-occupied Italy during the Second World War and published in 1956. My amateurish English translation follows. Click for some commentary and the magnificent Italian text.
The Tempest
Princes have no eyes to see these great marvels
Their hands now serve only to persecute us
–Agrippa D’Aubigne, Ã Dieu
The storm that drums on the hard
leaves of the magnolia its long March
thunder and hail,
(the sounds of crystal in your nocturnal
nest surprise you, of the gold
squandered on the mahogany, on the gilt edge
of the bound books, a sugar grain
still burns in the shell
of your eyelids)
the flash that candies
trees and walls and surprises them in this
eternity of an instant–marble manna
and destruction–that you carry
carved in you by decree and that binds you
more than love to me, strange sister,–
and then the rough crash, the sistri, the shudder
of the tambourines above the ditch of thieves,
the tramp of the fandango, and above
some gesture that gropes. —
just like when
you turned around and with your hand, cleared
your brow of its cloud of hair,
waved at me–and went into the darkness
Abu Ghraib
We like to bomb from 30,000 feet,
fly back to Whiteman, MO after the run,
then drive to the mall for something to eat,
Or wire funds to the guys who buy the guns
that jab into the backs of old women
who stagger away from burning homes.
We don’t do firing squads, rape rooms, mass graves,
midnight arrests; we think we don’t know how.
A GI is a big buzz-cut guy who saves
The cowering victims of a foreign war,
or despotism, or incompetence.
We can even oust regimes from afar.
Dick and Lynne, in the VP’s residence,
once more shoulder the burden to maintain
security, order, and common sense.
They’re grandparents with degrees, guardians
of churches, agencies, and industries:
they know just how to handle ruffians.
Saddam built his own Lubyanka, grim and dank.
Isaiah asked: “How hath the oppressor ceased?”
The new commandant of Abu Ghraib’s a Yank.
And Babylon shall be as Sodom and
Gomorrah; by her shall we sit and weep.
a free novel on this site
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In 1995, I published a mystery with St. Martin’s Press, entitled Something to Hide. I then wrote another novel, a thriller called Tongues of Fire. I accumulated some flattering letters from publishers, but no contract offers for this second book of fiction. Yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me that I should give it away on my website. That’s the 21st-century way, after all. Click here to read the beginning and then download the whole thing if it appeals to you.
By way of background: Tongues of Fire is a thriller set just before the Second World War. The Nazis believe that they will gain enormous power if they can put together the shards of a universal language that are preserved in the various occult traditions of the world. Our skeptical hero, an American linguistic professor, begins to investigate their plot only because he has been forced into service by a Soviet agent (who is the main female character).
This isn’t Literature, but I think it’s fun. It’s also slightly “educational,” since the plot revolves around some issues in the philosophy of language. If one person enjoys the online version, that will be one more person than if I had left it on my hard-drive.