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Eric Lindstrom on James Schuyler ("Empathy and New Year")
1.7k Plays11 months ago
"New Year is nearly here / and who, knowing himself, would / endanger his desires / resolving them / in a formula?" So asks James Schuyler in this episode's poem, "Empathy and New Year." No resolutions for me this year, but instead an indulgence, a gift to myself, and I hope to you: my friend Eric Lindstrom rejoins the podcast to talk once again about Schuyler, poetry, and friendship.
Eric Lindstrom is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of two books: Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave, 2011) and Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction (Cambridge, 2022). He is now completing a third book, James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention: Romanticism Inside Out, which would be the first scholarly monograph dedicated to Schuyler's work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Experimentation
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm filled with delight today because we've got a sort of experiment headed your
Discussing James Schuyler's Centennial
00:00:13
Speaker
way. I have my old friend back on the podcast. Eric Lindstrom has returned to the podcast. Not only has Eric returned to the podcast, but he's returned to the podcast to talk about the poet.
00:00:24
Speaker
that we talked about the last time he was on the podcast, the poet James Schuyler, a poet whom Eric and I both really love. The poet who was the occasion for the last time Eric and I were in the same room as each other, Eric and I were both just in New York City to celebrate the centennial of Schuyler's birth. And so he's been much on both of our minds, not just for that.
00:00:52
Speaker
reason, but for many others. And it's such a thrill to get to talk with Eric again today.
Reminiscing February Poem Discussion
00:01:00
Speaker
Last time Eric came on, the poem that we talked about was Schuyler's poem, February, which seems to take place, or it's as though the poem is being spoken. Well, Schuyler in that poem, you might remember, says on the day before March 1st,
00:01:19
Speaker
which could be February 28th probably is, or maybe it's a leap year and it's the 29th. And I sort of dragooned Eric into coming on the podcast last time and insisted that we taught, you know, ordinarily I invite guests to choose a poem. And in this case, I said, Eric, let's do February and let's do it on this date. And Eric sort of rolled his eyes at my literalism. And now the joke is on,
00:01:49
Speaker
Me or him, I can't tell which.
Planning Empathy in New Year Discussion
00:01:52
Speaker
Both of us probably, and on you, dear listener, because Eric this time emailed me and he said, hey, let's talk about Schuyler's poem, Empathy in New Year.
00:02:05
Speaker
which is a New Year's Eve and Day poem. And he said, let's do it in a timely way. And I thought that was a great idea. And then what I found utterly charming and very Eric-like about this interaction was that he said, let's talk on Skype or Zoom or something, or I guess if you want to record it, that's fine, but I don't really care.
00:02:37
Speaker
mature of me. I guess I was tight. Yeah. I thought, you know, I definitely want to talk to you. And the last episode we did together was such a delight for me. And
00:02:52
Speaker
Maybe this is an extremely embarrassing thing for me to admit, but it's actually an episode I have listened to more than once because I found the conversation so stimulating that I want to make sure that I wouldn't lose any of the insight that was gained in it. So I have sort of gone back over it more than once.
00:03:14
Speaker
Which is not, I mean, it's hard for me to listen to my own voice, but I was there to hear Eric's. And so let me, first of all, recommend that episode to any of you who haven't yet listened to it. It was a great early episode in the podcast run. And we might get into some sort of background on Skylar and context setting and so forth, but we may also try to trim that up a little bit here and just get to the poem.
00:03:43
Speaker
So if you're craving more Schuyler, as no doubt you will be after this conversation, I heartily endorse finding that earlier episode with Eric on the poem February. And with all of that in mind, I'm going to keep the bio, the intro here really brief and just tell you, remind you that Eric Lindstrom is a professor of English at the University of Vermont.
Eric's Academic Background
00:04:08
Speaker
He's the author of two books. His first book is called Romantic Fiat and the second book called Jane Austen and Other Minds. He's the author of several articles, too many for me to list here, the editor of special issues of journals that you should
00:04:29
Speaker
look up as well. And he's working on a book which is most relevant for today's conversation. He's working on a book whose title is James Schuyler and the Poetics of Attention, Romanticism Inside Out, which promises to be the first monograph that's dedicated to the work of the first academic monograph that would be dedicated solely to the work of James Schuyler.
00:04:53
Speaker
which is a really exciting thing. And I've gotten to see bits of the thinking that goes into it and to talk with Eric about what's motivating and driving that book. And I can just say, I'm really excited. I'm really excited to read it. The last time Eric and I talked,
00:05:18
Speaker
I say that this time feels like an experiment. I guess every one of these conversations I has feels a bit experimental to me, and part of the variables that change are the
00:05:29
Speaker
the poem, of course, but also the person I'm talking to and the relationship I have with them and just their temperament and intelligence and so on. Eric, as I think I talked about last time, is somebody I've known for decades now. He and I started graduate school together at Yale and have known each other for over 20 years.
Innovative Literary Criticism
00:05:53
Speaker
One thing that you said to me, Eric, last time was that you were really excited about the... This is going to sound like I'm really patting myself on the back here, but I have a point that I'm about to get to. You said you found yourself excited about the project that the podcast was that it seemed to you like an exciting way to be doing literary criticism.
00:06:17
Speaker
and also an exciting way to be doing friendship, which I found really moving. And it was the kind of thought which you so often give me that I didn't have the words for until you offered them. And it occurred to me this time that now that it's not quite but nearly a year since that last conversation we had, and Schuyler's poems, I mean, obviously in particular, the poem that we chose last time and the poem that we've chosen this time,
00:06:47
Speaker
are so interested in the passage of time and in pinning down dates and things like that, and in the difficulty and confusion and insufficiencies of attempts to pin down dates that may be taken together. The last conversation we had in this one might also be seen as an experiment or as an interesting experiment in the way we do time.
00:07:15
Speaker
the way we measure time and its passage.
Podcast as a Teaching Tool
00:07:19
Speaker
So Eric Lindstrom, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for suggesting it to me. How are you feeling today?
00:07:28
Speaker
I'm great. I'm feeling really good. I got most of my shopping done. I hope you all out there are in a happy, peaceful place today whenever this gets released. And it's wonderful to hear you and see you come around. I have to say too, at a moment where I really needed to devise a class that would work for me this fall, your podcast helped me teach my
00:07:49
Speaker
Modern Poetry 2162 class at Vermont, which I haven't seen the evals yet, but I think students really loved and it was much to do with your contribution. And thank you in this day and age where we've got to find ways to teach our students bigger classes. One poem a day was my
00:08:11
Speaker
Savior. And so many of the poems that I thought about teaching or taught were from episodes of the podcast. And so I want to say thanks to those of you that have given your thoughts and have listened because it really helped me out. That's really cool. I think there's actually kind of momentum, pedagogy.
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, let me say just quickly, I don't want to create the implication here that the fact that I've, you know, Eric is, I've now had two guests back on. I had Lanny Hammer on twice, also for sort of topical or occasional reasons both times, you know, to talk about James Merrill's Christmas tree poem on Christmas last year.
00:08:55
Speaker
and then to talk about his friend Louise Glick, who'd passed away recently. I have more episodes lined up with guests who have not yet appeared on the podcast, and future guests and current listeners should not be under the impression that I am running out of guests to have. In fact, the poetry studies waters our
00:09:22
Speaker
are deep and wide, and it's been a marvelous kind of discovery to me that I'm at no, I feel like I'm in no danger of running out of cool people to talk to. This just feels like an indulgence today for us, and I hope it'll be a fun one for listeners. We're recording, I don't mind saying, it feels like a Skylarian thing to observe on Friday, December 22nd.
00:09:50
Speaker
in the afternoon. I think if all goes according to plan, the earliest you would be listening to this would be next year, on the first of the year 2024.
00:10:05
Speaker
So we're on this side of Christmas right now, and yet you'll be listening to the conversation, presumably on the other side of it. So I want to note that. The poem, Eric, that you've chosen,
00:10:24
Speaker
is another that we have a recording to, and I'll play the recording in a minute, as I said last time. And I'm just gonna stop saying, I think, as I said last time or whatever. So sorry for the repetitions, but let this apology cover future repetitions as well.
00:10:43
Speaker
Schuyler, for those of you who don't know him very well, was a poet who uncharacteristically of poets of his generation didn't like to give poetry readings or didn't feel comfortable giving poetry readings and didn't give any poetry readings until very late in his life. We have recordings of the few that survive and this poem seemed to
00:11:06
Speaker
you know, become part of the set list for the readings that he did give in the last couple years of his life. The most famous of those readings was the first one he gave, happened in 1988 on November 15th, 1988 at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City.
00:11:26
Speaker
And the recording that I'm going to play for you in a moment is from that reading. I feel like I need to set up the recording in just the slightest way before I play it, which is to say that Schuyler's friend John Ashbury introduced him.
00:11:45
Speaker
and give just a beautiful and really interesting, I think, introduction to him sort of situating his friend in literary history in ways that are, you know, in some ways that make perfect sense to me and other ways that sort of raise my eyebrows.
00:12:07
Speaker
Sorry, Ashbury, who was, without a doubt, the kind of more famous of the friend pair, and these poets, you know, along with Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch and Barbara Gast, sort of members of the so-called New York School of Poets,
00:12:31
Speaker
In the course of his introduction, Ashbury quotes from the poem that we're going to listen to. I think not knowing necessarily that Jimmy Schuyler would be reading from that poem in just a few minutes. So when Schuyler begins to read the poem and gets to the lines that Ashbury quotes, you'll notice that his voice sort of changes in a kind of unspoken acknowledgement.
00:12:55
Speaker
of the fact that you've just heard these lines quoted to you, he sort of laughs at the fact that he's doing that, the audience laughs in response. I think that context might be useful to listeners who don't know the recording and weren't listening to Ashbury's intro. Ashbury's intro
00:13:20
Speaker
alludes to the lines you're about to hear and then ends this way. So these are Ashbury's last words before Skyler takes the stage. I give you a poet who knows the names for things and who's knowing proves something. So that as a way into the poem, like I said, I'll now play the recording, unless Eric, is there any context you wanna set before we play this?
00:13:49
Speaker
No, that was great. I'm already thinking about the content of the poem because to jump ahead, quoting, quit quoting, and now you're making me think. I'll say it now. Now's the moment.
00:14:02
Speaker
It's like Ashbury lays a joke in there. Maybe he did know Skyler was going to read it and therefore quote Ashbury, which not to divulge too much of my positionality on Skyler and Ashbury as friends, great, but sometimes complex friends. Maybe Ashbury laid that joke in there so Skyler would step into the trap of quoting him, quoting him.
00:14:25
Speaker
in a poem that's about ambivalences, about quoting, which you will hear in just a moment. I couldn't help myself, sorry. No, it's good. It's good. And so remember, we'll make a link to the poem available to you so that you can look at the text of it. It's maybe a bit on the longer side of poems we talk about on the podcast. So settle in. It'll take four minutes or so for you to
00:14:53
Speaker
listen to Schuyler's reading. I'll also direct you to, as I am now in the habit of doing, to the Penn Sound website and archive, which has great recordings of Schuyler and many of the other poets whom we've discussed on this podcast. So that's where I've taken this audio from. So without further ado, I give you a poet who knows the names for things and who's knowing proves something.
00:15:24
Speaker
Empathy and New Year. A notion like that of empathy inspires great distrust in us, because it connotes a further dose of irrationalism and mysticism. Lady Strauss. One, Whitman took the cars all the way from Camden, and when he got here, or rather there, said, quit quoting, and took the next back through the Jersey Meadows, which were that then.
00:15:54
Speaker
But what if it is all my illusion? I doubt it, though. Men are not so inventive, or few are. Not knowing a name for something proves nothing. Right now it isn't raining, snowing, sleeting, slushing, yet it is doing something. As a matter of fact, it is raining snow. Snow from cold clouds that melts as it strikes.
00:16:22
Speaker
to look out a window as descent's wet feet. Now to infuse the garage with a subjective state and can't make it seem to, even if it is a little like what the dentist saw, a dark gullet with gleams and red. You come to me at midnight and say, I can smell that after Christmas letdown coming like a hound. And clarify, I can smell it just like a hound does.
00:16:52
Speaker
So it came. It's a shame expectations are so often to be counted on. New Year is nearly here and who, knowing himself, would endanger his desires resolving them in a formula.
00:17:07
Speaker
After a while, even a wish flashing by as a thought provokes a knock on wood so often, a little dish-like place worn in this desk just holds a lucky stone, inherited from an unlucky man. 1968, what a lovely name to give a year, even better than the dogs.
00:17:33
Speaker
Wirt, bird thou never, and woothy. Personally, I'm going to call the new year Mutt. Flattering it will get you nowhere.
00:17:48
Speaker
two awake at four and heard a snowplow not rumble a huge beast at its chow and wondered is it 1968 or 1969 for a bit. 1968 had such a familiar sound got coffee and started reading Darwin so modest so innocent so pleased at the surprise that he should grow up to be him
00:18:18
Speaker
How grand to be in a new year with a new writer you really love. A snow shovel scrapes, it's 12 hours later, and the sun that came so late is almost gone. A few pink minutes and yet the days get longer. Coming from the movies last night, snow had fallen in almost still air and lay on all, so all twigs were emboldened to make big disclosures.
00:18:49
Speaker
It felt warm, warm that is, for cold, the way it does when snow falls without wind. A snow picture, you said, under the clung-to elms, worth painting. I said, the weather operator said, turning tomorrow to bitter cold. Then the wind will veer round to the north and blow all of it down. Maybe I thought it will get cold some other way.
00:19:19
Speaker
You, as usual, were right. It did and has night and snow and the threads of life for once seen as they are in ropes like roots. Thank you.
00:19:42
Speaker
So there we have James Schuyler reading Empathy in New Year. Reading it two decades, it seems, more or less, after it had been written. Eric, I don't think of Schuyler as a poet who is terribly fond of epigraphs.
00:20:11
Speaker
This poem begins with one. So again from Levi Strauss, a notion like that of empathy inspires great distrust in us because it connotes a further dose of irrationalism and mysticism. The word
00:20:28
Speaker
the word empathy doesn't appear in the poem, but it's there in the epigraph. And I guess I just want to invite you to say something about the gesture of this epigraph as a way into the poem. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it really is an instance where reading the start of the poem is essential in the epigraph even before the start in a way.
00:20:54
Speaker
So Schuyler used collage technique a lot and quoted a lot and read a lot, not necessarily for academic reasons, right? Like he doesn't quote like Eliot. So why is this at the start of the poem? You mean he doesn't quote in the way that Eliot does? Yeah, he's not trying to sort of establish a sort of cultural
00:21:22
Speaker
center point or tradition or make you feel like you need have read something to read him. I think you're right in your description to say that the intentionality of this is that empathy is in it. And the word empathy is not otherwise in the poem. So like where is empathy in this poem is a question I think that will
00:21:45
Speaker
probably try to hunt, but also one that will permeate whatever we say or other people honestly say about this poem. It's in the title and it's in this Levistros. It's an anthropology text. We were talking about this just a little as we got our computers going and did the troubleshooting. This was a talk and then an anthropology essay and a journal, a pretty
00:22:11
Speaker
a pretty kind of center lane trade journal, current anthropology, and then in a book. So, okay, Schuyler probably read this in a book. But the other part of it that I find fascinating the more I think about, especially given what empathy is, the ability to feel what another is feeling, or even in a cognitive way, perhaps, to think another's thought.
00:22:42
Speaker
It's difficult to know how to take this epigraph and therefore it's difficult to figure out what position on empathy we ought to have at the start of the poem. I'm in a poetry job search right now and I'm learning more about contemporary poetry as a romanticist who mostly reads older stuff.
00:22:58
Speaker
And to me, it seems like contemporary poetry, which Schuyler perhaps isn't writing at this point, is really all about empathy, right? Like subject positions are often earnest and engaged and political along with aesthetic complexity and technique. And I think
00:23:19
Speaker
This epigraph is almost like a tender trap. I don't think it's a meanly ironic trap. But if we read it straight, we enter a poem where empathy is distanced by a kind of anthropological, academic mistrust of something that connotes irrationalism and mysticism. So maybe we start reading the poem thinking,
00:23:43
Speaker
that it's seeking a kind of neutrality. I don't think Schuyler was anything like an anthropologist, but there are reasons why he might be wary of the high emotional threshold of empathy, of mind melding, of feeling what another feels. Then the other way to read it is to say he doesn't mean us to align with it, in which case it's... You mean to align with the Levi-Strauss position. Yeah, yeah, right.
00:24:11
Speaker
that he's setting it up to counter it. Just in the sense that he's not an academic, he's not an anthropologist. This is a kind of high-tone register that he immediately wants us to
00:24:26
Speaker
to spin off of. And if that's the case, then we're starting a poem that is earnestly about empathy, whose initial move is kind of ironic. That's interesting. So that's why I called it Tender Trap, which is the name of a 50s movie. But you know, I think this is kind of a trap, but it's not meant to be like malicious or like, you know, you're gonna have to gnaw your arm out or leg out to get out of it. It just puts you in a position where there's wariness along with the earnestness of this all important question
00:24:57
Speaker
sorry if that was me, of how to feel with or think with in something like an unmediated level, right? Because empathy is the strongest claim for feeling with. It's stronger even than sympathy, which crosses difference. Empathy is supposed to be like direct
00:25:21
Speaker
So all of that kind of gets triggered, but honestly, it takes a lot of readings even to start.
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, no, well, see, there's so much in what you've been saying, Eric. I want to draw a bit of it. I just want to pull on a couple strings a little bit. One, when you made the remark about sort of your reading of contemporary poetry as being sort of all about empathy, I'm thinking of contemporary poets who are
00:25:54
Speaker
who stake positions that are kind of skeptical of empathy and sort of want to have a kind of, or have a wariness, let's say, about claims to empathy. But that's not to say that contemporary poetry isn't interested in or obsessed with the idea.
00:26:24
Speaker
you know, in a way sort of being against something is also a way of considering it. Your generalizations on contemporary poetry are much more well-earned and valuable than mine. I think we're both getting at something though, which is like, and this reminds me of Schuyler and the kind of flatness, the descriptiveness,
00:26:46
Speaker
of the New York school who had a kind of flat aesthetic often, but how do you write a poem with empathy in the title? It conceptualizes something that should be affective and human and it tells rather than shows to put it in just like a super straightforward way. It's a funny title because to achieve empathy in a poem with that name really makes it a meta thing rather than a story that we draw that
00:27:16
Speaker
concept out of and i think you know that also connects to me to how skyla reads it which is more comic reading than he typically gives his voice is always.
00:27:30
Speaker
Gruff, I find it beautiful, but his voice gives a steadiness to a poem, which is actually quite various. There's a lot of playfulness in the poem, I think, right at the start. There are lines that make you laugh, they're the dog's wort and woofy. And there are moments in this poem that just stop where you are,
00:27:56
Speaker
drop dead, plangent, moving, unwantedly insightful. So like this poem kind of runs the gamut in terms of its tone. Yeah. But to center empathy in a poem seems kind of like an impossible task straight from the title.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that brings me to the second of two strings I wanted to pull on in the thing that you had said a moment ago, which is I think you said very kind of swiftly, you made a distinction, which I think would be useful to elaborate between sympathy on the one hand and empathy on the other. I think colloquially,
00:28:38
Speaker
I mean, obviously there are people for whom that distinction matters a great deal and who would never think of those terms as synonymous. But I think sort of colloquially in our culture, we sometimes hear those terms used interchangeably or a kind of unthinking association of those terms.
00:28:56
Speaker
And so I guess I want for you to say more about what the competing kind of implications of those terms might be, like what would distinguish one from the other. And whether or not you or Skylar or I or the listeners should accept the Levy-Strauss position,
00:29:22
Speaker
I think we could probably account for why a reasonable person might, when considering the possibility of empathy, think of it as irrational and mystical, as a way of feeling, let's say, and maybe wouldn't feel the same way about sympathy. So, Eric, could you just say more about those two words?
00:29:50
Speaker
My brain is going back to things I learned long ago about the 18th century, but I feel like sympathy is a term. That's hard. Well, I mean, if you're starting to read books about sympathy, at least in a school context, you're reading Adam Smith and David Hume and ending with Susan Sontag and others. Sympathy crosses difference, and it often just allows the subject position to be where they are. It's mediated.
00:30:18
Speaker
So let's say like, go ahead. He has this beautiful phrase, which is great for poets. Whereas empathy, and I feel like in my classes and the life I move in, empathy is kind of one, like people use that as the default, because it's about like being there, like really feeling it, feeling just what another feels, but like from a
00:30:43
Speaker
ideas context, a philosophical point of view, like empty is a much higher bar. It raises the question about how you really commune with another mind, another life, another body. And that is, I think, in a lot of ways what this poem plays with and gets at. Whereas sympathy is much more
00:31:11
Speaker
guarded and is a discourse that is going to find ways to work itself out. It's always interrelating, but empathy is just like you're either there man with the other and feeling what they feel or you're not. It's more of an absolute thing, which I think is probably why Skyler grabs it there. If somebody is an empath, they're literally feeling the pain,
00:31:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of Bill Clinton, I feel your pain. That might be a good example of the kind of bad faith claim to empathy that people would rightly be suspicious of, right? If empathy always works that way, then it would be good to be skeptical of it.
00:32:02
Speaker
of sort of collapsing the distance between the person who's feeling it and the object that has aroused it or something. But the problem with it is that it might sort of kick that person out of the position they're in because now you're in it. It's like a game of musical chairs or something. I was also wondering if there's some kind of analogy
00:32:25
Speaker
to be drawn between sympathy and empathy on the one hand, and simile and metaphor on the other. Because simile retains its explicit crossing of this thing is like this other thing, whereas metaphor just says this is that.
00:32:44
Speaker
Yeah, so you use the word musical chairs. I think this poem opens with playfulness. One of the answers to where is the empathy in this poem is the first word or name. This is also a poem about name. Good. That was going to be my next question for you. Yeah, yeah. So dates get names, 1968, 1969. I think that's endearing and conceptually playful. But then the first name of the poem is the proper name Whitman. So Whitman has to be the answer
00:33:12
Speaker
to where's empathy in this poem. Yeah, and I do think this question of metaphor and simile is right at the heart of the poem, and even its metaphors, you know, metaphor means to carry over, you know, words to that effect are words of transport. And so Whitman comes to where they are, the New York school poets,
00:33:36
Speaker
from Camden, from New Jersey. So this is later Whitman, the Whitman who lived in New Jersey, I think after his stroke in later life.
00:33:46
Speaker
who gets there by the means of his time, the cars, right? So not the subway, the trolley, maybe not even the L. So the transport is already attended to in the poem, and then this is definitely a poem of similes and metaphor. The very end of the poem is a wonderful example of
00:34:09
Speaker
I know we'll get back to it, but I just love the end of the poem so much. The metaphor, that's almost a dead metaphor at this point, threads of life.
00:34:17
Speaker
rendered in terms of, I think, either another metaphor, ropes or simile, like roots, a definite simile. So the very end of the poem is like this triple of a beautiful but slightly pat metaphor, the threads of life, then seen in terms of maybe two similes. So he's definitely talking about simile and metaphor as a way
00:34:45
Speaker
about the question of empathy. And then the other thing that that brings to mind for me is that metaphor and maybe just being a poet using figurative language, being in a poem is always kind of a lively
00:35:04
Speaker
evasion of the being exactly there in the spot that we associate with like the place of empathy, you know, that the desire in this poem, the relationship that kind of comes up in the end of the first part about New Year's resolutions, a way of sort of saying
00:35:26
Speaker
that to be fixed to a spot is a threat to maybe metaphor to these things that the poem does. So I feel like...
00:35:36
Speaker
Whereas Schuyler doesn't talk a lot directly about empathy, the whole poem, the kind of scheme of the poem is patterned by talking about and using different things that are formally and conceptually arranged a lot like this empathy-sympathy question, simile metaphor, and then these other things about language and about
00:35:59
Speaker
the sort of constitution of our world, like being here versus being there, then versus now. It keeps kind of, like you said, musical chairs practice with these things or hopscotch with these things as a way to kind of turn over the question of empathy that the poem is, again, wary of just like dealing with head-on. Yeah.
00:36:33
Speaker
The idea of here and there comes up in the third and fourth lines of the poem. And when he got here or rather there. Right. Whitman took the cars all the way from Camden. Okay. So he's in Jersey, right? Like South Jersey. And when he got here, so am I right to think that
00:36:56
Speaker
where Whitman is getting to is New York, and Schuyler first calls, by which I mean the city, and Schuyler at first refers to New York City as here, but then realizing that presumably in his writing, in his moment of writing, he's not actually in New York City, which is a place he might have become accustomed to thinking of as here because he spent so much time living there.
00:37:24
Speaker
But maybe he's in Southampton right now, so he's not in the city. So he says, you know, Whitman took the cars all the way from Camden and when he got here, or rather there, right? Because I'm not in New York City, so I can't call it here. I have to call it there.
00:37:39
Speaker
I think that's right. And then if you're looking at the book, this is in Schuyler's second book of 1972, The Crystal Lithium, and it's headed, this section is headed, Southampton in New York. Right, it's sort of placed in both places. I think there's another reading too, because, well, the truth of Schuyler's biographical life, like he was probably living with Fairfield Porter,
00:38:05
Speaker
the great painter and Schuyler's I think best friend really and lover in some capacity I think we all have established.
00:38:17
Speaker
He was in Southampton, Porter. Schuyler is a New York school poet. So there's this kind of tacking back and forth between them there. But then I also think it's temporal, right? There's a tacking back and forth between now and then. Oh, I see what you mean. Here and there. So even as Schuyler thinks of himself as, let's say, in Manhattan, and Whitman is a guy in Manhattan, even though he was from Brooklyn and then Camden.
00:38:41
Speaker
when he got here or rather there, I think part of that here, there is temporal, because we don't know what time this wonderful encounter is happening in. Even if Schuyler were in New York when he were writing, Schuyler's New York isn't Whitman's New York. Yeah, Whitman's New York would be a there both in place and in time. That's so great. It's a kind of dislocation. And he's just doing it with the pronouns, you know? Here and there.
00:39:10
Speaker
And of course, the question that might always be raised about a moment like this in a poem, and what I mean by that are moments of self-correction, that gesture, or rather, and then say it the other way, is that if it's genuine self-correction,
00:39:29
Speaker
you know, edit my man, put in the right one. You know, it's like reminds me of when Elizabeth Bishop says, our looks too looks, our vision, visions is too serious a word, our looks too looks, right? But why keep the word visions in the poem? You know, one might ask a Bishop if it's too serious a word, like why keep the mistake in? And here maybe it's because it's producing that weird feeling of dislocation, which is more the
00:39:58
Speaker
the topic at hand rather than simply putting a pin in a map or an indicator of some kind on a timeline.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah, totally. It's that play, which is, of course, a play of demonstrative pronouns. It's a play of appearances, the play of time and space. This is a fairly cosmic poem when he brings up Maya illusion that becomes explicit. But I think even just in the regular old monosyllabic English pronouns of here and there,
00:40:30
Speaker
you get at that. It's playful. It's the sense of a kind of unsettled movement. Eric, do you have a reading of what it means or how we should think about the fact that what Whitman said, apparently,
00:40:51
Speaker
So the first quotation in the poem, if you don't count the epigraph, is quick quoting. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's it's funny, you know, Whitman's giving the challenge, but then comes there, you know, Whitman is is the predecessor. Right. Back up a little bit, because I think there are some illusions to key facts in this poem, which are really resonant to Skyler and hopefully to us. The Whitman of Camden is the older Whitman.
00:41:21
Speaker
who I think was an explicitly queer poet and figure. So this is the poet who is the,
00:41:29
Speaker
object of veneration and pilgrimage for people like Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter, the English writer, and they came to Whitman as a democratic poet, but as a predecessor in a lineage of queer love that goes all the way to Allen Ginsburg. Ginsburg talks explicitly about a kind of chain of relationships
00:41:53
Speaker
that he finds important and link him back to Whitman. So that's the Whitman of Camden. And so that Whitman says, quick quoting, is an ironic version, of course, of counseling the transcendentalist thing, counseling self-reliance, to the poet who, I think Schuyler inherits that tradition. I think Ashprey does too.
00:42:22
Speaker
But in a way, obviously, there's a very different sensibility that isn't canonical the way that a Whitman or Emerson was made to be. Whitman is giving a kind of paradoxical advice because he couldn't really appear in this poem if he weren't quoted.
00:42:39
Speaker
And the advice is like, be original in other words. Be original, yeah. And then I also think something about the pacing of this, it reminds me
00:42:53
Speaker
and I can never suppress the thought of like a different aesthetic, like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Like a figure of someone zips onto the scene. It's funny. And then almost just like, is it the Road Runner that just says beep beep and leaves? Yeah, it's funny. I had I had another cartoon playing in my mind at this moment. I had that it's become a meme of from The Simpsons of Abe Simpson. Do you remember the episode, you know, where he walks into the like Bart has somehow gotten the job of being the
00:43:22
Speaker
the doorman at a whorehouse in Springfield. I haven't seen this film, but I should. Yeah, yeah. And Abe Simpson, his grandfather walks in, you know, and he's like whistling and he sees Bart at the door and he immediately walks back out. Right. So it's like it's like it's a revolving door. Yeah. And you know, it's it's it's planned. Like this poem is playful. It's almost winky, but like it's
00:43:47
Speaker
always, like Whitman, of course, is the poet who says, you know, look for me under your boots. And like, if you have, you know, Schuyler always loved Whitman. I remember anecdotes that Doug Crace has written about where it's like when people would disparage Whitman, Schuyler would
00:44:03
Speaker
not just something to affirm how lovely and important he is, but like pick a sort of deep cut Whitman poem and just show the quality and irreplaceability of Whitman's voice. So to use him this way is funny, but doesn't disavow just how important Whitman is. The very first poem in Schuyler's first collection,
00:44:27
Speaker
or his first big press collection, freely espousing, is a very Whitmanic poem, which I think listeners can get just from the kind of whiff of the title. This comes back to Whitman. It's similarly the first poem in a collection and has a different kind of
00:44:46
Speaker
I'll say road-runnery or the Simpson-y kind of aesthetic where Schuyler's allowing humor to cut up that deep relationship to the poet. And where does Whitman go? He disappears back into Jersey. He takes a different mode of transport, not a bus or the subway, but the cars.
00:45:13
Speaker
And that, you know, gets us thinking about space and time, the gathering of people, but also a simile and metaphor because the link of that word kind of etymologically to transport systems to how to get over, get from here to there. And then and then here's my big reveal. But what if in the Ashbury quotes these lines, but what if it is all Maya illusion? Yeah.
00:45:43
Speaker
And that goes immediately to a joke. I doubt it though, men are not so inventive. So human beings are not inventive enough to make up the fabric of our world should it prove an illusion.
00:45:56
Speaker
Right. The word Maya, sort of various Indian religious traditions, which would suggest like the world of appearance is sort of button illusion, right? It's a cosmic illusion, right? All the
00:46:17
Speaker
The phenomena, all the entire phenomenal world, the ego as well, is a cosmic illusion. Of course, Schuyler being more than the average poet just committed to observation, to the realness of the particular, to the passing moment. This would be kind of a devastating thing for Schuyler to absorb into his poetics. And it just kind of gets tossed off here.
00:46:45
Speaker
And, you know, I've always wondered like why I looked, you know, you start, it's so easy to find things now. I looked and Maya illusion is a line from Whitman.
00:46:59
Speaker
It's a line from a Whitman poem, Calamus, which is the part of Leaves of Grass where Whitman really first started talking about male-male eroticism explicitly. And it's a poem called, Are You the Person Drawn Toward Me, which we could look up. But it's an incredible poem about the otherness of erotic life.
00:47:26
Speaker
And do you have the lines? I think I have it in a link. Yeah. And so empathy isn't in this poem, apart from the title, seemingly. So that explains, because I was going to ask, and I'll just talk while you look for it, Eric. If you don't find it right now, that's OK. No, I've got it. I've just got it. OK. So let me ask the question first, though, which is, well, what I was going to say is,
00:47:57
Speaker
But you've just given an answer. Why does that sentence begin, but what if it is all my illusion? In other words, why the but? What's the implied or previously stated thought or line that the question that he's going to ask now would be a kind of undermining contradiction to, in other words.
00:48:21
Speaker
But the link here is that that's a quotation from Whitman, and what Whitman is endorsing is the idea that some aspect of the world as we know it might in fact be illusory in this way. Is that right, Eric? Yeah, I think Whitman adds to the stakes. So the opening of this poem is about the play of appearances, right?
00:48:45
Speaker
is something that constitutes our world, right? The play of appearances constitutes a very like capacity to use really simple grammar like here and there. So that's the
00:49:01
Speaker
the canvas, I think the poem starts on. But give us the lines from Whitman, if you have them. Sure. So for readers at home, and maybe you'll link this, but it's from Calamus. It's, are you the new person drawn toward me? Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning. I am surely far different from what you suppose. Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
00:49:30
Speaker
Do you think it's so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
00:49:55
Speaker
Have you no thought, O Dreamer, that it may be all my illusion? That's great. It's stunning. I'm so glad. Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean, I wasn't as good at Googling as you were. Or maybe I didn't trust myself to know Whitman as well as maybe you did. And well, and then so Whitman is brought into the poem to deliver the message, to quit quoting.
00:50:23
Speaker
And then Schuyler sort of doubles back on that thought and quotes Whitman, in fact, but then dismisses him by saying, I doubt it, though, you know, men are not. Yeah, the whole the whole phenomenal world, men are not inventive enough. Humans are not inventive enough to make it all up. And so and then he gets into these lines that Ashbury quotes in the intro. I mean, Ashbury had quoted those lines about about Maya illusion. But but these lines that are
00:50:52
Speaker
sort of more recognizably to me, skylarian in manner in which he's like trying to describe the weather in a just right sort of way. Right now it isn't raining, snowing, sleeting, slushing, yet it is doing something. As a matter of fact, it is raining snow. Can I give you my sort of
00:51:15
Speaker
interpoetic observation about that. I was like, well, what did those lines remind me of? And what they remind me of are Frank O'Hara in Lana Turner, his Collapse. Oh, yeah.
00:51:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is a poem from 1962. So it would have been fresh enough in Skylar's mind. That poem begins this way. Lana Turner has collapsed. I was trotting along, and suddenly it started raining and snowing. And you said it was hailing, but hailing hits you on the head hard. So it was really snowing and raining, and I was in such a hurry to meet you. But the traffic was acting exactly like the sky, and suddenly I see a headline. Lana Turner has collapsed. It's a funny poem, right?
00:51:58
Speaker
But that business of sort of these ordinary weather terms in the gerundive forms getting sort of sprinkled through to get the just right kind of description of the thing that it is, I wonder if, consciously or otherwise, Schuyler's late friend,
00:52:20
Speaker
at this point, O'Hara would have been dead, is sort of present in his mind as he's trying to describe the weather.
00:52:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think for sure, but yes, I, yes. I mean, as a matter of fact, it is raining snow. My instinct on illusions is always, almost always yes, because I feel almost like smell. No, I'm really, I'm going to double down on this. Yeah. Like smell. There's always a chemical trace there, you know, like we can exaggerate maybe how far it goes, but yeah. So the irony of this poem, which, you know, I'm trying to say is the tender trap from Levy's shows is that like, there's no, um,
00:53:01
Speaker
this poem doesn't make undue demands, but there's no easy way to enter it or to take it. And the council to quit quoting is immediately followed by so many more quotes. Whitman, but then I'm totally persuaded. You're right. I mean, Schuyler, you know, they were roommates. They in their way were best friends. They were very different people. They had a falling out. Everything with Frank O'Hara
00:53:26
Speaker
was deeply known and deeply powerful and sometimes wounding to Schuyler. So that's there. The quotes in this poem really matter. Do you want to say something about the ones that come in the next several lines, which are the hardest for me to place? Are they quotation marks? Yeah.
00:53:51
Speaker
Yeah, that you come to me at midnight and say, I can smell that after Christmas letdown coming like a hound and clarify, I can smell it just like a hound does. So it came. Well, maybe it's my limits of Googling prowess, but to me, those are
00:54:07
Speaker
moments in the poem where Schuyler is putting in quotation marks just kind of idiomatic language that he finds and he's drawing it from life. As we learned at the Schuyler event, I think Eileen Miles said, and she would well know being Schuyler's assistant,
00:54:26
Speaker
you would just have the TV on or the radio on. He's surrounded by language and is a great aficionado, you probably heard my dog sneeze, an aficionado of Americana or other moments that are striking in language. It starts with the italics, which the listener won't see unless they have the text of the poem. Now to infuse
00:54:48
Speaker
There's these great lines, you know, to look out a window is to sense wet feet. I mean, you feel that actually, that's one of the most empathic moments in the poem. Yeah, you feel the wet feet. And I do want to just pause there for a moment. I'm glad you reminded me of that line because it does link up with February in a way, which is it's another kind of
00:55:07
Speaker
Schuyler is a great poet of the window, of being inside and looking at something that's happening outside, but that's framed by the architecture of his viewing in some way.
00:55:20
Speaker
Right, and he's such a wonderful observant descriptive visual poet, but not only that. So here, looking out the window is to sense wet feet, which is a different sensation, doggy shake, a different sensation. And it makes me think, OK, we might have a moment in the poem of empathy of direct feeling with, but it doesn't give us transcendence. It gives us wet feet.
00:55:49
Speaker
Yeah, right. The ordinariness of the poem starts to kick in, right? So, you know, the ordinariness of, as a matter of fact, it was raining snow, you know, it is doing something. So, ordinary life goes on, ordinary language is just right, or is certainly good enough to evoke it, as it did in O'Hara. We sense the wet feet. I'm feeling that just rereading it. And then he's evoking something about the task of the poet,
00:56:17
Speaker
to infuse activity, like a command to self, which is a comic note to self, now to infuse the garage, so not a privileged space, not a museum or temple or anything, now to infuse the garage with a subjective state and can't make it seem to, so failure somehow in that endeavor, even if it is a little like what the dentist saw. So that's an italics
00:56:42
Speaker
and capitalize, like it's the title of a film or something. I couldn't find it. I don't know it, but I also think it's kind of a joke because what the dentist saw is a dark gullet with gleams and red. So looking down into something that's just an inside that is fleshy and dark and obstructs you.
00:57:04
Speaker
It's funny because most of us not being dentists are familiar with that scene from the other perspective, right? True. What the dentist saw is like to imagine a very commonplace kind of scene, but from the perspective that you are never allowed to have. Yeah. Right? Oh man, I still remember everything about the facial details of my dentist when I was little and you're bringing that back.
00:57:34
Speaker
I also think, okay, this is about empathy because what the dentist saw is seeing inside a person. This is the Whitman thing, which maybe I've already underlined too much. Whitman adds erotic contact to the beauty and difficulty of empathy, quote-unquote. The dentist thing, which seems like a throwaway, is about seeing inside the body of another,
00:58:04
Speaker
It's just totally quotidian. It's not transformative or ironic or anything, but it has that kind of philosophical setup to it. It's also silencing though, famously comically. You can't talk. Right. When the dentist is looking into you that way, you can't talk.
00:58:27
Speaker
Yeah, right, right, right. And then there's a quote which I, you know, it has to do with the kind of set piece about love. Maybe it's from a song, I don't know, You Come to Me at Midnight, but to me that cues love.
00:58:44
Speaker
The lover comes at midnight. It's exciting or illicit or something. It cues expectations, which will feature when we talk about New Year. And we don't know who the you is. I don't know if we want to talk about that, but it's the you of this idiom that's being drawn from the air right now.
00:59:02
Speaker
And say, and this is in quotes, I can smell that after Christmas let down coming like a hound. And clarify, I can smell it just like a hound does. So it came, it's a shame expectations are so often to be counted on.
00:59:21
Speaker
So the exciting, maybe illicit, midnight erotic encounter is then deflected into these hounds and the Christmas letdown. This poem is about managing expectation. I like that clarification, the poem that is contained in that quotation. It's not that the thing you can smell smells like a hound smells.
00:59:46
Speaker
Right. Smell is a as a verb is an ambiguous one because of the way, you know, whether you mean it sort of subjectively or objectively. Right. Right. Whether or whether it's transitive. I don't know what you understand the grammar of what I'm saying. I can smell it just like a hound does. Yeah. The hound, the hound smelling it subject, you know, as a subject, but it smells dog like.
01:00:12
Speaker
But that picks up your great comment earlier, though, about why we want the here and there and why it's an enhancement and not something that should have been corrected out because, you know, smell the after dinner dinner. Sorry, I had to flip the page and I just said dinner instead of Christmas. I can smell that after Christmas letdown coming like a hound. So the clarification says.
01:00:33
Speaker
It's the capacity or whatever, the great power of smell that a hound has. But you've already heard that let down coming like a hound as if it's- Like smells like a wet dog or something.
01:00:46
Speaker
I think it's coming like a hound in the sense of a hound on its face. There's an urgent running. There's something... Like you're being hounded. Yeah. But the image of a hound at full run is also beautiful. It shows how inexorable letdown is. And of course he can't say take back and have that not be a part of your connotations anymore. So then you're introduced to this kind of
01:01:13
Speaker
a series of relays in the poem that are about just how challenging the setup and disappointment of desire and expectation are. Yeah. And I hear it in that line even, Eric. So it came, it's a shame, expectations. It's a funny kind of internal rhyme that is not typical of Skyler, I don't think. Yeah, right. Which is maybe a modeling of an expectation being realized.
01:01:43
Speaker
as a disappointment. Yes, right. So if empathy is almost like an impossible problem, but one that we always need to encounter as we want the other desire, the other have desire in ourselves, like are entangled with ourselves and don't know ourselves. You know, we think of it as like an impossible thing to realize, but then this poem gives us things
01:02:08
Speaker
that just kind of share it. They simply don't change life for us. So, you know, the wet feet kind of gives us that feeling with but isn't transformative. It simply just gives us life as we already had it.
01:02:25
Speaker
in a way what the dentist saw already gives us, we get inside the kind of mysterious darkness of another body or perhaps of our own body as a medicalized body, but it doesn't give us anything on the other side of something wonderfully transcendent and unknowable. It gives us life again as we already have it. And then here expectations are realized, right? But
01:02:50
Speaker
And that's a shame. We get empathy, it just doesn't change the game. And that immediately brings us to the what might feel like the most kind of topical or
01:03:06
Speaker
the business about the New Year's resolutions. New Year is nearly here and who, knowing himself, would endanger his desires resolving them in a formula. You want to talk about that question that Skyler is asking there? It seems to me like it's
01:03:27
Speaker
That's like the best argument against making New Year's resolutions. So unpack that for us, Eric. Why shouldn't we make New Year's resolutions?
01:03:38
Speaker
So Puppy's barking at the mailman. Yeah, don't worry about it. So he's giving us the new year in Empathy and New Year. Why do these two things go so well together, right? We could probably talk about that forever, but I think that's a great question because it just kind of gets us back to the simple wonder of the construction of this poem. They do go together. Empathy is about feeling with and dealing with our own embodiment and otherness.
01:04:08
Speaker
New Year is gloriously trivializing these issues in a lot of ways about making these resolutions that hold us where we try to hold ourselves to our wishes, to our better self, to being a little bit trimmer or whatever it might be, a little bit more self-possessed. But they relate to these questions about the
01:04:36
Speaker
inadequacy of the self, the constant need to have transport into a better self or into another. Is the idea that the problem with New Year's resolutions is a concept
01:04:51
Speaker
that it demands of us a kind of empathic relation with our future self that has the same problem that all empathic relations have if we accept the Levi Strauss sort of skepticism about them or Schuyler's own kind of troubling of those boundaries. In other words, like how could I know as I sit here at the end of 2023
01:05:19
Speaker
except by diminishing the self that I might be in 2024, what would be an appropriate formulation of desire for myself now to then? What I should resolve is to want what I want tomorrow, not to resolve to get tomorrow what I want today.
01:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, no, I like that. And actually from romanticism, those ideas are, while they're in Hume, I mean, David Hume, the philosopher that like the sort of deconstruction of the promise is that it requires stipulating that future self. Like you're saying, William Haslett has a whole philosophical treatise on that called an essay on the principle of human action, which he wrote for all of his wonderful personal essays.
01:06:08
Speaker
But for me, this part of the poem tells a lot of truth that I just kind of take personally. I find it very moving and troubling. I don't myself make New Year's resolutions, but I can feel... Yeah, wouldn't have thought so. Yeah, thanks. You know me. And so this part of the poem is about self-knowledge, right? I think
01:06:31
Speaker
I take Schuyler's speaker, I'll just say Schuyler, at his word. New Year is nearly here, and who? Knowing himself. So this is a statement that exhibits the speaker's self-knowledge. Not to make resolutions because to do so is to endanger his desires, resolving them in a formula. So that says something to me about the nature of desire, right? That in order to be preserved, it needs to be
01:06:58
Speaker
unspoken, not resolved, or that something about desire is irreducible and has to stay evasive, to stay alive. It's endangered if you resolve it in something fixed like a formula. And that's like metaphor, right? Like metaphor and other figurative language has that same kind of
01:07:26
Speaker
quality of jumping, of dancing, of leaping from one thing to the next and being inimical to being resolved into a formulaic extending. So he's talking about the nature of desire.
01:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, no, I love that. That's why you don't need New Year's resolutions because they can be too clarifying, right? It's almost like this is highfalutin, but it's almost like here he's in the line of like a Nietzsche or someone like that who says that the vital or D.H. Lawrence that the vital thing in a human being is our capacity, you know, to to want and create and produce and something about that needs to be opaque. Yeah. To the formula of knowledge.
01:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense to me, but what's funny to me about it is that this is the same poem which told us earlier, not knowing a name for something proves nothing.
01:08:26
Speaker
Right. That seemed to that earlier position the poem was staking out seemed to be in favor of being able to name things. Yeah. And here it seems like it's I mean, it's fine. Does he contradict himself very well? He is large. He was large. Right. But raining snow. That's different from naming a desire.
01:08:50
Speaker
I think that lets the world stay mobile and fluid and evasive. It is the right word, but it's a good enough wording. It does the job.
01:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like what I was saying in that business about where he's the raining, snowing, all that stuff. It sort of reminds me of what I was saying in our earlier conversation about February, where he was describing the scene so minutely. But I think I said something like, oh, his color palette is weirdly kind of limited. He's working with the Crayola starter box of colors. Nothing is chartreuse. It's always like pink. And here, those weather words aren't
01:09:35
Speaker
I mean, it's like he's got the basic ones that little kids know, and it's just a question of putting them in the right arrangement to describe the thing that's happening rather than to try to metaphorize it or to use some kind of arcane meteorological language or whatever.
01:09:58
Speaker
I think that's it. And then the actions reinforce that because their simple monosyllabic action melts and strikes, keeping that kind of minimalist, hard-hitting simplicity.
01:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. Well, then we get to this business that I want to ask you about, Eric, the name of the year. And I know, because I didn't know until you told me, having looked at his diaries, and we don't have, I mean, we can maybe just note this and then move on, that there's some weird question here about the date. So in the poem, to remind listeners, he says this, this is how the first half
01:10:39
Speaker
of the poem ends. 1968, and there he's spelled out the numbers, 1968, what a lovely name to give a year. It's funny to me, he sort of anticipated that thing that has also become a meme, like fill in the blank would be such a lovely name for a girl. But 1968, what a lovely name to give a year, even better than the dogs, Wirt,
01:11:02
Speaker
bird than ever. There's another quotation, which I'm sure you'll have something to say about, from Shelley, right? Ode to Skylark. Skylark, that's all it is to say about it. Applied spirit, bird than ever, right? Yeah, right. And Woofie, personally, I'm going to call the New Year mutt. Flattering it will get you nowhere. And that gets a laugh on the reading. And that's the end of the first section of the poem. So this business of sort of naming the year and so on,
01:11:29
Speaker
Well, what do you make of it, Eric? What does it matter? Does it matter? Do you have thoughts about it? Yeah. I mean, the relationship of the proper name
01:11:41
Speaker
to a noun is something we all understand, but it's intriguing and mysterious. And when you live with a year for 364 or five days, it becomes a name. Part of it is that thing of just repeating a word until it estranges itself from you. It's become ordinary even though it's here, I guess the antithesis would be arbitrary.
01:12:11
Speaker
But then reading this poem, it's tricky because 1968 just isn't any year. And I don't know if Schuyler is trying to claim a sort of space apart from culture and politics, but 1968 is an especially volatile, important year. You know, student... Politically. Tat in Vietnam, assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.
01:12:38
Speaker
Yeah. And so for him to sort of end it with 1968 is like a comfy old sweater. Right. Is odd. If when we're writing a book chapter or something about this, like you have to try to confront that because it's sort of ostentatiously apolitical. And then the thing- Unimpathic.
01:13:00
Speaker
It seems unempathic and seems not sympathetic to the spirit of the times or to the demand to engage with.
01:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, with just how fractious this moment was. But then you were going to tell us about the diary, right? But it is 1968. So it's like, you know, I mean, if we're being honest, right, like every year becomes worn smooth by the end of it. Right. And so that I just want to say these words because it's the part of the poem that I always underrate and I think is so powerful if time is spent with this. After a while, even a wish flashing by is a thought provokes a knock on wood.
01:13:40
Speaker
So often, a little dish-like place worn in this desk just holds a lucky stone inherited from an unlucky man. So, knock on wood is something you do for good luck. We're not in control. We don't possess knowledge and all the answers. And then it becomes this kind of remembrancer of the unlucky man that we know nothing else about.
01:14:07
Speaker
but who just haunts that moment and then is passed off in the poem for 1968. Then we looked at the diary that Nathan Kernan has helped all readers of Schuyler by providing for us. It turns out pretty clearly that the part of the poem, particularly that
01:14:31
Speaker
in Form Section 2 was written at the start of 1968. So moving from New Year's Eve 67 to New Year's Day 68. Yeah, so this question of how could he think about 1968 in that way?
01:14:47
Speaker
maybe is answered by the fact that there's a slip or something or maybe an artistic choice for reasons I'm not sure of to portray it as 68 to 69 versus 67 to 68. If you follow the journal entry, 1968 hasn't happened yet. This is the new year that becomes 68. Why do you do that? I really don't know. I don't know either. I don't know either.
01:15:16
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's just let it float. Here is a question that maybe some answer will occur to us as we move along. We do get into the second section of the poem, which, Eric, is there something sort of
01:15:38
Speaker
standing back from the poem's bipartite division into two halves that you could say is a way of characterizing a distinction in tone between the second half and the first, or topic, or
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. How the poem sort of moves or operates. You know, one thought I had originally was just, well, the title of the poem is a bipartite title, but it doesn't seem as simple as saying, well, the first half of the poem is Empathy and the second half is New Year. In fact, it doesn't
01:16:11
Speaker
seem to resolve into that kind of mapping. So I don't know, should we just talk about some of what happens at the beginning of the second half of the poem? I want to do that. I do like the question though, and I don't have an answer to it. I don't think the poem gives an answer. And you can see that in as simple a presentational way as section two has a Roman numeral two.
01:16:41
Speaker
Yeah, I noticed this section one, doesn't it? But, but, but, but when he read it at the DIA, he said one. Yeah. And that formalizes the poem. I think, you know, I'm kind of a philosophically minded literary critic when it suits me.
01:16:57
Speaker
I think this poem is a poem about phenomena. It's a phenomenological poem, but it resists the traditional tidy dialectical reading. I would be tempted to say the two parts of the poem frame a dialectical awareness that doesn't have or seek
01:17:19
Speaker
or knows not to want to require dialectical synthesis or closure. And so partly why it's a two-part poem, because it's all about here and there, this and that, now and then, you and me, and there's no third.
01:17:36
Speaker
Right, but it's great because, you know, there's just like, well, there's a very like, duh, obvious kind of reason for the poem to be divided. It's about this sort of liminal moment of transition, and the part one is giving us the before and the part two the after. Yes. Because there he is, awake, and he's sort of confused about what year is it right now,
01:17:57
Speaker
He goes back to this sort of nostalgic sort of lingering over the sound of 1968 as a year, except now it's written out in Arabic numerals rather than spelled out in letters. Oh, I never noticed that coming. Yeah, well, that's what I'm here for. And then he starts talking about his reading habits, which I'm interested in. So got coffee and started reading Darwin. So modest, so innocent.
01:18:26
Speaker
so pleased at the surprise that he, italicized he, should grow up to be him, italicized him. Eric, what do you make of the reading of Darwin here and of modesty and of the sort of discovery that Schuyler seems so pleased to narrate at this moment?
01:18:50
Speaker
I mean, he did love reading Darwin. I know that you love Elizabeth Bishop and she did as well. So there's good implications. I think for similar reasons too. Yeah, the aesthetic of observation and wonderment of a kind of particularity that could dissolve into
01:19:09
Speaker
something fantastically mysteriously large and truthful and accurate, which they both cared about. So I take it that he did get up that day and read Darwin. He probably had, for those of you that care about this,
01:19:24
Speaker
out there in the world. He probably had instant coffee, Skyler was really into that. Yeah, so this wasn't good coffee. He got coffee, he didn't make it. I situate this probably at the Porters in Southampton because the passages in this part of the poem exactly line up with the journal entry that we just talked about written there January 1st, 1968.
01:19:50
Speaker
Um, but why Darwin? I mean, Darwin is not a figure we think of, um, vis-a-vis empathy and beyond the fact that it happened like this. Well, but I mean, he does, he does help us here. He tells us what it is he finds endearing about Darwin. So modest, so innocent, so pleased at the surprise that he should grow up to be him. Right. And that last, um,
01:20:18
Speaker
observation that he should grow up to be him, which also got a laugh, I think, from the audience at the DIA. He's so pleased with himself in a funny way. Sorry, I was just going to say, maybe there's some sort of interest there. There's something kind of Darwinian about the evolution that Darwin takes going from a person who has become this other person somehow. I don't know.
01:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, and then that makes me think about how that larger perspective is not something we really see about the speaker of this poem or about Schuyler, right? Like the speaker in this poem is, as you so beautifully said, an illiminal before and after, but Darwin sort of gets in a way the big narrative, the master narrative, even in this moment, kind of about Darwin's life, that he should be him. Both of those are in italics. Yeah. I mean, my read on this is like Darwin
01:21:15
Speaker
is the great observer and compiler, right? Of scientific behaviors and processes. And so from the perspective of a Darwin, the emergence of the self or the ego kind of has the position of otherness.
01:21:37
Speaker
That's not how I live my life. That's not how most of us live our life. We're centered kind of in the self and the ego. But for Darwin, the realization that his social, existential, even biological, mature selfhood would emerge sort of strikes him with surprise as if it had the disclosure of the other.
01:21:59
Speaker
It's like the inverse of the empathy problem, right? Where in empathy it's that you're regarding objects as though they were subjects or something. And what's pleasing about Darwin is that he regards the subject as though it were an object.
01:22:15
Speaker
I think that's just it. And then the notion that, oh, that's happening to him. It's inside him. So among the playful and mysterious but unresolved dialectics in this poem are the inside and outside of a self. And I think so Darwin
01:22:35
Speaker
Is struck by that and it's it's kind of we're making silly references or I am to old cartoons But you know, he's the mr. Magoo of this moment. Let Darwin is so focused on describing the Critters and phenomena the external world that the realization of a self over time strikes him with alterity and
01:22:56
Speaker
Eric, you're forcing me to do something which I've been trying to resist doing, which is to read into the record what I think might have happened here in terms of Schuyler's reading history. So you're right that Elizabeth Bishop is fascinated by Darwin too. We know that now because she wrote a letter to a woman named Anne Stevenson, a poet and scholar writer who was writing the first book, in fact, about Bishop.
01:23:26
Speaker
while Bishop was still alive. She was the Eric Lindstrom to Elizabeth Bishop's James Skyler. And she wrote Bishop letters in which she asked Bishop these questions about, you know, her poetry. And Bishop's letters back to Anne Stevenson survived and have been reproduced and quoted. Anne Stevenson published her book about Elizabeth Bishop in 1966
01:23:55
Speaker
Skyler loved Bishop. Betty read it. And in that book, Anne Stevenson quotes Bishop to this effect. So now I'm going to read to you. This is Elizabeth Bishop.
01:24:08
Speaker
writing about Darwin. She says, to Anne Stevenson, I can't believe we are wholly irrational and I do admire Darwin. But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic. And then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking.
01:24:33
Speaker
sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.
01:24:54
Speaker
I mean, I think that the business of like the Darwin that you were describing for us a moment ago, Eric, the Darwin who's observing the critters and writing them down and to whom it suddenly
01:25:08
Speaker
there's some kind of moment of crystallization or something where he realizes, oh, I too am a critter. Like, I don't know that there's, yeah, there's something about that. That's the, that I think, you know, so modest, so innocent, so pleased at the surprise that he should grow up to be him.
01:25:28
Speaker
And Schuyler feels, and I think this is, as the kids say, relatable. I don't know, it's how grand to begin a new year with a new writer you really love. So Darwin was a love for his, but also a new love here, it sounds like. A new, oh yeah, a new writer you really love, yeah. I mean, he's not new in the sense of up and coming, but he's new to him.
01:25:54
Speaker
Yeah, right, Skylar. And I'll wonder if he read Bishop and then thought, I should give this Darwin. Sounds interesting. The dates make it work. You've got a yellow brick road of great evidence there to make that argument.
01:26:11
Speaker
Okay, so we'll just leave it at that. And then a snow shovel scrapes. It's 12 hours later. Help us. I'm sort of interested there, something to do with time. It's 12 hours later, the sense of sort of all this time elapsed, but 12 hours since when? Since the waking at the beginning of the second section? Oh yeah, because it gets dark at 4. It's now the evening or the late afternoon. The few pink minutes before the day is gone.
01:26:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, part two is more, I think you said this really aptly, is more of an identifiable Schuyler diary poem, diurnal poem. And so often in those time passes within the poem, it's one of the beautiful effects that it sounds just so ordinary, almost like lazy.
01:27:02
Speaker
start writing a poem and let time pass as you write, but it's one of the effects that he so marvelously lets happen. But there's also this wonderful kind of disjunction or elasticity between the time that's required to read it and the time that's implied in the annunciation of it versus the time that's like recorded
01:27:29
Speaker
diaristically. Yeah, no shovel scrapes. You know, earlier we had the huge beast, which was the metaphor of the snow plow. Here it's the shovel scraping. And in the journal, it's Johnny Porter, Fairfield's son scraping and Skyler describes his clothes and the weather and all that. And you get a moment that's a lot like that poem February that we read together with the pink last minutes of the day.
01:27:59
Speaker
And yet the days get longer. Yeah, Schuyler's reminding us that somehow it's just the start of winter in continental North America, but somehow the days are getting longer. Yeah, the poem is quietly disjunctive here, right? Yeah. The reading of course itself
01:28:18
Speaker
as you've written about, you know, so splendidly multiple times, like reading's going to introduce an affectively rich kind of not empirical time. And so his reading of Darwin, which presumably took whatever minutes it took, here is almost treated more like it's a kind of poetic or lyric reading that creates a time that's not, you know, that's not indexed, right, to the poem. It kind of allows us to,
01:28:46
Speaker
explore different temporalities. And so immediately it's 12 hours later. And then there's a break, midline again, very quiet but disjunctive. Coming from the movies last night, snow had fallen. The nice completed perfect tense or pre perfect tense, snow had fallen while they were at the movies, presumably.
01:29:10
Speaker
Yeah, you go in the movie, there's no snow, you come out, there's snow, magic. Yeah, the world continues. And again, that keeps the, I think, light but persistent philosophical motifs of this poem. The world is definitely persisting even though they're in the dark movie theater watching a film. Which is like what might happen to us, sorry for interrupting you, as we read the poem outside
01:29:36
Speaker
object permanence. Yeah, it's getting dark and change. Yeah, object permanence means change. So yeah, and then and then you get this scene where there's a beautiful
01:29:49
Speaker
natural landscape. I think Porter did multiple paintings of twigs around Southampton trees that are heavily laden with snow. Snow had fallen in almost still air and lay on all. So all twigs were emboldened to make big disclosures. So the twigs are larger because of being encased in snow, but they're given this language which suggests
01:30:16
Speaker
verbal boldness and disclosure, human empathic connections, the twigs are kind of being given that. Agentive kind of. Agentive, yes. The twigs are given the adjunctive weight of human disclosures here.
01:30:31
Speaker
And then I've taught this poem only twice, but students always love and connect to the next bit. It felt warm, warm that is for cold, the way it does when snow falls without wind. That's because you teach in Vermont. They know what that means.
01:30:49
Speaker
Yeah, because I live in a place where when it's snowing, that means it's warmer, and the snow makes it feel strangely warmer, and Schuyler's capturing that, and he's right. Right. And then I love these lines, and I know you'll have interesting things to say about them, Eric, because they remind me of the conversation that we had last time.
01:31:12
Speaker
So now the friend who you've suggested to me must be Fairfield Porter, the you, and I think that that just sounds right, in part because of what he says is, so in quotation marks again, a snow picture, you said, under the clung to elms, and the quotation continues, worth painting. So what Fairfield says to Jimmy is a snow picture worth painting.
01:31:41
Speaker
You know, I'm interested in the way, so presumably Porter is looking at the landscape and he calls it a picture, a picture worth painting. Like it's already, it's like the paint, the work of art is already there. It just needs to be accomplished or something. Yeah. And this one deserves to be.
01:32:08
Speaker
Yeah, right. And Porter did paint such pictures.
01:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's an offhand comment, right? Like, part of what's appealing to me about this part of the poem, it's almost like a much quieter having a cook with you, Frank O'Hara, which you did in your, I think, very first episode with Brian Paley. Like, there's an intimacy here. I don't want to read too much of this. I think you could read a lot into it, but I don't want to, like, misshape the tone of this part of the poem. But like, they've gone to the movies. It's like a date.
01:32:41
Speaker
Skyler, you know, as Anne Porter, Fairfield's wife said, came with them and stayed 12 years. You know, they went out and it's a throwaway comment that any two people, but certainly like a kind of coupled, in some sense, combination would have like leaving a movie, you remark on how the weather's changed. It's a beautiful night, the snow picture worth painting. But when Fairfield Porter says that, what might result is
01:33:10
Speaker
something legitimately amazing. That's true, but I guess what I'm noting, dumbly insisting on too, is that there's something linguistically interesting about the comment as well because it's different from saying,
01:33:26
Speaker
that tree is worth painting. Yeah, he's already seeing it as a picture. Right. It's like the precocious film student who walks around looking at everything through his hands as though they were a viewfinder or something. I mean, I'm not saying it's precocious. What I mean is pretentious, and I'm not saying it's pretentious either, but it's
01:33:48
Speaker
It's as though, sorry, what I'm thinking of, Eric, is how you said last time we talked that Schuyler was an anachphrastic poet, not simply in the literal sense, which might mean for those who aren't familiar with the term again, that would mean like a poet who is interested in describing paintings in his poems.
01:34:12
Speaker
or other works of visual art, though he does do that. But you meant it more generally, that somehow Schuyler looks at the world as though it were a painting and describes it somehow in those terms. And it seems like, at least in the reported speech here, Fairfield Porter is doing the same thing, a snow picture worth painting.
01:34:33
Speaker
Yes, I think that is going on, but I think it fits the moment. You're recalling and articulating my kind of conceptual point better.
01:34:45
Speaker
then I have it in my own mind. And I'm going to play, I don't know what, I'm going to play tag here and go to a different spot and say, this is how life unfolds in these moments. When we come out of the movies and it's a calm, snowy, wintry night without much wind and it's warm that is for cold, the world seems as it were framed for our
01:35:15
Speaker
are looking, our intimacy, our enjoyment. There are those moments that are just still and without being mediated in an extra way seem like they're just there. And it has to do with the stillness and the warmth and the kind of
01:35:36
Speaker
shared moment here, which will then immediately change. That said by the other, the you who I think is Porter, and then the speaker who will just say is Skylar, James Skylar, Jimmy,
01:35:52
Speaker
I said, the weather operator said, so there's all these said, which are kind of ungainly if you look at them, but this poem is about speech, right? And this is a poem about empathy and it really ends on what people said, like the means we have is not just language, but talking to each other. And so it really rests on that, to the point of being a little bit ungainly.
01:36:15
Speaker
the weather operator said, turning tomorrow to bitter cold. And there's quotes again, so this has to be the you who I think is Porter. Then the wind will veer round to the north and blow all of it down.
01:36:29
Speaker
everything that's collected on the trees. Yeah, it is beautifully still seen, right? This is how cold happens in such moments in such a place. Southampton, Long Island, the wind is blowing over Long Island sound from the colder northern reaches in New England.
Analyzing Poem's Final Lines
01:36:49
Speaker
And then the quotations go away at that point. And then they go away. And these very lovely, very lovely lines that end the poem. Do you want to maybe just read those lines to us, Eric, and then we can talk about them as a group? Yeah. Sure. Thanks. I do love these lines. And it's not in quotations, as you indicated. Maybe I thought, so I'm going to pause just for one second, then I'm going to read the whole thing.
01:37:14
Speaker
There's a poem of empathy here. The speaker doesn't even know his own thought, right? It's not enunciated, which means it didn't come out in the conversation, but it also means the speaker hasn't committed himself to saying exactly what it was. So maybe I thought it will get cold some other way. So that statement's in a weird space. It's not articulated. It was maybe his thought. Maybe not. Maybe I thought it will get cold some other way.
01:37:44
Speaker
You, as usual, were right. It did and has. Night and snow and the threads of life for once seen as they are in ropes like roots.
Metaphor of Threads of Life
01:38:01
Speaker
So one thing that's implied by those lines, Eric, is that they're being written the next day.
01:38:09
Speaker
It already has. The wind has already veered around. It did. Yeah, there's a definitiveness.
01:38:18
Speaker
to how things unfold. And here, it's just simply recorded that it unfolded the way the you anticipated and not the way the speaker maybe did, maybe didn't. For whatever reason, the speaker is committed to a possible difference. Things are restive for the speaker. Maybe it'll get cold another way.
01:38:43
Speaker
Which would have been like a preferable way, a less harsh way than Fairfield seemed to have the good sense to know would happen. I guess so, yeah. But I guess, I mean, I suppose I have a reading on this poem. I don't know. I think it connects back to being a poet as opposed to a painter. So like O'Hara has that
01:39:02
Speaker
fun. Why I'm a poet. Yeah, right. This poem could also have been called, Why I'm a Poet, Not a Painter, the restiveness of it. The speaker doesn't commit themselves to how it would be different. Like you said, whatever difference would be probably less bitter, less cold, less about the wind veering around from the north, but also it just simply would be different. It would evade the definitiveness that Fairfield Porter has the good sense, not just as a weather,
01:39:33
Speaker
prognostician or a painter, but as a kind of human being to say, no, this is how it happens. And so the speaker for whatever reason wants to evade that, to have a room of
01:39:46
Speaker
kind of motility where it could happen a different way. Which sounds similar to the skepticism about the New Year's resolution. Yeah, but then... Evasion was a word that you used there too. Yes, but then things, whether big things in life, compilings of a year, things we do or don't do. People die in.
01:40:10
Speaker
things happen and that they're definitive and in that sense, simple, in a grammatical sense of they become the simple past completed action. And that's what happens to the weather. So the weather becomes the bearer of the mysterious, sometimes
01:40:33
Speaker
unspeakable definitiveness of simple action, you as usual were right. So here's just a friend being able to say, you're usually the one who's right. But it carries all this other stuff about things do happen and happen definitively just the way this weather has. And that then becomes night and snow and the threads of life
01:40:59
Speaker
for once seen as they are. We don't always or can't always see them as they are. The threads of life. You referred to that earlier, much earlier in this conversation, Eric, as a metaphor that was almost like a dead metaphor.
Evolution of Metaphors
01:41:13
Speaker
Yeah, threads of life. Yeah. But say more about what, I mean, if it's dead, is it being resuscitated here or is it what work is that
01:41:21
Speaker
But even before we get to the final two lines, so night and snow and the threads of life, maybe include the next line too, for once seen as they are. The threads of life, meaning what, the sort of the kind of texture of our lives, the things that connect one thing in our life to another thing in our life, threads in that sense. Yeah. Yeah, you got me on that one.
01:41:51
Speaker
I want to talk about ropes and roots. I do too, but I want to hold. The ties that bind, the threads of life, the threads of life connects to the three fates. But I'm struggling because it's a metaphor for what? The threads of life, it gets back to this kind of
01:42:12
Speaker
sometimes marvelous, sometimes ungainly repetitiveness or tendentiousness that Schuyler isn't afraid of. The threads of life are a metaphor for life. Obviously relationships, that's doing some work here as
01:42:33
Speaker
the equivalency of empathy, the equivalency of new year. New year is a thread that goes from one year to the next and we give it a kind of ritual time marking significance. You said something about the sort of spooling or the, sorry, I'm losing my articulateness at this moment.
01:43:00
Speaker
I wonder also, the idea of, I'm thinking of Ariadne's thread, of a kind of thread that would connect, or that would be a path of some kind, or a thread to follow, or a thread to... That would be like the calendar, something to follow. Honestly, I'm gonna say something super, I don't know what, subjective.
01:43:28
Speaker
The way I read this poem, Fairfield Porter died in the mid 70s, fairly soon thereafter, not at a very young age, but he wasn't that old either. He was maybe early 60s. I haven't googled that in a while, but I think that's about right.
01:43:46
Speaker
The way this end of the poem lands is almost as if it were an elegy for Fairfield Porter, the way that Buried at Spring, Schuyler's beautiful poem, is an elegy, a demonstrated actual elegy. There's a sense of definitiveness and loss and threads of life
01:44:06
Speaker
is evoking in a failed way because it's almost a cliche what you're left hanging on to with that, like what the relationships truly are and also how they break. Right.
01:44:22
Speaker
But I don't have a good answer because I can't say like what the kind of tenor of that metaphor is. And then what Schuyler sort of does do, which I think I am into because I feel like I've got something to say about it, is that he
01:44:43
Speaker
makes that big evocation of life, the ties that bind, the things that can break, the things that hold continuity, for once seen as they are.
Elegiac Tone and Metaphors
01:44:55
Speaker
So here's the moment where the poem
01:44:58
Speaker
is able to kind of look things straight, look at things straight. Without that vital evasiveness I've been trying to evoke in terms of metaphor. And then what I love in the end, you know, Schuyler's pretty sparing with his metaphors. Threads of life become ropes, threads of life in ropes.
01:45:21
Speaker
So they become thicker. They become more durable. If you look at a rope, it has that texture.
01:45:31
Speaker
It's made up of lots of threads. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's also a metaphor that would evoke to me at least the trees in the snow picture worth painting that there's something about a tree in that environment or in general a tree in winter that has a kind of ropey, stark, captivating wonder to it. They look like cables.
01:46:00
Speaker
And obviously a rope is a connective but also sometimes violent thing on a bridge, on a ship. So the threads of life evoke things as they are.
01:46:15
Speaker
but through metaphor. But it's a metaphor that's also very faithful to perception, to perception of trees, but of course relationships. And then that's not good enough. And what I love about this is as modest as the poem can be, or a Schuyler sometimes is, the way Bishop could seem to be too, he doubles down or triples down, the threads of life are
01:46:39
Speaker
finally seen as things as they are, seen as they are, because of two metaphors, in ropes, but then the ropes themselves are like roots. So by the end of those lines, in service of seeing things as they are, he's given us a couple metaphors and a simile. Yeah, and the progression from threads to ropes to roots
01:47:10
Speaker
is one of becoming, in general, more sort of substantial and kind of robust or something. But then also what the roots give us is like a kind of image of something that's organic and also sustaining, not just binding, but like
01:47:45
Speaker
engaged in the kinds of biological
01:47:49
Speaker
You know, yeah, the Darwin. Things don't grow in New Year, you know, it's not the earth isn't ready for that. But these roots, like you're evoking, I never thought of that at all. You know, they, they, they grip, they reach down and, you know, you're making me think of the Williams. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I also, I think that that's winter comes, Eric.
01:48:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's better than, I didn't have that positive reading at the end of the poem, and that's better than what I had because I just see the stolidness of ropes-like roots.
Themes of Friendship and Empathy
01:48:28
Speaker
At the same time, they have all those qualities of engendering and of new potentiality and growth, organic growth. Yeah, no, I see something like that. I also hear- Look at them as just stolid and ugly and there and embedded.
01:48:44
Speaker
I wish I knew offhand how Skyler would pronounce the word that's spelled R-O-U-T-E-S. Like would he say routes or is it a homonym with roots? Because if it is a homonym, then I also like the idea maybe that these ropes are like paths to follow or something, you know?
01:49:05
Speaker
And I'm thinking about Whitman taking the cars and all that's great. Yeah, and yeah, no, that's really great. I, I hear roots. You know, he has a, I don't know, that would be my guess but on no basis do I say that.
01:49:21
Speaker
You're making me look down too, because I realize we finished the poem, so I should have a finishing mentality where part one ends with the word nowhere. It begins with all the playful tacking back and forth between here and there, but it ends nowhere, which connects to the
01:49:45
Speaker
wary, almost guarded quality of the opening of the poem. But, you know, this one ends with roots. So there's a little plot.
01:49:56
Speaker
And I like how nowhere is the last word of that first section, as you said, and the first words of the stanza that that concludes our new year, which feels like almost anagrammatically related to nowhere or closer than that or something. It's a funny kind of relation between that. Yeah, no, that's great. It does.
01:50:19
Speaker
This is the most sober New Year poem, I mean I don't know that many New Year poems, but you know he's getting up at four to read Darwin and drink his coffee. Yeah there was nothing about sort of champagne or celebration or and in fact to the extent that the kinds of conventional
01:50:38
Speaker
New Year's Eve or New Year's practices are acknowledged, they're argued against here, like the business about the New Year's resolutions, like it's an argument against those. Who sees things as they are on New Year's Day? And yeah, you know, I have to say, I mean, I find it like, I find this to be actually a kind of cheerful poem in the end. I don't
01:51:06
Speaker
I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know. There's something, maybe it's sort of Pollyanna shipmate to say this, but it feels sort of...
01:51:20
Speaker
I don't know. There's an anchoring in the friend. The tone of this poem is not flighty. It's a downbeat. But within that, the downbeats, I think because they don't really get answers or knowledge, but do find anchorage in the real. I agree. That's interesting. There is something
01:51:50
Speaker
lovely and fortifying about this
Skepticism and Friendship
01:51:52
Speaker
poem. And if I had to point to it, it's a really flat line, but the greatness, I guess you could say empathically or like in terms of the ethics of friendship of just saying you as usual were right and has.
01:52:08
Speaker
It didn't has, normally has the blow of almost a faithfulness that could really harm. But when it's married to you, as usual, we're right, the closeness and comfort of being with that other who's the right one gives the passage of time and happenstance
01:52:31
Speaker
that quality of ongoingness of trust, even the ropes like roots, which are the kind of unadorned element of the earth that we have to go back to, somehow are attached to this other voice, you as usual were right. So fate doesn't harm.
01:52:54
Speaker
Right? That, you know... Yeah. It would be nice. It would be a comfort to believe in the project of empathy, if maybe. But maybe here we get a kind of...
01:53:12
Speaker
skepticism about that concept, but that replaces it with something that does its work by more reliable means, or, you know, that has to do with friendship, as you're suggesting here. Well, I feel like I've done this in our conversations twice, but particularly today, like,
01:53:34
Speaker
This is the best two hours I've had with this poem and yet I feel like I've been in moments like nacing you or like pushing back. And I think that that happens in this poem, right? There could be more alignment between the two figures in the second half of the poem, but the speaker kind of almost wants to create difference
01:53:55
Speaker
Maybe I thought it will get cold some other way. I feel like friends and intimates often have this dynamic which we play out as a kind of unresolved dialectic. Maybe the resolution is only love or like the other takes a certain position just because the first person offers up what they have to say and then you just depart from it. I mean, I know that that is my default reaction to conversation in life all too often.
01:54:21
Speaker
And the realization is the reason why that's happening is to get you as usual were right, it didn't has. So empathy is, what's the word? It's a kind of foil for the realization that difference provides the real anchorage and pleasure. I love it. And why would we collapse that? No, we shouldn't. Let's not.
01:54:48
Speaker
Let's end here, but let's end with you reading the poem for us one time, Eric, from beginning to end, if you don't mind. Can I offer you a deal? Okay. I'll take part one and you take part two. Oh, fair enough. I like it. I would love to hear that. Okay. Should I read the epigraph again?
01:55:08
Speaker
I think you should do whatever you want, but yeah, since you asked. It's not in French. Empathy and New Year. The notion like that of empathy inspires great distrust in us because it connects, sorry, my glasses are not as good as they need to be because it connotes a further dose of irrationalism and mysticism, la vie stress.
01:55:34
Speaker
Whitman took the cars all the way from Camden, and when he got here, or rather there, said, quit quoting, and took the next back through the Jersey Meadows, which were that then.
01:55:46
Speaker
But what if it is all Maya, illusion? I doubt it, though. Men are not so inventive, or if you are, not knowing a name for something proves nothing. Right now it isn't raining, snowing, sleeting, slushing, yet it is doing something. As a matter of fact, it is raining snow, snow from cold clouds that melts as it strikes. To look out the window is to sense wet feet
01:56:15
Speaker
Now to infuse the garage with a subjective state and can't make it seem to, even if it is a little like what the dentist saw, a dark gullet with gleams and red. You come to me at midnight and say, I can smell that Christmas letdown coming like a hound. And clarify, I can smell it just like a hound does. So it came.
01:56:41
Speaker
It's a shame expectations are so often to be counted on. New Year is nearly here and who knowing himself would endanger his desires resolving them in a formula.
01:56:59
Speaker
After a while, even a wish flashing by as a thought provokes a knock on wood so often, a little dish-like place worn in this desk just holds a lucky stone inherited from an unlucky man. 1968, what a lovely name to give a year. Even better than the dogs, Wirt, Bird Thou Never, and Woofy. Personally, I'm going to call the New Year Mutt. Flattering it will get you nowhere.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:57:30
Speaker
Two, awake at four and heard a snowplow, not rumble. A huge beast at its chow and wondered, is it 1968 or 1969 for a bit? 1968 had such a familiar sound.
01:57:50
Speaker
Got coffee and started reading Darwin. So modest, so innocent, so pleased at the surprise that he should grow up to be him. How grand to begin a new year with a new writer you really love.
01:58:07
Speaker
A snow shovel scrapes. It's 12 hours later and the sun that came so late is almost gone. A few pink minutes and yet the days get longer. Coming from the movies last night, snow had fallen in almost still air and lay on all, so all twigs were emboldened to make big disclosures.
01:58:37
Speaker
It felt warm, warm that is, for cold, the way it does when snow falls without wind. A snow picture, you said, under the clung-to elms, worth painting. I said, the weather operator said, turning tomorrow to bitter cold. Then the wind will veer round to the north and blow all of it down.
01:59:04
Speaker
Maybe I thought it will get cold some other way. You, as usual, were right. It did and has. Night and snow and the threads of life for once seen as they are in ropes like roots.
01:59:28
Speaker
Eric. Thank you, my friend. What a pleasure. Yeah, what a wait and 23. It was a treat and a surprise. We surprised myself. You surprised me. I asked and you said yes, and that really was a delight.
01:59:46
Speaker
Let's do this at least once a year. Thank you. Thanks listeners for tolerating. Yeah, thanks for hanging out with us. Hang out with us some more. I wish everyone a happy new year and let's talk more about poetry in 2024. Bye everyone.