I’m confused by a professor that I have this semester. He is, himself, a poet, and I’ve spoken with him in his office, which was wonderful. He’s lively, conversational and willing to be open and share as much as he knows about poetry one-on-one, but in the classroom, he’s rambling to the point of repeating himself and dissolving every lecture into a drug story from the 60’s. What’s more, our class is made up of a mix of graduates and undergraduates and we keep having to take these bizarre quizzes. On the first day we cover a new poet, before ever having spoken of them in class, we get a quiz. I have no problem with this idea in general. I do have a problem that the quizzes have asked us things like the date and location where Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot met for the first time, or the quizzes ask us to fill in two one-syllable words in a line of poetry taken from the middle of a poem we’ve never discussed. The quizzes are incredibly subjective. I don’t know anyone, graduate student or undergraduate in the class, who has done well on them. It honestly seems that the only way you could do well on one of these is if you could crawl inside this professor’s brain and figure out what HE thinks is important about that specific author. This is impossible to know before we’ve discussed the poets in class. I have no idea why he doesn’t give us the quizzes AFTER we’ve covered the poets. I did farily well on the last quiz, because I used a highlighter to underline every number that appeared in the introduction to the Norton Anthology on Modern American Poetry for that writer (…he passes photocopies of these out to us in class…usually two days before the quiz…but of course, he hasn’t had any of us purchase the Norton Anthology…). After I highlighted these, I made flashcards. That’s right; flashcards. I’m getting my terminal graduate degree and I’m making flashcards. In fact, I just made another set of flashcards on biographical information about H.D. I have a quiz on her today. This one is making me more annoyed/nervous than the other quizzes, because I’m writing my final project about H.D. I think her poems are earth-shattering and powerful, and I never encountered them before this class. I wish I could focus on her poems instead of making flash-cards and listening to this guy’s drug stories from the 60’s. If I have to hear about him driving around San Francisco with another cronie of Kenneth Rexroth’s who was doing cocaine, I’m going to fall asleep. That’s right baby-boomers; I said FALL ASLEEP. Talkin’ ’bout my generation? Your generation neeeds to stop being so full of itself. Your personal adventures make me ill sometimes, moon-doggy and Willow-frond. I know what you did was important. Stop talking about it. It’s egocentric. Let your children and grandchildren feel that their own lives and experiences are important as well, because they are human experiences, instead of always forcing one decade to be the center-point around which all American culture revolves. You know why that’s dangerous? Because it muffles you in nostalgia to the point that you completely miss the important, transcendent, beautiful things happening NOW, in the world NOW, not when Abbie Hoffman was getting rolled by the cops. So, that is my message for today; go to hell 1960’s. You go to hell and you die. I won’t let you take H.D.’s poetry away from me, or force me to read it through some patchouli-smelling, bead-wearing lens. These are my poems as much as they are yours.
Sheltered Garden
I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest–
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.
I have had enough–
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch–
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent–
only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light–
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit–
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
With a russet coat.
Or the melon–
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste–
it is better to taste of frost–
the exquisite frost–
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves–
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince–
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
–H.D.
