A poet / teacher on mediocre poetry:

"As for the presence of so much failed or mediocre or formulaic work piling up around the ostensible "real thing"--that also seems to me a normal and healthy process. In a great pyramid, most of the stones are inside--not polished, not perfect. Some, very few, are the visible, sharp-edged outside stones by which we feel we know the pyramid to be a pyramid. In poetry, some of us are laying the inside stones. Some of us those shiny outer edges. The aim is to build the glorious thing. And if you look back at any period in the history of poetry in this language there are really so very few poets whose work endures--rarely more than two or three in a generation--and yet all that "poorer" work was always being written, all around them, perhaps in some crucial way actually permitting them to do their work. How often one finds the stated "major influence" on some magnificent poet to be some "minor" poet whose work simply doesn't make any real sense as an influence on the "great" one. Who knows what we all give each other--it's such a mysterious process. And yet, somehow, letting everyone add their share, century after century, it gets done."

I've spent most of the evening talking online, and I also watched "Ladykillers", the British version, which is far superior to the new one with Tom Hanks. Mr. Hanks is, of course, an excellent actor and his character is larger and more memorable than the original's -- but what is lost in translation is a subtlety that I think is unique to British film; Americans are no good with dry wit -- everything of ours is so dramatic, so sugary-sweet and inevitably cheap. While the British version is filmed in black and white, it's the American version that delights in the grossest caricatures, the most obvious contrasts, and these extend even into the picture: it's easier to see what's happening onscreen in the new version, but the "black and white" of the original has a nuanced nonchalance, it has shades of grey.

I made the mistake of reading the Kid's blog. He's still with his new boyfriend, was arrested for driving without a license while smoking pot, quit his job. Seems like he's still too hard on himself, still has panic attacks, and lacks all sense of direction. But for all that he's surviving -- Thornton was right, he didn't need me. What especially hurts when I read his entries are his kind references to his new boy:

Im in love again, Im going to be moving out and Moving In with a boy for the first time ever. Life is good. Mike is amazing, Hes unlike anyone Ive known thus far, Treats me very well. Is A romantic guy like me too, so its great.

I have to say, if only for the much needed feeling of intellectual superiority, sic. And that's how it makes me feel. "Mike is amazing. He's unlike anyone I've known thus far; treats me very well. Is a romantic guy like me too, so it's great" -- it stings me; it's a stab at my heart. It's my fault for reading it, I know...but when he was with me, I was the beloved, I was special, and it was I who was "unlike anyone [he'd] known thus far". It really hurts me to think that he could just move on to someone else, some random guy that he met on a whim from the Internet, and already he's thinking of moving in with him and his given himself up to him completely.

I don't know if I envy him -- I think what I wish that the Kid knew was how much I really did cared about him and identified with him. I mean, I did love the time we spent together and I do miss him, but I had to decide that he wasn't for me. And I feel like I'm the one who's suffering for that decision, which isn't fair -- I broke up with him because I thought that it would be good for me. But here I am.

Just because we decide upon the best course in life, or any course at all, doesn't mean that it will be without pain. What is left of the Kid is a multifaceted memory: hugging him on a park bench while he cried; walking through the mall holding his hand and expostulating my wild theories as he scanned for potential gay-bashers; suffering panic attacks in the middle of the night while he lay in bed waiting for me to crawl into his arms, waking up the next morning and wanting any kind of stimulation, wanting out of that suffocating little room where he smoked twice an hour and chatted on AOL; hating to be with him but running after his bus to prolong our partings; feeling the pangs of regret when I hurt him, the wild exhiliration when we made up; seeing the broad green of the park near his house from the window of Bus 33, watching the lights of a titty bar wink at me from across the highway on the night I broke up with him, while I waited in the fading light for another bus, a final bus that would not, would not come. Today I was walking through that park again and I was haunted by the thought that I would see him with his boyfriend; I felt the most palpable agony at each unrevealed face and distance-hidden stranger, as if it were the shock of him watching.

Unless I send this to him, he'll probably never read it. My life will continue; I'll continue to write my turgid prose, and for other men. Still -- why I am left with these memories, this loneliness, while he has already moved past me and I am to him nothing more than a vague recollection, a dreamy face among the time-blurred crowd of ex-lovers who must now bow before the living idol of his new love?

I still have all my interests to shield me from this world and to filter out the stream of life; but I wish that I could push beyond them to connect with more people, and beyond anything else I have a keen desire to be loved with pure, unadulterated passion and to so love in turn. This desire is my downfall, and perhaps my redemption; I find its living embodiment in the character of Aschenbach, the hero of Mann's "Death in Venice". Mann has succeeded in painting, for the intellectual and self-consecrated artist, his private remorse. Where are you, my Tadziu?

Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme sœur,
Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur,
Et vers le ciel errant de ton œil angélique
Monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique,
Fidèle, un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur !
- Vers l'Azur attendri d'Octobre pâle et pur
Qui mire aux grands bassins sa langeur infinie
Et laisse, sur l'eau morte où la fauve agonie
Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,
Se traîner le soleil jaune d'un long rayon.

"Mon âme", the poetic soul, but truly poetic, and also the loved one, the expression that denotes the very core of one's being; it is the center of the human that climbs, up, up, and out of itself, like the rising waters of a fountain, or bent as the great weight of the moon bends water, "vers ton front oü rêve, ô calme soeur", where the contrast is immediate between the calm serenity of sorority and fervent masculine rising; here is a calm that lapses into sleep, the sleep of "un automne jonché de taches de rousseur", which can only be indentified with the hypnotic crimson folds of the lover's dress, a shimmering of phantom light that finally gives way to the white flicker of "le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique"; infinite, a sky, and yet immediately limited, immediately the globe that holds it, like the unescapable earth, the unescapable winter that autumn portends; the paradox continued in the angel who errs; the fallen angel and the sky captured in the globe of the smallest proportions, but nonetheless the soul climbs towards this vague infinity of being; bounded because it is being, but insofar as it is, being infinite.

The "jardin mélancolique" must bear out these contradictions, and reminds us of the original garden of Eden and the first sin. So the fallen angel of infinitely orbed and delimited oneness inhabits the garden, in one of those grandly contradictory gestures, God's hand reaching out from the infinite to create the mortal creature, who is not yet mortal but bounded by the inevitable facillty of his sin. Here, in the center of the poem, the soul rises, but finally that rising is only a sigh, a sigh towards heaven. "Soupire" holds the great weight of sadness, borne out by the white dashes of clouds in the blue sky, borne out in the irony of the faithful fountain that continues its duties, according to the laws of nature, when by those same laws, seemingly, man must fall, and cannot find the positive force he seeks even in the loved one, who errs, and whose dress is crimson, that deceiving Eve of the red apple -- the poetic rising of the soul must lapse into the purely sexual rush of the blood into upward erection.

This tender sadness is the tender October, the beautiful month, the month easily imagined for Keat's sonnet, and still the sky is a burning blue; but it is pale, fragile, and this whiteness now reminds us of the imminent snow.

Here the poem turns.

Because this sadness, this human grasping at the infinite, this is pure -- this is the purity of the soul moving, this is the motion, and the sadness is captured in all of the images but static, and overcome in this headlong rush, embodying grief but beyond it. This is a "langeur" but a "langeur infinie", rolling along on limp L's, gurgling into the R, but stretching even into the limpid clearness of the I like the sky.

We must judge the poem by its aim, and it is this aim, transcending the dead water and the savage wildness of the agony of "feuilles", an agony of both the falling leaves and of dying poetry, the double death of the white, unfilled page and the page that is already filled and is lifeless in the limp hand that produced it, it is this aim that, while it might blow with the cold october winds, portending winter, portending the ultimate death, portending the cold furrows of nothingness, still, in digging this furrow, still, in rising, drags along with it "le soleil jaune d'un long rayon" -- this arrow-streak of beauty, of light, of life, fills the gaps of emptiness, fills the scarlet blotch of sin embodied in Eden's fall, leaps above its source, and, in leaping, transcends its very self and overcomes the white death of the empty page, even as it springs from it and must fall back into that emptiness; poetry is a kind of arc, a jump through the nothing, an echo in the vast reaches, the void of eternity.

I've been semi-sick for the past couple days; I don't know what it is -- could be pollen, could be an actual cold -- but I've had a slight sore throat and all my muscles are really sore. I feel a little bit better today.

For the Fourth of July I went to Vancouver, Washington with my friend (and I use the term loosely) Gael, two lesbians, an extremely effeminate youth, Redface (whom Gael is apparently involved with, despite the fact that he already has a boyfriend), and a tall, dark, handsome fellow, Petra. We drove from Portland into the suburbs, and I was struck by the sheer green beauty of the landscape. This was the earth, city-obscured, the earth of fields and hills, sprouting trees and mossy locks, the life-bound, boundless, fertile globe along which we move, in flying metal. It reminded me of the suburbs where I grew up, and I felt a little homesick. The city is different from the suburbs, however close they are to each other, and I missed the hills, the neat, two-story houses, the manicured lawns, always overshadowed by the reminiscence of a more ancient landscape, domesticated but untamed, and vast. I miss now the shopping centers, domed by the long globe of the sky, where teenagers and their middle-aged, comfortable mothers and fathers came to buy groceries or rent a movie or browse, ignorant and self-content, through the clean aisles of mass-produced but ultimately innocuous books, whispering each, "This is life; what I say is different but finally kind; wars, religious turmoil, turpitude, angst are all things to be considered from the privacy of a soft armchair, and discussed politely at genteel dinner-parties; or you can brood, if you like, in your SUV, over the hum of NPR." It is the quiet, secluded, privileged life of the rich middle-class, mostly caucasians, yuppies all, but I miss it. I don't live in the center of the city in all its gargantuan hugeness, where people pour around thousand foot skyscrapers like ants around sand-castles, but Portland, in its gritty, poor, matter-of-fact realness, is tiring in its own right.

The festival was typical of its kind. Thousands of people (46,000, in fact) swarming on a common green, trampling the grass, laying down blankets, holding each other, kissing, laughing, buzzing with conversation, eating grapes, watermelon, pizza, purchased confections (and there were the concession stands, people-swarmed and swarming), massing into porto-potties set in rows like a parody of neighborhood blocks; these were dirty teenagers with fat faces and baggy pants, goateed, chin pointed men, their tall and slim, maquillaged women, clutched about the shoulders -- their lonely and broad counterpoints, soiled, stretched garments bulging with skin, clutching skirts and purses. Crowds like these remind me of the living dead, the masses of flesh eating, "rancid humanity", that eerie, prophetic painting of America in the throes of a modern apocalypse.

The fireworks began shortly after the band stopped, a sort of rolicking, insipid jazz that I think no one enjoyed. We saw them through a curtain of trees, unfolding their petals of light, soaring never high enough, but always obscured by the swaying foliage. The music, projected from the now empty bandstand, crackled, fuzzed, and halted, started up again. A country song played, "If tomorrow I lost everything I've worked for in my life / Except my twenty children and my trailer-lovely wife / And this godly country..." or something like that. I booed, a chorus of one. "What is this," I asked Chea (one of the lesbians), "the fourth of July?"

When the fireworks stopped, the paralyzed masses rose up in a turmoil, fleeing in every direction, riding bikes, boarding cars, buses, walking, whispering, chattering, and spilled over the highways like a flood. The grassy fields, I imagine, lapsed again into emptiness, into serene and midnight silence, into a post-diluvian tranquility that held with the singing of crickets at least until dawn.

I'm sitting at my computer listening to Bach; the harpsichord triples in minors, the violin purrs a story that's filled with despair, but balanced the one against the other, there's the feeling that I often get from Bach -- that life is sad but valuable, lonely but worthwhile in spite of, or perhaps because of, that loneliness.

I remember what Thornton said to me still, when I broke up with Jon and was in utter agony and whined and whined to him: he said that he didn't have time to talk to me because I was melancholy, that he didn't have time for people who have negative attitudes. That really struck me to the core. Of course it was mean and shallow of him to say that, and of course I hurt his friend, so I could expect no sympathy, but it reminds me of the things J.D. used to tell me -- and they're both of them older men, although Thornton is about 20 years JD's senior.

Is it really possible to control your happiness? Can you just decide to dawn or brighten up, like a light-bulb, at the flick of a switch? Sometimes, I'll admit, I treasure my melancholy, even though I rarely enjoy it -- because that's the life that I know, and it's hard to imagine anything else. I try to change my perspective, I try to be more social with people; lately I've been greeting people on the Trimet bus system, striking up conversations, and bidding good-day to random people I see on the street -- but sometimes I'm just sad, and more, I'm lonely. I feel like people expect me to be happy or go away, and that just doesn't seem fair. There's a certain morality in happiness, tenuous and tricky, but I think we expect our peers to be happy; we do, like Thornton, instinctively shy away from the whiners, the self-pitiers, and I'm not sure if that's merited or if it's a crime.

I still miss Jon. I don't miss anything about him particularly; he smoked pot all the time, he never had anything interesting to talk about -- but at the same time he was sweet and he was a boyfriend. He was interested in me. Or I felt he was interested in me; but to meet someone and be "together" with them but a week after...although to be fair, he dumped me. Still, it reminds me of Hamlet's quip to Horatio, 'the funeral meats did but coldly furnish forth the wedding tables'. Now he has a new boyfriend, and I'm alone. I feel like I deserve it; as if this is my punishment for breaking up with him -- and at the same time, I don't understand why I'm the one who has to suffer. Brannian tells me that's the way life works. There's no reason in it, no intricate meaning, no "karma" -- it just is. Shit happens. Still, when I broke up with him (at his birthday party no less), I remember feeling awful; I remember crying to the sky for a lightning bolt, for some kind of a punishment; I felt so guilty -- and I couldn't believe that I could do something so awful without suffering for it. But suffer I did, and I still am. Yet it was right. Ultimately, it was the right thing to do.

I finished Virgil's fifth eclogue today, the commentaries, and started on the sixth. I need to begin reviewing my Greek for classes next year, too; but I always shy away from it -- it's harder to use the Greek dictionary. There's also this business of mistakes: I have no way of knowing that I'm not making tons of mistakes as I parse through Virgil and Lysias...but I suppose even if I got one thing wrong and one thing right in every sentence, the true knowledge would augment and the false examples, in insolation, would eventually correct themselves when set against the larger store of evidence. Learning a language is a bit like excavating -- the more you unearth, the better a feel you get for the thing you're investigating; a single block of stone or a fragment of a pot isn't going to get you anywhere, but everything together tells a story, assembles into a coherent whole. Alex the archaeologist! Ha!

I went to a jazz festival tonight. It was five dollars to get in. I was a bit grudging to pay the five dollars -- I don't know why; I'm such a cheapskate. It was for a good cause, too: feeding the hungry. Still, all these philanthropic ideals -- I can't help but feel skeptical. I mean, feeding the hungry isn't going to solve things; it isn't going to somehow make life meaningful. There will only be more hunger; they beggars will reproduce, population will increase...from a biological standpoint, providing resources to the hungry doesn't seem like it will help things. And sometimes, sadly, I'm very much a biologist.

There were Christians outside of the fair trying to convert people. I was in a very bad mood; maybe it was because I'd just been reading the (highly inaccurate) War for God at a bookstore, but I just became so infuriated. I pushed my way through them and when one of them asked, "Have you heard the Gospel?" I said, "No, but I know when it was written," and walked on. I wanted to say, "I probably know the Gospel better than you do," or ask a million questions or start arguing. But Thornton said something else, "You aren't going to convert them and they aren't going to convert you." How these ghosts haunt me!

Ben is dating someone now, too. Well, I'm still single. If I'm single forever (which is a far way to predict from twenty) then I suppose I'd better get used to it; and take some small consolation in the fact that there are many other single people and the idea that there's much besides to do. Like memorize poems. Or dance. Tonight, outside, with a crowd of adults, some alone, or married, some young, others well into their sixties, I danced to accordion jazz. The Wilamette River flowed on by us, customers at restaurants ate their dinners, and a youth, poet and scholar, for once forgot his choler and moved to the inane beats of the herd. Maybe happiness is a choice after all.