From a list of the most interesting list of of finalists ever (so says Ron Silliman), the National Book Award judges picked Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (UC Press) as this year’s winner.

Waldrop, a fixture of the poetry world of Providence, Rhode Island, has been celebrated as a translator (most recently of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal) and as a publisher, with his wife Rosmarie, of Burning Deck Press.

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy is made up of three long poem sequences that mix philosophy and poetry in a style familiar to readers of Waldrop’s fourteen other collections.

“These powerful poems,” says his publisher, “at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.”

Publisher’s Weekly called the collection “entrancing” and the Providence Sunday Journal said it’s “a complex, absorbing work.”

The National Book Award judges said: “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”

Pennsound has a large collection of Waldrop recordings up for those who want deep immersion into the transcendental experience.

For anyone else who just wants a taste of the celebration, here’s a short clip from St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Have the NBAs transcended?  Has this award gone to a notably different poet than it has in the past (2008: Mark Doty; 2007: Robert Hass; 2006: Nathaniel Mackey)?

Many have noted the poetry latent in Sarah Palin’s speech. Now that she’s published a memoir, Going Rogue, many are noting the non-poetry of her non-prose.

But who would have imagined that Palin had a poetic forerunner, a partner in rhyme, a fellow Bard of Bad? Julia A. Moore (1847-1920), popularly called the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” produced reams of writing that soon became known as the worst of the verse. If Palin wrote a poem, I posit, it would be this definitive work of Moore’s.

To My Friends and Critics
(an excerpt)

Perhaps you’ve read the papers
Containing my interview;
I hope you kind good people
Will not believe it true.
Some Editors of the papers
They thought it would be wise
To write a column about me,
So they filled it up with lies.

The papers have ridiculed me
A year and a half or more.
Such slander as the interview
I never read before.
Some reporters and editors
Are versed in telling lies.
Others it seems are willing
To let industry rise.

The people of good judgment
Will read the papers through,
And not rely on its truth
Without a candid view.
My first attempt at literature
Is the “Sweet Singer” by name,
I wrote that book without a thought
Of the future, or of fame.

I own a pink skirt, a pink dress, a pink scarf, a pink coat, three pink sweaters, and six pink shirts. Each time I shop for clothes, my eyes wander toward another rose tee, and my fingers fondle another salmon sarong, and I ask myself, Why?

But I know why. I love pink because I am Woman.

Obviously.

The more serious implications of being Woman—and Literary Woman in particular—have lately drawn a lot of press. First, as poet Steve Fellner noted in his blog, men beat out women four to one in the prestigious, and historically male-skewed, Whiting Awards for emerging writers. Second, in a move that attracted much more attention than the Whiting wrong, Publishers Weekly compiled a boys-only top 10 books list of the year. The extended list of 100 best books featured 29 female writers.

In response, Women in Letters and Literary Arts started a list of their own. The purpose is “to note great books by women that Publishers Weekly missed in their all-male top ten ‘Best Books of 2009.’” Given that Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, and other stars published books this year, the task shouldn’t be too onerous. As of today, the WILLA list features so many books that this blogger felt dizzy at the prospect of counting them.

So many books, in fact, that as I skimmed down the page, one of the central mysteries of the issue emerged—a mystery that doesn’t necessarily pertain to sexism or feminism, though it might. Why the obsession with listing and besting? Does anyone believe in those lists? Are they just conventions that help readers, writers, and publishers navigate a confusing landscape? (Even if everyone agrees they’re just convention, of course, they still matter—they still affect sales and recognition.)

I haven’t noticed anyone puzzling over that question, but Lizzie Skurnick of Politics Daily writes a cutting, entertaining meditation on the subject, and Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin offers the usual biting sound byte:

Women are making their own lists, with no men on it. That’ll teach em! But don’t we expect this now from places like Publishers Weekly? The only surprise being that. . .no one at some point said, “We should put a lady on there, or the feminists are going to make a fuss about it” (or maybe they did and the next line was, “Actually, people might read us if that’s true”).

In unrelated developments that nonetheless appear related, The Guardian has amped up its coverage of Gender across Genres. British writer Joanna Trollope chews on chick lit. Jo Shapcott, who chaired an event called “The Female Poem,” raises the question: “Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the ‘female’ poem?” No one’s sure, which seems like the right answer. In her summary of the event, Shapcott proposes advantages of being a female poet:

The panel was convinced that a poet ought to be an outsider. The edge, the discomfort makes for clearer vision. Maureen Duffy reminded us of the audacity and courage of Aphra Behn in this regard. Virginia Woolf pinpointed the feeling of an outsider beautifully in A Room of One’s Own: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

White space criss-crossed yesterday’s New York Times opinion page like mortar. Uneven in length and width, stanzas gave the impression of crumbling brick. Poem titles appeared painted on, recalling graffiti.

In light of the endless debate over Whether Good Political Poetry Exists, the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a wall of poetry–a throwback to the days when poems regularly appeared in newspapers–gave me a case of the grins. The poetry wall struck me as an editorial eye-roll, a visually complex, literarily ambitious “duh.” (Just the same, it’s worth bearing that debate in mind while reading these poems, which, like the rough-hewn wall, can feel uneven.)

The poetry wall is an appropriately international effort. American poets Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, C. K. Williams, Bruce Weigl, and Mark Doty, many of whom write on social and political themes, contributed; so did the European writers Zafer Senocak, Tomaz Salamun, Vera Pavlova, and Ewa Lipska. My favorite piece of masonry is Pavlova’s conclusion:

Under 11/09/89,
my diary says:
“Natasha lost a front tooth,
Liza for the first time
stood up in her crib
on her own.”

You wonder: had the speaker not yet heard the news? Was she ignoring it? Did she not understand the significance of the day? Or is the point that the significance of such a day lies not in what newspapers report, but in what diaries record, and that these kinds of events are sometimes, but not always, distinct? And if they are, why, and how?

Speaking of “how,” Marie Howe—whose poems so gracefully insist on the ordinariness of the extraordinary, and vice-versa—writes that the wall went up, “and that was that. People / lived and died, and married.” She describes watching TV, and noting how Berliners “touched the faces of their loved ones / and ran their hands over their heads and hair.” Her intimate moments go public, like diary pages ripped out and blown onto the street.

The title of the work by Salamun, a Slovenian poet, is nearly a poem in itself. “Remembrance of a Yugoslav” could suggest that the poem features a Yugoslav’s reminiscences, or that the poem remembers a Yugoslav—a gesture, perhaps, toward the idea that since Yugoslavia no longer exists, identification as Yugoslavian survives only in memory.

Take a look, if you haven’t already. What do you think of the poems?

In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

Let’s begin with the conservative translation project, guided by ten commandments of sorts. One warns against “emasculation,” urging translators to avoid “unisex, ‘gender inclusive’ language.” Socialist incursions into Biblical text present problems, too (in one edition of the Bible, they write, “the socialistic word ‘comrade’ is used three times”). The authors of the Wikipedia-style page detailing this undertaking anticipate some discomfort with their ideas: “liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds,” they write.

In analyzing this project, where does one begin?

The first word of the first sentence of the first book of the Bible, naturally.

With Milton’s opening in mind, I decided to compare and contrast their version of Genesis 1:1 with the King James translation. The latter reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth.” This makes sense; the first word of Genesis is “B’reisheet,” meaning “In the beginning.” The “Proposed Conservative Translation,” by contrast, reads: “God created heaven and earth in the beginning.” The site provides the following “analysis” as explanation: “The first word is God.”

All right. But it isn’t. Also, the explanation itself rings of the King James translation of the Gospel According to John (”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). If only they could offer a Miltonic defense for the revision–something about Classical syntax, perhaps.

Moving on to the second word of Genesis. Over in the Low Countries, academic Ellen van Wolde is scrutinizing the Hebrew verb “bara.” She argues that it means not “created,” as traditionally understood, but “separated.”

According to The Telegraph, she based this conclusion on the observation that God always “created” in plurals: “God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” Genesis according to van Wolde, then, begins: “In the beginning, God separated heaven and earth.” The idea that heaven and earth predated humans appears in other ancient texts, she writes.

But let’s not dither. The third word of Genesis is Elohim, or God, whose details, physical and otherwise, have provided fodder for R. Crumb. While crafting his recent comic book Genesis, which hews closely to the King James text, he told Time:

He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

(See picture at top.)

If this is getting to be too much, why not eschew that troubling sentence altogether? In his forthcoming tome A Literary Bible, David Rosenberg treats the Bible as a literary work rich with fissures and mysteries. Rather than insist on tidiness, as the conservative translators appear to, he delights in the work’s innate messiness. He writes:

The Bible is a deeply complex text, and its primitive passages are set in a sophisticated writer’s looking back, so it’s the wrong material for literal-minded comedians and artists, who are prone to react before they think. My translations, whether they render the Bible as strange or strangely familiar, engage the ancient texts in contemporary terms. I do not seek to embellish or alter the originals, but mainly to restore the original experience of reading them.

That original chaos, he suggests, is most generative.

Writers keep writing about the end of writing.

The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?

There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak.  Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?

And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).

*

They Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: As Poetry Perishes, Prison Population Soars

CHICAGO — As a result of poetry’s slow yet unquestionable death, droves of impoverished versifiers — writers who once worked as teachers or editors, or who relied on grants, fellowships, and publications for financial survival — have been filling the nation’s debtor’s prisons.

The first to note the phenomenon were the few remaining poets still conducting outreach workshops in jails. They were surprised by their students’ enthusiastic participation and polished writing. The only problem, reported one instructor, was a high degree of competitiveness among her pupils; one student described another’s work as “unbearingly knowing, with a jangling quality that hearkens to Pope.”

A guard described walking down the cellblock and finding prisoners in what appeared to be collusive discussion. He cocked his gun and approached with caution, only to discover what one prisoner confirmed as a “collegial conversation” on “Islands, Isolation, and Themes of Imprisonment in Early Donne.”

Another guard witnessed a tête-à-tête between an older and a younger prisoner occurring in the former’s cell. Demanding the reason for this meeting, the younger prisoner mentioned he was seeking direction on his dissertation, an exploration of the Beat aesthetic.

This reporter secured an interview with the younger prisoner.  “After my M.F.A., I was unsure what to do with myself,” the man explained. “I was several thousand dollars in debt, and thinking about a PhD, but I kept hearing the discipline of English had died. When I learned that several of my favorite poets and scholars had gathered in this debtor’s prison, I jumped at the chance. I’ll be here for about 5-7 years, which should be enough time to teach some composition courses to younger prisoners, and get in a good draft of my dissertation.”

Upon further questioning, the younger prisoner clarified that he had, in fact, sneaked into the debtor’s prison.

“I’m happy here,” he said. “We’ve even founded a school of sorts – the Prison School of Poetry. We’re largely influenced by the works of Sir Walter Raleigh and the bards of the Irish independence movement, who wrote songs and poems on the eves of their executions.”

Report submitted from within debtor’s prison. Having endured numerous lectures on “the death of journalism,” this reporter decided to move in herself.

*

It’s hard to imagine an obituary for poetry until we know exactly why and when it will die, but here’s how one might start.

Poetry, Remembered as Gentle Source of Readerly Exaltation, Murdered in Bath

Poetry, an esteemed verbal art relying on compression, form, metaphor, or other means to achieve heightened literary and aesthetic effect, died Thursday when longtime companions Prose, Technology, and Incomprehension initiated a brutal attack at Poetry’s home in New Jersey. Poetry was at least 4,000 years old.

*

It’s equally hard to speculate on the aftermath of poetry’s death, but we can be confident New Mexicans will play a prominent role.

In “Desert Places,” Poetry Cited — and Sighted

ROSWELL—Since poetry’s demise last January 23, believers here and in other remote locations across America claim the form is not dead at all.

Mary McPherson, 32, was driving down Clovis Highway when she noticed the air shimmering strangely above the pavement. Scientists would cite extreme heat as the reason for the phenomenon. But McPherson has another opinion.

“It was a moment of loveliness that seemed loaded with significance,” she said. “No one will believe me, but I swear there was poetry in it.”

Robert Hache, 65, reported an equally uncanny event at the grocery store. “I was passing through the soup aisle, and suddenly I heard someone say, ‘Oops! Oops! I spilled the soups,’” he remarked. “It reminded me of the poetry I used to read when I was little. Everyone tells me that poetry is dead, but I’m not so sure.”

Psychologist Sinda Turner at the University of New Mexico described these apparitions as a normal element of grieving. “We tend to keep seeing the departed, in various senses, for years after the death,” she said. “Think of Elvis.”

She said she’s attempted to confirm the death of poetry with colleagues in the university’s poetry MFA program, but could not find the poetry professors.  “People say they’ve moved to prison, where they’ve founded a new school, and have already published several anthologies,” she said. “I’m not sure what to make of that. New Mexicans are very imaginative.”

Was William Safire a poet?

No.

He was a Nixon speechwriter, a conservative pundit, a four-time novelist, and a funny, fastidious observer of English usage.

But can we detect his influence, however great or small, on such dextrous manipulators of contemporary verse as Matthea Harvey, Heather McHugh, and Paul Muldoon (among others, perhaps including you, dear commenter)?

Yes.

And could anyone encounter a poem about a bartender, say, without recalling Safire’s column on bartenders, barmen, barmaids, barkeeps, innkeepers, and so forth?

I certainly can’t.

Some background:

Like you, I attended the scariest high school in the world. Like Safire, I attended one of New York City’s “specialized high schools” for science and mathematics. In my befuddling ninth-grade math class, I didn’t appear special so much as dyspeptic – but during those lessons, to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” William Safire was my Tums, my Maalox, my Zantac, and my Prevacid.

My math teacher’s hair would flop like a fish as he dodged around the classroom, explicating proofs in a gruff Brooklyn accent. Weathering his whirlwind of charts and graphs, probabilities and equations, I comprehended little, save that he loved Safire’s “On Language” column. Every now and again, he would pause to mention it, and one day he asked whether any of us read it, too. I said I did.

That moment struck like lightning in a storm, bringing with it illumination and connection. Suddenly my math teacher – let’s call him Mr. Carp – seemed just like me. He, too, marveled at the distinction between “enormity” and “enormousness,” and preached the equivalency of “comprise” and “include.” He knew that language, like people, could stumble, march, or dance, and that in Safire’s column, language jitterbugged. He evolved from challenger to ally, from stranger to friend.

I fancy I evolved in his eyes, too – from perennially baffled to potentially curable. True, I continued to sweat at the touch of a tangent, to squint at the squiggles and arrows of logical proofs. But I did learn that the logic of wordsmiths functions as follows:

IF a lackluster math student loves William Safire’s “On Language” column, AND a devoted math teacher loves William Safire’s “On Language” column, THEN an unlikely bond will develop between them.

I daresay even that:

An unlikely bond will develop between a lackluster math student and a devoted math teacher IF AND ONLY IF both love William Safire’s “On Language” column.

That bond expressed itself most frequently when we encountered an infelicitous phrase in a word problem. The scene usually played out as follows:

Mr. Carp reads a problem aloud while I think about lunch. He concludes: “Hopefully, the ladder will still be upright when the boy returns an hour later.” He points at me. I gaze back, alarmed. He announces: “As Abigail knows, and as Safire would surely point out were he in class with us now, the adverb ‘hopefully’ could suggest the ladder is itself hoping for something, which introduces an unhelpful vagueness. The sentence should read, ‘The boy hopes the ladder will await him when he returns.’” An approving nod in my direction. And then a return to the swirls of sines and confusions of cosines.

Perhaps Mr. Carp, who hopped around the room enforcing rules of logic, wasn’t so different from the amateur linguist who jauntily emphasized accuracy along with creativity, flexibility within form.

***

Now, a selection of wordplay-centric reminiscences of Safire — and an invitation to add yours below:

The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!! — Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times

But he delighted in the infinite variety and power of language and covered the subject from all angles: the arcane origins of newly vogue phrases, acceptable grammatical innovations and lamentable passings, jargon and, his word for its blogosphere corollary, “blargon”; metaphors, euphemisms, malapropisms and “bonapropisms,” a word he coined for serendipitously appropriate misspeaks. Safire was an early victim of alliteration-addiction syndrome. — Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star

It wasn’t that the words were unknown, although “nabob” was a stretch, derived, as it was from an antique term from India’s Mogul empire. But when they were strung together — “nattering nabobs of negativism” — and issued from the mouth of Spiro Agnew, they became magically, memorably, melodically meaty. Turned on the critics of the Vietnam war, they were like the thrust of a foil, the stroke of a clever, graceful warrior. — OregonLive.com

Credit Safire with preserving his loyalties. For years, he relished making mincemeat of liberals as much as refusing to mince his puns. In 1994, Safire was calling the Clinton White House “the Whitewater House.” He wrote of Agnew in 1995, “His two-timing was out of joint.” — Todd Gitlin, The New Republic

In a recent Slate article, Ron Rosenbaum explores uses and abuses of the word “genius,” suggesting:

Maybe genius has been, if not democratized, more widely and thinly distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a precious few…. Maybe we no longer live in the kind of romantic age that created Byron, the template of genius.

Or maybe we do.

Following the announcement of the 2009 MacArthur fellowships (which honored poet Heather McHugh, among others, with $500,000), the media have continued the tradition of calling the grants “genius” awards — “creating” genius where the MacArthur Foundation planned merely to give money. It turns out the Foundation abstains from the nebulous business of christening genius (or so it thinks):

We avoid using the term “genius” to describe MacArthur Fellows because the term connotes a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess. The people we seek to support express many other important qualities: ability to transcend traditional boundaries, willingness to take risks, persistence in the face of personal and conceptual obstacles, capacity to synthesize disparate ideas and approaches.

I find this paragraph most thoughtful for its use of “connotes,” which allows that “genius” holds no obvious meaning (some would disagree that genius’s chief connotation is intellectual rather than creative or otherwise). I find it most comical for its effect on headlines. The caveat prompts publications to frame the word “genius” within quotation marks, lending the label a vaguely sarcastic ring: “4 Mass. residents awarded ‘genius’ grants,” “Poet’s Wordplay Leads To MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award.” Ouch.

Why such loyalty to this disavowed, difficult term?

One answer is, I suggest, the same that explains high attendance at county fairs: our enthusiasm for enthusiasm — our joy in finding things extraordinary, and saying so (whether or not we know what we’re talking about). If the protean label “genius” tends to simplify, maybe we sometimes like to simplify, to say complexity doesn’t matter, or that certain work surpasses the need for nuanced evaluation: we just know what it is. It’s genius. And if we can’t, in turn, define “genius,” well…pass the corndogs!

But the quotation marks jerk us backward by our sun-faded, hay-permeated collars. “Don’t want to make any big claims, do we?” the quotation marks mutter in our ears. “Don’t want to say anything indefensible, am I right? Always need to be careful? Cynical age, this, isn’t it?” (For some reason the quotation marks, like most killjoys, speak in a British accent.)

Which is why the eschewal of quotation marks on the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog feels so refreshing. Two adjacent headlines announce “Heather McHugh, Poetic Genius” and “Edwidge Danticat, Genius.” Granted, the blog’s authors may have intended to highlight the absurdity of trafficking in grandiose judgments. But the magazine’s appreciation of McHugh and Danticat can’t be denied, and so I prefer to see these phrases as unpunctuated, unadulterated statements of adoration.

Thanks also to that blog for providing McHugh’s response to the use of “genius,” as compact and mysterious as a poem: “How do I feel about the word ‘genius’? Bottled.”

Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:—
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

—Lord Byron

Keats didn’t actually die because of a bad review. But if he had, how would he feel now that Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about him, is garnering so much positive press?

Being dead, he probably wouldn’t feel much of anything. If he weren’t dead, though, his waxen cheeks would flush, his vague eyes focus, his chapped lips tremble. He’d study Entertainment Weekly and Time Out and The San Francisco Chronicle. He’d linger over the blog entries, gasping with pleasure – or horror? “O, for a glass of vintage!” he would whisper, emotions high. It would take him so long to read all the reviews that, unfortunately, he would die before he finished.

And so it is in memoriam to John Keats (1795-2009) that I offer a round-up of numerous, luminous Bright Star reviews. Your blogger found a total of 55, terminating her search only when she could no longer focus her eyes.

(Scouring the Internet for Keatsian kudos, I noted another, perhaps related phenomenon: Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a novel about a poet, has inspired at least 38 articles, including ours. Yes, I counted those too. Perhaps the public’s supposed skittishness about poetry fades when novelists and filmmakers use non-poetic forms to enter the poetic realm?)

Out of respect for the recently departed Keats, I have focused on portrayals of the poet himself, aiming to select the most flattering commentary possible. But out of respect for Truth, which, as you know, is Beauty, I have also tried to maintain objectivity. Here are film reviewers on the poet’s latest reincarnation:

“Self-important scribbler….Keats is clearly a proto–rock star—driven, yet lovable, and always attuned to himself….Artfully tousled hair.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“Tubercular young man…who spends his days sitting with a friend in a darkened room in his house in London or wandering Hampstead Heath in a seeming trance.” – David Denby, The New Yorker

“A bit of a slacker, a little too quick to have his friends pay the bills while he gazes mopily into the distance.” – Stephen Whitty, The Star-Ledger

“Struggling with money, bad reviews, and poor health….Pallid.” – Lou Lumenick, The New York Post

“Pale, intense and faintly wasted.” – David Gritten, The Daily Telegraph

“Penniless and crumpled.” – James Christopher, The Times

“He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

“But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Poems can sometimes help with that.

The Poetry Foundation has these poems available for your perusal today. No offense, fine poems, but kind of a weird list, isn’t it?

I hope no one will mind if I offer Robert Pinsky’s poem “9/11″ here. There’s a lot I like about this poem. Its unapologetically direct title. Its swerves from incisive analysis to granular reportage. Its inclusion of Marianne Moore, Ray Charles, Frederick Douglass, Donald Duck, and Emily Dickinson as American icons. I like the line “The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.” And many other things, but perhaps most of all the poem’s willingness to make large claims, and inclusive claims, at a time in our literary history when such gestures are generally scorned as de trop or naive. I think that takes some nerve, and I applaud it.

9/11

We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched

The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us

But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
That we inscribed with meanings–who keep so few,

More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than “First of May” or “Fourth of July.”
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes

Tell the interrogator their commanding officer’s name
Is Colonel Donald Duck–he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it’s nearly

Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.

Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
Will Rogers was a Cherokee, a survivor

Of expropriation. A roper, a card. For some,
A hero. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve

When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten?–Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,

The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
And on the other side that morning the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed

The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand.
O Americans–as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together

A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?–
Or in the Eighteenth Century clarities

And mystic Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye of the Pyramid watching over us,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle’s head

From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty–
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror

And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those symbols, or Ray Charles singing “America

The Beautiful.” Alabaster cities, amber waves,
Purple majesty. The back-up singers in sequins
And high heels for a performance–or in the studio

In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.

(Robert Pinsky wrote this poem for the September 8, 2002 edition of The Washington Post Magazine; I cut and pasted it from here. You can hear Pinsky read the poem here.)