Good evening. Colleagues. Better. Can everyone hear me?
Thank you all so much for coming. I am thrilled and somewhat unbelieving that I am standing here before you today.
And it's wonderful to be here with so many friends, old teachers, publishers, fellow candidates, family members.
Once upon a time. There was a little girl who grew up in Georgia, but his grandparents lived in Kentucky.
At holidays, her family would drive up to Kentucky through forests and passed streams and waterfalls that trickled through limestone hills.
The water over time eroded great networks of caves in the limestone, and the pure limestone filtered water became an important ingredient in Kentucky.
Bourbon. One hot, bright summer day when the girl was four or five or maybe six.
Her family visited Mammoth Cave,
a national park whose eponymous network of limestone halls and caverns has been in continuous human use for at least 5000 years.
And it is still being explored to this day. It's the longest known network of caves in the world.
Her little sister was a toddler and was deemed too small for the tasking tour, which lasted 2 hours and involved a long,
gradual descent and at the end, a vertical climb of over 500 stairs on a twisting metal staircase with open risers.
The descent to the gloom was pretty easy, easy enough.
But let me tell you that climbing out was a doozy. As some Roman poet might have said.
The sister who was a toddler was left having a complete screaming meltdown in the bright sun.
The exasperated mother was there with the toddler and the little girl and her father set out on the long tour.
They would cross bottomless pits on flimsy bridges, squeeze through fat man's misery,
stoop down through tall man's misery, or the father did the skinny little girl probably slip through with no problem?
They wondered at the colonnades of two leg tights and stalagmites.
They passed a lake dubbed leafy and rivers called echo and sticks, and gazed up into the star chamber,
a dome 189 feet high that gave the impression to visitors that they are seeing the night sky.
Emerson describes it in his illusions. On arriving at what is called the star Chamber.
Our lamps were taken from us by the guide and extinguished or put aside.
And on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads.
And even what seemed a comet flaming among them.
I don't remember if there was mention made of the enslaved African American, Stephen Bishop, who in 1838 was began guiding people through the cave.
He was the first person to make a map of the cave. He was, in fact, Emerson's guide.
He called it a grand, gloomy and peculiar place.
In fact, there is a book of poems by a Kentucky poet, David McComas, called Ultima Ultima Thule,
which is about Stephen Bishop and also about Davis McCombs, who was himself a guide in Mammoth Cave Stevens.
Stephen Bishop had been purchased along with the cave and several other people by a doctor,
Goran, who later write, Basically the last year of his life, freed Stephen Bishop.
He reminisced of Stephen that Stephen was a self-educated man, a fine genius,
a great fund of wit and humour, with some little knowledge of Latin and Greek and much knowledge of geology.
But his great talent was a perfect knowledge of man.
So the reason why the cave bears a lot of these classical names, Lethe and Styx, is because of Stephen Bishop.
In fact, he taught himself to read and write when visitors like Emerson would come to the cave.
They liked to write their names in smoke on the walls of the cave.
And he started asking them, What do these letters mean and how can I do this?
And taught himself basically from there, including some Latin and Greek.
At the start of the tour or maybe the end.
This was a long time ago. There was a sort of zoo of native fauna of the cave, some of them endemic to the cave,
including a tank of the glassy cave fishes that had evolved to be blind and see through of cave shrimps.
And there was an exhibit of bats. These might have been taxidermied because I don't remember bats fluttering around in this exhibit,
13 species of which make use of the cave, some for their Hibernate column.
Although all of the bats are in decline, many because of white nose syndrome.
The guano that the bats deposit in the cave is an essential nutrient for the caves ecosystem.
Among the bats of the park are the little brown bat, the big brown bat,
the tri coloured bat, the Seminole bat, and my favourite ravenous, big eared bat.
It's my favourite because it is adorable and charismatic, but also because Refn esque is the most interesting person you have probably never heard of.
He was born in Constantinople.
11 teen parents ended up in Kentucky, was a friend of John James Audubon, and invented or wrote about a theory of evolution a bit before Darwin.
Of these infernal crepuscular creatures.
Only the bats regularly passed back and forth from the night sky above to the sky.
Less gloom below Hermes psycho pomp is properly their pace, their patron divinity.
Down, down, down. As Alice thinks, falling into wonderland.
At the end of the long downward winding tour, you climbed the staircases up and up and up.
The staircases had great gaps in it, big enough for a small person to slip through.
The adult behind me unhelpfully told me it would be better to keep my eyes on my shoes.
It was on that day that I developed a fear of heights or more properly, a terror of depths and a fascination with underworld and wonderlands.
And after worlds. Which are, after all, real places opening and branching and barricading and turning never to be fully explored beneath our feet,
and also an affinity for bats.
I have a poem by that name. Not sure what year this was.
It might have been 1974 or a year or two earlier,
which is the same year that the philosopher Thomas Nagel published his famous essay on consciousness and perception and the mind body problem,
which is called What is it Like to Be a Bat?
In it, he writes. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders.
Because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, this is little species.
Just people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.
Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, In fact, bats are more closely related to primates than they are to mice.
Nevertheless, present a range of activity and the sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid,
even without the benefit of philosophical reflection.
Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
Clearly he had been in a room with a bit.
I've said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat.
Now that we know that most bats perceive the external world, primarily by sonar or echolocation,
detecting the reflections from objects within range of their own rapid, subtly modulated high frequency shrieks,
their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes,
and the information that's acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance,
size, shape, motion and texture comparable to those we make by vision.
But bat sonar, the clearly a form of perception is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess,
and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.
This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.
Also in the essay, he introduces another alien form of life a martian coming to Earth.
Who? How is the Martian going to describe things on earth and so forth.
I think that is probably what triggers the Martian school of poetry.
I might be wrong about that.
Where there's the school of poets who are trying to describe things in almost this metaphysical sense of as strangely as possible.
It's kind of strange, our idea of what we're perceiving.
The essay, as far as I know, did not cause a school that puts.
This is not Nagle now, this is me. Bats are mammals.
They are closely related to us. So there are some things I think that we can understand about fatness.
They nurse their young like us. The mother pup bond is in some ways very similar, even to the point of mother ese.
I think this was recently published that, you know, when mothers speak to babies, our voices tend to rise and pitch like, Oh, what a cute little baby.
So bats also do this. Although some bats are already quite shrill, they lower their voices to the babies.
Oh, what a cute you to be. That's fly, which we only do in dreams or machines.
Some of the biggest differences are they hang upside down. They're mostly nocturnal.
They hibernate and the use of sonar. So sonar is very different from how we receive most of our visual information.
Since light comes in at the eyes and we receive it passively.
Sorry, John Donne. We do not shoot out I-beams that twist with other I-beams.
Bats speak to listen. They call to elicit a response.
The other to receive It is by sounds of things that they determine their shape and size, direction and velocity velocity.
They explore by singing and by listening. And in this way, perhaps they do have some things in common with how poets perceive the world.
Oops. So had Thomas Nagel or the Hope or the little girl, for that matter, read or had read to her.
And the girl's case, a children's book published ten years before in 1964 by the poet and critic Randall Giroux,
and illustrated by Maurice Sendak before he became the Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are,
Although I think you can sort of see Maurice Sendak ness here.
Also, it was marketed as a children's book, but it was meant to be for both children and adults.
It seems to have been widely reviewed in the New York Times.
The writer Elizabeth Hardwick reviewed it at that time.
She was married to Robert Lowell, who had been Randall General's roommate at KENYON.
She says of the poet. The poet is a haunting little story.
It is truly about a bat. And at the same time, truly about a poet.
The animal is real as an animal, and the human activity is also real.
These lovely verses are the kind a reflective, gentle bat would write if he were the poet Randall Jarrett.
Randall Duran was born in 1914 in Nashville, Tennessee.
He died in 1965 in Chapel Hill.
His death was reported as an accident, but many of his friends considered it essentially a suicide.
He was walking along a road and was struck by a car.
But it was a time when he was also very, very depressed and suicidal.
Randall Jarrow was perhaps the most important poet critic of his generation, which is saying something.
He was associated with KENYON College and the agrarian poets such as John Crowe, Ransom, Alan Tate and Robert Penn Warren.
Although his politics were far to the left of these agrarian poets.
And though he was born in Nashville, he did not have a Southern drawl or a Tennessee train.
Having grown up instead in that bastion of coastal liberal elites.
California. He almost single handedly rescued Robert Frost.
Reputation from Robert Frost.
And is now mostly known for one poem, the widely anthologised death of the ball turret gunner, which we will go to later.
So the bad poet is about a lot of things, but on the surface it is primarily about what it is like to be a bat and.
What it is like to become a poet. It turns out there's a fair amount of overlap.
The book begins. Once upon a time there was a bat, a little light brown bat the colour of coffee with cream in it.
He looked like a furry mouse with wings.
When I'd go in and out of my front door in the daytime, I'd look up over my head and see him hanging upside down from the roof of the porch.
He and the others hung there and a bunch of snuggled together with their wings, folded fast asleep.
Sometimes one of them would wake up for a minute and get in a more comfortable position,
and then the others would wriggle around in their sleep till they'd got more comfortable too.
When they all moved, it looked as if a fur wave went over them.
This is probably the little Brown backed my Otis looking focus the mouse eared flicker of light of the order k wrapped around the wing hands,
the hand wings. It's a fairly straightforward storybook opening.
Once upon a time, there was a little with a few exceptions.
There is a narrator who has inserted himself as if to say, I am not the little brown bat,
making us all the more suspicious that he is the bat poet Seymour.
And the striking image of the fir wave. A precise observation that lets us know we are in the hands of a real writer and
of a real writer who has seen a real phenomenon and has observed it from life.
I would also say that to me there's something that vibrates a little bit with significance about the porch.
Of course, in the south.
The front porch is a place of where the public can come and meet, where you can sit and watch the people go by and life go by.
But when I hear the word porch and bats, I also think of porches of underworld's and things that might be hanging about the porches.
The other thing that strikes me is this fir wave.
It's very precise and it reminds me of one of my favourite similes from The Odyssey in Book 24,
where the souls of the suitors who have been slaughtered by Odysseus are compared or likens resembles to bats.
And let's see if I can go back. I realise that this first part of Book 24 may not be the oldest part of the Odyssey, but I'm going to ignore that.
So. And as in the innermost recesses of a wondrous cave.
Bats flit about gibbering when one has fallen off the rock from the chain in which they cling to one another.
So the souls went gibbering. There are several points that interest me.
I love that. It's a wondrous cave. It's a it's a fantastic, awesome, dazzling special cave.
Which makes me think of the wonders of Mammoth Cave.
I love that mystery. This is the modern Greek word also for bat, so that seems to speak pretty directly to me.
I'm intrigued by the word chain here.
I when I pronounce Greek, I'm just going to warn you, I cannot do arouse me in vowels anymore.
I've lived 20 years in Greece and I skip the rough breathing, so or my source, the word for chain and that.
Also makes me think of Plato's ion, where we also have this weird chain.
Plato's ion is about poetic inspiration, also about madness and poets and whether poets are sane.
But it's also discusses that inspiration is kind of contagious so that in the same manner also the muse inspires men herself.
And then by means of these inspired persons, the inspiration spreads to others and holds them in a connected chain.
This is the same word we had with the chain of bats, and it's used to compare this inspiration to magnetic stones clicking together.
A brief plot summary of the book. As it is the end of summer, the chain of bats moved from the porch to their hibernate Gillum, a nearby barn.
The little brown bat doesn't want to leave the porch and so becomes isolated from the chain of bats.
I think Elizabeth Hardwick writes Alienation Explanation point.
He suffers from insomnia, which for a bat means being awake during the day when he starts seeing the colourful daylight world and
creatures like the chipmunk and hears the mockingbirds sing all day long as well as far into the night.
I should add here that the mockingbird meme is polyglot, as is America's nightingale,
the champion singer We don't have Nightingales a fact that John Crow Ransome remarks on in his poem Philomena not to these shores.
She came this other thrice. But he does mention that he had heard them at Oxford.
I per annotated with the Oxford students once and in the quadrangle in the cloisters on the shore,
precociously knocked at antique doors ajar fatuous Sally touched the hems of the Harrow fence.
Sick of my dissonance, I went out into Bagley would.
But I digress. The Bat admires the song of the mockingbird, who imitates the world in order to chase it away and establish his territory.
He always had a peremptory, authoritative look as if he were more allied than anything else and wanted everything else to know it.
This is also very similar to how he describes Robert Frost.
When the mockingbird sings one of his songs. It is called, of course, Ode to a mockingbird.
The poetry of the mockingbird has the little bat all aflutter.
The bat wants to try his hand or his hand wing at poetry.
He asks the bird. Do you suppose a bat could make poems?
A bat, the mockingbird said. But then he went on politely.
Well, I don't see why not. He couldn't sing them, of course.
He simply doesn't have the range. But that's no reason he couldn't make them up.
Why? I suppose for bats, bats, poems would be ideal.
Which is an idea I'd like you to keep in your head.
For bats at bats, poems would be ideal when the bat shares a poem with the mockingbird about an owl.
The mockingbird gives surprisingly technical field feedback for a children's book.
The only other such poetic exegesis I can think of in children's literature is Humpty Dumpty.
Technically, says the mockingbird, It's quite accomplished the way you change the rhyme schemes particularly effective the bats.
It is it. And it was clever of you to have the last line two feet short.
Two feet short. The next to last lines. Iambic pentameter in the last lines.
Iambic pentameter. The bat looks so bewildered that the mockingbird said in a kind voice.
And iambic foot has one weak syllable and one strong syllable.
The weak one comes first. When you shorten the last line like that, it gets the effect of the knight holding its breath.
The bat poet composes a poem for his friend, the chipmunk, who is chuffed.
And for the mockingbird, who is not. The end of his mockingbird poem is a sort of cross between Yeats and Stevens.
And this is the last stanza. Now, in the moonlight, he sits here and sings.
A thrush is singing than a thrasher, than a j.
Then all at once, a cat begins. Miaowing a mockingbird can sound like anything.
He imitates the world. He drove away so well that for a minute in the moonlight.
Which one's the mockingbird? Which one's the world?
But what he wants to do is to make a poem about bats. If I had one about bats, maybe I could say it to the bats.
He does make one, but just as he has perfected it and is prepared to tell it to the bats,
he himself becomes lethargic and forgetful and falls into the oblivion of hibernation.
The first part of the bat's bat poem goes.
A bat is born naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail and catches him.
He clings to her, long for by his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night, doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting.
Her baby hangs on underneath all night and happiness.
She hunts and flies her high, sharp cries like shining needle points of sound.
Go out into the night and echoing back. Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is, which way it's going.
She lives by hearing. Of this poem, the bat poet thinks to himself.
It was easier somehow than the other poems. All he had to do was remember what it had been like to be a bat.
And every once in a while put in a rhyme.
Of course, the poem was actually written by Randall Gerow, and Randall Jarell publishes this poem in The New Yorker,
and it is a poem in his last book, The Lost World, not by the Poet, but by Randall Drill.
Randall Gerald cannot possibly remember what it had been like to be born upside down,
naked, blind and pale, and had been caught by his mother as he fell into the world.
And I do not think it was a matter of putting in a rhyme either, because that is not how rhymes work.
Rhymes work more like echolocation. In fact, pale calls forth tail or tail claws, calls forth pale teeth underneath and so on.
We might look at a few poems about bats and some poems that function like bat poems,
things that come out of a sort of echolocation and call out of doubt and darkness,
things into being added, the blankness or the brightness or the blindness or the blackness of the page.
All of these words, I think, etymological related. Bats, unlike mockingbirds, cannot lift themselves into flight off the ground.
And this is why, if you see a bat in a room like poor Thomas Nagel and it's like it's pitiful on the floor, they cannot do it.
Their wings are too flexible and nimble, which allows them to do all their nifty flight.
But in order to get lift, they have to climb to a height and fall into flight.
So they fall headlong into kind of nothingness, into blackness, into thin air.
Call it negative capability, if you will. Keats's phrase I realised in its cluster of letters contains a lot of back words.
I am no Anthony Atherton, who I think is in the audience.
But I did try to fool around with those letters. Some of them I use more than once.
But, you know, pitching a tiny, agile bat, a cave city, all of these existing within negative capability.
Before I look at those poems, though, I would like to briefly talk about rhyme.
I thought you were going to skip this, but you won't.
How Rome works, Rym, is itself a kind of simile to unlike things are somehow related, it sets up an equation or an inequality.
Rym is hyper local to a language, its terroir.
English gets womb and tomb breath and death.
But English has a problem with love. I mean, what's to rhyme with love?
We've got above love of glove.
Other languages have other pairs of of words that rhyme in Greek, for instance, hands and knives rhyme rather conveniently.
I think of rhyme as a kind of quantum entanglement. It exerts spooky action at a distance if you consider slant rhyme.
It's only slants when the second rhyme comes into the picture, and then that rhyme skews the rhyme of the first.
So there they are, constantly connected.
And if you want dynamic rhymes, if you're a rhymer, if you're born under a rhyming planet,
it's good to rhyme across parts of speech, rhyme generic with abstract rhyme, monosyllables with polish syllables and so on.
Taxonomies of rhyme.
I won't do all of this, but just to have this up here briefly, perfect or true rhyme all sounds from the last stress syllable on match up.
Masculine rhyme. It's masculine because of grammatical gender, not gender.
Gender. I've had arguments with this on Twitter and Facebook.
Work and lurk time crime feminine also grammatical gender not gender Gender Bridal Title Muscle Hustle Dactyl XY Dactyl is not a gender,
I don't think. Rapidly. Rapidly.
There are lots of kinds of slant rhyme. There are some that are kind of more literary than others.
Slant rhyme where the consonants match up, but the vowels don't match up.
More appropriate for for the page.
If you're doing assonance, which is just the vowels, that's great for a popular song or performance, but it might not work on the page.
And this is because vowels are slippery.
My vowels are not your vowels. Vowels change according to generations, according to region, according to class.
One of my great examples is Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter going back to Tennessee.
If you listen to this song. Tarred and hard is a perfect rhyme.
If you see it on the page. For me, it might sound like tired and hard.
It's a slant rhyme, but for her it is a full rhyme.
So if you really want a rhyme that will travel, it's better to hitch it to the consonants, to then to the vowels.
But that is not the. This is one of my favourite fat poems in more than one sense of that word.
This is mined by Richard Wilbur. Mind in its purest play is like some fat.
The beats about in caverns all alone, contriving by a kind of senseless wit not to conclude against a wall of stone.
It has no need to falter or explore. Darkly, it knows what obstacles are there, and so may weave and flitter, flitter,
dip and so forth in perfect courses through the blackest air, and has this simile like perfection.
The mind is like a bat. Precisely.
Save that in the very happiest intellects in a graceful error may correct the cave.
This is Wilbur in his purest play. We have words like play wit, happiest, graceful.
So even in a poem about darkness, he sparkles and illuminates.
That's. I don't know if I've said this yet, but bats are more associated with similes than metaphors for an assortment of reasons.
Bats are like other things. So a bat is like a mouse with wings.
It's not that a mouse is like a bat without wings. A bat wings are like an umbrella.
Bats are like tea, trees in the sky, etc., etc. If you look at the rhymes, which are all of them gracefully variable.
So we'll see. Largely they are across parts of speech alone and stone.
They're air. They're save and cave.
Bat and which are both nouns. But there also is a variation there that gives some energy to the poem because they are slant rhymes.
The only noun noun rhyme that is not also slant is perfection and intellectual.
And there's something nice about the square. True ness of that.
One of my favourite is save and cave.
Save really being accept here, but also being a kind of save the bats about to make a mistake and conclude against a wall of stone.
But then it has a save and that rhymes with cave.
I love the word conclude, which sounds like a bat going splat against a wall, but also has this intellectual idea of coming to conclusions.
And it's almost as if Wilbur is making a new etymology and that it's not about shutting something off, but it's related to concussion.
I love has this simile a like perfection.
That's a wonderful pun.
And I like how the poem calling forth the rhymes and through the stanzas, which are kind of bigger organs of sounds than individual rhymes,
creates these spaces, these stanzas on the page, which to me are units of thought,
but they are also a way of exploring the blank black blackness of the page.
The cave of the page. This poem by Emily Dickinson is probably one of the first appearances of the Little Brown Bat in literature,
although it's one of the commonest in North America.
The bat is done with wrinkled wings like fellow article and not a song pervade his lips or none perceptible.
His small umbrella quaintly have describing in the air an arc a like inscrutable.
The late philosopher disputed from what firmament of what astute abode and powered with what malignant
malignancy suspiciously withheld to his adroit creator a scribe no less the praise beneficent,
believe me, his eccentricities.
Like most Dickinson poems, this is in common metre in hymn metre.
She has a lot of wonky rhymes. My theory about this is that she gets them mostly from hymnals where some of the lines
are simply not good and instead develops a kind of elaborate theory about them.
It's a kind of ars poetica. This back could well be an ancestor of the bat poet with his coffee with cream in it coat.
This. That is done. Or like a follow article.
Bats are often likened to articles of clothing, likened to gloves or old rags or silken sleeves or ragged shawls.
In the Asian American poet Paisley Rector's poem Bats, they are likened to a stranger's under things found tossed on the marital bed.
So it's also this kind of yellowy brown article.
We have these wonderful rhymes article sort of rhymes with perceptible, almost imperceptibly.
So air is kind of included in philosopher reaches out and arrives at philosopher abode and withheld,
kind of have a dissonance with them, and praise extends into eccentricities.
So she feels her way through the poem via the rhymes.
But there are also other kinds of correspondences, not all of the correspondences or sounds we have describing in the air,
which corresponds with ascribe this idea of writing in the air.
And I love her use of this Latinate Register of Diction.
Emily Dickinson's Latin was quite good, and it is usually profitable to look at the etymology of her last words.
The late philosopher is an elated philosopher, but he is also a philosopher up in the air.
I think we could even say which philosopher, since he's describing his circles that are inscrutable.
He's very Archimedes like. The firmament is a strange word for Sky, if you think about it, because the sky is not firm,
but it's a good word for a bat's sky, for the ceiling of a cave, say, and eccentricities looks back, echoes back to arc.
These imperfect circles where eccentricities come from.
The idea of Ptolemaic orbits where the earth is not quite at the centre, these kind of wonky orbits.
So even that eccentricity has a correspondence in arc.
Oops. No, no. What is happening?
Tech person. All right. If pressed something wrong.
Another poem. We're going to get a little bit into what I would call bat poetics as opposed to bat poems.
And by that I mean poems that start in a kind of darkness or doubt and that feel their way often by sound.
This poem. Is that all right?
Have this because of the umbrellas and the back with.
We grow accustomed to the dark when light is put away as when the neighbour holds the lamp to witness her goodbye.
A moment we uncertain step for newness of the night, then fit our vision to the dark and meet the road erect.
And so of larger darkness is those evenings of the brain when not a moon disclose a sign or star come out within the bravest,
grope a little, and sometimes hit a tree directly in the forehead.
But as they learn to see either the darkness alters or something in the sight adjusts itself to midnight and life steps almost straight.
Fabulous things going on with the rhymes away is calling out to good bye night
and erect a rhyming as if that is almost as if it's nicked and a wrecked brain.
That wonderful Blake in word is a solid slant rhyme with within but again across parts of speech.
And you see the one true rhyme here tree and see is right when you get hit directly in the forehead.
And then sight and straight were straight can contains sight.
It's almost a sight rhyme and it's almost straight.
So there's a lot going on there. And we have the evenings of the brain, which are a kind of Emily Dickinson, Dark night of the soul.
This is one of my favourite poems. It's also I like how it is kind of almost in conversation with this poem.
This is by Theodor Rescue, born in 1908 in Michigan and died in 1963 in Michigan.
He writes a lot about the wonderful nature in Michigan, which is this land of 10,000 lakes.
He's the son of a German immigrant who had a market greenhouse.
So nature is very much with him in the poems.
He is also a poet who struggles with mental health issues.
I think basically manic depression throughout his life and this is in a dark time is very much that dark night of the soul.
It is a bad poem in the sense that it starts at a point of darkness or doubt.
It feels its way by this larger sound organ of the stanza.
These are variations on the Venus and Adonis stanza of Shakespeare, which is a kind of octave,
almost like the first part of a sonnet, except there's a variation.
Those would be A, B, a, B, c, c. Here we have a, b, b, a, c, c.
I like them because they're almost like sonnets on steroids.
They have a sonnet feeling to them, but they're faster. In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade. I hear my echo in the echoing woods, a lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren. Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.
The days on fire. I know the purity of pure despair.
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks. Is it a cave or winding path?
The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences.
A night flowing with birds. A ragged moon. And in broad day, the midnight.
Come again. A man goes far to find out what he is.
Death of the self in a long, a tireless night. All natural shapes.
Blazing, unnatural light, dark, dark.
My light and darker. My desire, my soul.
Like some heat Maddened summer fly keeps buzzing at the sill which I is I a fallen man
I climb out of my fear The mind enters itself and God the mind and one is one free.
And the tearing winds. It's a terrifying I mean, I feel batshit crazy reading this book.
And it's a wonderful poem. And, you know, it wouldn't exist without this form.
RATH He writes, I was this form, this poem was dictated.
It's a dictated poem, something given scarcely mine at all.
For about three days before its writing, I felt disembodied out of time.
Then the poem virtually wrote itself one on a day in summer 1958.
I think back to that icon of Plato and madness and inspiration and that connection here.
He has an almost shamanistic experience, which we might call madness, but Socrates might call inspiration, and it results in this fantastic poem.
There are some interesting rhymes, shade and wood. We have sea and tree that we had out of Emily Dickinson.
My favourite here is Correspondences, which is the largest rhyme word in the poem and sort of rhymes with out what he without what he is.
And we end with mind and wind.
One of those grandfathered in rhymes like Love and Prove Risky had also written a poem about a bad a kind of children's poem.
You know, by day the cat, the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an ageing house, blah, blah, blah. But when he brushes up against a screen,
we are afraid of what our eyes have seen for something is amiss or out of place when mice with wings can wear a human face.
And there I think what he's touching on is the untimely sickness, the uncanny ness of the bat.
It is something homey, like a mouse, and it lives in the house, and yet it has a human face and it gives us that and Heimlich feeling.
It might be weird to look at this as a poem when we know this is by a mockingbird.
But it does feel like a poem to me. It begins in darkness.
It feels its way through its form and through its rhyme.
There is very little that is visual in the poem. It precedes by sounds.
Whose woods these are. I think I know his house is in the village, though.
He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farm horse farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake.
The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness, spells, a shake to ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep. So everyone knows this poem.
We do actually know quite a lot about the writing of this poem.
For one thing, although the poem is set at the winter solstice, the darkest evening of the year,
it was written in the middle of June 1922, roughly at the summer solstice.
It was written in one go. Almost came to him.
He had been working. Oh. And it was also written not as evening descends, but as the dawn breaks.
Frost had been working productively all night long on his long poem New Hampshire.
Mostly in blank verse, Ramble becomes the title poem of his book by that name that won the Pulitzer Prize.
It's kind of frost at his worst, you know.
It's got weird politics in it. He rants against the Russkies.
It's got his faux folksiness. The poem ends well.
If I have to choose one or the other, I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer.
With an income in cash, say a thousand from, say, a publisher in New York City.
It's restful to arrive at a decision and restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present, I am living in Vermont. After completing this thing.
He turned a page, was workbook and wrote this poem basically without stopping.
This is a facsimile of that draft. The first stanza came to him entire as it is, and then he says, That went off so easily.
I was tempted into adding difficulty of picking up my three from my 1 to 4 to go on with.
In the second stanza, I was amused and scared at what that got me into.
Frost takes the Rubaiyat stanza famous from Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
a poetry book that would have been in nearly every house with any book of poetry in it in 1922.
It was wildly, wildly, wildly, wildly popular in the late 1800s.
And so it would be in everybody's house. So the obvious problem, though, is what to do in the end.
So you've got these link ruby stanzas.
If we remember the ruby at home, you can hear some of them, you know, a book of verses underneath the bow, etc., etc., etc.
I do notice you notice some rhymes in there. Keep deep sleep.
So the problem comes at the end once you've linked a stanzas and that third line is shooting out to the next stanza and keeps the thing going,
you have a chain and all my thoughts, as it were.
Holmes, in preface to poetry, writes, The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.
The first two lines of the last stanza come fast and flow beautifully, the crest of the poem's emotion and its music.
But then, with success in sight, there comes an awkward and unexpected stumble.
He writes. One of the things he tries is that bid me give the reins a shake.
Which might have been the fact and the action. But the rhyme is wrong.
It's already been used in a previous stanza, and so has the image of the horse shaking his head.
But you can see what happens. So he writes that last third stanza with the third line.
He's not sure what it's going to be. And then what happens? He's realised, What if I just repeat the third line?
So the last line of the poem was written before the second to last line of the poem, even though they are the same line.
And that's a wonderfully echoing that thing to do, to listen to the thing that comes back.
And there we have a great poem. We are rounding and around.
I know people might be getting worried, but we're getting there. This is also one of my favourite poems.
Much ink suspense built on this poem.
It does strike me as a kind of bat poem in a sense, not by any rhymes, but it does proceed by correspondences of sounds.
There's very little that is visual in it. Robert Hayden, who was born in 1913 in Detroit and died in 1980 in Ann Arbour,
was the first African-American to serve as consultant of poetry, the post that later became the poet laureate.
Also perhaps appropriate to talk about that poets he suffered his whole life with very, very poor vision.
That is why when you see photographs of him, he has these coke bottle glasses on, but I think does put him towards having an affinity for bats.
There's winter Sundays. Sundays to my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue, black, cold.
Then with cracked hands that ached from labour and the weekday weather made pink fire banked, fires blazed.
No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know? What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
I think it is one of the great sermons on Love right up there with Corinthians.
Obviously, we have this idea of Sundays and fathers and love that puts us in this mind.
He was writing about his his foster father, a man who was very, very supportive of his poetry and career,
but I think also could be difficult to live with just that opening Sundays, too.
My father got up early. This is there's a whole novel right there.
It's a lesson also for prose writers of how to write narrative.
Sundays, too. My father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue, black, cold, not the cold darkness, the blue, black, cold.
Then we start hearing the sounds. Then, with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday, weather made banked fires blazed.
So there's assonance, there's internal rhyme, there's alliteration with weekday weather.
That also is a whole short story.
The weekday weather. I also think of the Greek word chorus, which can be weather or time.
Then we have and no one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking the chronic angers of that house that suddenly a Greek word in the poem that lifts the register,
speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.
That as well is hearkening back to the Sundays to.
Those little adverbs that suddenly break open the narrative of the poem.
When you hear him read this poem, which you can do on YouTube, he actually says, What did I know?
What did I know? Of love's austere and lonely offices, the quiet vowels at the end, and the slight rhyme of love.
One of the few rhymes for love. Austere and lonely offices that register of office.
We think of religious offices. But ultimately, it's this assonance at the ends that kind of gets me austere offices.
The vowel. That is all. We're coming round.
This is Randall, Gerald's most famous poem.
He became very anxious about it. He thought this was his one bid for remembrance,
which is what Robert Frost wrote to Unter Meyer immediately having completed upon stepping on Woods on a snowy evening.
The death of the ball trick, Gunner. From my mother's sleep, I fell into the state and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from Earth, loosed from its dream of flight, I woke to black Flack and the nightmare fighters.
When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Gerald, who served in the Army or Army Air Forces, provided the following explanatory note.
A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24,
inhabited by 250 something calibre machine guns and one man a short, small man.
When this gunner tracked with his machine guns, a fighter attacking his bomber from below,
he revolved with the turret hunched upside down in his little sphere, and he looked like the foetus in the womb.
The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells, and the hose was a steam hose.
This is one of a handful of poems to have its own Wikipedia entry.
It is in the company of Lake Isle of Innisfree, and this be the verse.
So poets sometimes grow to hate their successes, even as they are often fond of their failures.
It's an epigram epitaph of a type so commodities might recognise the dead speak in the first person to us,
the future reader or the passer by and invokes a relationship with a state.
We might think of some of Housman epitaphs Epitaph on an army of mercenaries or here Dead.
We lie because we did not choose its five lines, which feels epigrammatic.
I might point out that Randall Gerald's dissertation was on Houseman,
so he might have been thinking of the sound wise fros calls out to hose, as it were.
We have black flak and nightmare fighters. Jiro had wanted.
He had volunteered for the army. He had wanted to become a pilot, but failed the motion sickness test.
Eventually, his job was to operate a celestial navigation tower.
Celestial Navigator is as poetic a job title as they come and to teach people to fly at night.
Well, that's the job of the critic, too, Alan Tate, he wrote.
What I do is run a tower that lets people do celestial navigation on the ground in a tower about 40 feet high.
A fuselage like the front of a bomber is hung and the navigator,
sometimes pilots and bombardiers, too, sits in it and navigates by shooting with his sextant.
The stars that are in a star dome above his head. We move them pretty much as a planetarium operator does.
One trainer in a year certainly saves five or six bombers and their crew through improved night flight skills.
It's not my favourite poem. I think it's got a lot of shock value that it's kind of a one trick pony.
You read it over and over again. I think the shock kind of wears off.
But spending time with the poet and its gentle animal poems has given me a little
insight into this harsh epigram and into the anxiety that Gerald had about it.
The gunner, after all, was born mid-air. He falls into the state.
He flies at night. The fur is, of course, the fur lined flyer suit, but it is also very mammalian.
He is upside down. He clings to a larger flying thing which has a belly in the note.
Randall is keen to point out that he is upside down.
Well, Randall probably was not thinking of a bat poet analogy consciously when he wrote this.
I feel sure it is present. His poem Bats, which is the poem the bat put composes for his fellow bats,
and their chain of fellowship is almost a lullaby and stands directly opposite
this violent abortion of innocence by the state military industrial complex.
It almost seems to undue to call back to recall this poem.
Gerald had been very anxious about the theme of this poem.
When he reads the poem on a YouTube video, you can hear a reading he gave at the 92nd Street Y in April of 1963.
It's before the huge depression that comes on towards his 50th birthday and depression that is brought on by JFK's assassination on November 22nd.
I think the 60th anniversary of that is two days from today.
He's really pleased in this video to talk about his new poems, the poems that will make up the Lost World, the last book.
He mentions that there are no Men in the Last World, this last book.
There are only animals. Women, often middle aged women and children.
His quip about this is he had killed off all the men in his early war poems.
He's excited to tell the audience about the eccentricities and strange facts of the bat, which are yet all true.
A bat is born naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail and catches him.
He clings to her long for by his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night, doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting.
Her baby hangs on underneath all night and happiness.
She hunts and flies her high, sharp cries like shining needle points of sound.
Go out into the night and echoing back.
Tell her what they have touched. She hears how far it is, how big it is, which way it's going.
She lives by hearing the mother eats the moors and the gnats she catches in full flight.
In full flight. Her baby drinks the milk.
She makes him in moonlight or starlight in midair.
There's single shadow printed on the moon or fluttering across the stars worlds on all night.
At daybreak, the tired mother bat flats flaps home to her rafter.
The others all are there. They hang themselves up by their toes.
They wrap themselves in their brown wings, bunched upside down.
They sleep in air, their sharp ears, their sharp teeth.
Their quick, sharp faces are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day. As the mother sleeps, she folds her wings around her sleeping child.
In this animal fable of a talk. I guess I've been fluttering around in inscrutable arcs about what I mean by what it is to be like a bat poet.
What it is like to be a bat poet. A bat poet to achieve flight, false, unknowing, headlong into the blankness, the blindness, the blackness.
The bat poet lets sound do the thinking, feeling forward by rhymes and other correspondences etymologies, perhaps even by stanzas.
A bat poem is often not particularly visual or full of outlandish images, but is rich in sounds and echoes.
Bats are communal rather than solitary. Rather than staking out territory of dazzling originality.
It is not so much interest to them. They are rather linked in a magnetic chain of tradition and are interested in conveying the shapes,
hearths and textures of the world and their experience of it to an audience.
Listeners of creatures to whom they are linked and fellow feeling.
All children's books are about going to bed as the poet has written once.
The bat poet never gets to share his bat poem with his fellow bats, unlike the mockingbird, a solitary genius of the romantic type.
The song isn't enough for him. He wants to put in words for the bats what it is like to be a bat.
But on that port's to oblivion and Lethe, he becomes sleepy and the poem is forgotten.
It's a deeply melancholy book, maybe about artistic failure or the limits of art, or the limits of the audience.
Yet perhaps poetry wins out at all. The Bat poet is at least able to share his poem with the Chipmunk.
The chipmunk is a bit confused. So you bats sleep all day and fly all night and see with your ears and sleep upside down and eat while
you're flying and drink while you're flying and turn somersaults in mid-air with your baby hanging on.
And and it's. It's really queer. The bat, poet says.
Did you like the poem? Oh, of course.
Except I forgot it was a poem. I just kept thinking how queer it must be to be a bat.
The bat said, No, it's not queer.
It's wonderful.