Ode to John Berryman, and: Ode to Archibald MacLeish, and: Ode to Wallace Stevens

Abstract

Ode to John Berryman, and: Ode to Archibald MacLeish, and: Ode to Wallace Stevens Marcia Southwick (bio) Ode to John Berryman Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so— —John Berryman If life is so boring, why would anyone care that Reggie Jackson, in 1977, hit three home runs to win the World Series for the Yankees? Or why would people get excited about spaceships landing on the moon? Life isn’t boring, friends, if you’re a researcher just about to get a grip on tropical storm & fire disaster patterns, or if you’ve gathered statistics for ten years on the mating habits of aquatic insects & are about to publish the results. Life is only boring, friends, if you sit around expecting ball lightning to pass through your living room. [End Page 169] Your body relaxes, causing your hypothalamus to stimulate your pituitary gland into secreting so many hormones that your sense of well-being turns into torpor & sloth. You sit on the couch all day. I should know. What if, like me, you don’t notice a mouse scaling the draperies & by the time you see it, it has already gnawed a hole in the ceiling while clinging to an electrical wire? Would that excite you? To be bored, friends, is to get your paw stuck to a glue board, your eyes staring up, beady & joyless. A mouse has no aspirations as it chews the upholstery, or eats its way through a cereal box, whereas we, friends, have every opportunity not to rip open sacks of flour or shred books, & to search for meaning. Also, once you’re dead & you can’t say words, such as wheel, oyster, sister, Water Department, etc., life is boring & you can’t even say so. Ode to Archibald MacLeish A poem shouldn’t mean, but be . . . —Archibald MacLeish Be what? A thought that deserts us to follow a silverfish slipping beneath a pile of linen or a cockroach as it figures out a maze? (It must stay in the light so as not to receive an electric shock if it heads into the dark.) A thought doesn’t mean much, but it can do what spiders do. By a method called ballooning, spiders can float on a silken dragline of their own [End Page 170] spinning. Like dragonflies, thoughts can hover. Dragonflies flap two pairs of wings at once, timing the stroke of the hind pair to meet the oncoming air before the front pair have been disturbed. Thoughts, like earthworms, can consume 40 times their own weight & can leave compressed castings behind them as they go— for us, the castings take the form of poems. I agree with you. A poem should be & its thoughts have meaning because at the bottom of them are things as ancient as the fossils proving that whales once had legs, lost them, & rolled back into the sea. Ode to Wallace Stevens for Landt Dennis The world is ugly, and the people are sad— —Wallace Stevens A drainage worker from Coco Beach has just climbed through spider-filled pipes, strapped a 435-pound manatee to a stretcher & delivered it in stable condition to Sea World. Is this ugly or sad? There’s sadness & ugliness of course. McDonald’s is extending north into the Arctic circle & straddling the international date line, spreading all the way to New Zealand and Western Samoa. A shopkeeper in Lincoln, Montana, sells Home of the Unabombert-shirts because Ted Kaczynski had ridden his bicycle daily down Main Street. The Dahoney Eye & Tissue Bank of Los Angeles has harvested corneas from the dead without permission from families. [End Page 171] And two twelve-year-olds, Johnny & Luther, have led the Army of God through the jungles of Thailand. They seized the Burmese embassy & convinced their followers that they were backed by an invisible army of 200. That’s sad. And yet some people find beauty in things like the flared rim of a Riedel whiskey glass, which fully disperses the complex bouquet of a rare 1951 single malt. Others are happy excavating cockroach fossils, dating back 30 million years, in the coal mines of Rhode Island. You found happiness writing poetry...