Alice Bloom

Unemployed: Fired By A Poem

 Word by word by word, the words of a work of literature are on the page. Where else would they be? To explain this banality, I’ll backtrack a bit to when I learned to read.

I was hiding in my bedroom, sitting on the floor against one wall, looking into a bank of windows yellow with the late August setting sun, and holding a copy of the complete poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Did I have 2, or already 3 children by then? The apartment was quiet, my mother having taken them off to the park for an hour. My husband was in medical school, I had my first real job at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and had been assigned for the coming term the course “Intro. to Poetry 252.” Junior faculty seldom talked to, seldom were spoken to, or saw the then Chairman in the halls, and were assigned our courses in a note from his secretary, Mr. Marble, and Mr. Marble had written to me that I was “down for 252, Sec. 10 & 11.” There were 99 members of the English Department that year, 3 of us women: a former nun, an ex-Army colonel, and me. Don’t ask, okay? Our building was literally organized like a slave-ship, with those who rowed below having offices in the cellar next to the furnace ducts; and, lofty elevator floors above us, the offices of those who edited the various Norton Anthologies and the Norton Critical Editions. If Mr. Marble had sent me a memo that I was “down for Astrophysics 349” I wouldn’t have made a sound. Despite my piffling salary, I was the one feeding us. But I was tip-full with the terror that comes exactly of being a fake, and getting paid any amount at all for it. It was going to be a dreadful term.

Poetry and I were not friends. Our mutual disenchantment stemmed from the days of my never being able to see the “deeper meaning,” so that must have been high school humiliation. Later, presented with any poem to “analyze” in any class, I kept my mouth entirely shut and if called upon, ducked and mumbled. Fellow grad. students spoke for 20 minutes without pause about “O Rose, Thou Art Sick,” or whatever, earning such points as could never be mine, and I secretly consoled myself with 1. they had more “imagination,” and 2. better “backgrounds.” I continued to get good grades; I kept my scholarship; but all the time I felt like a successful forger producing hundred-dollar bills hot off my personal press. I was on better ground with novels; but with poetry I was running a riverboat shell game.

Mr. Marble, or the department, did not assign texts, and we could pick our own material for any course. (Unless, of course, we were assigned to teach as “section men,” which even the nun and I were called, for one of the Norton Editors.) I had spent this summer compiling my own little anthology (to take to the print department) of animal poems, can’t remember where that inspiration came from: “The Dalliance of The Eagles,” “The Tyger,” Lawrence’s “Snake,” Ferlinghetti’s “Dog,” Donne’s “The Flea,” Christopher Smart’s wonderful “My Cat Jeoffry,” W.C. Williams’ cat with its cautious hindfoot lowered into the empty flowerpot, and many more, plus “The Windhover,” which is why I’m sitting this day with Hopkins’ Complete Poems in my lap. Compiling the little anthology was fun and gave me some hope for the course. There are heaps of good poems about Fauna, and maybe we could move along to Flora for the next unit of study, assuming I could find more than those about a sick rose and about daffodils. If I compiled several little anthologies, and the class took turns reading the poems aloud, then time would fly and there would be little need for me to produce large amounts of “analysis,” which, naturally, I wasn’t going to be able to do, anyway. So, this quiet afternoon, I turn my eyes from the western light to “The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord,” and the opening lines (I will get them!):

 I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding . . .

            I read the lines over and over, more at a dead loss each time. What needed to be interpreted here? What could I say about this? What to say? I stared at the lines, reading them again. Then, in the midst of this confusion of fear, diapers, words, poverty, and various desperations, God spoke. I know it was God, because when God speaks, your life is changed thereafter. And God said, I think: the work of art is itself.

Whereupon what happened is that I wasn’t reading any longer “I caught this morning morning’s minion,” but “I,” “caught,” “this,” “morning,” “morning’s” “minion,” and on through the poem. It was not anything like the dictionary definition of each word; I after all knew that; but at the moment this happened, each word appears to be, is held inside of, is surrounded by a luminous light of its own entire existence, the blood-line of the dictionary included, each word offered like a grail cup of exact, specific, life-giving aliveness. It is not I who needs to glow; each word glows, like an illuminated “M” or “K” on a page of the Lindisfarne Gospels. I sit there, I don’t know what is happening, but I know I suddenly know what I’m seeing. I look up at the yellow window. Each window is yellow. The setting sun is the setting sun. Back to the page. Each word is a word. I can hardly believe this, or believe in the terribleness of the ordinary: window, setting sun, word.

I must have gone into a sort of trance. I am sitting on the floor, back against a wall, facing the west, holding a book. What I suddenly know is this: the poem is it. It is over with. It is intact. I can’t hurt it. I can ignore it, but I can’t hurt it. It is it, word by word, no matter what activity I verb-around at. The work is done. My job is to point to the work. Here it is. And it blazed-up off the page: revelation, ecstasy, transport, beautiful completion, word by word.

As dutiful graduate students, we’d all taken careful lecture notes on “Hopkins’ debt to Duns Scotus; love for; theories of ‘itness’ & ‘whatness.’” And here it was, of course, all the itness, and the whatness, just as they both wrote that it was, did exist. It, whatever it is, speaks itself. No mere terms, any longer, for me. And as I sat there, astonished, I turned to “Spring,” and then to “The Caged Skylark,” and I could read those, too. And I saw that this was so about all art: a painting is on its canvas, a sculpture is on its pedestal, a novel has already had the last word. Shakespeare, presumably having finished his works, is dead. Great Expectations does not require my workshopping. Here’s what it is to read! Nothing is about me, and I am handed freedom. I have nothing to do but see and say what has been done: to see and say it’s tremendous, actual, emphatic, clear, and above all, final life. Here it is. I turn to Gregory Corso’s poem about his pants, expecting such a subject might not be suitable to this new realization, but each word again is fired like an illuminated letter.

Those of you reading this who have been in my classes will see that this is not the usual instructional handout that I write 10 or 12 of, per term. I’m describing a mystical experience; I don’t know how else to word it; and I hope only to reproduce it as clearly as possible. I have no advice to give you, for once. I mean, could I write “read Chapters 3 thru 9, work in your journals, don’t be late with this next paper, and have a mystical experience”? I know I had prayed for years. What I mean is that I had worked with patience and determination, and that this work was like prayer. In that sense, now that I look back on this afternoon’s experience, I see that I had made myself ready for this complete, unexpected surrender to the absolute existence of the other; and, when it happened, my mind broke, all my spurious expertise, in a splintering of shell, like an egg thrown against a rock. As all of us know this surrender sexually, or maybe only sexually, it was that, too. Or, that moment told about often in the lives of saints, struggling to say what it is like, when religion, surrender, joy, swoon, and sexuality, work, and holy illumination, sit down at the table together at last, to talk, clink cups, and look at each other knowing they are comrades to the marrow. And it was an ancient moment, a commonplace moment, one that has happened many times over many years to many people; so it was for me, as though at last, with even modern religious patience (not much, in the long run of things), I’d been rewarded for my faithfulness and told to sit down, too.

All of this happened in several minutes. The little family had not even returned from the park. I remember that I got up off the floor and started some supper. I’ve been teaching because of this sunlit, sunset moment, ever since. Like anyone who has undergone such an experience, call it “mystical” if it seems to fit, I became very difficult to work with, thereafter. Though, thereafter, I kept reading about such an experience, and these connections between art works and mystical states; between work and prayer; between art and prayer; prayer and geometry: in G.K. Chesterton, in William Morris, in studies of the Gothic cathedrals, and most informative to me, I believe, in Simone Weil’s essay “Reflections On The Right Use Of School Studies With a View To The Love Of God,” and in Jeanette Winterson’s calling what I saw “the solid presence of art,” and her amazing sentence, blistering, “All painting is cave painting on the low dark walls of you and me, intimations of grandeur.” Both these quotes are from her essay “Art Objects” from her book of the same title; and you must read “objects” as a verb, not a noun, which is Winterson’s intention. I give these essays, Weil’s and Winterson’s, to classes when occasion or subject allows.

We recently replaced our kitchen Queen Atlantic, very old, with a tidy, tight, new Irish stove. The Queen Atlantic, though glamorous to look at, ate a quarter-cord of birch in one gulp. Or so it seemed. It was a Giantess of Inefficient Gluttony. She would roar and smack her lips uncontrollably for 35 minutes, drive us from the room with hot smoke, and then pouf! go out. The new Irish stove nibbles all day on 3 short logs, sleeps through the night on a few coals, and perks up first thing in the morning when fed 4 chopsticks.

I had been eating cords of Wordsworth, of Milton, of anybody for years, as though there were not enough poems in the forest to keep me warm. I gobbled, sent forth a few sparks, and went out. Following my experience sitting on the floor in the Ann Arbor apartment, I can live on a line for several months, sometimes. Lately there are two lines, one from Macbeth: “No, this my hand will rather/ The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/ Making the green one red.” And the other from Section 47 of “Song of Myself,” but I’ll here cite the entire short stanza:

I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,

(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)

Our own soul has to yearn for a long time to understand, even if “yearning” feels to us like an inferior activity, something meager and humble-pie, a bit disgraceful at our age, and definitely not smart. I know for certain, because of the experience against the wall that I had, that no poem, novel, play, anything, will show itself to us because of any theory we apply to it, but will only show if we sit, look, and patiently wait to see. When we fall in love with art, we are on fire, forever. A slow steady burn of it. 3 to 8 words, one pencil sketch, can keep us going all night. 4 poems, at most, plus one novel, a short one: what a great semester that could be. And then we’d all come down to staring at the flames, and when we finally acted it would be like coming forward to a big communal fire-pit and adding our own twig.

Alice Bloom

Unemployed: Fired By A Poem

 Word by word by word, the words of a work of literature are on the page. Where else would they be? To explain this banality, I’ll backtrack a bit to when I learned to read.

I was hiding in my bedroom, sitting on the floor against one wall, looking into a bank of windows yellow with the late August setting sun, and holding a copy of the complete poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Did I have 2, or already 3 children by then? The apartment was quiet, my mother having taken them off to the park for an hour. My husband was in medical school, I had my first real job at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and had been assigned for the coming term the course “Intro. to Poetry 252.” Junior faculty seldom talked to, seldom were spoken to, or saw the then Chairman in the halls, and were assigned our courses in a note from his secretary, Mr. Marble, and Mr. Marble had written to me that I was “down for 252, Sec. 10 & 11.” There were 99 members of the English Department that year, 3 of us women: a former nun, an ex-Army colonel, and me. Don’t ask, okay? Our building was literally organized like a slave-ship, with those who rowed below having offices in the cellar next to the furnace ducts; and, lofty elevator floors above us, the offices of those who edited the various Norton Anthologies and the Norton Critical Editions. If Mr. Marble had sent me a memo that I was “down for Astrophysics 349” I wouldn’t have made a sound. Despite my piffling salary, I was the one feeding us. But I was tip-full with the terror that comes exactly of being a fake, and getting paid any amount at all for it. It was going to be a dreadful term.

Poetry and I were not friends. Our mutual disenchantment stemmed from the days of my never being able to see the “deeper meaning,” so that must have been high school humiliation. Later, presented with any poem to “analyze” in any class, I kept my mouth entirely shut and if called upon, ducked and mumbled. Fellow grad. students spoke for 20 minutes without pause about “O Rose, Thou Art Sick,” or whatever, earning such points as could never be mine, and I secretly consoled myself with 1. they had more “imagination,” and 2. better “backgrounds.” I continued to get good grades; I kept my scholarship; but all the time I felt like a successful forger producing hundred-dollar bills hot off my personal press. I was on better ground with novels; but with poetry I was running a riverboat shell game.

Mr. Marble, or the department, did not assign texts, and we could pick our own material for any course. (Unless, of course, we were assigned to teach as “section men,” which even the nun and I were called, for one of the Norton Editors.) I had spent this summer compiling my own little anthology (to take to the print department) of animal poems, can’t remember where that inspiration came from: “The Dalliance of The Eagles,” “The Tyger,” Lawrence’s “Snake,” Ferlinghetti’s “Dog,” Donne’s “The Flea,” Christopher Smart’s wonderful “My Cat Jeoffry,” W.C. Williams’ cat with its cautious hindfoot lowered into the empty flowerpot, and many more, plus “The Windhover,” which is why I’m sitting this day with Hopkins’ Complete Poems in my lap. Compiling the little anthology was fun and gave me some hope for the course. There are heaps of good poems about Fauna, and maybe we could move along to Flora for the next unit of study, assuming I could find more than those about a sick rose and about daffodils. If I compiled several little anthologies, and the class took turns reading the poems aloud, then time would fly and there would be little need for me to produce large amounts of “analysis,” which, naturally, I wasn’t going to be able to do, anyway. So, this quiet afternoon, I turn my eyes from the western light to “The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord,” and the opening lines (I will get them!):

 I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding . . .

            I read the lines over and over, more at a dead loss each time. What needed to be interpreted here? What could I say about this? What to say? I stared at the lines, reading them again. Then, in the midst of this confusion of fear, diapers, words, poverty, and various desperations, God spoke. I know it was God, because when God speaks, your life is changed thereafter. And God said, I think: the work of art is itself.

Whereupon what happened is that I wasn’t reading any longer “I caught this morning morning’s minion,” but “I,” “caught,” “this,” “morning,” “morning’s” “minion,” and on through the poem. It was not anything like the dictionary definition of each word; I after all knew that; but at the moment this happened, each word appears to be, is held inside of, is surrounded by a luminous light of its own entire existence, the blood-line of the dictionary included, each word offered like a grail cup of exact, specific, life-giving aliveness. It is not I who needs to glow; each word glows, like an illuminated “M” or “K” on a page of the Lindisfarne Gospels. I sit there, I don’t know what is happening, but I know I suddenly know what I’m seeing. I look up at the yellow window. Each window is yellow. The setting sun is the setting sun. Back to the page. Each word is a word. I can hardly believe this, or believe in the terribleness of the ordinary: window, setting sun, word.

I must have gone into a sort of trance. I am sitting on the floor, back against a wall, facing the west, holding a book. What I suddenly know is this: the poem is it. It is over with. It is intact. I can’t hurt it. I can ignore it, but I can’t hurt it. It is it, word by word, no matter what activity I verb-around at. The work is done. My job is to point to the work. Here it is. And it blazed-up off the page: revelation, ecstasy, transport, beautiful completion, word by word.

As dutiful graduate students, we’d all taken careful lecture notes on “Hopkins’ debt to Duns Scotus; love for; theories of ‘itness’ & ‘whatness.’” And here it was, of course, all the itness, and the whatness, just as they both wrote that it was, did exist. It, whatever it is, speaks itself. No mere terms, any longer, for me. And as I sat there, astonished, I turned to “Spring,” and then to “The Caged Skylark,” and I could read those, too. And I saw that this was so about all art: a painting is on its canvas, a sculpture is on its pedestal, a novel has already had the last word. Shakespeare, presumably having finished his works, is dead. Great Expectations does not require my workshopping. Here’s what it is to read! Nothing is about me, and I am handed freedom. I have nothing to do but see and say what has been done: to see and say it’s tremendous, actual, emphatic, clear, and above all, final life. Here it is. I turn to Gregory Corso’s poem about his pants, expecting such a subject might not be suitable to this new realization, but each word again is fired like an illuminated letter.

Those of you reading this who have been in my classes will see that this is not the usual instructional handout that I write 10 or 12 of, per term. I’m describing a mystical experience; I don’t know how else to word it; and I hope only to reproduce it as clearly as possible. I have no advice to give you, for once. I mean, could I write “read Chapters 3 thru 9, work in your journals, don’t be late with this next paper, and have a mystical experience”? I know I had prayed for years. What I mean is that I had worked with patience and determination, and that this work was like prayer. In that sense, now that I look back on this afternoon’s experience, I see that I had made myself ready for this complete, unexpected surrender to the absolute existence of the other; and, when it happened, my mind broke, all my spurious expertise, in a splintering of shell, like an egg thrown against a rock. As all of us know this surrender sexually, or maybe only sexually, it was that, too. Or, that moment told about often in the lives of saints, struggling to say what it is like, when religion, surrender, joy, swoon, and sexuality, work, and holy illumination, sit down at the table together at last, to talk, clink cups, and look at each other knowing they are comrades to the marrow. And it was an ancient moment, a commonplace moment, one that has happened many times over many years to many people; so it was for me, as though at last, with even modern religious patience (not much, in the long run of things), I’d been rewarded for my faithfulness and told to sit down, too.

All of this happened in several minutes. The little family had not even returned from the park. I remember that I got up off the floor and started some supper. I’ve been teaching because of this sunlit, sunset moment, ever since. Like anyone who has undergone such an experience, call it “mystical” if it seems to fit, I became very difficult to work with, thereafter. Though, thereafter, I kept reading about such an experience, and these connections between art works and mystical states; between work and prayer; between art and prayer; prayer and geometry: in G.K. Chesterton, in William Morris, in studies of the Gothic cathedrals, and most informative to me, I believe, in Simone Weil’s essay “Reflections On The Right Use Of School Studies With a View To The Love Of God,” and in Jeanette Winterson’s calling what I saw “the solid presence of art,” and her amazing sentence, blistering, “All painting is cave painting on the low dark walls of you and me, intimations of grandeur.” Both these quotes are from her essay “Art Objects” from her book of the same title; and you must read “objects” as a verb, not a noun, which is Winterson’s intention. I give these essays, Weil’s and Winterson’s, to classes when occasion or subject allows.

We recently replaced our kitchen Queen Atlantic, very old, with a tidy, tight, new Irish stove. The Queen Atlantic, though glamorous to look at, ate a quarter-cord of birch in one gulp. Or so it seemed. It was a Giantess of Inefficient Gluttony. She would roar and smack her lips uncontrollably for 35 minutes, drive us from the room with hot smoke, and then pouf! go out. The new Irish stove nibbles all day on 3 short logs, sleeps through the night on a few coals, and perks up first thing in the morning when fed 4 chopsticks.

I had been eating cords of Wordsworth, of Milton, of anybody for years, as though there were not enough poems in the forest to keep me warm. I gobbled, sent forth a few sparks, and went out. Following my experience sitting on the floor in the Ann Arbor apartment, I can live on a line for several months, sometimes. Lately there are two lines, one from Macbeth: “No, this my hand will rather/ The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/ Making the green one red.” And the other from Section 47 of “Song of Myself,” but I’ll here cite the entire short stanza:

I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat,

(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)

Our own soul has to yearn for a long time to understand, even if “yearning” feels to us like an inferior activity, something meager and humble-pie, a bit disgraceful at our age, and definitely not smart. I know for certain, because of the experience against the wall that I had, that no poem, novel, play, anything, will show itself to us because of any theory we apply to it, but will only show if we sit, look, and patiently wait to see. When we fall in love with art, we are on fire, forever. A slow steady burn of it. 3 to 8 words, one pencil sketch, can keep us going all night. 4 poems, at most, plus one novel, a short one: what a great semester that could be. And then we’d all come down to staring at the flames, and when we finally acted it would be like coming forward to a big communal fire-pit and adding our own twig.

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