Comments on: The soul grows refined

By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:17:10 +0000

“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”
Frank O’Hara (yes?), “Meditations in an Emergency,” November 1954 issue of Poetry.
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By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:03:27 +0000

You’re all mistaken. “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” was obviously written by Sir Francis Bacon, later plagiarized and published by Sir Francis Drake, after which it was lost and forgotten, resurfacing in 1932 when W.H. Auden was rummaging through a trunk he’d found at the bottom of the English Channel during one of his many famed diving expeditions. Auden, hating the poem but realizing its potential historical value, kept it secret until a young student named Frank O’Hara came along, at which point Auden, feeling mischievous one day, slipped the poem into one of O’Hara’s notebooks while he wasn’t looking. O’Hara never noticed it, however, and the poem was only rediscovered in 1989 by a less-than-reputable Daytona Beach-area antiques dealer, who mistakenly attributed it to O’Hara. The poem was then published under O’Hara’s name for the first time, in the April 2, 1990 issue of The New Yorker, which was, you’ll remember, just a few weeks before Noah’s Ark was found inside the basement of the Empire State Building.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:41:14 +0000

>Kent, I thought Joshua Clover wrote “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” At least that’s what Tosa Motokiyu told me when I had a Coke with him not long ago…
Now there’s a picture for you: The baby Clover, pounding away at his portable Royal, in his red diaper!
Kent
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:09:36 +0000

Kent, I thought Joshua Clover wrote “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” At least that’s what Tosa Motokiyu told me when I had a Coke with him not long ago…
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By: Michael Gushue

Michael Gushue — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:41:43 +0000

Here, here.
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:22:18 +0000

One of the deepest and most beautiful acts of friendship in poetry may have been Kenneth Koch’s composition of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” and then attributing the poem to his beloved late friend, Frank O’Hara.
Kent
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:13:36 +0000

(I sent this in yesterday – guess it got lost.)
Thanks, Unreliable, that really made me laugh! Goodbye, the last of my midnight blues. Here’s one for you.
Don, something about the way you referred to extravagence made me think you had changed the sense of it. In Gornick’s sense, I think of the emotional extravagence of romantic friendships between women, before such extravagence was turned into “sickness” around 1900.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:40:27 +0000

P.S. That tear blurred my vision, evidently; sorry for the typo up there, friends!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:07:53 +0000

John, thank you for so aptly remembering the Golden Anniversary issue of Poetry! Here’s what Henry Rago said in the foreward:
“This issue of Poetry celebrates fifty years of uninterrupted monthly publication. Its editor dedicates it to the memory of the founding editor of this magazine and his first friend in the world of poets, Harriet Monroe.
What seems most personal in this dedication – an act of piety that has been the chief hope of more than seven years – may also suggest the broadest public meaning: this anniversary will commemorate countless other such friendships, and with them the austere devotion at their center. A few years before his death Wallace Stevens called Poetry “a kind of hearth”: “It gives us in return for our daily support chiefly itself but in addition it gives, what every hearth gives, a familiar fellowship.”
For Aristotle the word “friendship” was sufficiently free of any hint either of solipsism or of collusion to suggest a systematic treatise, the gentlest moment of his Ethics. They are freinds who share a friendship for what is good, and in that good…”
I had to wipe a tear away as I typed that!
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By: john

john — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:25:29 +0000

I’m visiting family & friends at my ancestral home, and so away from my books, but the comments here recall to mind words of wallace Stevens, quoted by Henry Rago in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of “Poetry” magazine (forgive my ineptitude with code for italics), which, alas, I will have to paraphrase,
“We return to ‘Poetry’ as to a kind of hearth, for the fellowship and friendship that is found there.” (Too many “f”s — forgive me, dear readers, and forgive me, shade of Wallace Stevens.)
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By: Michael Gushue

Michael Gushue — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:25:56 +0000

great topic, though too large to tackle in a comment. Edward Thomas’ and Robert Frost’s friendship is worth looking at on this subject.
Also, for a deeper context on Montaigne, David Bolotin’s “Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the Lysis” is an excellent and thought-engendering book.
Tangentially, at my favorite eatery along Route 130 in New Jersey, the waitress used to say “Honey, the only thing around here that’s refined is the sugar.”
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By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:47:50 +0000

Mary, I post this especially for you, because it is meant to be: Dorothy Parker, “The Little Hours.”
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:28:30 +0000

Thank you, Michael, Mary, and Brian.
Just to clarify, Mary, the word “extravagance” is Gornick’s, taken from the quoted part of her essay, above. But it’s a great question to wonder about the sense of the word as it appears there!
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By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:31:05 +0000

I have been a member of groups, and I have had lasting
relationships; but I, essentially, am a loner. Nonetheless,
most humans, it seems to me, want and appreciate deep
friendships. The closest I’ve come to experiencing
friendships of any depth have been due to my imagining
them. I doubt that anyone who has encountered me,
other than perhaps a relative, ever had an intense
feeling for me. I simply do not easily fit in; therefore,
I am tolerated, but seldom arouse serious attention.
I was cute when I was younger, and I still look younger
than I am; but that is just a body thing, and I do not
have much of a body. Actually, I tend to ignore my
body because I prefer mental activity over physical
activity. So/ what you write about here/ I accept as
true; and I feel that/ more now than ever in my life/
reminding us of the presence and strength of human
emotions, especially the positive ones, is vital. Peace.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:16:17 +0000

I couldn’t fall asleep for crying
Weird, this happened to me last night. Probably not the place to admit such a thing, but they call me brave. Don’t worry, though, it doesn’t happen often.
I had books in front of me – but alas, these books…
Yes, that’s what it was like for me last night. I have books to read. Should I turn on the light and try to read?
Sometimes we turn to our friends, and sometimes we turn to our books, and they seem strangely to be related. Is that an extravagence?
I’ve always found my friends through words – written words. Interesting notion – extravagence. It seems like a basic necessity to me, though perhaps I don’t understand your sense of the word extravagence.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:15:44 +0000

Thanks for this, Don. A passage that I can never read without crying is by, of all the unlikely poets, Kenneth Koch:
I never mentioned my friends in my poems at the time I wrote The Circus
Although they meant almost more than anything to me
Of this now for some time I’ve felt an attenuation
So I’m mentioning them maybe this will bring them back to me
Not them perhaps but what I felt about them
John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank O’Hara
Their names alone bring tears to my eyes
For an opposing view, see Joseph Epstein on Harold Bloom: “In The Western Canon, he reports that whenever he re-reads Bleak House he cries whenever Esther Summerson does, ‘and I don’t think I’m being sentimental.’ In the same book he also reports that he uses the poems of Walt Whitman to assuage grief. ‘I remember one summer, in crisis, being at Nantucket with a friend who was absorbed in fishing, while I read aloud to both of us from Whitman and recovered myself again.’ Poor friend, one feels, poor fish.”
It’s a good line, & Bloom probably deserves it. A certain sentimental (in Schiller’s sense as well as in our colloquial sense) relation to literature need not preclude (indeed should necessitate) a suspicion of it. But when I first read those passages in Bloom, I recognized myself. To let my polemical guard down for a moment, these friendships are the reason I read & write. It’s good to know I’m not alone.
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