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Michelle A. Taylor on Patricia Lockwood ("The Ode on Grecian Urn")
1.9k Plays9 months ago
What is a poem worth? What does beauty do to the person who wants it, or to the person who makes it? Michelle A. Taylor joins the pod to talk about Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Ode on a Grecian Urn," a wild and funny and ultimately quite moving poem (which is also, obviously, a riff on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn").
Michelle A. Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Michelle is a scholar of 20th century literature, and more specifically, literary modernism. She is currently finishing her first book, tentatively titled Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism. Her academic essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Modernist Cultures, College Literature, Modernism/ modernity Print+, Literary Imagination, and Modernist Archives: A Handbook, and she has also written essays and reviews for The Point, Post45 Contemporaries, The Fence, Poetry Foundation, the Financial Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. She received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2021, and from 2021 to 2023, she was the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it is my tremendous pleasure today to be talking with Michelle Alexis Taylor. Michelle is an old friend of mine, though it's amazing, I don't know how quickly that has happened, I guess. And the poem that she has, to my delight, chosen for our discussion today is Patricia Lockwood's poem called The Ode on a Grecian Urn.
00:00:32
Speaker
And I'm sure Lockwood is well known to many of our listeners, but we'll have more to say about her, of course, in just a moment. First, let me tell you a little bit more about Michelle, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. She also asked me to say that she is the caretaker of a cat named Orlando.
00:00:58
Speaker
And that is significant for reasons that maybe we'll discover or maybe not. I don't know. Maybe it'll just sort of bleed through the fabric of our conversation. She's a scholar of 20th century literature and more specifically of literary modernism.
Michelle's Academic Work and Writing Style
00:01:16
Speaker
And we can talk about what the distinction may be between literary modernism and 20th century literature. Perhaps those sound like the same thing to some of you.
00:01:25
Speaker
She's finishing her first book right now, which is tentatively titled, Click Lit. That's click like with a Q-U-E. Click Lit, Coterie, Culture, and the Making of Modernism.
00:01:41
Speaker
a book whose chapters cover the intimate writings and hijinks of figures like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gina Barnes, Nancy Canard, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent, so an eclectic mix of
00:02:01
Speaker
of modernist figures, and her academic essays have appeared in places like modernist cultures, college literature, about which more in a moment, modernist modernity print plus, literary imagination, and modernist archives, a handbook,
00:02:21
Speaker
And Michelle is, like many young scholars working today, and like many former guests on the podcast, like me, I guess, someone who has not only been busy writing those kinds of academic articles and books and so on, but is also someone who is writing what we
00:02:46
Speaker
strangely in academia, sometimes called public-facing writing, like what else could writing be? But anyway, and those kinds of essays and reviews have appeared in places like The Point and Post-45 Contemporaries, The Fence, The Poetry Foundation, Financial Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. Michelle received her PhD from Harvard University in English in 2021.
00:03:16
Speaker
where among her teachers was a former guest on this podcast, Stephanie Burt, where among her former colleagues, and now again, current colleagues, another former guest on this podcast, Christopher Spade,
00:03:35
Speaker
Michelle is also as an undergrad, a student of another podcast guest, Lanny Hammer. So the connections here are thick and manifold. And that may be interesting to you. It may not, it is to me. From 2021 to 2023, Michelle Taylor was the Joanna Randall McIver,
00:04:03
Speaker
I hope I've got that right, junior research fellow at St. Hilda's College in Oxford, and she's now much to my delight back in the United States, like I said, where she is a postdoctoral fellow at Emory.
00:04:20
Speaker
So I first met Michelle in writing when she submitted an abstract for a special issue of the academic journal College Literature that I was editing with my friend Bob Volpicelli, who I think, and I can say this, will be a future guest on
Patricia Lockwood's Career and Influence
00:04:43
Speaker
the podcast. So
00:04:44
Speaker
stay tuned for that. Bob and I edited an issue whose organizing rubric, whose title was Poetry Networks, and Michelle sent us a proposal for an essay for that special issue, which we were immediately delighted to accept and which, as I would come to know,
00:05:08
Speaker
forms an important part, I think, of her larger research project, that book that I mentioned earlier. That piece was on T.S. Eliot and some coterie writing that Eliot had done. We can get in, perhaps, to the idea of the coterie. Maybe there will be time to talk about
00:05:25
Speaker
But for those who aren't familiar with that term, Michelle's going to be the authority here who might correct my account of it. But you can think of coterie writing or what a coterie in this sense is as a kind of writing that is circulated within and meant for a kind of small social circle. I suppose a term like small, one would want to define.
00:05:53
Speaker
relative to other kinds of audiences, but we're thinking of texts that circulated privately or semi-privately among friends or fellow travelers. That essay, as I say, was on Eliot's coterie writing.
00:06:11
Speaker
So we took that essay. We were very proud to publish it. It's wonderful. I will provide a link to it in the episode notes. But ever since then, Michelle and I have remained in touch and it's been my pleasure and honor at times to appear on panels with her at conferences and that kind of thing, to exchange work.
00:06:36
Speaker
And I've been following her writing more generally ever since then. And, you know, just I think to give one other example at the kind of other end of whatever spectrum it is on which one defines an audience for this kind of writing. So she read that piece for us about Elliot that appeared in the academic journal College Literature. She also wrote again on Elliot for The New Yorker.
00:07:04
Speaker
That piece, which is also wonderful, is about the recently opened correspondence between Elliot and Emily Hale, or maybe it's wrong to say it's the correspondence between them because it was one side of that correspondence, Elliot's letters, which were fascinating, whose fascinating nature Michelle adroitly
00:07:30
Speaker
draws out for the general reader who doesn't know the backstory. She tells it beautifully. She tells it with great economy and also great wit and curiosity.
00:07:52
Speaker
And you might think those two examples, the academic article, the New Yorker piece, must display very different gifts that this writer has. And to some extent, they do. But also, I guess I want to say that in both kinds, both of those examples as elsewhere in Michelle's work,
00:08:14
Speaker
You see on evidence a balance that I think is hard to strike between, on the one hand, careful archival, biographical, cultural historical research with, on the other hand, elegant and sensitive close readings of literary texts and of
00:08:39
Speaker
paraliterary texts or non-literary texts alongside them. She does it all in a kind of clear and witty and authoritative, writerly style of her own. And so for all of those reasons and many others besides, it's just my delight to have Michelle Taylor on the podcast today.
00:09:02
Speaker
Michelle, you are joining us, I have to say, from the coolest-looking podcast setup that any guest who's appeared on this podcast has been in. You're in Emery's secret podcast lair. How are you doing today? What's going on in Atlanta?
00:09:22
Speaker
Thank you. I don't know if you can see it. I think the glamor lighting might be hiding it, but I'm blushing profusely, which is appropriate if we're thinking intertextually about Keats maybe. I'm good. Shout out to the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship for providing me
00:09:41
Speaker
the coolest room that I have ever done anything in.
Exploration of Lockwood's Ode on a Grecian Urn
00:09:46
Speaker
Good. Well, welcome. I'm really happy to have you here. It's fun to get to do this with you. Of course, you know, as the audience might be thinking, well, I introduced you as a scholar of modernism and of and by that really we mean in particular the sort of writing of the
00:10:05
Speaker
a certain kind of writing of the first half of the 20th century in particular, though its modernism's borders have gotten nothing but foggier, I think, over the years. And that's a good thing for reasons that maybe we can get into. But I think it would be quite a stretch to say that the poet we've chosen for this discussion today is a modernist writer.
00:10:28
Speaker
I sort of gestured in my intro of you to the idea that our audience may well have heard of Patricia Lockwood or have read Patricia Lockwood, but let's not assume that to begin with. Maybe for the totally uninitiated, you could just tell us a little bit about who Patricia Lockwood is and what it sort of
00:10:50
Speaker
how it was that you first of all came to be a reader of hers and then second of all how it was that you came to decide when I asked you to be on the podcast that you would want to talk about this poem in particular.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I wouldn't, in my professional opinion, as a card-carrying modernist, call Patricia Lockwood a modernist, but she does, in the last poem of her second collection of poetry, Motherland, Fatherland, Homeland Sexuals, that poem's called The Hypno-Dome Speaks and Speaks and Speaks.
00:11:31
Speaker
And she has a line in this poem where she says, or the speaker, the Hypnodom says, give me the money for modernism and give me the money for what comes next.
00:11:42
Speaker
So she is a poet. I mean, I was enchanted with her before I read this line. I think this this line further enchanted me with her as a modernist. She's obviously somebody who is invested in various ways in modernism. She often uses modernists for the important intertexts in her work, like in her novel. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
00:12:03
Speaker
So, I wish I could tell you that I'm so cool, and I first encountered Lockwood on the Wild West of weird Twitter where we were all making jokes like, can a dog be twins? But I didn't. I, like so many of her readers, first encountered her
00:12:20
Speaker
through her poem, Rape Joke, which came out right after I graduated from college, and maybe the only poem that I can really point to that has gone viral. It's a poem in which she personifies a rape joke and makes fun of it, but also tells the story of a sexual assault. It is a
00:12:47
Speaker
It is a poem that exemplifies the gifts of hers that I find most compelling, some of those gifts, because it's both extremely funny and uniquely funny. She has a unique sense of humor. She is a brilliant comedian, in contrast to the kinds of comedians that she is spearheading in this poem, the ones who think that the only way that they can get laughs is by joking about sexual assault.
00:13:16
Speaker
So the poem is very funny, but it's also very- Sorry, and when you say, sorry Michelle, when you say this poem, what you're referring to is the rape joke poem, not the poem at issue today. No, no, I mean the rape joke poem, rape joke. But it's also a poem that's very moving, very visceral, very upsetting because it is recounting a sexual assault. And so I was immediately,
00:13:45
Speaker
enamored of her and her ability to kind of walk this line. And then I read her second book with Stephanie in a class, Motherland, Fatherland, Homeland Sexuals, and from then I just sort of followed her career for years.
00:14:07
Speaker
including you reviewed her novel, did you not? Yes, so that second book is 2014, and then she wrote a memoir called Priest Daddy, which is about growing up in, among other places, St. Louis, Missouri.
00:14:22
Speaker
the daughter of a Catholic priest. So her father is a Catholic priest. The way that he's able to have a wife and a family is that he converted to Catholicism after becoming a priest or whatever you call it as a Protestant. So he got a special dispensation from the Pope to keep his family.
00:14:42
Speaker
One of the ways that the church would use her father is that in the wake of a scandal,
Literary Analysis and Techniques
00:14:50
Speaker
they would send him because he would be so reassuring because he had a wife and children. It's framed as her return home, but she thinks about growing up with this very idiosyncratic
00:15:09
Speaker
family. And then she wrote a novel called No One Is Talking About This, which is also very comic and very sad. And she is a literary critic. She writes explosively witty, trenchant criticism for the London Review of Books. And I have enjoyed her in every medium that she has chosen to utilize. And I'm sure I'll continue to enjoy her in
00:15:39
Speaker
every medium she chooses in the future. Yeah, well, that's really helpful background. Yeah, I have to say for people who are not familiar with her work, just look up some of her literary journalism in LRB and
00:15:57
Speaker
It is unlike any other kind of literary journalism you will find. I'm brilliant and funny and pretty constantly illuminating too, I think.
00:16:14
Speaker
I wonder before we get to this particular poem and however it is you might want to set it up for our listeners, Michelle, and whatever it is you might want to say about what led you to... You said a lot in what you were just talking about the
00:16:35
Speaker
rape joke poem, though, you know, perhaps there are people out there who are thinking, well, why aren't we talking about that poem? There are perhaps good reasons why we're not and we can we can talk about why we're not doing that and why we are doing this instead in a moment. But, you know, just in terms of her career, I wonder
00:16:56
Speaker
It's funny, when you were saying just a moment ago telling us about how she was raised in St. Louis, I was like, does Michelle have a thing for writers who were raised in St. Louis? Because I think of you as an Elliot person also, another famous child of that city. But really, my question is not about St. Louis. It is about
00:17:18
Speaker
sort of how you make sense of the place poetry specifically holds in the career of a writer who has been so active and prolific in
00:17:40
Speaker
other genres and forms alongside it. So that's a question that maybe there's an answer to that is a kind of biographical answer or a
00:17:53
Speaker
a sociological answer as it applies to Lockwood in particular. But as I ask it, I also find myself wanting to invite you to contextualize that kind of balancing of modes of writing in a kind of literary history that might include writers that you focus on in your scholarship, like T.S. Eliot, who was
00:18:23
Speaker
perhaps is I think most well known to most people these days as a poet, but who is also a literary critic in really important ways, who is a playwright and who experiments it in a whole variety of forms and that that kind of experimentation is an important part of modernism. So I guess just how do we think about
00:18:45
Speaker
sort of what is there to learn about the status of poetry in contemporary culture, sort of given our noticing of the fact that Lockwood is a poet, but is very active in these other kinds of writing as well. Is that interesting to you? And if so, why?
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, there's so many things to say in answer to that. Obviously, I think you mentioned St. Louis. You're pointing to another very famous poet who is also very well known and widely read for his literary criticism, or at least some of his literary criticism, T.S. Eliot.
00:19:24
Speaker
When I think about this, I think about a debate that Eliot participated in, that other poet critics participated in in various ways, which is the debate about whether a poet should be a critic and what might be the benefit or cost of a poet being a critic as well.
00:19:41
Speaker
Eliot thinks that a poet has to be a critic because you have to, but a critic also has to be a poet because you can't discharge your creative impulse through your criticism. Your criticism has to be this self-negating consideration of the object at hand. And your poetry is this other thing that you're doing where you're sort of, you're fashioning something out of a very complicated ether that surrounds you where you're also self-negating, but to a different end.
00:20:11
Speaker
So he thinks that there has to be this very strong distinction and you have to understand what you're doing with each of those. And you'll do each of those best if you're doing them both separately. Do you think that Eliot lived up to that distinction? No. No one thinks that Eliot lives up to anything that he says about critics. I think he's a great literary critic. I think he's a great literary critic for the reasons that Lockwood is a great literary critic, which is that he's
00:20:36
Speaker
He's kind of, his best bits of literary criticism, I think I have a favorite one, he says, the poet falls in love or reads Spinoza and these two things have nothing to do with each other or the sound of a typewriter or the smell of cooking, but in the mind of a poet,
00:20:54
Speaker
these experiences are always forming new holes. So, you know, there's these moments where you get into a kind of lyric intensity that gets at a beautiful truth, we might say. And this is what Lockwood is doing, except her, which she adds, which Elliot actually, Elliot could be very funny in an extremely caustic and mean way, which I love.
00:21:15
Speaker
I mean, you're about to try to convince me that Elliot was funny. I think it's going to take more convincing, but maybe that's a conversation for another day. Oh, I think he's so mean. He's so mean. That's where I think he's funny. Lockwood, uncontroversially, I mean,
00:21:30
Speaker
I just mean no one would disagree that Lockwood has injected humor into this mix, right? Yeah. Humor is a part of her lyric intensity, if we can use that phrase, tends to involve humor. That's sort of how she does her gut punch. And her criticism, like her poetry, is full of these images and these metaphors that express something that
00:21:59
Speaker
can't or at least shouldn't be expressed in the kinds of critical prose that I enjoy writing. So I think her criticism and her poetry are part of that. She is a, to me,
00:22:15
Speaker
She is a poet in everything she does. Everything that she writes has that brilliance that she brings to her poetry. And I'm a modernist, so I always think about things in modernist terms, but she's constantly finding brilliant new objective correlatives
00:22:36
Speaker
for the thing that she wants to explain or express, whether that's in her memoir or her novel or her essay about meeting the Pope in the London Review of Books. She's always, yeah.
00:22:50
Speaker
So my question for you was sort of follow-up question as you were talking just now was going to be, well, what does it mean to be brilliant in the way that a poet is brilliant? Because of course, other kinds of artists have, presumably, it sounds like you're implying other ways of being brilliant.
00:23:09
Speaker
You answered that question, though you raised another maybe and a simpler one to address, but I think important where you said, you know, she's always got these objective correlatives. Now, for those who don't know, that's a term from Eliot, TS Eliot. I almost called him Tom. I don't know why. Do it. Call him Tom. It was his name, but I'm not buddies with him like that.
00:23:35
Speaker
So that term, objective correlative, is a term of Eliot's. And I take it, Michelle, you're saying that part of what, in your estimation, perhaps as a modernist or just as a Michelle Taylor or whatever, what it is that constitutes and distinguishes poetic brilliance from other kinds of artistic brilliance, perhaps, is that poems or people who are being poetic tend to operate
00:24:03
Speaker
by producing or presenting or discovering these things called objective correlative. So now we need to know what an objective correlative even is. What did Elliot say that was?
00:24:15
Speaker
I don't know that I feel comfortable making claims about all poetry, but certainly much poetry, a lot of poetry, you could say that. Elliot introduces the idea of the objective correlative in an essay called Hamlet and His Problems, which I think is a kind of funny title. That is funny. I admit it. That's a great title, and I wasn't thinking of it. So yeah, you're right. You win. Elliot's funny. He can be.
00:24:43
Speaker
And it's basically, I mean, it's a way of understanding an image. So he thinks an objective correlative is basically a kind of image that is equal to what he sometimes calls like an art emotion or an aesthetic emotion, which is like a more complicated than happiness and sadness and frustration or whatever. There are these kinds of complicated concoctions of emotion that poetry elicits and he has all these theories about how poetry elicits it and how
00:25:10
Speaker
the best way to prepare yourself to have it elicited in you or to elicit it in a reader. But basically, there is an image, there is a fact that is equal to the emotion. The issue with Hamlet is that Elliot cannot figure out why Hamlet is the way that he is. There is nothing in the text to Elliot to justify Hamlet's behavior. There's nothing to which it corresponds.
00:25:38
Speaker
There's nothing to which it corresponds and that's you know, he's like in her life or whatever or yeah, right. Yeah, and and And and that's a you know, it seems like Elliott is criticizing Shakespeare for this But it also you can read the essay and think that is what makes the play so brilliant that that there is this this missing thing. I
00:25:58
Speaker
OK, but so Elliot thinks that's perhaps, but maybe this is more complicated than that, that largely absent from Hamlet. And that's the problem either with Hamlet, the character Hamlet, the player, both or something. But that poems tend to have this. And so would I be right to sort of where, you know, whereas Hamlet lacks it, a typically good poem, according to Elliot, will will have things like this in an objective relatives in it.
00:26:27
Speaker
And so when you were talking about the emotion, that was interesting to me. You said it's not a simple thing like happiness or sadness or whatever. Would I be right to say that it's Eliot's view that the most efficient form, because we can't do it with a word like happy or sad or even a more interesting and nuanced emotional word like, I don't know, fill in the blank, whatever your favorite kind of nuanced emotional word might be,
00:26:52
Speaker
that actually the most efficient and condensed form of making that emotion legible to a reader or to the poet who's writing the poem is the image itself or the thing, whatever it is, that that's the package that sort of
00:27:15
Speaker
best does the work of kind of carrying that emotional state from poet to reader. Is that something like that? And I think, I mean, Elliot, no one could accuse him of
00:27:30
Speaker
clarity even though he's a very clear writer in some ways which is one of the other things I like about him but in other ways you know he has these he's always throwing these terms around and not entirely defining them and and they're very slippery and so art emotion is one of those terms sometimes it seems that
00:27:46
Speaker
when he is thinking about the idea of an art emotion, it is this complex that is about both feeling and thinking at the same time, that it is even potentially bodily in nature, that your whole body is receiving the art emotion when it's working properly. And yeah, the best way to convey it is through poetic language.
00:28:08
Speaker
Great. Yeah.
Themes and Emotional Depth in Lockwood's Work
00:28:10
Speaker
And that, to me, this ties back to Lockwood in that for me. And I think I have written about this elsewhere, but she, to me, she's a poet that activates my body when I'm reading. I feel more viscerally than some poetry. I feel her poetry. And also, my body reacts.
00:28:29
Speaker
because I laugh and sometimes I cry. And those are when a poem makes you laugh or cry, a poem is in your body. Literally, it is moving and doing things to your body in a way that you are aware of. And I think that's particularly special and I think that that's something that she, that maybe is important to her poetics.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's beautifully said. And so we're about to hear an example of that kind of, well, perhaps we can't predict what our listeners will experience somatically or otherwise, but potentially at least an example in this poem today. So obviously, we'll have lots to say about the poem once we've heard it.
00:29:20
Speaker
a reminder that there will be a link to the text of the poem and the episode notes. It's slightly on the longer side of poems that we have on this podcast, so we'll listen to a recording of Lockwood, read it, and so it's a really interesting recording, I think, and that recording lasts a little, just over four minutes, so you know, that's what you're settling in for here when
00:29:40
Speaker
once we start hearing her voice. Of course, many of you will have noticed that the title of her poem seems, you know, is obviously a direct allusion to a very famous poem, which, you know, I know Michelle earlier you said she has a lot of modernist intertexts
00:30:01
Speaker
in our work. Here is a romantic intertext, right? So this is clearly what she's doing is riffing on John Keats's famous poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn. So, you know, for people who want to do their homework here and for whom that poem is not fresh, I don't know, maybe
00:30:25
Speaker
hit pause, go read Keats, and then come back and listen to this. Or maybe not. I don't know. Maybe that's not necessary, and that could be an interesting question for us to take up. Michelle, is there anything else you want to say about the poem before I press play and we listen to Lockwood read it?
00:30:41
Speaker
No, it's a challenging poem to read, so it's good to hear her read it. She does a wonderful job. It is possibly, I haven't fully fact checked this, but my intuition is that, or my experience is that this is the last poem that Lockwood published. So she has two books of poetry. I think the second one came out in 2014.
00:31:05
Speaker
And then this poem comes out in September 2017 and since then I do not think that a poem from Lockwood has appeared in print anywhere. When you hear the poem it's interesting to think of it in that context and I think I'll just say I remember getting this issue of Poetry Magazine, seeing her name on the cover, feeling a thrill and reading this.
00:31:29
Speaker
And I feel like I'm probably projecting backwards. I think probably what I was thinking was, oh my God, I can't wait for her next book. But I think maybe I also felt something like, oh, is this it? Is this like, where are we going from here? So anyway. A farewell to all that kind of poems. I hope not. Well, yeah, maybe. I hope not. We'll see. I mean, it does also occur to me that when you and I were chatting before we started recording and I said, well, maybe we could talk about how poetry, you know, modernism and how poetry fits in alongside other forms.
00:31:57
Speaker
You quite rightly noted, I want to credit you, that in the very nature of Lockwood's career, there is also a very kind of contemporary phenomenon of poets or of writers whose earliest work is poetry and who
00:32:14
Speaker
and not to suggest, not that you were suggesting, nor am I, suggesting that Lockwood's reasons for devoting herself more to other kinds of forms are financially motivated or whatever. But one might say about many, you know, there are lots of poets who have novels, and novels, you know,
00:32:32
Speaker
do circulate more widely than all perhaps, but the most viral poems, which Lockwood has written. So there is that kind of contemporary, interesting contemporary context to the literary scene to think about too, sort of how Lockwood fits in alongside, I don't know, a poet like Ben Lerner or, you know, other kinds of poets like this. Okay, here is Patricia Lockwood reading The Ode on a Grecian Urn. The Ode on a Grecian Urn.
00:33:03
Speaker
is worth any number of old ladies. A grandmother hung from a cliff like a tense moment in an action movie, and the ode, speaking itself with its hand on one heart, steadfastly refused to save her. In fact, it did that thing where it ground each finger out with a motorcycle boot and then ate its cigarette for emphasis, whooping.
00:33:26
Speaker
Some old-ass bitch was in Pussy Church, when the ode, now spelling itself with an umlaut, swung its urn at the back of her head, really clocking her, till the violets in her church hat grew from the floor and won a third-place prize for consciousness.
00:33:43
Speaker
The ode is pushing nanas off bridges, detonating them with dynamite, tying them to railroad tracks with squeaky young rope, pouring big glugs into them out of the skull and crossbones bottle. The ode is checking its pocket watch, which points always to death to old ladies o'clock. It is shrieking, ugh, you're like 100, and your breath smells exactly like horse medicine, ho.
00:34:10
Speaker
The ode is blasting holes in them, is laying them out in the potpourri isle, is stabbing them with those icicles they always said were dangerous. The ode means ill to all of them. The ode is worth any number. And the worst is, I believe it.
00:34:28
Speaker
The worst is I will become one, without having written anything like the ode on a Grecian urn, and sit in long rows along with my kind, till there the ode comes striding toward me, my necessary death at the ready, my pulse like black grapes at its fingertips, saying, fear not, it will be fast, the forgetting of great poems will fly through you in bullets. Beauty is truth, and truth,
00:34:57
Speaker
But already I'm losing it. All I know is that the world is falling away, and you won't believe what it is wearing. The ridiculous pantsuit of me, a old lady, crumpled hopelessly at the crotch, a flower valiant in its little butthole.
00:35:15
Speaker
All the vital syllables are being erased. Its space-age fabric now seen for what it is, an embarrassment. My name is turning into Edna, Myrtle, Dorcas. My descendants find my peppermints disgusting. The urn is approaching to scatter me over a landscape that is heaven on earth. And in the feet of the poem I am running. In mad pursuit, and struggle to escape. Chased as if I am worth one million.
00:35:45
Speaker
Pearl, opal, ruby, coral, until I am caught by the feeble arm. And because it is true I am telling the ode, you stood in me like a spine, put poppies behind my eyes just the fact of you, that he took one raw spring to set you down, instead of going out to tip heifers, tweak noses, or sexually harass huge curvy vases.
00:36:12
Speaker
You were for me too, though they would trade me and all my Bula's have lined me up to enter that land in my turn.
00:36:20
Speaker
You let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms. First to myself, and then almost out loud. Mine. Mine. The world's. All mine. Something to say in the face of tall sickness as I quietly try to unwrap hard candies. As I tug down tissues from my sleeve. Because it is true, I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it.
00:36:49
Speaker
And the ode is murmuring almost gently. But do you like my ending? Some people don't like my ending. I don't. I never did. I thought it was so overwrought. Though now that I'm here myself, why not? If it has to be this way, then better. Put a bright red cough on all that white.
00:37:15
Speaker
Wow. So you've just heard Patricia Lockwood read The Ode on a Grecian Urn. Michelle, I'm tempted just to ask you since you introduced this, you know, idea or language to us a moment ago, like you say, you experience these poems in your body. So
00:37:37
Speaker
or you've just had the experience now of listening to this performance of the poem, and I wonder if it's not too weird or personal a question, like what was that experience like for you in an embodied way?
00:37:51
Speaker
This is funny, this is very embarrassing because I remember when I, I'll do this by way of an anecdote, which is I remember when I reviewed the novel and I was writing my review and reviews hadn't come out because I was reading a review copy and I thought I'm going to be very brave and I'm going to talk about how I cried at the end of this novel. And then every reviewer talked about how they, mostly she, but they cried at the end of the novel.
00:38:20
Speaker
I always find if it doesn't make me laugh, it makes me chuckle, or it makes me grin very widely, so I feel that stress. I'm just going to get very particular about it. You feel the stress of the grin on your face. You feel the skin of your face stretching because I'm grinning at the beginning. It's so funny. It's comic and cartoonish.
00:38:41
Speaker
Are there moments that stood out to you in that way? I mean, obviously we will get to those as a kind of textual matter, but even in her manner of reading that are sort of
00:38:55
Speaker
that you want to kind of point to as giving you, like, what is the epitome of that grin you were feeling or that? Yeah, she has such an arch way of reading, which almost the first time I ever heard her read, I was a little, I don't want to say put off, but I had to adjust to it. Boot, motorcycle.
00:39:14
Speaker
the way that she says that it's a kind of funny way that she creates that syllable and that whole image is I think that that's the image where you go from this is very ridiculous to okay this is hilarious right that that's a moment really clocking her another moment and I think the moments that the punch lines
00:39:36
Speaker
They are significant. And that's what I love about her as a comedian, is that it's easy, it was not easy, but it's easier to write something funny where the joke is just a little like escape valve, where it's just letting a little bit of tension out every so often. And that's its function, just that.
00:39:57
Speaker
For her, she is deliberate about her punchlines. She's not just taking them where they come, where she can get the laugh and then moving on. The laugh isn't a detour or a pit stop. It's an important point along the route of the poem.
00:40:13
Speaker
Um, so I think, yeah, so it's, it's, uh, you're like 100 and your breath smells exactly like horse medicine. Of course the line, and I'm so delighted to be able to bring this line to your readers. Some old ass bitch was in pussy church. We're going to say so many new words in this podcast. Um, that's great. Um,
00:40:34
Speaker
Yeah, and then there's that turn. There's a transitional couple of stanzas or verse paragraphs. The worst is I believe it. The worst is I will become one. You know, the ode's gonna kill her. And then there's the end. And there's two lines that catch my throat.
00:40:56
Speaker
Yeah. And we can talk about them more later, but one is you stood in me like a spine and the other, which is a bodily line. They're both bodily. You stood in me like a spine. And then because it is true, I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it. And she doesn't. But sometimes when I read it to myself, because I'm such a sensitive
00:41:21
Speaker
creature, I choke up there. And I love in a sense that I choke up there because it sounds like something is boiling in my throat when I get upset reading it. So those lines are sort of the ones that like, and then she has a little joke, but do you like my ending? Some people don't like my ending, but you're now on the road to like tier town.
00:41:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Oh, that's great. Okay. Well that yeah, that's so that's that's like a lovely preview of the Arc of the conversation we might be about to have that we'll have to see if that's if that's how it how it turns out I mean, I guess it's it's it's it's just maybe worth well, I don't know. Let me ask it as a question Michelle. Is it worth saying something about? the Keats poem before we start or do you think that's a
00:42:11
Speaker
not the point here and we shouldn't be distracted by that kind of, um, pedantry or something like, like, do we need to, does the, does the, does the, I mean, no doubt there, there might theoretically be something to gain by, by having the Keats well in mind. I don't think we, we want to like re because it's a long poem and this will be here forever if we do that. Um,
00:42:38
Speaker
But I guess the question is, is it essential, or is it a mis—am I sort of being too literal-minded by inviting us to think for a moment about the Keats first?
00:42:53
Speaker
Um, I think, I think it's worth, it's worth maybe giving a tiny pressy. Uh, but, uh, although we both love our boy, John, uh, I do think you're a little bit more of a Keatsian than I am. So maybe you could give a very, very short, just, you know, gloss on what is the ode on a Grecian urn. Well, ode on a Grecian urn. Yeah, right. Well, so that's one interesting, I mean, my, my first, my first and only scripted question for you about this poem was going to be, talk to us about the word in the title. Um, but, um, so.
00:43:23
Speaker
be thinking about that, Michelle, but right. So the Keats poem doesn't have the the in it. It's Ode on a Grecian Urn. And I don't know, what can I say? It's one of Keats's great odes. It's a poem in which the poet seems to be contemplating
00:43:39
Speaker
the object named in its title, the Grecian urn, though I think, and I'm not a romanticist, so at least as I remembered writing a paper about this when I was in grad school and reading the relevant scholarship, which I think still is valid in saying that we think there was no single urn that Keats saw and was describing, but that what he was doing was forming a kind of composite and virtual
00:44:05
Speaker
object to address in this poem, perhaps an amalgam of a number of pieces of ancient Greek pottery that he would have seen in the British Museum and also, I think, famously
00:44:27
Speaker
perhaps superimposing on those a scene he would have just seen from the so-called Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon Frees, which had come to the British Museum and which he was one of the first people to see. So he's looking at this object, or the poem is looking at this object and sort of trying to figure out what it's depicting and what's going on in part of the immediate kind of
00:44:56
Speaker
pathos of the poem or energy of the poem, what have you, and people have all kinds of different readings of the poem is that, you know, there are these figures who seem to be, there seems to be, for instance, like a male figure in pursuit of a female figure, and Keats seems to be interested in the way that moment of erotic
00:45:23
Speaker
perhaps violent pursuit is sort of frozen before it can be realized or satisfied and is sort of perpetually in that sort of state of incompletion and stillness. And so the poem sort of works through the scenes that it
00:45:44
Speaker
it imagines it's depicted on the urn. And then it famously ends with this phrase which is quoted more or less in this poem that
00:45:54
Speaker
and is another great sort of critical, I think, sort of crux in the tradition of scholarship on the poem. Beauty is truth, truth, beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know. There are questions about who, if anyone, is supposed, who are we supposed to understand? Is speaking, is that the urn speaking to us? Is that the
00:46:16
Speaker
Poet speaking to us is that the urn speaking to the poet or the poet speaking to the urn or, you know, there's the question of whether that phrase showed or shouldn't appear in quotation marks. So yeah, I don't know. That's ode on a Grecian urn. Okay, that was my prissy. So tell us about the the, Michelle. Why is the poem called The Ode on a Grecian urn?
00:46:37
Speaker
Well, the first time I saw this poem, I remembered Helen Venler saying, I don't remember in what context, but she was reminding us quite emphatically that Heitz's poem is called Ode on a Grecian Urn. It is not.
00:46:54
Speaker
the ode on a Grecian urn. Decades of students getting it wrong, I guess. Yeah, just years of experience and frustration built up in that remark. Why do you think that mattered so much? Yeah, what do you make of that?
00:47:09
Speaker
I mean, there's so much pretension to call something the, right? Once you're like, I have written the ode on a Grecian urn. There is no other ode, but this one, my ode on a Grecian urn. So ode on a Grecian urn is just like, here is an ode on a Grecian urn. There's no an, it's just ode.
00:47:29
Speaker
So the V, V, Ode on a Grecian Urn, in some sense, so the title's doing several things. For one thing, it's pointing to what has now become the definitive Ode on a Grecian Urn. It also reminds me, the way that you framed your question reminded me of Wallace Stevens, the end of Man on a Dump, which might be in conversation with Ode on a Grecian Urn and with us. Where was it one first heard the truth, the the?
00:47:57
Speaker
So here we are, and if beauty is truth or truth beauty, we're trying to figure out what's going on there. That's a relevant assertion.
00:48:06
Speaker
But finally, the title and the first line together make up a comment by Faulkner in a Paris interview. And if I have it here, I can read it. So let me just find it. OK. So the interviewer is trying to get Faulkner, who's not really cooperating too, too much, to talk about how to be a good novelist,
00:48:31
Speaker
And, you know, Faulkner says at the end of one answer, the novelist is completely immoral in that, sorry, one
00:48:41
Speaker
Oh, yeah, maybe. It seems as though Michelle's having an intrusion into her her medically sealed podcast room. But so I'm just filling some time here and I want to hear more in just a moment as I'm sure all of you do about Faulkner and
00:49:01
Speaker
the opening line of the poem. Michelle, is everything cool on your end? Yeah, I think so. I was just interrupted by a man, which is very appropriate. I guess so. Are you okay? Is everything okay? Yeah, I'm fine. Somebody thinks that they have this room reserved, but they don't. But they don't. They don't. And they were persuaded by your telling them so. I don't know about that, but I don't think I can lock this door, unfortunately, but we'll just keep going. We'll keep going. I'm so sorry. That's cool. Tell us about Faulkner.
00:49:28
Speaker
Okay, so he says, at the end of this, he says the artist or the novelist is completely amoral and that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. And then the interviewer says, do you mean that the writer should be completely ruthless? And Faulkner says, unequivocally,
00:49:44
Speaker
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board. Honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. The ode on a Grecian urn is worth any number of old ladies.
00:50:12
Speaker
In this interview also, I think not in significantly, Faulkner claims that the best job that he ever had was as a landlord in a brothel. And the way that he talks about that, it's very clear that the benefits of the job were that he got to exploit the sexual labor of women. And it was a very easy job and it accorded him
00:50:36
Speaker
he says a certain amount of respect. The women would defer to the landlord of the brothel and call him sir. The bootleggers in the neighborhood call him sir, and he can call the police by their first name. So it's an interesting interview as it thinks about how the artist can exploit women to get his work done.
00:50:57
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so there's so much there that seems immediately relevant to this poem, but just to kind of re-inscribe that excellent kind of source attribution kind of gloss that you just gave us back into a reading of the poem. So what Faulkner is talking about is like,
00:51:18
Speaker
art is worth more than life. The artist needs to know that if, presumably he in Faulkner's estimation, but we can be more generous and say if they are sort of cognizant of that fact. And so Lockwood in
00:51:36
Speaker
in quoting that line is immediately raising the issue of, well, several issues, but among them, like the relationship that life and art bear to each other, the kind of appropriate valuing of one relative to the other. And
00:51:59
Speaker
It sounds as though, naively, we might say, because she's not departing from it in one word, that in the title, and this is one of those titles which, as you say, runs into the first line of the poem, the title and first line of the poem, she is quoting Faulkner precisely and then goes on to sort of comically
00:52:29
Speaker
imagine the consequences of such a position. I'm trying to figure out how to take that
00:52:40
Speaker
that position that Faulkner sketches out in the Paris Review interview and to sort of contextualize it with respect to this very kind of funny scene that we get in the first verse paragraph or stanza call it whichever you like of the poem. So this business about the
00:53:04
Speaker
you know, it's like the scene from the action movie and so forth. So what's the, like, I don't know, what's your reading, Michelle, of the kind of ironic self-positioning or whatever that Lockwood is doing by following Faulkner's dictum with this kind of comic scene?
00:53:28
Speaker
So, Faulkner's, these two bits of the interview that I quoted of Faulkner, he's thinking about the economic exploitation of women, right? Like you rob your mother in order to be able to write poetry, or you become the landlord of a brothel so that you have an easy job where other people earn the money for you that you need to write poetry. In this poem,
00:53:58
Speaker
She's reading into Faulkner's answer a kind of a secondary gain that the writer, I mean, sorry, I'm saying Faulkner's talking about poetry. He's invoking Keats. And in the interview, he actually sort of, I think he asserts that like poetry is the highest, but if you can't do it, then you can write short stories. And if you can't do that, then you write a novel. But anyway, the point is about art.
00:54:22
Speaker
She is doing a kind of reading of something else that the artist is getting out of this exploitation, which is joy. That actually the art itself is not just financed by this exploitation, but something about this destruction
00:54:40
Speaker
this violence against women is productive of the art, and this is a feminist criticism that is not alien to us, not unique to this poem, but that's the kind of reading that Lockwood is giving it, and she's giving it in a very comical way because we have here this sort of rogue terrorist ode, this ode that is most like Wiley Coyote, and instead of Bugs Bunny, it's a bunch of grandmas,
00:55:07
Speaker
And the old sort of life is going around and terrorizing old ladies and murdering them in violent, cartoonish, extravagant ways.
00:55:22
Speaker
So the idea isn't simply that you as an artist, according to Faulkner, if ever are presented with a choice where in order to finance your art, you need to brutalize some old ladies, you'd better do it if you're serious. For Lockwood, the comic exaggeration of that position is somehow like,
00:55:44
Speaker
Art doesn't just do that incidentally or as a kind of collateral damage along the way, but what produces art is the pleasure that is taken in that kind of violence.
00:55:56
Speaker
I think so. I think that's certainly its relationship to that quote of Faulkner's. That's super interesting. I love how we have these two intertexts lining up for Lockwood in this way on the one hand.
00:56:16
Speaker
as you help us see. And I wonder how reliably she might have expected a reader to have picked up on the Faulkner illusion that, of course, you're a very good and expert reader. So for you, you were able to do it. But anyway, that's a secondary question.
00:56:35
Speaker
There's the there's what she's doing with the Faulkner interview. There's also clearly the in the background of this the Keats is out on on aggression or in itself I say at the beginning of the Keats poem in particular He's kind of looking at this object and trying to make sense of it and you know one thing that occurs to me is that as he's looking at the scene of
00:56:58
Speaker
of these figures that on this kind of notional urn that he's describing, one way of understanding what he's doing is that he's trying to read and decode and make sense of a kind of generic image, an image that is stock in some way. And of course,
00:57:19
Speaker
Lockwood is doing something like that too, you know, when she says, and I thought these lines were very funny myself. In fact, it did that thing where it ground each finger out with a motorcycle boot and then ate it's cigarette for emphasis. That thing as a phrase is sort of alerting us to the kind of generic, like we all know the scene. It's a motif in a certain kind of movie where somebody is hanging from a ledge and the cruel, sadistic,
00:57:49
Speaker
bad guy or whatever doesn't just kill them but wants to kind of draw it out and takes pleasure in the sort of teasing nature of that. So what's the question here?
00:58:02
Speaker
is would it be right to say that Lockwood is positioning herself with respect to those stock images in a way that's analogous to the way Keats is doing to his? Or what else are you, like now that we sort of set up that opening movement of the poem in that way, what else do you find yourself thinking about? I mean,
00:58:25
Speaker
take my question or just say something better than that if you like. Yeah, yeah. There's several things are happening. So I love your your invocation of the stock images. She totally is. There's another stock image. So this poem is not just thinking about a relationship to those images. It's literalizing them. We have a literalized ode. We have a literalized Faulkner phrase. We also have a literalized cliffhanger.
00:58:48
Speaker
Right. She says a grandma grandmother hung from a cliff like not as in a tense moment, but like a tense moment in an action movie. She is the grandmother hanging there is like a moment. It is not it is not drawn from the moment. It is like the moment. These are distinctions. So she's she's taking these these terms of art and these and these ideas and literalizing them here, but also in relation to the quixote.
00:59:18
Speaker
One of the things that strikes me is, you know, Keats is focusing on, he's interested in the power of the urn that it gets by way of its stillness and its silence. It will, you know, there's a lot of still in this poem, there's a lot of forever in this poem. Everything is suspended in time in Keats' poem, I mean. We're looking at a static image.
00:59:42
Speaker
So much of the language and imagery of Lockwood's poem comes from cartoons and film, which is not a static medium. It is like poetry. It is a medium that has duration. The other thing is that the urn is perfectly silent. It can't speak except that maybe when it does at the end.
01:00:04
Speaker
You mean in Keats. In Keats. In Keats. Here, I think, not only do we get that the Ode is speaking itself, this is a very sonic poem. It's a very oral A-U-R-A-L poem.
01:00:20
Speaker
You can hear it. You can hear when it does that thing where it ground each finger out. If you've seen that happen in a movie, you hear the sound of the boot against the like gritty, sandy dirt. You hear it kind of crunching the dirt and maybe crunching the bone as it does it. And then the whooping. So this is not a poem that is quiet. And this is not a poem that is static immediately. I think the two things
01:00:49
Speaker
Two of the things that are being brought to our attention in this first paragraph. Well, that's super interesting. I mean, I'm thinking in your invocation of cartoons and of movies, you're of course quite right that they are in very real ways like moving images.
01:01:05
Speaker
But at least traditionally, that movement is an illusion that is created or rendered by the rapid juxtaposition in ways that exceed our ability to discern.
01:01:21
Speaker
of one image after the next. And so, you know, maybe that's sort of what it means to be animated in every sense, you know, both as a cartoon or as a person to be alive. I mean, the other thing that I think we're never far from in the Keats poem and that we're certainly not far from here is that the urn isn't just, oh, it was in Cleanthe Brooks who called it like a pot.
01:01:50
Speaker
I forget, but it's not just a jug, right? It's not just any old container. It serves a purpose and its purpose would seem to be, would presumably be to store the ashes of, you know, it has a kind of funerary or elegiac kind of function. And we're never far from death in the,
01:02:18
Speaker
in the Keats poem, and we're certainly not far from it here. The next thing I wanted to ask you about, Michelle, is that moment, it's like a showy, kind of really jokey kind of moment that comes in the second stanza where the ode, I mean, and actually I was thinking about this as you were making your quite compelling, I think, argument about the ways in which this poem is like sonic and aural and so on.
01:02:41
Speaker
I'm not to be a jerk, but I was thinking like, oh, but what about then this business of the ode, which you can't hear this? Now it's sort of a typographic joke. The ode and ode has the umlaut above it.
01:02:57
Speaker
And I was curious, actually, when listening to the recording, was Lockwood going to register the new orthography of that word when she read it aloud? And to my ear, she didn't. It sounded the same.
01:03:16
Speaker
It seemed to me to be a joke for the eye or for the mind, but not so much for the ear. I just offer that as an initial observation, but I'm more interested in asking you, what do you make of a joke like that where the ode has an umlaut now?
01:03:38
Speaker
Like what's the joke? And you were telling us before how Lockwood's punch lines aren't simply there to sort of diffuse tension or to get a laugh, but they're kind of doing work. So what work is that joke doing?
01:03:53
Speaker
I mean, I'm sure that if I am sure that somebody other than me would be able to tell you about the history of spelling ode with an umlaut You know, is that like a better transliteration of the Greek? Is it you know is was there a period where the ode was spelled as an umlaut? I I cannot give you that history and I'm sure it is a joke about that history but it's also you know that the the the ode is it's
01:04:20
Speaker
When I think about being on the internet, umlauts are funny. People just put umlauts on things to embellish a word without actually meaning anything about the pronunciation of the word. Maybe it's a kind of pretension. The ode is constantly updating itself. The ode is
01:04:46
Speaker
Keeping up with the times, the ode is on the internet and has internet humor. Every joke, there is a purpose, every joke you can dig into. It's not a joke that I fully comprehend yet. I mean, I think it's funny, obviously, but I don't know. What do you think about the ode with the noom loud? It looks like a face now. Now that I look at it, it's a face making,
01:05:15
Speaker
little eyes, big mouth. Oh yeah, I see it now that you set that though. I would be lying if I said I was seeing it earlier. I mean, I don't know. To my mind, all I could offer about it is that it's a way of kind of amping up the pretension of the
01:05:43
Speaker
you know, of the cultural prestige or something that the Keats poem holds for Lockwood and for us, that it's fancy, but it's fancy in a way that's kind of ridiculous, right? That we're meant to find ridiculous. And yeah, I mean, I guess I'm interested also in
01:06:13
Speaker
this way that the, in Lockwood's view, the poem gets personified and sort of, you know, animated. I'm coming back to that word now in the way that it does.
01:06:32
Speaker
You know, I think you were saying I can't remember if it was in the conversation we were having before this episode or if it came up as we were setting up Lockwood and you were talking about the rape joke. But I think you noted at the very least in this episode that the way that that poem proceeds is by personifying the joke, that the joke becomes a character who does this and that or, you know, right. So. I guess in both cases, we have
01:07:01
Speaker
the personification of a verbal artifact of some kind or an utterance of some kind, who now acts as a character, and because that's happening,
01:07:15
Speaker
it sort of opens up kind of certain veins of irony for Lockwood. But that, I don't know how to refer to this, it's like the sort of, you said earlier that there was a kind of turn or a couple of turns that happened for you in this poem and that one happened
01:07:36
Speaker
you know, to my reading, I haven't counted the lines or anything, but like, let's say roughly halfway in those lines that are after the Ode is worth any number, and it sort of trails off in ellipses. And then Lockwood or her speaker says, and the worst is I believe it, the worst is I will become one and so on. But like in the lead up to that line, it sounds like that.
01:08:04
Speaker
what I'm hearing is just that joke of the sadism, of the misogynist kind of sadism, the cruelty in particularly to not just to women, but to old women, is all getting kind of amped up and amped up and amped up. And I wonder, is there any
01:08:25
Speaker
Aside from noting that, as I've just done, do you think there are moments in that progression that would merit our closer attention along the way? Or what do you make of that progression sort of leading up to what you take to be the first real sort of turn in the poem?
01:08:46
Speaker
Yeah, I've already talked about the sonic qualities, and I think it's worth attending to them. The squeaky young rope glugs, the onomatopoeia of the big glugs that are being poured into the nanas out of the skull and crossbones bottle, which is another cartoon image.
01:09:07
Speaker
There's a lot of puns on clock and time. So when the ode swings its urn at the back of the grandma's head, it clocks her. And I was looking this up earlier, because in some sense, probably clock is onomatopoeic also, in that it sounds like a hit. It's got a sharp sound.
01:09:31
Speaker
It's also, I think, comes from when you have clocks with bells or something and the gong hits the bell in the clock. That's possibly where the idea of clock as a punch comes from. So there is something about almost the punctum or time, the feeling and the pain of time progressing.
01:09:55
Speaker
A clock also has a face, which is really relevant. A clock also has a face, yes. So we have this idea that time is moving forward, but then of course the Ode checks its pocket watch, and its pocket watch is still, like everything in the Ode on a Grecian urn, the pocket watch points always forever to death to old ladies o'clock.
01:10:21
Speaker
So, you know, for the old, time isn't moving forward, but for these women who are aging, you know, if you're a grandma, you've been experiencing the progression of time. I think that there is a, you know, this is a very, these first paragraphs are mostly comic progression. There's a moment of bizarre beauty.
01:10:41
Speaker
in the third verse paragraph. He swings his urn at the back of her head, really clocking her, till the violets in her church hat grew from the floor and won a third place prize for consciousness. So that's a really lovely elegiac image. I mean, the old lady is knocked out, possibly killed by an urn, which we can imagine shattering over her head.
01:11:04
Speaker
She falls to the ground, the urn falls to the ground, and out of the ashes and her violet, her church hat with its flowers,
01:11:12
Speaker
flowers grow, violets grow out of the floor and they win a prize for consciousness. Though only a third place prize. A consolation prize. Yeah. Yeah. And there's, I don't know how much we want to get into it, but in, you know, there is a, there's a, there's an essay about, about the odor and aggression and other things by Barbara Johnson.
01:11:35
Speaker
And she quotes, it's called Mutinous Envy. It's a great essay. And she quotes Peter Sacks in the English Elegy. And Sacks is talking about Apollo chasing Daphne. So Apollo wants to rape Daphne. Daphne is a, I think she's a wood nymph.
01:11:54
Speaker
She prays to Artemis and Artemis to save her from this turns her into a tree and there's a gorgeous Bernini sculpture of Apollo his arms are kind of slowly like like beginning to wrap around Daphne and as they're wrapping around her she in a kind of moment of agony or ecstasy and shock is turning into a tree and Saks is is describing this moment and he
01:12:24
Speaker
says that Daphne is thus eventually, this is a quote, transformed into something very much like a consolation prize, a prize that becomes the prize and sign of poethood. So somehow we're getting here, this third place prize is a consolation. I feel like there's the idea of the consolation prize is sort of reverberating. And you don't need to read Barbara Johnson to read this poem, but I do think that this idea of the poets
01:12:49
Speaker
consolation prize for not having necessarily the pleasure of assault. Then that is figured as a loss and the poet is rewarded a consolation prize, which is the prize in sign of poethood. And that this is this consolation prize.
01:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, is being awarded for the flowers that grow out of the grandma's head on the church floor. I wonder if maybe there's some kind of pun there on violets and violence or something like that. Sure, yeah. At the Violet Hour. At the Violet Hour, I was thinking of Keats, sorry, of Elliot as well.
01:13:30
Speaker
Yours is, believe it or not, not the first, maybe not even the second, but at least the second.
01:13:38
Speaker
Precy of the Apollo and Daphne myth on this podcast. So we had an early episode with Katie Cadoo on the Andrew Marvell poem, The Garden, where the same sort of assault figures and its connection to poetic power and so on figures. Though, interestingly, as I'm listening to you talk about this, Michelle,
01:14:05
Speaker
You know, I'm thinking both in the Apollo and Daphne story and in Keats' ode and in the kind of long tradition to which both are connected of the kind of linking of poetic power and sexual violence or sexual conquest or masculine sexual virility.
01:14:35
Speaker
The women in those poems and in those myths are always young, you know, for keeps their maidens, right? And here we seem very much to be confronted with old ladies and that kind of disgust at the bodies of old ladies and at the smells of the bodies of old ladies.
01:14:59
Speaker
and at the maintenance of these bodies and all of this. So I guess I just wanna know what's the work being done here by this way of describing and imagining sort of the decrepitude of age.
01:15:15
Speaker
Yeah. Because so much of this critical literature that I'm citing a little bit is about sexual violence against maidens. And there is no lust in this poem. Or there's a brief image at the end with a sexually harassing huge curvy vases. But other than that,
01:15:40
Speaker
There isn't really lust in this poem. A grandmother is not just an older woman. She is a woman who has had children and therefore is not a maiden. Her maidenhood is long gone. Her children have had children.
01:15:57
Speaker
The disposability, I do think that the political moment here is important. This is September 2017, the disposability of old women, the
01:16:15
Speaker
There's an image of a pantsuit that I think might be politically resonant later in the poem. Right. Sorry. See you're thinking of Hillary Clinton. I'm thinking of Hillary Clinton, but you know, other older women, you know, older actresses, whatever. There's something there about possibly trying to
01:16:36
Speaker
put the writing off, the negation, the erasure of older women from even our conceptions about how art is made back into the conversation about how art is made. We can talk and have talked a lot and write about the
01:16:57
Speaker
the violence against a young woman or the figurative violence against young women and how it is inspirational for the poet, how it becomes a figure of what poetic language is doing or trying to attain to. But in these narratives that we have even about reclaiming the role of women and the place of women in these poetic narratives or narratives of poesis,
01:17:27
Speaker
We have nothing about old women. Right. Now we do, because we have an ode that has to get its jollies by murdering grandmas. By murdering grandmas. I wonder how it might be connected to the kind of violent and erotic logic or economics of
01:17:46
Speaker
for instance, the Carpe Diem poem in which the argument made—it's funny, the other day I was standing in front of my class and I was trying to explain the logic of the typical Carpe Diem poem in which the male poet addresses the desired female and tries to convince her to have sex with him, the argument being,
01:18:09
Speaker
you know, she will die, she will get old and die, so they'd better do it now before that terrible fate happens. You know, I'm noticing, Michelle, that at that moment, so like the title and sort of first line,
01:18:31
Speaker
idea comes back in the moment of the poem where Lockwood writes, let's see, how should I read this? The ode means ill to all of them. The ode is worth any number. So we're going back to the first line there. The line trails off. And what follows it, I think, have I got this right, is the first appearance of a first person singular pronoun in the poem. And the worst is, I believe it.
01:18:57
Speaker
the worst is i will become one without having written anything like the ode on aggression urn and that it seems to me i don't know it seems to me like a place where the
01:19:11
Speaker
All of that kind of irony and kind of bravado of the mode that we've been getting up to that point seems at least for the moment, not that it's gone forever, but at least for the moment to have kind of dropped away. And we get what is actually a really kind of vulnerable and one could imagine, though we should maybe be careful not to simply reduce it to this, we could imagine
01:19:40
Speaker
that is a thought that Patricia Lockwood is having in her own person, that there is this kind of terrible logic that would account for and value poetry in a particular way and that would be premised on this kind of the disposability of women or the violence towards women and so forth. And that's all bad enough, but what's worse
01:20:09
Speaker
is that this young woman who's writing this poem believes it and sort of sees this sort of grim fate of her own. So, you know, I want to get us
01:20:25
Speaker
into the sort of second half of the poem here and into the turns the poem takes. So how are you reading that? I mean, how are you reading that as a moment of a kind of turn tonally or in terms of the line of argument that's being sort of implied by the poem's progression? Yeah, I mean, I agree with your reading completely.
01:20:52
Speaker
I think it's very interesting. She says the worst is I believe it. And we have a sense of who the I is. It's the speaker of the poem. It's somebody who, in the next line, tells us that she will become one. Although, again, one, does she mean an old lady? Eventually, it's clear that she does mean an old lady. She'll sit in long rows around her kind. But it's not that these are ambiguous pronouns.
01:21:17
Speaker
What does she believe? Does she believe that the ode on a Grecian urn is worth any number of old ladies, or is there another it? Is it that beauty is truth and truth beauty? Is that the worst thing? I think there's a live question there. Well, and maybe, are those thoughts related? Yes. Is the Faulkner line related to the thing, let's say it's the urn saying it at the end of the Keats poem, beauty is truth and truth beauty? Yeah.
01:21:46
Speaker
I mean, I could imagine a reading by which it would, right? So that Faulkner is saying, all that matters really is beauty, right? Make the beautiful thing. Who cares what you destroy along the way? Lockwood is saying, not just who cares, but let's do that on steroids. Make the beautiful thing by hurting old ladies, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, anyway. Yeah.
01:22:10
Speaker
And then there's a sort of, and I haven't put it all together, but, so she predicts that she's going to become an old lady, I guess. She'll become one. I guess she'll become an old lady, although I'll become one without having written anything like the Odo Nogretian urn and sit in long rows along with my kind.
01:22:29
Speaker
We've had this picture of old ladies in church, so we can put this person back into that image of old ladies in rows and pews at church. But it does occur to me, and there are a lot of different places where the body or parts of the body are
01:22:47
Speaker
are punning in little ways on poetry and parts of poetry, starting with a finger, a dactyl as a finger. I think there's others later. But here, I notice as we're sitting in long rows, line break along with my kind, so it's drawing your attention to the long rows and the lines of the poem. And then later she says, in the feet of the poem, I am running. So there is...
01:23:14
Speaker
The primary reading, the dominant reading, is certainly that she'll become an old lady. But there's another weird, there's possibly another reading here where she's thinking about somehow the ode is going to violently turn her into a poem or something, or she'll be buried in the lines of poetry. I don't know.
01:23:40
Speaker
And what it's like maybe to be made into a poem is perhaps something like what happens to Daphne when made into a tree, or what happens to the figures on Keet's urn as they're sort of frozen into place in this moment of being still unravished or something.
01:24:03
Speaker
Even the black grapes, there's an Archibald McLeish poem, Ars Poetica, that begins. A poem should be palpable and mute as a globed fruit. And the pulse, I think it's such an interesting, my pulse like black grapes.
01:24:23
Speaker
A pulse is something you palpate. You palpate the wrist to feel the pulse. The pulse isn't exactly mute because you can sort of hear the heartbeat. But all of these weird little ways that these parts of the body or aspects of being a body are maybe being related to poetry or a poem.
01:24:46
Speaker
Hmm, yeah. When the line, the sort of famous end phrase from the Keats poem comes up and then trails off before she's able to complete it, she I'm saying block wood or the poem here says, beauty is truth and truth, but already I am losing it.
01:25:10
Speaker
Maybe say something about how you read the phrase losing it, Michelle, and then what follows there. All I know is that the world is falling away. When the poem says all I know is X, what is it that the poem knows? What does it mean that the world is falling away?
01:25:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a kind of, I guess, if we're reading this poem as this woman is imagining becoming, maybe does become an old lady, you can think, you know, the forgetting of great poems will, the line before that at the end of the previous verse paragraph is, fear not, it will be fast. The forgetting of great poems will fly through you in bullets. And we've had all these images of holes before. So we have, again,
01:26:04
Speaker
this image of the, of the, of the person, the holes appearing in the person, which are like holes in the mind. And I think about age and senility. You can read these three lines as an elderly person trying and failing to remember.
01:26:21
Speaker
Gosh, I wonder how much dementia one would have to have as a poetry critic to forget the final lines of the ode on aggression urn. But, you know, beauty is truth in truth, but already I'm losing it. Losing it can be a figure of speech for I'm going crazy. I'm losing my it being my mind. Again, here is the it. What is it? Am I losing the poem? Am I losing my sanity? Am I losing my life? The world is falling away. That can be a very romantic image.
01:26:49
Speaker
The world falls away when we are absorbed, falls away when we're in love, but it also falls away when we die because we become disconnected from the world. I'm trying to recall if there's anything like a world falling away in ode on a Grecian urn. I don't think so. I guess we're teased out of thought.
01:27:17
Speaker
at the end of the poem, as doth eternity, doth tease us out of thought as doth eternity. But yeah, I, you know. Yeah, good, no, that's good. So we get pretty quickly thereafter to the lines that, or one of the lines that you said so affected you. Let me set it up for you.
01:27:44
Speaker
the urn is approaching to scatter me over a landscape that is heaven on earth. And in the feet of the poem I am running in mad pursuit and struggle to escape." And that mad pursuit is another kind of direct quotation of the Keats poem where the line in Keats is,
01:28:00
Speaker
What men are God are these? What maidens' loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? Okay. Chased as if I am worth one million. Pearl, Opal, Ruby, Coral. Until I am, which are all sort of, I don't know, precious or semi-precious things, but also like ladies' names. Yeah, old lady names. Old lady names.
01:28:21
Speaker
until I am caught by the feeble arm, and because it is true, I am telling the ode, you stood in me like a spine, put puppies behind my eyes, just the fact of you." That was a line that you said really sort of got in you. Yeah.
01:28:40
Speaker
Talk to us about that. It might be precisely the hardest kind of line to talk about, a line that you feel so emotionally, but would you be willing to just speculate about it for a bit? Sure.
01:28:55
Speaker
So, sorry, I'm catching up to it. So we have a moment. So the Ode is tracking our speaker down, has come to see our speaker like death, like death in like a cloak, you know, my necessary death at the ready. And now the speaker is facing the Ode, is facing her assassin.
01:29:19
Speaker
in a sense, and is speaking to, you know, this thing that is possibly going to kill her, and says these beautiful, loving lines, spine,
01:29:34
Speaker
Maybe that's a pun. Books have a spine, right? You stood in me like a spine, but, you know, a spine is what holds you up. So we have this poem shooting through you, like it's your backbone. It's the thing that holds you up and holds you together. You stood in me like a spine, and then she's reduced to a skeleton.
01:29:52
Speaker
put poppies behind my eyes. We can see the skull and flowers coming out of the skull. Just the fact of you, which is so interesting. What does that mean, just the fact of you? And part of the gloss on the fact of the poem is that he keeps
01:30:08
Speaker
took one raw spring to set you, the poem, down instead of going out to tip heifers, tweak noses, or sexually harass huge curvy vases. You were for me, too, penultimate verse paragraph. Now the speaker is in the face of this obliteration, perhaps, claiming the poem. So suddenly, it's not exactly a
01:30:39
Speaker
an attainment or a push for equality with the poem, but it is, she, as the poem is coming to claim her, she is claiming it. Oh, lovely. She is claiming it, Michelle. You were for me too. Though they would trade me, they, who is they, Faulkner?
01:31:02
Speaker
They would trade me, and all my beulahs, I think that's a flower, but also again, an old lady name. Old lady name, yeah. Again, here we have the lions, have lined me up to enter that land in my turn. You let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms.
01:31:22
Speaker
So that, you know, now suddenly the poem has been sort of disintegrating, obliterating, causing violence to the bodies of old ladies. And here's this old lady saying, you kill me and you, it's almost like you kill me and you kill yourself because you were in me. Right. Oh, that's great because what I'm hearing first though, I think both things are true is the, you know, imagine you're sort of
01:31:49
Speaker
confronting the thing that's chasing you down to kill you as though in some horror movie or whatever, but the true horror is that like, is when you turn to confront that killer and you say, I love you. I've always like, you made me who I am. You know, it's not that you're this kind of just this sort of adversary who's, you know, foreign to me and, but rather that I've,
01:32:14
Speaker
I've I have already internalized the thing that is doing this violence to me. Yeah. Yeah. The the instead of going out to tip heifers line and amuses me because I think what it's doing is on the one hand kind of jokingly referring to cow tipping as like the kind of thing that boys do, you know, who live on farms or whatever. I don't know that they actually do, but because I was never
01:32:40
Speaker
such a boy myself. And it's sort of conflating that with what are for me some of the most moving lines in the Keats poem, which go like this. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, leads thou that heifer, lowing at the skies?
01:32:59
Speaker
and all her silken flanks with garlands dressed. I think that's the image that we think Keats took from the Elgin Marbles. There's this, or I don't know, at least at some point people thought this. Maybe they still do. There's this image of this cow that seems to be being led to sacrifice in that.
01:33:18
Speaker
sacrifice sounds like it might be the equivalent of the kind of sacrificial violence that's being recorded by the Lockwood poem to this point. But that business, I find very poignant just now as you reread them, those lines, you let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms, a place where a person feels
01:33:45
Speaker
you know, who knows why we're sitting in those waiting rooms, but whatever it is, it can't be good. And we're, you know, we're feeling our mortality and feeling very vulnerable. And in a moment like that, we're, we're also sort of biding our time and trying to fill it and endure the waiting that happens in those spaces where the waiting that seems so weighty, you know, and, um,
01:34:09
Speaker
And in a moment like that, well, what might a person do? They might find themselves reciting a bit of poetry that has gotten into them somehow. And there seems to be a kind of bitter acknowledgement of that. I mean, just to put it most plainly, maybe we could say,
01:34:32
Speaker
a bitter acknowledgement on Lockwood's part of how much the Keats has gotten into her, right? Even as she sees herself as like the sacrificial object in the Keats Poems logic. All right. And then we get to the, those lines lead us into the other line that you singled out. So I'm going to read a bit more and then I want you to talk about it more, Michelle.
01:35:01
Speaker
You let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms first to myself and then almost out loud. Mine, mine, the world's all mine. Something to say in the face of tall sickness as I quietly try to unwrap hard candies as I tug tissues down from my sleeve, because it is true. I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it. Um, so,
01:35:29
Speaker
That line murders me. I know a little bit why, but first of all, we can acknowledge that it is gorgeous. The assertion, it's so powerful and that I had a throat and you boiled in it.
01:35:48
Speaker
all mono syllables. When I think about, I think I've said this, that, you know, to me, partly the sound, the boiling in a throat is a little bit, to me, like what I sound like when I can't not cry and read that line at the same time. It's like this guttural kind of feeling. But it's also, if you think about it, you know, you talked, we've talked about how possibly what is killing her is the internalization of this ode.
01:36:15
Speaker
is what she has internalized from the ode, from the legacy of the ode. And we'll get an image at the end of the poem, right? A bright red cough on all that white, which is evoking for us Keats' tuberculosis, partly. Yeah, for sure. And if you think about what is the, I had a throat and you boiled in it. What is, that's a sonic thing, boiling has a sound. It's also very, very sensual, very physical. Boiling is hot.
01:36:44
Speaker
I've never coughed up blood in a tubercular way. I've never coughed up blood all the way up the length of my throat. But blood is very hot. Blood is the temperature of the human body. It's 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. If you have a fever, it is higher than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's very warm.
01:37:04
Speaker
And if you think about the feeling of blood coming up in the throat wet and kind of gurgling, the ode is like a disease inside of her throat. Like the disease that killed Keats. Yeah.
01:37:23
Speaker
when you pointed out that that line that I had a throat and you boiled and it was all monosyllables, I thought, wait a second. I mean, you're right. I'm not disputing that, but it's 10 of them also. And I haven't tried to scan the poem. I don't think that's what it wants us to do, necessarily. I'm not sure how
01:37:46
Speaker
rewarding an enterprise that would be. And that line doesn't sound... I mean, obviously what I'm suggesting here is that maybe there is some kind of ghost of the pentameter.
01:37:54
Speaker
line there. It's not a perfectly iambic line or anything, but it's close enough, I guess, that I hada is not an I am, right? Neither is throat end, but you boiled in it. I don't know. Anyway, there we have a line that's very similar. The other thing I wanted to say is that
01:38:17
Speaker
you know, not only, and I don't know though, I guess, you know, on the sort of suggested by the evidence of this poem, it sounds like Lockwood is really fond of Keats. And if so, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that she knows not just the sort of legend of his life and death and of the text of some of his, you know, most well-known poems, but she might also know from reading his letters
01:38:45
Speaker
that for the last couple years of Keats's life, I mean, he's constantly complaining in the letters about having a sore throat. And doing so, I think anxiously because he had witnessed his brother die,
01:39:06
Speaker
of the same illness that he feared he had and that he would in fact have. That idea of boiling in the throat and all of what you said is so I think apt Michelle, I mean also what it would do would be to, you know, now I am thinking of the wasteland actually and it would be silencing, right? It would be
01:39:31
Speaker
you know, if that happened, it would prevent your ability to produce speech out of that, out of your body that way. And so it's a particularly cruel or ironic kind of violence maybe. Or you know, think of the Keats line from not the Grecian urn ode, but from Nightingale.
01:40:02
Speaker
the singest of summer and full-throated ease, that idea of poetic speech as being sort of full-throated and easy, you know? Okay, then,
Reflections on Keats' Influence and Poetic Philosophies
01:40:15
Speaker
God, yeah, please. I'll just say, there's two, she repeats this line, this phrase, because it is true, I am telling you, or because it is true, I'm telling the ode, because it is true, I am telling you ode.
01:40:28
Speaker
And what follows, I think, are very beautiful lines. And I don't think that's a coincidence that so much beauty is lavished in these lines that follow this expression of truth, right? Oh, I see. The dialectic of truth and beauty. Right. Yeah, okay. Being performed here in some way. Yeah, yeah. Because it is true, I'm telling you something beautiful.
01:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, or- Not because it's beautiful, in fact, but because it's true. It happens to be beautiful. Because it's true. And actually, it's almost like, you could almost read it as spiteful. I'm just telling you it's because it's true and I don't care if it's beautiful, but then what comes out is something that is very sad, but also very beautiful. Because of course, though the beauty is truth, truth, beauty, you might take as a statement that is simply asserting a kind of equivalency between beauty and truth, of course,
01:41:16
Speaker
one way that one might well take it would be to say that, well, in fact, it's saying, like, we don't need to worry about truth because if we achieve beauty, we will perforce have found what is true. Like, truth is reducible to beauty, right? And that might be a way of reading Keats, the kind of
01:41:35
Speaker
kind of luscious theticism of Keats, the kind of anti-intellectual, and I don't think Keats is reducible to that position, but though there's a kind of tradition of thinking of him that way, and part of what's so interesting, I guess, about the Grecian urn ode is the way it sort of acknowledges that position, but also opens up some kind of ironic space from it. But here, the ode
01:42:03
Speaker
I mean, maybe in Keats, the urn speaks here, that the ode speaks at the end of this poem. So let me read the last lines of the poem, Michelle, and then invite you to tell us what you hear in them. And the ode is murmuring almost gently, but do you like my ending? Some people don't like my ending. I don't. I never did. I thought it was so overwrought that now that I'm here myself,
01:42:30
Speaker
Why not, if it has to be this way, then better put a bright red cough on all that white? Yeah, what should we notice about these final lines?
01:42:43
Speaker
Yeah, what should we notice? What do you notice? Again, yeah, so that little pathetic phrase from the ode, but do you like my ending? Some people don't like my ending. In a way, mirrors, if you don't like, beauty is truth and truth, beauty in quotation marks at the end, mirrors it, right? It's like this little like blot
01:43:04
Speaker
of like the ode, the ode comes in there and like puts its foot in its mouth almost. You've got this beautiful ending and then it's like, wait, but I need you to reassure me that you like my ending. And the speaker says she never did. She thought it was so overwrought, overwrought is a very funny way to describe it because A, Kleanth Brooks described a poem as a well-wrought urn thinking about the ode on a Grecian urn.
01:43:29
Speaker
But also overwrought is in the final stanza of the Grecian urn he he describes the urn as having a breed embroidery of carvings of marble men and maidens overwrought and I think here he just me he does it's not it's not an aesthetic statement about I think.
01:43:47
Speaker
My initial reading, at least, is not that Keats is making an aesthetic judgment about the overwrought nature of the urn, but simply telling us that what has been wrought over the surface of the urn are marble men and maidens with forest branches and the trodden weed. But here, she's taking his phrase through Cleanthe Brooks and making an aesthetic judgment that it is overwrought, that it's overdone, overdetermined.
01:44:15
Speaker
And of course, that's an objection that one might make to Lockwood too, right? Yeah, sure, one. I mean, if a person didn't like her or didn't like this poem, they would think, oh, it's too much, like, come on. She's always, I mean, she's always too much. She's interested in being too much, I think, right? Yes, yes, yes. She's interested in just overwhelming you with jokes and images, the aesthetic. So yeah, it is, you're right. She's criticizing Keats and finding a point of, one of many points of contact between them.
01:44:44
Speaker
I have to say, just to introduce one other intertext, I mean, I think it's right that Cleanthe Brooks is probably thinking of Keats when he, in the well-run, but he's also thinking of John Donne. I mean, the phrase comes from the canonization. Yeah. But I think both sort of serve in our imagination as an emblematic image of like the well-made poem.
01:45:06
Speaker
Yes, yes. Right, the well-made artifact. Yes, yeah. Right. And of course also, I mean, I guess, sorry, Michelle, I want to let you have the last word here, but so let me just sneak in something before that, which is to say, you know, if the ode in Lockwood's poem has some anxiety about its ending and, right, there's this sort of, here's the quotation and then there's a kind of worrying about it.
01:45:37
Speaker
In that respect, it sort of mirrors the ending of the Keats poem too, which ends, Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty, and then follows that with this sort of editorializing comment, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know, right? Right, right. Okay, so. Yes, yeah. But now you bring us home here. Tell us what else you're doing. Yeah, and also, I mean, I just wanna look at the poem again.
01:45:56
Speaker
These lines also are so just visually on the page. I look at these lines of Lockwoods and I'm searching for, there we go. They're some of the most uneven, just like jagged. The shape of the verse paragraph is one of the most jagged shapes in the whole poem with many short lines and then longer lines. So overwrought being one line, for example.
01:46:18
Speaker
But then there's a turn, a final turn. Though now that I'm here myself, why not? If it has to be this way, then better. Put a bright red cough on all that white, no period at the end. So many, would you describe, like, words, de-ectics that point, you know, now, here, it,
01:46:39
Speaker
What is now? What is here? What is it? You know, is it the now of our reading? It's sort of grounding itself and not grounding itself because these are such ambiguous pointers. In the way the lyric present so-called tends to do, I think. I mean, I think it's sort of self-consciously so. Also, it's interesting to me that word over rhymes with the next line. Why not? Yeah. Yeah, that's such a good rhyme. I mean, it's also, it's an overwrought moment.
01:47:09
Speaker
It's too made, self conspicuously. It's too made. Sorry, you're trying to remember something? The rhyme, the why not rhyme? The rhyme, yeah, that's a moment of overmaking, but self-consciously so, I think.
01:47:24
Speaker
Yeah, doesn't Meryl, this is totally off topic, but doesn't Meryl rhyme TS Eliot with So What, I think? Maybe, I don't remember. There's a very funny rhyme in Thousand One Nights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, yeah, so it's a great rhyme, I think. I don't think it's overwrought. I think it's magnificent and clever and apt.
01:47:46
Speaker
To be clear, when I accuse it thus, I think I'm... Praise. Well, I just think that's what it wants to be, too. Yes. I think by design, it's a moment of being overwrought. Yeah, it's a flair. It's a bit of a flair for the dramatic here. As is that final line. Gosh, right? Yeah.
01:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, but she earns it to use the parlance. She earns it, I think. But if it has to be this way, then better put a bright red cough on all that white. What do you see there? I see blood coughed up onto a tissue firstly. She's primed us to see this because we have the throat with the poem boiling in it. We have the speaker unwrapping hard candies. We can think about a lot. If you're complaining about a sore throat, lozenges or cough suppressants,
01:48:37
Speaker
tugging down tissues from her sleeve. So it primes us to the bright red cough is the blood that comes up out of the cough on all that white, on a white tissue. But of course, that white is also paper. It's also the poem. And if you think about a text as something in black and white, and then there is a bit of color, it's a pop of color, you might say. Is it a blemish?
01:49:06
Speaker
Or is it the poem coming to life and bleeding? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm laughing to myself because I'm thinking of the stupid joke, the kid's riddle, what's black and white and red all over, which is the answer is a newspaper, the pun on red. But here, I think the idea is right.
01:49:29
Speaker
that, well, okay, so if it has to be this way, if this kind of bitter logic that I've sort of spent this poem detailing and I'm now kind of resigning myself to,
01:49:39
Speaker
then what like may as well lean into it to borrow another sort of dated phrase from the politics of that moment. If the poem's gonna kill me or something, then you know, better to burn out than fade away or something like that, this sort of like go out with a kind of like put
01:50:04
Speaker
put what's inside of you on the page, even if it's disgusting, even if the price of having done so is your own life.
01:50:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, one reading of if it has to be this way is, you know, if it has to end here, I think. So there's also a kind of like, it's going to end either way. So let's...
01:50:35
Speaker
leave a mark, even if that mark is maybe a blotch or a blemish blot, something like that, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's wonderful. Well, if it has to end this way, Michelle. Do you want to read it for us one more time?
01:50:54
Speaker
I will try.
Conclusion and Farewell
01:50:56
Speaker
I think we all have to admit that it is a difficult poem to read tonally. The movements of it are so all over the place, but I will be honored to give it an attempt. Okay. Take a sip of water. Okay.
01:51:18
Speaker
The ode on a Grecian urn is worth any number of old ladies. A grandmother hung from a cliff like a tense moment in an action movie and the ode, speaking itself with its hand on one heart, steadfastly refused to save her. In fact, it did that thing where it ground each finger out with a motorcycle boot and then ate its cigarette for emphasis, whooping.
01:51:45
Speaker
Some old ass bitch was in pussy church when the ode, now spelling itself with an umlaut, swung its urn at the back of her head, really clocking her. Till the violets in her church hat grew from the floor and won a third place prize for consciousness.
01:52:01
Speaker
The Ode is pushing Nana's off bridges, detonating them with dynamite, tying them to railroad tracks with squeaky young rope, pouring big glugs into them out of the skull and crossbones bottle. The Ode is checking its pocket watch, which points always to death to old ladies o'clock. It is shrieking. Ugh.
01:52:20
Speaker
You're like 100 and your breath smells exactly like horse medicine, ho. The ode is blasting holes in them, is laying them out in the potpourri isle, is stabbing them with those icicles they always said were dangerous. The ode means ill to all of them. The ode is worth any number. And the worst is,
01:52:44
Speaker
I believe it. The worst is I will become one without having written anything like the ode on aggression urn and sit in long rows along with my kind till there the ode comes striding toward me, my necessary death at the ready, my pulse like black grapes at its fingertips saying, fear not, it will be fast. The forgetting of great poems will fly through you in bullets.
01:53:12
Speaker
Beauty is truth and truth, but already I am losing it. All I know is that the world is falling away, and you won't believe what it is wearing, the ridiculous pantsuit of me, an old lady crumpled hopelessly at the crotch, a flower valiant in its little butthole. All the vital syllables are being erased.
01:53:39
Speaker
It's space age fabric now seen for what it is, an embarrassment. My name is turning into Edna, Myrtle, Dorcas, my descendants find my peppermints disgusting. The urn is approaching to scatter me over a landscape that is heaven on earth. And in the feet of the poem, I am running in mad pursuit and struggle to escape.
01:54:03
Speaker
chased as if I am worth one million, pearl, opal, ruby, quarrel, until I am caught by the feeble arm.
01:54:13
Speaker
And because it is true, I am telling the ode. You stood in me like a spine. Put Poppy's behind my eyes, just the fact of you. That he took one raw spring to set you down instead of going out to tip heifers, tweak noses, or sexually harass huge curvy vases. You were for me too.
01:54:34
Speaker
Though they would trade me and all my beulahs have lined me up to enter that land in my turn, you let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms, first to myself and then almost out loud. Mine, mine, the world's all mine. Something to say in the face of tall sickness as I quietly try to unwrap hard candies as I tug down tissues from my sleeve.
01:55:04
Speaker
Because it is true, I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it. And the Ode is murmuring almost gently. But do you like my ending? Some people don't like my ending. I don't. I never did. I thought it was so overwrought. Though now that I'm here myself, why not? If it has to be this way, then better. Put a bright red cough on all that white.
01:55:37
Speaker
Well, Michelle Taylor, that was a beautiful reading and a beautiful conversation. I mean, funny and quite moving and fascinating. And I want to thank you for making the time and for giving us the gift of your critical attention. Thank you. It's such a joy to discuss these poems with you.
01:55:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, I look forward to future conversations with you and about poetry and about other things. So I want to thank the listeners for hanging out with us for the last couple of hours. Gosh, we've been at it for a while. I hope you like these long episodes, people. Sorry. No, it was worth it. It was good. Yeah, that was great.
01:56:22
Speaker
Do stay tuned. We'll have more episodes very soon. And as I must say, please, if you are enjoying the podcast, share it with other people. Leave us a rating and review, that kind of thing. Let's help other people find it. But in the meantime, thanks for listening and be well, everyone.