“Come Live with Me and Be My Love”

After taking a short detour to craft a Talking Pictures quiz on classic 20th-century movies (find the answers here), your poetry team captain is back with a review of the April centos and a new prompt featuring a venerable poetic line. As of June, the call for centos—poems composed entirely of lines lifted from other sources—had provoked more than 100 responses, including “Bygone” from NLP all-star Charise Hoge:

I took the lake between my legs.
Eight mallard ducks fly over
to the angel’s skin.
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
And you learned to dance with pain

where the water collects around your heart,
where deep in the night I hear a voice
across the instrument panel of my life.
There you are—cased in clean bark you drift
beyond the maximum possible distance

where moorings fly, and suns cast a curious shadow.
And I understand that everything must go,
here on the drawing board.
It is true—I’ve always loved the daring ones.
Every morning I forget how it is.

The sources of this remarkable effort are (Charise tells us):

1. Maxine Kumin, “Morning Swim”
2. Raymond Carver, “Deschutes River”
3. Michael S. Harper, “The Black Angel”
4. Louise Glück, “The Undertaking”
5. William Pitt Root, “The House You Looked For”
6. Stephen Dunn, “To the Upright”
7. Charles Simic, “Butcher Shop”
8. Thomas Lux, “Five Men I Know”
9. Louise Glück, “The Undertaking”
10. Harold Bond, “The Way It Happens to You”
11. Mary Shumway, “River Road”
12. Tom Crawford, “everything must go”
13. Maxine Kumin, “The Nightmare Factory”
14. Alice Walker, “Once”
15. Charles Simic, “Poem”

One virtue of the cento as a form is the likelihood of unexpected juxtapositions, as in lines 7 and 8: “where deep in the night I hear a voice /across the instrument panel of my life.” Brava. The poem is a surprise and makes me want to reread it—always a good test of a poem’s quality.

Michael C. Rush weighs in with the most unusual title, “Scintillating Centomorph”:

Day dawns through a promiscuous succession
In a spirit of cruelty or retribution
In this last of meeting places,
A widening path, a question
Always fugitive and always,

As if it were necessary,
Anxious to express so many things,
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
Like the wind itself, that’s merely air:
We seek radiance in a gray hour.

If the knowledge were given you,
The wall filled with passionate graffiti
(Just the amount of detail is extraordinary),
Why should we not in reason ask why?
Today the mind is not part of the weather.

Michael’s rhetorical prowess is on display here, and the momentum he creates is impressive. The first sentence stretches beautifully across the first two stanzas, 10 lines in all.

These are Michael’s sources:

1. Octavio Paz, “Day”
2. Tom Disch, “Capital Punishment”
3. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
4. Dorianne Laux, “On the Edge”
5. Antonio Machado, “Always Fugitive, Always Near”
6. Tomas Tranströmer, “From the Winter of 1947”
7. Rabindranath Tagore, “A Hundred Years Hence”
8. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”
9. Amy Clampitt, “Syrinx”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “Poetry Searches for Radiance”
11. Stanley Kunitz, “King of the River”
12. Robert Desnos, “The Satyr”
13. Tom Disch, “D. W. Richmond Gives Directions to the Architect of His Tomb”
14. William Bronk, “The Questions”
15. Wallace Stevens, “A Clear Day and No Memories.”

I love the opening of Paul Michelsen’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Gaslight,” another extraordinary title:

If you are still alive when you read this,
I do not say this in order to wound
I just wanted to tell you
We shadowbox and double-cross
The one you saved, and saved, and saved

“See what they did to me.”
Abandoned too soon, set down with due care.
As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend,
Oblivion is the only forgiveness.
I have forgotten how to sigh—

All those kots and koshkas mewing for moloko and getting none
(It’s your language. I’m just trying to use it.)
Remembered everything I had so long forgotten:
Everything just as it was in nineteen hundred and seventy-six.
Neither the actors nor the audience knew what was coming next.

The sources:

1. Saint Geraud, “Goodbye”
2. Henri Michaux, “I Am Writing to You from a Far-Off Country”
3. James Tate, “Intimidations of an Autobiography”
4. Sade, “Smooth Operator”
5. Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “A Monument in Utopia”
6. Marquis de Sade, Justine
7. Ian Curtis, “Atmosphere”
8. Cole Porter, “Just One of Those Things”
9. Jorge Luis Borges, “Fragments of an Apocryphal Evangelist”
10. Dorothy Parker, “The Danger of Writing Defiant Verse”
11. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
12. Victor Borge, quoted in his obituary in The Boston Globe
13. Denise Levertov, “A Woman Meets an Old Lover”
14. Adélia Prado, “Invitational”
15. David Lehman, “Amnesia” for Tom Disch

It is a particular pleasure to watch a line from a Cole Porter song (“As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend”) lead to a vatic forecast from Jorge Luis Borges (“Oblivion is the only forgiveness”). To include a line from Ms. Parker in a poem that mentions her is also a shrewd stroke. And how could I not respond joyfully to the conclusion?

In “Calm Before the Storm,” M.D. Skeen picks lines from Coleridge, Byron, Kipling and Longfellow to arrive at what I would characterize as a “wonderful concentrate of Romanticism”:

The star of the unconquered will, he rises in your breast,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen-
Serene, and resolute, and still, and calm, and self-possessed.
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
On that green light that lingers in the west.

As one by one thy hopes depart, be resolute and calm.
Give the gale your sea worn sail in shadow of new skies.
O fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong,
You shall see old planets change and alien stars arise,
Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

Foretelling the coming-on of rain and squally blast,
The gull shall whistle in your wake, the blind wave break in fire,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast.
You shall fulfill God’s utmost will unknowing His desire-
The pall of a past world; and then again with curses cast!

Without specifying which lines came from which poem, M. D. names these four source poems: Coleridge’s “Dejection, an Ode,” Longfellow’s “The Light of Stars,” Kipling’s “The Voortrekker,” and Byron’s “Darkness.”

Borrowing from Wildred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Rachael Watson aims to capture the terrible crash of illusions felt by soldiers exposed to trench warfare in World War I. “Craiglockhart Hospital” is her title:

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad.

Bugles sang, saddening the evening air,
Winging wildly across the white,
And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned.

Three of the lines come from Sassoon; the other three from Owen. Rachael alternates between the two:

1. Sassoon’s “Dreamers”
2. Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
3. Sassoon’s “Survivors”
4. Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
5. Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang”
6. Owen’s “The Last Laugh”

For next time, let us take our point of departure from Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” which begins with the immortal lines, “Come live with me and be my love / and we will all the pleasures prove.” Marlowe’s was the most famous seduction, or invitation, poem of the Elizabethan era. Inspired by it, John Donne wrote “The Bait,” a variant that begins “Come live with me and be my love / and we will some new pleasures prove.” Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a brilliant counter-argument, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.”

Marlowe’s strategy was not to persuade by logic (as in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which I wrote about here) but to list the pleasures that a union of bodies, minds, and souls would provide. I suggest reading the four poems mentioned here. Then, writing a poem that begins, “Come live with me and be my love,” how would you proceed? How sincere, or ironic, would you be? Would you employ the carpe diem (“seize the day”) argument? Would you use the opportunity to overcome an obstacle in the relationship—or to accompany a present on the beloved’s birthday?

See what you can do in four four-line stanzas. Deadline: 10 days after this post appears. Thanks, everyone!