A new year and some old poems for a new installment of Poetry Class! Some of you will notice that two of these poems are written by authors with whom, to put it mildly, we here at Stevereads have issues. We consider John Updike to be one of the century's most grossly overrated authors, and Vonnegut? An absurd little anomaly, a quirky little cartoon masquerading as a man of letters.
And yet, we liked each of these poems - within limits, of course. Heller's insight in the Vonnegut poem isn't all that insightful, afer all, and the whole last verse of the Updike should be dumped. But even so, we like the poems ...
... ah, but we get ahead of ourselves! It's not for us to tout the values of the poems we post! Oh no! We post them innocently and await the pitying savagery of our betters!
(p.s. 'Rapture' is our favorite)
Unfaded
The dead are villains we pretend to love
Their waxy faces a serene reproach.
We learn their secrets with distaste:
the things they did make them at least
as bad as we are - even worse because
they're dead, and we're alive and might improve.
The dead are villains we pretend to love.
They died deliberately to spite us,
to leach our lifeblood for their awful dryness.
We clothe their faults in all the virtues
they never had, to keep them in their place,
where they should stay, away from us.
The dead are villains we pretend to love
though every now and then we hear their voices
speaking exactly as they spoke to us,
and see their smiles again as they once smiled,
and their hair unfaded as it was in life.
Jamie McKendrick
Rapture
It is just as they knew it would be:
the proof
of their rightness spread around them
like grass or sidewalks
among the bland custardy palaces
and picnic tables
of their reward. The air
smells of children and coconuts. Truth
blares from every station on the dial.
Do they miss dogs, the black
squelch of November, bittersweet
wringing its red hands?
Are they saddened
to meet an old love without pain
in the gilded silent grove
that lately, come to think of it,
has been looking rather dusty,
and where less and less often they feel someone watching?
The angels are kind, like waiters, but not very talkative.
No wonder they gather, like exiles
straining toward faint reports
crackling up from below -
war, disaster, stars plunging into the sea.
God, it appears, is elsewhere, even here.
Katha Pollitt
Stolen
What is it like, to be a stolen painting -
to be Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee"
or "The Concert," by Vermeer, both burglarized,
along with "Chez Tortoni" by Manet,
and some Degases, from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, in Boston, twelve years ago?
Think of how bored they get, stacked
in the warehouse somewhere, say in Mattapan,
gazing at the back of the butcher paper
they are wrapped in, instead of at
the rapt glad faces of those who love art.
Only criminals know where they are.
The gloom of criminality enshrouds them.
Why have we been stolen? they ask themselves.
Who has benefitted? Or do they hang
admired in some sheikh's sandy palace,
or the vault of a mad Manila tycoon?
In their captivity, they may dream of rescue
but cannot cry for help. Their paint
is inert and crackled, their linen friable.
They have one stratagem, the same old one:
to be themselves, on and on.
The boat tilts frozen on the storm's wild wave.
The concert has halted between two notes.
An interregnum, sufficiently extended,
becomes an absence. When wise
and kindly men die, who will restore
disappeared excellence to its throne?
John Updike
Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!
Kurt Vonnegut
