Sherry Chandler

Hard for even oblivious me to miss the confluence of Ash Wednesday and W. H. Auden’s 100th anniversary.

On my drive home tonight, I learned on All Things Considered more about Auden’s disenchantment with “September 1, 1939,” a poem I discussed at Christmas. It seems he became really disenchanted with it when Bill Moyers wrote words closely echoing the final lines — “We must love one another or die” — into a speech for Lyndon Johnson, a snippet of which was then used for the infamous Daisy campaign ad (video here).

I may not be as critical of the Daisy ad as I should be. Manipulative and cynical yes, but it blew my younger self away at the time. Still, I can see how Auden wouldn’t much like to be used that way.

My favorite Auden poem, predictably enough, has to be the ekphrastic Musée des Beaux Arts, with its wonderful “torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

Below, a holographic copy, compliments of The Library of Congress:

A week or so ago, I See Invisible People introduced us to Edward H. Hagen, of the Institute of Theoretical Biology in Berlin. Mr. Hagan is an Evolutionary Psychologist, whatever that is, who theorizes, among other things, that rape may be an evolutionary adaptation for the following reasons:

High status males may be have been able to coerce matings with little fear of reprisal.

Low status women (e.g., orphans) may have been particularly vulnerable to being raped because males need not have feared reprisals from the woman’s family.

During war, raping enemy women may have had few negative repercussions.

Men who were low status, who were likely to remain low status, and who had few opportunities to invest in kin may have realized reproductive benefits that outweighed the considerable costs (e.g., reprisal by the woman’s family).

With all respect to Mr. Hagan, and a possibly less-than-sincere attempt not to blame the theorizer for the facts, that strikes me as hogwash. Rape’s only usefulness as a reproductive strategy comes when it is used as an instrument of genocide, as we’ve seen it used time and time again in the last several decades. It is an instrument of war and domination.

I am way past outrage at the latest incident of rape that is causing scandal in Iraq. It all just makes me too tired to climb on my soapbox or to discuss the political and/or emotional implications of all this. I suggest you read:

The New York Times

Juan Cole

TPM Muckraker

Baghdad Burning

I have felt that perhaps we should use some caution in how we pulled out of Iraq. But no sensible Iraq policy seems possible under current circumstances. I want us out NOW.

I continue to make my way through Kenneth Rexroth’s American Poetry in the Twentieth Century. Some pithy observations therefrom (a little string of pearls):

• Philosophizing poets have been a dime a dozen in our epoch but [Wallace] Stevens is the only one who is actually a philosopher. (p.65)
• If the mind can be so constructed, the sensitivity so attuned, principle so unfalteringly adhered to, it is quite possible to produce poetry in which there are no mistakes. This does not mean that the verse of Wallace Stevens should be a model for others; it should not, for that very reason. It is the achievement of an individual poet as a unique being—a style. (p.68)
• The word “precious” is usually a term of condemnation. For Marianne Moore it is the highest possible praise. (p. 68)
• The important thing to remember about Gertrude Stein is that she is nowhere near as deep as she seems. She always said she meant literally whatever she said, and indeed she did. (p. 75)
• A dying social order, a dead language, a value system emptied of meaning—to assault the Old World with the learned arrogance of T. S. Eliot … is to assault it with pride and pride goeth before a fall. William Carlos Williams subverted it with humility. He has been a Taoist revolutionary—”Water seeks always the lowest place and washes away mountains.” (pp 77-78)

Fashion tends to be turning away from some of Rexroth’s opinions, especially about the relative worth of Eliot/Pound and Williams. Still, I find these thoughts worth pondering in trying to develop something like a prosody of my own. And it’s refreshing to find some one who actually considers Williams the deeper thinker.