The Radiant Sisters

Clearly, my blog has gone into abeyance while I work on Pleiades, but to tide you over, here's a poem, "On the Beach at Night" by Walt Whitman, that I found while doing research for mentions of the Pleiades in literature.

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

Of note: my play is about Jupiter (Zeus) and the Pleiades, and long before I read this poem, I had planned for my play to take place in a summer house on Walt Whitman's native Long Island, with some key scenes occurring "on the beach at night."

Also of note: I found two different versions of this poem online, the one above, and a version where the Pleiades are referred to as "delicate brothers" and "radiant brothers." I had heard that Whitman compulsively revised his poems, but never seen such a clear-cut example! It seems that when the poem was originally published in Leaves of Grass in 1871, it was "brothers," but twenty years later, it had changed to "sisters." Did he revise it to make it less shocking/controversial? After all, if the Pleiades are always referred to as the Seven Sisters, it's a gender reversal to portray them as brothers, and a phrase like "delicate brothers" would have served as a big sign-post pointing to Whitman's homosexuality.

Then again, according to another website I found, the Pleiades have always had an association with homosexuality -- I suppose because they are seen as such a strong feminine influence that, when they appear in a man's astrological chart, they signify effeminacy or homosexuality? But I enjoyed this astrologer's positive re-interpretation of the Pleiades (seeing them not as victims, but "divine sisters on a voyage to true individuality and rebellion against social expectations... a reminder to those who would follow in their steps of revolution, promising that all burdens endured would lead to a greater brightness that would withstand the darkness of man's own ignorance") and his discovery of an ancient text that assigned a virtue and a color to each of the seven sisters. One of my challenges while writing Pleiades has been to develop each sister as an individual character -- when the myths don't give them much in the way of individual personality. And I get a kick out of this esoteric astrological stuff.

Odes for Obama

Like many other people, I didn't think much of the poem that Elizabeth Alexander wrote and delivered on Inauguration Day. The Guardian has a good take-down of it, echoing many of the criticisms that I had when I first encountered it.

I'll admit that it's hard for me to get into contemporary poetry, and I have very defined prejudices about what I like in a poem--my opinions are more rigid on this matter than they are regarding plays, movies, or novels. Basically, I think poems should have structure. This could be rhyme (and unfashionable though it is, I love a well-deployed rhyme) but it doesn't have to be. It could be a systematic patterning of images, a vigorous rhythm, and/or playful use of sounds. I also like conciseness: I prefer a series of strong, vivid impressions to long abstract musings about "poetic" topics like love or death. In terms of poetic diction, I hate the self-consciously lofty and discursive, and prefer startling but precise juxtapositions of words. So generally speaking, I guess I'm an Imagist.

And, like the King of the Imagists, "Uncle Ez" Pound, I'm ambivalent about Walt Whitman, the inventor of free verse and father of American poetry. Stuff like "Song of Myself" is undeniably powerful, and it has a sense of structure and a vigor--great, swingy rhythm!--that I love. But I think that Whitman eventually became a parody of himself. I was disgusted when I first read Whitman's "The Runner" in my high school poetry textbook--I thought it anticlimactic and needlessly wordy. This is the entire poem:

On a flat road runs the well-train'd runner,
He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais'd.

To me, this is flat and prosy--just like Ms. Alexander's Inauguration poem. E.g. "Built brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean and work inside of" has two cliches ("brick by brick" and "glittering edifices"), plus a jarring example of ending a sentence with a preposition, all in two lines--argh! And there must be a more interesting way to express the sentiment "keep clean and work inside of," too.

So I asked myself what I'd have done in this situation, and thought about Obama, and the "O" logo so prominent in his campaign. I began playing around with that letter, its sound and its shape--patterning a poem around the "o" vowel and the idea of circles. As I've said before, I think constraints spur creativity, and I think here they helped me avoid cliches. (Indeed, my poem is almost a reverse-lipogram: only 13 of its words do not contain the letter "O.") While I realize that what I've written would never pass muster at an actual inauguration, because punning on the new President's name is too much like creating a personality cult, I'd like to share it with you. If nothing else, it's an attempt to express my idea that poetry should be concise, startling, playful, vigorous.

1/20/09
By Marissa S–

O for this bauble-blue globe, our home,
O oxygen flowing into lungs’ lobes!
O solar voltage, grown blossoms, o storms,
Ocean foam, open coasts;
O spiro, o spero.

O the rotunda and Capitol Dome!
O echoing forebears, o voices in stones!
O sound of groans, slave-holds choking close;
O loads borne, o holes torn,
O torrents of bullets.

O voyages over, beyond and below!
O circles, o cycles, coalescence in one!
O folding toward focus, no goal too remote...
Sole moment. Souls, only.
O sore, soaring hope.