Cannon, loose

   ..

                     But it's the having

   not the keeping that is the treasure.

   Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon

   and said he was giving up poetry

   because it told lies, that language distorts.

   I agreed, but asked what we have

   that gets it right even that much.

   We look up at the stars and they are

   not there. We see the memory

   of when they were, once upon a time.

   And that too is more than enough.

Jack Gilbert

Refusing Heaven

  The Lost Hotels

  of Paris
  [fragment]

Knopf, 2005©

Gérard barred from Roland Garros

No dogmatic adherent of the 

Fall of Man school of sartor-

ial policing, himself - 

remembered by us all, in fact, 

for teasing the fine line be-

tween treachery and liberty in 

composing some habillements - 

Gérard nevertheless recoils from 

tennis’ fatal overreaction to the 

immaculate whites of Bill Tilden, 

the blithe panache of René Lacoste, 

the marmoreal valour of the Finzi-

Contini’s, for that matter, in their 

banishment's redoubt. You’d almost 

think, we’ve heard him muse, they 

do it for the money.

As if some gruesome Larry Ellison, 

flaunting the fattest, lurid Rolex 

he can find, practitioners of tennis 

now were bent, he truly feared, on 

forcing clashing catamarans to front 

a sponsor corporation, on what used 

to be a genial game. The iconoclastic 

lust to deny to others what they like 

was flashed before his eyes by Vittorio 

de Sica, in the arrogant brush of the 

fascist leather trenchcoat through the 

Dottore’s library, arresting the whole 

household as much for sensibility as 
hereditary faith. 

Now tennis, now sailing: why do they 
mock their favourite crimes, and per-
petrate such blight, denying us gen-
tility in camouflage of spite? 

Vittorio de Sica, director

Giorgio Bassani, book

Giancarlo Bartolini Salimbeni,

  art direction

Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini

1971

Last week, on the 29th, 100 years ago in Paris

We might have remarked as we

passed a bold centennial with

some concession to its mean-

ing, but we find that a con-

sensus still eludes us. I re-

fer to the first performance

of Le sacre du printemps, at

the new Théâtre des Champs-

Élysées, Nijinsky hollering

in the wings to give direc-

tion to the dancers, the or-

chestra inaudible above the

commotion in the hall.

No two witnesses agreed with

each other, on what they saw

or heard, or even with what

they'd said the night before.

They put one in mind of how

Wallace Stevens parsed The

Things of August, greatly 

now affronting the minds of 

denizens of Virginia, endur-

ing a cacaphony of cicadas:

something so generative that

breaks upon the stage as if 

by shock, itself, but ancient: 

These locusts by day, these crickets by night

Are the instruments on which to play

Of an old and disused ambit of the soul

Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery -

A disused ambit of the spirit's way,

.. that was a ghost, and is ..

A century later, almost to the day,

that instant in the history of the

dance is what has not expired, as

much as it is said, the world has

changed. The great commotion lives

and its instruments are with us, a

comprehension needing to be played.

      The greatest events and thoughts -

      but the greatest thoughts are the

      greatest events - are comprehended

      last: the generations that are con-

      temporaneous with them do not exper-

      ience such events - they live right

      past them. The light of the remotest

      stars comes last to men ..

Modris Eksteins

Rites of Spring

  The Great War and

  the Modern Age

Houghton Mifflin, 1989©

Wallace Stevens

Collected Poetry and Prose

  Things of August

Frank Kermode and 

  Joan Richardson, editors

The Library of America, 1997©

Friedrich Nietzsche

Basic Writings of Nietzsche

  Beyond Good and Evil:

  What is Noble

Walter Kaufmann, translator

op. cit.

   

Saturday commute lxxxii: tossing time

What is more difficult,

to make too much or too

little of the tried and

true temptation to give

tossings to a lake? On

Saturday we hold an an-

cient code, against do-

ing either, playing wil-

ling parts in precious

gravity. We are never

by a lake without infer-

ring the gift, the in-

tention of that body to

dispel any resistance,

to giving it our friend.

    Sure, it's teleology, a

    kind of Whig theory of

    the landscape; or maybe

    Jung or Hobbes has of-

    fered us an answer. But

    we don't lack an answer.

    We answer to the lake.

 

Suppose it were Friday lxx: becoming the field

Mr Nathaniel Perry teaches
at a distinguished small
college in Virginia and he
is an artist in the medium
of the book. I note, a num-
ber of our colleagues in 
Context are expressing al-
arm for its longevity, and
yet I doubt if anyone will
associate the treasures of
Mr Perry's craft with any
other medium. He received
the American Poetry Review
Honickman First Book Prize,
whose printer is the estim-
able Copper Canyon Press, 
publisher of a translation
from Sophocles, I've al-
ready discussed.

Yes, throughout Nine Acres,
there's the distinct press
of a cultivating instrument
in the sequencing of words;
communicable, communicated
belief, and hope for the fur-
rows' tenacity and fecundity
in time. One could not not
want to hold this structure
of feeling, one could not
airily lay aside in the bi-
nary heaven of the web, such
presence in the hand. We see
better what we touch. 

Here one can disseminate, but
not expect to plant, a prom-
ising expression of the heart.
So let us not waste fortunate
experience in demure neglect
of each other; we do not, for
ourselves. This is gorgeous
stuff. We take it, we save it,
we savour it without prejudice, 
as Mr Jefferson observed, in 
usufruct for the living. 

    This rain will fall all day. The boy
    and I are watching it fill the fields,
    which is good for fields. To fill, to feel
    filled will last and be a shield

    against the vacant weeks, the drier
    days. And what are the things that fill
    us up? Little graces, good food,
    the arrows we trade, our small good will?

    We don't know what saves us. Better to be
    a field, the boy and I decide,
    at least he seems to agree. He's filling
    a bucket with everything he finds,

    and he's so pleased when it is full,
    his smile a clutch of raspberries
    in the forest sun - no more worries,
    no more to do, nothing's scary.

Nathaniel Perry
Nine Acres
  Bush and Cane Fruits
Copper Canyon Press
The American Poetry Review, 2011©

Gaining trust

I agree .. that homosexuality is usually a miserable way of life and that it is the duty of society, if it can, to save any youth from being led into it. I think that that duty has to be discharged although it may mean much suffering by incurable perverts who seem unable to resist the corruption of boys. But if there is no danger of corruption, I do not think that there is any good the law can do that outweighs the misery that exposure and imprisonment causes to addicts who cannot find satisfaction in any other way of life.

Lord Patrick Devlin's groundbreaking masterpiece in The Enforcement of Morals (1965) lies heavily annotated in pencil on my shelf, in the timeless companionship of its peers, from Hart, Mitchell, Berlin and others. At least from the time of Harold Laski's brilliant correspondences with Justice Holmes, the British academic meritocracy has invigorated American jurisprudence beyond the sight of most of our citizens, indeed most of their leadership, only to be discovered by schoolboys seeking models of rational inquiry. How often that misery to which Devlin so movingly avers did lead to preserving him in print at $2.50, for acquisition a decade later on the distant farm of Stanford, is less interesting to us today than his empathy for the crisis of exposure, weathered calmly now.

Devlin's is one of the most bracingly companionable intellects a library can domicile - one cannot say, contain - and his history of Wilson's diplomacy is a glory of the craft, which I've long expected to consider here. I would rather endure the glare of his mistakes than the shelter of all the condescension propagated so uncritically today in the United States, and echoed from its highest bench this Winter, because of the constancy of his poise between morals and their rôle in the law. One learns to trust the fairness of a man who's not an idiot or a sloth, who still would not have dinner at one's table.

Now we hear it said, the law can't lead the way, the oppressed have enough friends without troubling our Justices; and, Pilate-like, the jurisdiction over morals is a problem for the satraps in their states. Oh, give me reason, deeply tainted, before gaudy cowardice. The law is the act, opinion is its shadow.

I should not care, any more than

my critics would, to have my per-

sonal morality equated with that

which gains the highest measure 

of popular approval. But the ques-

tion is not how a person is to as-

certain the morality which he ad-

opts and follows, but how the law

is to ascertain the morality which

it enforces.

God save the Queen's Bench, and pro-

tect her Lords of Appeal.

Patrick Devlin

Late Fellow of the British Academy

The Enforcement of Morals

  Based on his Maccabaean Lectures, 1958,

  and debates on the Wolfenden Report, 1957

Oxford University Press, 1965©

An open pander to the southern hemisphere

Having only yesterday celebrated

the seersucker season, I mean to

inflict no more than routine dis-

orientation upon the friends of

this page, in snapping up a wor-

sted for our friends across the

Equator. I did avoid saying, be-

neath, but only because I was on

my mark at the moment. I'm sure,

I've lapsed into that hierarchic-

al frame of reference for which

we would like to deny credit to

discredited imperialisms, espec-

ially inasmuch as we accept Sr

Magellan's hypothesis, that in

a round-ish sort of globe, we

know no up, no down. We care-

fully do not express astonish-

ment, that Australians don't

fall off.

But I have to share with you,

the dismaying failure of this

publication to engage, in any

constant way, the subordinate

hemisphere. You can't possibly

know, my delight to find Peru,

lighting up on my blogger map;

I've already remarked, on south

east Asia. Only the other day,

India reported a sighting, and

I supposed Terestchenko was on

some romantic shoot behind our

backs, or an engineer from Ham-

burg had been called to consult

with Jaguar's new proprietors.

Now, silent, India reverts to

form, and Peru is sealed away.

So I present this stalwart im-

pression of counter-seasonal

attire, in sympathy for the

cooling sector of our orb, in

hope that no one minds if we

have warmth. One can't be too

careful.

Kevin Flamme

Tree, casting

  ..
  The way they quiver
  At the slightest breath of wind,
  The way they thrill,
  And shudder almost individually,
  One of them beginning to shake
  While the others are still quiet,
  Unaccountably, unreasonably -
                          

What am I saying?
One leaf in a million more fearful,
More happy,
Than all the others?

On this oak tree casting
Such deep shade,
And my lids closing sleepily
With that one leaf twittering
Now darkly, now luminously.                            

                                            

Charles Simic

Leaves

  [fragment]

New and Selected Poems

  1962-2012

op. cit.

ii Photo Valéry Lorenzo