Robert Peake

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

I couldn’t have expressed this better myself. We are homeward bound today (on my birthday—what better way to spend it than five miles above Greenland?) No doubt I’ll be unpacking our experiences for some time to come. Photos from this trip (and others) are available here.

In “Biology Teacher,” Zbigniew Herbert speaks about the unspeakable: the murder of his childhood biology teacher. He is one of a generation of poets attempting to come to terms with survivor guilt after the atrocities committed in their native Poland during its occupation by the Nazis. Herbert addresses a subject of both great generational and personal difficulty with remarkable sensitivity and care. In this poem, just as in another, perhaps more famous poem entitled “Five Men,” Herbert focuses not on the atrocity of killing, but the humanity of those killed.

His poetic tactics follow two lines: detail and syntax. First, the very careful selection of detail draws out an understanding of the victims’ personality and humanity. Second, the syntax allows these unique details to be revealed in interesting ways, building up to poignant observations about the sanctity of life. In “Biology Teacher,” it is Herbert’s boyhood delights at the gross-yet-fascinating subject of biology that tell us so much about the teacher who introduced him to this world. Through careful detail and syntax, we discover what the biology teacher really taught Herbert: a relationship to the natural world involving great care, tenderness, and even respect—punctuated by moments of delight.

We went to Cambridge yesterday on a train that suddenly lost power. The conductor pulled over, shut it down, and started it up again. I never knew you could reboot a train. I guess Windows is everywhere.

Gazing up at the delicately vaulted ceiling of King’s College Chapel, the construction of which spanned the reign of several monarchs during the tumultuous Wars of the Roses, it struck me what a magnificent sanctuary the university system remains. It shares a common heritage with the monastic tradition. In a world beset by conflict, disease, and poverty, universities still stand as a tribute to our higher and more refined natures—both Soul and Mind. Prior to the Age of Reason, academic endeavor and spiritual quest were considered more similar pursuits. One aspired to contribute to Knowledge for sake of of a glory non nobis, Domine.

How strange to see science and spirituality become so unnecessarily polarized as the power of the church became destabilized through hypocrisy, and the power of the academy became decentralized even up to our present postmodern state. Strange, because despite all the technological advances we have gained through the scientific method of inquiry and through standing on the shoulders of previous scholars, so much of human behavior remains as barbaric and Medieval as ever. My thought and prayer in this chapel was: thank God (and Henry VI in this particular college’s case) for the universities, which still preserve the some of the highest and best aspirations of our culture.

We went up to Hertfordshire to visit Val’s parents yesterday. On the way to our train in King’s Cross station, we passed a bricked-in archway with half a luggage trolley stuck into it, as if passing straight through the wall. Above the trolley, a standard train station placard announced: “Platform 9 3/4”. That’s right—the magic portal to Hogwarts from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. England has a history of celebrating the blurred boundary between fiction and reality. In Old Hatfield, when we arrived, Val’s mother pointed out the Eight Bells pub—where Bill Sikes ostensibly sheltered after killing Nancy in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.Val was also delighted some years ago to discover a plaque inside The Church of St. George The Martyr in Southwark purporting that Little Dorrit sheltered there one famous night in the Dickens novel by the same name. Clearly, the English have a long and continuing tradition of literature informing life. I was hard pressed to find analogous American examples.

After lunch in Covent Garden, we went into the bookstore district of London today and had a look around Foyles. While the poetry section was not as physically large as Powell’s Books, it was well appointed with contemporary poets, including several feet of Ashberry. It also had all the old warhorses on the shelves, and Stephen Fry’s book on becoming a poet, which, on brief skim, seems to set the cause of non-metrical poetry back by a hundred years. Overall, there seemed to be a strong focus on verse and intricate lyric—though they did feature a number of free verse American poets, and prominently displayed Allan Ginsberg’s Howl. Still, the selection was noticeably different from independent bookstores I have perused in the U.S.—and certainly better equipped to meet the needs of a literate, poetry-loving people than your strip-mall Barnes & Noble or Borders chain store.

Off to visit Cambridge tomorrow.

“Meditation at Lagunitas” is a classic Robert Hass poem. The reading experience is similar to that of some of his other best poems: what seems causal and at times abstract ends up fusing into something transcendent. Hass is an expert at successfully and convincingly dropping in bold, general statements, as in the oft-quoted opening of this poem: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking.” His success from this point on depends on his ability to simultaneously veer wildly away from this central idea into specific detail and lyric refrain—and yet contain and encompass all his seemingly unrelated musings within this expansive theme.

Hass alternates between philosophical statements and strong, carefully-chosen images, upping the ante each time. The first pairing is: “The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea” with the image “[t]hat the clown- / faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk / of that black birch is, by his presence, / some tragic falling off from a first world / of undivided light.” Here abstraction and specificity fuse in the first moment of elaborating on the theme of loss. The second example only escalates and develops this theme with “…the other notion that, / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Again, drawing on the detail of nature (ostensibly details gathered from Lagunitas), Hass develops the theme of loss outward into the ineffable—into the marvelous idea of naming (an archetype, as in Adam from Genesis) turned on its head to be a kind of elegy, or consolation for loss.

We sheltered in John Keats’s house this afternoon. (“Hampstead isn’t far; we won’t need our rain wear!”) Poignant, to see the couch on which he retired, the view he contemplated, toward the end of his short life. More fodder for my thinking on poetic tradition: apparently he wrote poems in the pages of his Complete Works of Shakespeare as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Talk about responding when the inspiration strikes… Afterward, I barely managed to roll back through The Heath after a phenomenal Indian food meal on High Street. No doubt ghee is now seeping from my pores. And on that note, I’m off to write some gritty laments on the back pages of the Larry Levis book I brought along.

One of the best parts of spending time with families is hanging out with the kids. This is how I had my first introduction to The Wombles the other day. In addition to being ahead of its time as a high-quality stop motion animation series, this mid-1970s TV show promoted a strong reuse and recycling message. (Although, that said, one of Val’s friends remarked that she thought the show might have also encouraged an entire generation of children to leave ostensibly useful bits of trash behind in the real-life Wimbledon Common burrows- a.k.a. Womble-land—in an attempt to help this fuzzy underclass in their efforts at creative reuse.)

Flash-forward to last night, when every few minutes a government-sponsored advertisement would appear on television asking all families in the UK to reduce both energy consumption and waste by 20%. I couldn’t imagine something like this playing in the red states of America. As a socialist country, the UK (and most of Europe) is used to taking lifestyle cues from government. And as a nation ravaged by World War II, Britons are used to getting behind rationing and other forms of conservation. Their survival depended on it. In fact, even as rationing was seen as a heroic war effort, a greener-than-thou attitude has sprung up as a seemingly ubiquitous attitude in the UK, with green services galore, not to mention this two-seat electric car.

Had a great trip down to the South coast, the highlight being a sword fight with a four-year-old on the bowling green of Carisbrooke Castle. We crossed the Solent in the kind of gale that threatened the Fastnet Race. Unfortunately, that meant we couldn’t take the hovercraft—but the fast catamaran only pitched and rolled during the slow going in and out of port. Good thing, too—Val and I were stuffed on two enormous portions (“Those are the mediums?!”) of fish & chips as well as tea and Turkish delight.

I have been reading Zbigniew Herbert on the train, trying to get past the translation. Apart from stunning poems like “Five Men” and “The Pebble,” most of the poems I have read so far smack of romantic Slavic intillectualism and an out-of-tune surrealism. I wonder if his work focuses more on language and lyric device to make what seem like generalizations come alive in new (linguistic) ways. In any case, it is a far cry from Adam Zagajewski, whose poems in Mysticism For Beginners are tight and self-contained—a kind of Eastern European Ted Koozer with a deeper connection to history and a more philosophical bent. Still, I’m ploughing through Herbert poems by the hundreds, hoping to get more inside this poet, hoping to read beyond the language barrier and into the mind of the man that has written poems that make my jaw drop open with their fierce, unflinching gaze.

Meanwhile, it is evident that since I was here three years ago, Polish people have immigrated to the UK in great numbers. There are now Polish grocers and restaurants just down the street. On the tube today, young Poles were poring over a glossy Polish-language magazine sporting the latest PC gaming equipment and games. According to Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish that contemporary poets employ is only nominally different from its medieval counterpart—making their poetic tradition vastly more accessible and vibrant than our own. (Imagine if Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote in English-as-we-know-it.)

Having a jolly good time driving around on The Island as this thrilling tourism video will attest. Gosh!

This was probably our easiest intercontinental flight yet, thanks in part to the inadvertently educational in-flight entertainment system. We caught the tube all the way up to Golders Green (no apostrophe there, for historical reasons—this excuse covers a multitude of sins in England)—to spend some quality time with Val’s delightful musician friends, their lovable elderly golden retriever, and two cats. We took Gilly (the dog) for a brief walk in the park after a nearly-fatal nap, ordered in some Chinese food, and began setting the world to rights.

Today we are resting (I’ve been reading Robert Hass and an essay by Richard Jackson on imitation that will fold nicely into my upcoming talk), adjusting to the new time, and getting ready to head down to Portsmouth tomorrow to visit Val’s oldest school friend. The following day we’ll catch a ferry to the Isle of Wight, then back to Golders Green on Wednesday. I hope to bring back some photos of the lovely South coast, and to get some more reading done on the train there and back.

I have set up a Flickr map (thanks, Nathan) and plan to add pictures as we go.