Posts Tagged ‘Patrick Kurp’

Winters loved Airedales.

Patrick Kurp‘s blog Anecdotal Evidence is always a treat, but it is particularly excellent today, as it celebrates the birthday of two poets: the late Yvor Winters and very current Les Murray, who identifies himself as “a very high-performing Asperger’s.”

How can we avoid sentimentality? According to Murray, “I think it’s probably in not telling lies. There’s always something false about the sentimental. When it’s feeling without lies, it’s terribly scary, but it’s not sentimental.”

Winters defined a poem as “a statement in words about a human experience,” and later in the same text added, “special pains are taken with the expression of feeling.”

He wrote elsewhere: “The basis of evil is in emotion; Good rests in the power of rational selection in action, as a preliminary to which the emotion in any situation must be as far as possible eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood.”

These are two very different poets, but one thing they had in common was their love of dogs. “Here’s a test for both poets,” says Patrick. “If any subject invites sappy sentimentality, wallows in whimsy, it’s dogs. Their extreme poetic admirers want to be admired for their love of canines. To address the subject in poetry without falsity or self-admiration means swimming against the warm fuzzy tide.”

See how both poets fare in Patrick’s essay, with two poems on the death of their dogs. Well worth the read. It’s here.

Meanwhile, happy birthday, Les Murray and Yvor Winters, wherever you are in time and space.

My friend Mike Ross immediately thought of me when he read today’s post from “The Rice History Corner” blog at his alma mater, Rice University in Houston. (I’m flattered.) It features a Czesław Miłosz having lunch at the university’s faculty club with Prof. Ewa Thompson. The Nobel poet recorded a program for KUHT-TV with Thompson and other Houston writers and scholars, and also gave a talk at the University of Houston.

Zagajewski provided another Houston link

The column is written by the university’s “centennial historian,” who doesn’t give her name. She has good taste, though: Patrick Kurp‘s blog Anecdotal Evidence is at the top of her blogroll. Moreover, she delights in such poets as Zbigniew Herbert and Adam Zagajewski, as well as Miłosz.

The connection between Miłosz and Houston rang a bell in other ways. Adam Zagajewski arrived on the campus of the University of Houston in 1988, and later launched a program connecting the students in Texas with Miłosz in Kraków. So the link between Miłosz and Houston is stronger than might be supposed.

Meanwhile, in my perambulations around the web, I found Christopher Hitchens‘s “The Captive Mind Now,” words written on Miłosz’s death in 2004, in which he revisits the landmark Captive Mind and “ketman,” and somehow brings Azar Nafisi‘s Reading Lolita in Tehran into the mix, with its dedication from the Polish poet’s “Annalena”:

A brilliant article in today’s Quarterly Conversation offers a fresh take on Lev Loseff‘s much-discussed Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. Marbled with impressive insights, it represents the finest standards of literary journalism, and should establish a new highpoint for the rapidly disappearing genre … let me dissemble no further, dear reader, I myself wrote the review.

A hackneyed opening gambit, I know … So let’s cut to the chase with a little shameless plugging via an excerpt:

“For Brodsky, poetry was a ticket out of this world. And in Russia, the poet is godlike. To know both is to understand the context for this erudite and often wise book—a work more likely to find readers among current fans, rather than find new ones. Yet Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life is simultaneously enlightening, perplexing, and exasperating. The knowledgeable reader is left feeling rewarded and cheated at once, as if invited to a sumptuous banquet and offered only canapés. The protean figure remains beyond the range of these pages. The door remains at once half open and half closed to us.

You’ll read no secrets in Loseff’s volume. But neither will you get Brodsky’s bewildering, mesmerizing blend of hubris and humility, charm, and abrasiveness. Brodsky was a Catherine Wheel of metaphysical brilliance, scathing insults, and intellectual splendor.

Russia’s longing for pure poet-heroes held an incandescent grip on the Russian psyche, and the nation bleaches its bards to an unearned whiteness. Writers have always claimed special moral exemptions for themselves—wishing to be something grander than simply a guy who wields a ballpoint or stares at an empty computer screen. Brodsky upped the ante.

He told Loseff that the lesser cannot comment on the greater, the mice cannot review the cat. Was he exempting himself from criticism? Certainly. But Brodsky was also the first to bend his knee to those he saw above him on the ladder—from Ovid to Auden. The sense of hierarchy may rub against the egalitarian Brodsky who once wrote, ‘Evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another,’ but the contradiction can be chalked up to his complex humanity as easily as his self-blindness.”

Read the rest here.

Quarterly Conversation is run by Scott Esposito. It’s another valiant online effort to sustain serious literary criticism – and that’s no hyperbole.

It’s gotten some rave reviews, from The Nation, among others. From Columbia University Press: “It would not be a stretch to say that The Quarterly Conversation has come to be one of the better places—online or in print—to turn to for literary and cultural criticism.” According to Canongate Books’s “Meet at the Gate”: “If a website was able to drool, Meet At The Gate would be drooling over The Quarterly Conversation. It’s what online literary magazines are meant to be.”

The always insightful Patrick Kurp, by the way, reviews Denise Gigante‘s The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George in the same issue – it’s here (and the Book Haven Q&A with Denise is here). An excerpt from Patrick’s review:

… despite Gigante’s standing as an academic in a major university English department, she is a writer, not a slinger of theory or political poseur. Out of primary documents she reanimates a major poet and his world, and crafts a transatlantic adventure story with a novelist’s gift for moving narrative along. In brief, Gigante convincingly demonstrates that George Keats, the poet’s junior by sixteen months, served as John’s “muse.” In an 1818 letter to Ann Wylie, John says: “My brother George has ever been more than a brother to me, he has been my greatest friend.”

Helen's hero ... as seen by Bernardo Daddi

Helen Pinkerton‘s interview in Think Journal, “The Love of Being,” starts out slowly – but by the time she gets to Thomas Aquinas, she’s on a tear.

The octogenarian poet came from hardscrabble upbringing in Montana. Her father died in a mining accident when she was 11, leaving her mother with four children to raise – well, if you want that story, you can read it in my own article about her here.

Then, she landed at Stanford, where she was one of Yvor Winters‘ inner circle, along with folks like Janet Lewis, Thom Gunn, Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity, and J.V. Cunningham. Although she intended to be a journalism major, her plans changed abruptly: “Winters’ level of teaching, the kinds of topics he expected us to write about, the seriousness of his consideration of literary and philosophical questions of all sorts simply brought out in me a whole new capacity for thinking and writing.” After that, and a course on narrative with Cunningham, she launched an alternative career as a poet and a Herman Melville scholar, too.

After that experience, Pinkerton found that her subsequent graduate work at Harvard “was a breeze and made little mark on me as a poet or a scholar.”

Fra Angelico's Aquinas

Winters described Pinkerton’s poetry as “profoundly philosophical and religious,” and she discusses how Ben Jonson scholar William Dinsmore Briggs led her in that direction, though she never met him – his teaching on medieval and Renaissance learning “permeated” the work of Winters and Cunningham, she said. Helen became preoccupied with the Thomistic notion of esse, and sees “nothingness” as the primary temptation of humankind. Hence, her poem, “Good Friday” (included in her book Taken in Faith), which claims:

Nothingness is our need:
Insatiable the guilt
For which in thought and deed
We break what we have built.

But more than temptation – it is delusion. “The chief aspect of the drive is the metaphysical assertion that nothingness is the real reality – that there is no real being.”

She links this drive with the thinking of the 19th and 20th century, particularly romanticism, which she sees as a drive toward annihilation. “Real love is the love of being. Eros is the love of non-being”:

Helen, me, and the late Turner Cassity

I found my way out of it by grasping the Thomistic idea of God as self-existent being. There is no nothingness in reality. It is a kind of figment of the imagination. To believe that there is is a verbal trick – a snare and a delusion. Much of modern philosophy (Hegel, the Existentialists, et al.) are caught up in this delusive state of consciousness.

I do scorn and critique (always) “romantic religion” – or the religion of eros … as I call it – and I did see in others, as well as in myself – a pervasive “unavowed guilt” in our culture – based on an unavowed longing for “nothingness.” This is a kind of obsession of mine in my early thinking (and consequently in my poems) after I came to a realization of the nature of my consciousness. What was driving me to be dissatisfied with everything and everyone, including myself, was this “eros,” this craving for extremes of feeling, for a kind of perfection in things and in others.

Patrick Kurp has written some lovely stuff about Helen at Anecdotal Evidence – here, and here, and here … oh, just type “Pinkerton” into his search engine. There’s lots. I’m proud to have introduced them.

Meanwhile, an Yvor Winters reading was always mesmerizing. You can get a taste of it in this recording from San Francisco’s Poetry Center on Valentine’s Day, 1958:

Yvor Winters Reading – 1958

they warm themselves...

Kraków sustains a steady descant through the pages of Adam Zagajewski‘s new collection, Unseen Hand – most often, it’s Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter where I stayed in May:

In the Church of Corpus Christi I lit candles for my dead,
who live far off – I don’t know where
– and I sense they warm themselves in the red flame too
like the homeless by a fire when the first snow falls.

That’s Corpus Christi, outside my window in Wolnica Square. And one poem for St. Catherine’s Church, and at least three references to Jozef Street, catty-corner to Wolnica Square. “Joseph Street in Winter,” is dedicated to Joachim Russek, the head of the Judaica Foundation, a tutelary spirit for my first trip several years ago:

In winter Joseph Street is dark,
a few pilgrims flounder through wet snow
and don’t know where they’re going, to which star,

And two references to pigeons – charitable, because I know Adam finds them contemptible. It was the subject of our first discussion when we met in Rynek Główny, which was swarmed with pigeons.

He didn't like the pigeons.

I actually “met” Adam during an online interview six or seven years ago for an article that was published Poetry Foundation article). But much of the short interview never made it to the final piece. For example, I asked him what gave rise, to a generation of giants:

“Good question. I have many contradictory explanations. One of the main ones is that the attention given to the meaning of human life in radical circumstances (as opposed to the hermetic direction, or to a purely formal quest) in Polish poetry after the WWII catastrophe was a very important move: it gave the dying Modernism a new energy. It ‘rehumanized’ a highly sophisticated but a bit empty palace of modern poetry.”

On irony:

“Well, the disease of irony seems to be well identified. I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance. How to cure it? I wish I knew.”

"We'll be living in small ghettos..."

He has earned my own fealty, not only for his poetry, but for his many kindnesses. So I was pleased when I read on Ann Kjellberg‘s website for her journal Little Star, a lengthy excerpt from his introduction to Edward Snow’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke. (It was also excerpted by Poetry Daily here.) Adam is much in demand for introductions, blurbs, reviews, and essays. This introduction is one of his best (I excerpt from Ann’s excerpts – and by the way, thank you, David Sanders, for pointing out the piece in Poetry News in Review):

“We have a new sorrow today: after the terrible catastrophes of the twentieth century, after the disasters that entered both our memory and imagination, we tread gingerly at the point where poetry meets society; “Don’t walk beyond this line,” as the sign on every jetliner’s wing warns us. And yet the central issue for us is probably the question of whether the mystery at the heart of poetry (and of art in general) can be kept safe against the assaults of an omnipresent talkative and soulless journalism and an equally omnipresent popular science—or pseudo-science. It also has a lot to do with the weighing of the advantages and vices of mass culture, with the influence of mass media, and with a difficult search for genuine expression inside the commercial framework that has replaced older, less vulgar traditions and institutions in our societies. In this respect, it’s true, poets have less to fear than their friends the painters, especially the successful ones, who, because of the absurd prices their works can now command, will never see their canvases in the houses of their fellow artists, in the apartments of people like themselves, only in vaults belonging to oil or television moguls who don’t even have time to look at them. Still, the stakes of the debate and its seriousness are not very different and not less important than a hundred years ago.

We know that the main domain of poetry is contemplation, through the riches of language, of human and nonhuman realities, in their separateness and in their numerous encounters, tragic or joyful. Rilke’s powerful Angel standing at the gates of the Elegies, timeless as he is, is there to guard something that the modern era—which gave us so much in other fields—took away from us or only concealed: ecstatic moments, for instance, moments of wonder, hours of mystical ignorance, days of leisure, sweet slowness of reading and meditating. Ecstatic moments—aren’t they one of the main reasons why poetry readers cannot live without Rilke’s work? I mean here readers of contemporary poetry who otherwise are mostly kept on a rather meager diet of irony. The Angel is timeless, and yet his timelessness is directed against the deficiencies of a certain epoch. So is Rilke: timeless and deeply immersed in his own historic time. Not innocent, though: only silence is innocent, and he still speaks to us.”

From my interview (I had cited this in an earlier post last fall, when Adam’s name came up again for a Nobel), when I asked him about the future of poetry and poetry-lovers in the world of tweets and sound bites he said this:

“We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish — and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.”

By the by, Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence has a review of Unseen Hand here.

From Andrzej Wajda's 1990 movie

Among my first errands in Warsaw was delivering several DVDs of Mary Skinner’s In the Name of Their Mothers to Warsaw filmmaker Leszek Cicirko, who worked with Mary in Poland, and Hana Rechowicz. She is the daughter of Sendler’s co-worker, Jadwiga Piotrowska – I wrote about her here.

On the train from Kraków to Warsaw, I finally got back to Anna Mieszkowska‘s Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust. It’s a problematic book, crying out for a good editor and better organization, but it’s all we’ve got in English or Polish on the woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto from certain death. It’s filled with long excerpts from Sendler’s own writings, which redeems its many flaws.

I reached the point in the book where Sendler describes the Polish Jewish pediatrician and children’s author, Janusz Korczak, who had established a Jewish orphanage along the lines of his educational theories. Sendler had of course worked worked with the doctor in the Ghetto, after the orphanage was moved inside its walls in 1940. Korczak refused many offers to be smuggled out of the Ghetto – he would not abandon the children in his care. And so he died with them. On August 5, 1942, Korczak joined nearly 200 children and orphanage staff members were rounded up for deportation to Treblinka, where they were all put to death.

In Sendler’s words:

“He walked at the head of this tragic procession. He held the younger child in his arm and with his other hand he was leading another infant. That’s how various people have recorded it in their memoirs, whereas others record it differently, but this doesn’t mean anyone has made a mistake. One has only to remember that the route from the orphanage to the Umschlagplatz was long. It lasted four hours. I saw them when they were turning from Żelezna Street into Leszno Street.”

Curiously enough, Korczak was the subject of a recent email from Helen Pinkerton, who had seen my posts on Mary Skinner’s PBS film, which reminded her of Edgar Bowers‘ poem, “In Defense of Poetry,” in his Collected Poems. The poem ends:

An old light shining new within a world
Confusing and confused, although their teachers
Deny the worth of writing – my latest colleagues,
Who hope to find a letter in the mail,
Are happy if their children study Shakespeare
At Harvard, Penn or Yale, write articles
To prove all writing writers’ self-deception,
Drive Camrys, drink good wines, play Shostakovich
Or TV news before they go to bed,
And when their sleeping or their waking dream
Is fearful, think it merely cinema,
Trite spectacle that later will amuse.
But when my mind remembers, unamused
It pictures Korczak going with his children
Through Warsaw to the too substantial train.”

Curiously, too, this poem was also the subject of a recent post by Patrick Kurp in Anecdotal Evidence, who compared its quiet power to Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, where “Every frame is too emphatic, too loud, too cartoonish, too insistently certain of its own bravery in the face of evil.”

Andrzej Wajda also made a movie, Korczak – so Korczak’s story has entered the world of art.

But I’m always a little uncomfortable when suffering of this magnitude gets turned into a poem or painting or even movie – it’s too easy to appropriate the suffering of others to give massiveness to one’s ideas, and to subtly enhance oneself. Regardless of the artistry of the result, the process is morally questionable. I know Czesław Miłosz felt much the same way about his own “Campo dei Fiori.” As I noted in an article a few years ago, “The Doubter and the Saint“:

“Later, in Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, the poet called it an ‘immoral’ and dishonest poem, ‘because it was written from the point of view of an observer about people who were dying.’ It was too easy, he seemed to be saying: the poet observes an atrocity, writes a poem in protest, and is pleased at having written a beautiful poem; conscience slackens.”

The real Korczak

Moreover, it’s a strange process by which we begin to prefer the glossiness of the artistic version – in fact, I just proved it. While looking for a photo, I quickly latched onto Wajda’s movie image of Korczak, which was much preferable to the real doctor at right, who wasn’t an actor and didn’t have a cameraman.

Sendler, who was on site for the unspeakable event, recalls that Korczak had, a few weeks before, directed the children to perform Rabindranath Tagore’s play, Post Office, which describes how a child striving to escape his sickroom confines, ultimately dies, with death seen as, in Tagore’s words, “spiritual freedom” from “the world of hoarded wealth and certified creeds.”

But I think Sendler’s artless words are simplest and best when describing the atrocity:

“I was at the orphanage to see that play. And then, when on August 6, 1942, I saw that tragic parade in the street, those innocent children walking obediently in the procession of death and listening to the doctor’s optimistic words, I do not know why for me and for all the other eyewitnesses our hearts did not break.”

“But our hearts remained intact, and what also remained were thoughts that to this day cannot be understood by any normal person.”

My place on the corner by the green awning

A graceful and thoughtful post (as always) from Patrick Kurp over at Anecdotal Evidence on An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz – it’s called “You Have to Have Some Basis in Being.” Also, a long review from last week’s Przeglad Polski, which I will post as soon as the translation is finished; I edited it in an odd little cafe called “Freedom,” filled with shelves and shelves of tatty old paperbacks and pungent with the remnants of cigarette smoke – how retro! I’m told that smoking is verboten in the cafe, but years of heavy-duty smoking has left its indelible traces.

The flames: lost in translation

At Freedom, I had my first-ever flaming coffee drink, called “The Fiery Philosopher.” That’s me. The fiery philosopher. I couldn’t resist, really. This photo doesn’t quite capture the effects of the roaring flames in the coffee cup, but I tell you, it did put some cheer into my afternoon. Especially since not all the alcohol was burned off.

Meanwhile, brief pause in my posts from Kraków, as I adjust to my new digs in Wolnica Square after nine days at the Miłosz conference’s hotel, which was able to provide the luxuries Westerners have come to believe they are entitled to.

Brick Gothic

In Wolnica Square, I am literally living under the shadow of Corpus Christi Church, which is right next door, and on the marketplace that, in 14th century Kazimierz, rivaled Kraków’s main square for size and bustle. The original Kazimierz City hall across the square was built in the 14th century, burned down, and was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th century. The church, founded in 1342 by King Kazimierz the Great, is Gothic, with the usual baroque era additions. Hard to get used to medieval cathedrals of brick rather than stone.

Nowadays, the square is filled with shops and delis and boutiques and fresh fruit and vegetables.

Why the area is renowned today is that it is the old Jewish quarter, and synagogues, temples, and Jewish landmarks abound.

Meanwhile, among the joys of Kraków are the street vendors selling little bunches of lilies of the valley – virtually unseen in California, where the climate and soil aren’t hospitable to the delicate and fragrant beauties. I have missed them – they were the favorite flowers of my childhood – and I have enjoyed seeing the vendors’ barrels filled with them. Lilacs, too.

Postscript: Dave Lull just sent me a link for a Guardian blog piece about the Miłosz centenary – it’s here, though the writer James Hopkin gives no evidence he actually attended the event he is writing about.

Media Jobs Daily shameless swiped from TV Newser, and now we swipe from both for the burning question of the day: Can a journalist’s desk be neat?

Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business Network says no: in the clip below, spotlighting his in chaotic workspace, he claims that “any reporter that has a neat desk isn’t a reporter.”

Mike Janssen offers this thought:

What do you think? My desk is tidy, and I am a reporter, dammit. But as we move to using less paper and more pixels, maybe it’s not the desk that matters, but the Desktop. And I won’t vouch for the state of that.

I find this conversation personally reassuring. I take the view that someone once explained to me, “If a messy desk signals a messy mind — what does an empty desk show?”

Postscript: Dave Lull writes with this link, “Neatness doesn’t count after all - tidy vs. untidy desks” to reassure me.

But as if to tweak my guilt again, Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence writes: ‘I’m a fastidious desk-keeper, by the way. A newspaper editor once purposely seated me beside another reporter whose desk was a landfill, just to bug me.”

A distant second, I'd say...

Patrick Kurp‘s post over at Anecdotal Evidence is so filled with his characteristic charm that we couldn’t resist posting about his post — his 2,021st, he admits. It’s Anecdotal Evidence‘s fifth anniversary today.

As an anniversary present, Anecdotal Evidence was named one of top 50 blogs for humanities scholars by Online Education Database.

But Patrick is not blogging for fame or glory, and is modest about his occupation:

Among the folk arts, blogging ranks somewhere between scrimshaw and tatting. Practitioners are harmless folk, furtive and deficient in social graces but trainable with patience, understanding and a firm hand. Some are gainfully employed and support families. Others remain editors and minor humorists.

Patrick appears to be a teacher — at least, he refers to teaching in some of his posts. I actually have never met him face-to-face. He’s one of a cyberspace network of literary bloggers. He names a few other fellow travelers in today’s post, including humble moi.

One of the most rewarding ventures of my brief blogging life has been making a cyber-introduction between Patrick and Helen Pinkerton, a poet he has long admired, as proven by a number of his posts about her poems. It was also an opportunity to introduce Ms. Pinkerton not only to a long fan, but to the joys of the blogosphere. A fruitful friendship on both sides — and one which both have thanked me for.

Patrick is one of the few bloggers with the discipline to post daily … actually, with 2,021 posts, it’s more than daily. As he writes:

Some have been trifling. To most I lent all the seriousness a minor humorist can muster. If a day were to pass without a thought worthy of nurture, I would be a sorry writer. Arranging words in pleasing shapes, like a folk artist snipping tin for a weather vane, is what we do. As one of this blog’s tutelary spirits puts it:

“There is no use in indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another.”

"It is strange to think of surviving..."

A few days ago, I wrote a belated birthday card for Joseph Brodsky, who would have been 70 last year. Today, Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence commemorates a different anniversary: Joseph died fifteen years ago today.

Patrick opens with Joseph’s line from “Lullaby of Cape Cod”: “It is strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.” Odd way to open a post commemorating a death … Patrick’s reaction to his 1996 death was, “How unfair,” but the death was by all accounts somewhat self-inflicted.

In the introduction to Joseph Brodsky: Conversations, I wrote:

Friends and colleagues remember his chain-smoking, even as he took capsules of nitroglycerine. … ‘I saw him five days before he died, and he was the color of ashes,’ said Ardis publisher Ellendea Proffer, whose efforts with her husband, the late Professor Carl Proffer, brought Brodsky to the United States. ‘But I’d seen him that way before and he had lived.’ For Brodsky, smoking and writing were tragically linked. Proffer told me he insisted, after his many heart surgeries, ‘If I can’t smoke, I can’t write.’ His choice was staggeringly characteristic, arguably heroic, ultimately fatal.

Patrick adds, “By all accounts, Brodsky was a charming, deeply civilized man. …” Well, count me out on that one. When he meant to, he could be extraordinarily charming. On other occasions, he could be aggressively abrasive. John Woodford at the University of Michigan told me, “Sure he could be arrogant and swaggering. … When someone asked about the sensual impact of various languages on his ear and mind, and included Spanish in the question: ‘Spanish?!’ he said. “I don’t believe I consider it a language.’

Richard Wilbur, ever the gentleman, put it wisely: he said that the Nobel poet could be “harshly downright at times,” but added that “a little scorn can be a precious thing in a slack age.”

Patrick, in his tribute, cites Anthony Hecht:

“In Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), Hecht dedicated “Exile” to Brodsky. The poem blurs the Russian with his biblical namesake, and generously welcomes him to his adopted land. Here are the final lines:

You will recognize the rank smell of a stable
And the soft patience in a donkey’s eyes,
Telling you you are welcome and at home.”

I went back and looked up Hecht’s poem – surely Hecht couldn’t have confused the patriarch Joseph with the New Testament one – but in this remarkable poem, the two Josephs segue into each other, and end with the Russian one.

But the line that caught my eye was the one just before Patrick’s excerpt, after Hecht warns: “These are the faces that everywhere surround you;/They have all the emptiness of gravel pits”:

Out of Egypt...

“This is Egypt, Joseph, the old school of the soul.”

Hecht’s book was published in 1977, and the poem was probably published at least a year or two earlier than that.

I remember about that time, in an elevator in the University of Michigan’s ugly Modern Language Building, Joseph saying apropos of nothing: “We are dying, Egypt, dying.”

From Act IV of Antony and Cleopatra. But perhaps he was echoing an American Anthony, who had just written a poem for him about other Josephs, in other Egypts, and about his new terra deserta.

Melancholy thoughts on an evening when Alexandria and Cairo are swept in flames.