"Lightning In A Bottle" Lyric Video

It was usually Mondays I spoke to the poet Samuel Menashe. We had a ritual: I would call to let him know I was ready for our talk; then he would call me back. I was a graduate student in Toronto, and Samuel—well, he was hardly well-off either; he’d lived in a rent-controlled New York walk-up, with the bathtub in the kitchen, for fifty years. But the poet had a long distance plan. Sometimes our ritual broke down. I would sit there holding the phone, for one minute, two, waiting for Samuel’s call. He would’ve entered my number wrong or been searching scraps of paper for it. (There wasn’t yet the YouTube video of his apartment, but I had a notion the place was an affable mess.) Eventually, I would eat the long distance charge and dial New York. The connection re-established, Samuel almost always sounded distressed. He would take my number down for the umpteenth time and repeat it to me slowly. (You would think I was a journalist for the Times.) I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to try calling me back. He was eighty-two by then. I was trying to interview a poet for a chapter of a dissertation. The year before, I’d gotten in touch for permission to reprint one of his poems in an anthology. I admired his work, but at that point, I figured I was going to do a dissertation on the San Francisco cult poet Weldon Kees. Samuel, a cult poet in his own right, pointed out that others had already written about Kees. “Young man, why don’t you work on me?” Samuel wondered aloud. Letters to a Young Poet, this wasn’t. Still, he asked a good question. (Why didn’t I work on him?) Plus, the nakedness of the appeal was somehow more honest than what I imagined to be a poet’s usual, more subtle angling for attention. It was sort of charming, even. Samuel hadn’t had a lot of guile about his career. After surviving World War Two, he completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne and published his first book of poems in England, to some note. But he had a hard time securing a publisher in New York, where he spent the rest of his life in the walk-up. He taught a bit early on at Bard College, but was never a citizen of the creative writing world. Nor did he especially ingratiate himself to people with power. I don’t think he went out of his way to make trouble. (He certainly didn’t have the professional avant-gardist’s feel for the strategically public salvo.) He probably just couldn’t help himself. This one time, Samuel was walking down the street, where he happened upon a poetry editor of The New Yorker. (Apparently you can happen upon such creatures in New York.) Now, your typical poet is going to want to be friendly, if not deferential, toward this powerful person. Samuel greeted her by reciting a poem of his. He was a great reciter of poetry. “Didn’t we publish that?” the editor is said to have asked. “No, you didn’t publish that,” Samuel replied. “Moreover, you didn’t publish my poems in the table of contents.” The editor stormed away. “I was just trying to give her a flower,” he told me innocently. As Samuel talked, I typed, the receiver between my neck and shoulder. At first, I think I felt I was doing something good: for an old man who could use the conversation and, more importantly, a flailing scholar (and fledgling poet) who could use an original topic. I was living at home then, working out of my sister’s old bedroom, which I’d converted to a makeshift office. It was just me and my mother in the house; my father had suffered a paralyzing stroke and was laid-up in long-term care. Heaps of books and paper rose from the floor. Some of the papers were handwritten drafts of poems that Samuel had sent. It only occurs to me now, typing this, that my sister’s bedroom wouldn’t have looked terribly different from Samuel’s living space, except the walls were the pink of her childhood. (Samuel’s walls were white and flaking, his furniture distressed beyond the point that a young, chic couple with money would find acceptable.) The rest of the house was pretty messy, too. My mother and I had surrendered it to the dust. Beyond the clutter, the similarities stopped. My home was a bungalow in a suburb of Toronto—an unlikely place to be receiving calls and mail from a New York bohemian who’d once supplied Allen Ginsberg with addresses to visit in Europe, which the author of “Howl” duly entered into what Samuel described to be “a very well-ordered address book, the opposite of what I have.” That detail – when it was delivered up – made me straighten a bit. (I’d often been skeptical of the rebel pose that poets like Ginsberg struck.) Samuel then told me about attending a reading of Ginsberg’s. The famous Beat poet read a poem that he assured the assembled would be finished in heaven. “I raised my hand,” Samuel confided, “and asked, ‘Why do you call it a poem on earth?’” We talked in the morning, which was better for Samuel. He preferred to spend the rest of the day walking about New York, perhaps working out a poem in his mind—if there was a poem to be worked out. Central Park was a favourite destination, which he revealed to be the source of some of his splendid poems, like “Forever and a Day”:           No more than that           Dead cat shall I           Escape the corpse           I kept in shape           For the day off           Immortals take. Actually, Samuel had seen a dead squirrel; “cat” was merely the poet’s elegant, one-syllable solution. (An amateur would’ve been faithful to the fact of the squirrel; Samuel’s deference to the philosopher’s trusted prop was a sign of faith in iconic forms.) But cat or no, you wouldn’t guess the poem, so pared of particulars, had been proposed by a walk through Central Park. Samuel was an inveterate whittler of detail, and the Library of America’s recent selection of his work – in an edition that’s as smart and spare as one of those iconic Salinger paperbacks – conceals a tourist’s guide of New York and its ghosts. Samuel never married nor had children. I suspect that for New Yorkers of a certain generation, he was a kind of constant, an institution on foot, the neighbourhood flâneur. It’s tempting to romanticize such a life. “Are you attracted in any way to the image of Blake as a kind of outsider?” I asked him once. “No, I would love to have been an insider,” he sighed without hesitation and (it should be recorded) an eye to his image: a good thing for a young poet to witness. Several times, he told me he wished he’d married, gotten a steady job at a college, and moved out of the walk-up that, he recalled all too often, his father had called a “hovel.” My interview notes are silent on what I said in reply. “You shouldn’t say that,” is probably all I mustered. There isn’t much else to say to a person who traded a life for poetry and maybe regrets the trade. (If there is, Canadian graduate school doesn’t teach it.) My visions of a feel-good bestseller – Mondays with Menashe – were dissipating. I looked out the window of my sister’s bedroom, as I often did when talking to Samuel, there to find two lawn ornaments, a plastic swan and rabbit, floundering in uncut grass. Still, Samuel wasn’t depressed, as we often understand the term. (“I liked his precise use of the word hovel,” he said brightly of his father’s dark comment.) Moreover, he was the sort who could say he’d be fine never waking up again, and still present as energetic, even positive, to use a much-abused word. He often launched into our conversations by observing that he was “all ears,” at which point he’d never fail to explain that he’d first heard that exotic expression on the lips of the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, with whom he sometimes had a “friendly acquaintance.” But if Samuel circled back to some of the same well-trod ground, it’s because it was in part the turf on which he’d built his life. Time and again, he would tell of being seized by this or that phrase—some stray line of the Old Testament, Simone Weil, a relative long dead. He liked telling me about a particular visit from an aunt and a cousin. On parting, he’d tried to give his cousin a hearty farewell. His aunt, however, had leaned in. “Don’t waste your words,” the aunt whispered to Samuel. “They fall to the ground / And there is no wind / To pick them up.” “Isn’t that unbelievable?” Samuel would exclaim to me, marvelling at his aunt’s “complete poem” (which he’d taken the liberty of lining through his emphatic pauses). It was that generous sense of wonder that led him to reproduce the sayings of his parents as epigraphs for a couple of his own poems. These parents, he said, were so far up the slope – of Parnassus, I think he meant – that he himself had to take but a step to plant a boot on the peak and become a poet. “They weren’t philistine clods, and I was the young poet. Nonsense. My father insisted that I had to be a misfit.” Usually, though, Samuel didn’t like talking influences. When I asked him which poets he read, he said, “I glance at the poems in The New Yorker. Blake…. I used to know a lot of Hopkins by heart.” (A Hopkins had hauled him out of a funk once.) In terms of contemporary poets, he mentioned Kay Ryan and Billy Collins. When I pressed him on specific poems, he conceded a Franz Wright in some number of The New Yorker. “It was wonderful to me,” he said. But when I asked if he remembered the title, he said, “No, no, but the point is it was ‘one poem.’ One poem can nourish me.” There was a time when Menashe would throw a sheet over his bookcase to discourage guests from checking up on his reading. It may be that, having been neglected for so long, Samuel was wary of losing the attention of his interlocutors to other, more securely shelved poets. He was certainly quiet on the war, especially the Battle of the Bulge, which took place in the Ardennes forest in the winter of 1944 and 45. It was some months of talking to Samuel before he got into specifics. I’ll let him take over:The artillery was incessant, it was like a storm where the lightning never stops. And I was nineteen. You have to imagine what children we were. You were less mindful. And I came into this farmhouse where a remnant of some of the platoon was. And I’d never seen an earthen floor. I didn’t know the term “shock.” I sat down with my back against the wall. And my eyes met the sergeant’s eyes. Our eyes met momentarily. And we looked away. And I knew then that I looked away because I knew that I was looking at somebody who was going to die very soon, and he looked away for the same reason.         I’ve given you the background, but I don’t provide that material in the poem “Warrior Wisdom.” It’s not necessary.Then, he recited the poem:           Do not scrutinize           A secret wound—           Avert your eyes—           Nothing’s to be done           Where darkness lies           No light can come. Samuel didn’t go in for confessional poetry, with its grievances, laundry lists, and one or two carefully curated details. (It wouldn’t have occurred to him to remember the sergeant’s name to us or assign his hair a colour.) This is sometimes the case with people who might have something worth confessing. But Samuel wasn’t an unconscientious man. He always asked about my father, who wasn’t looking like he was going to recover the ability to walk. Plus, those drafts of poems he sent were a weekly wonder. I framed a couple of them; I have dozens more. In Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, one character’s tossed-off and handwritten messages – Chinese characters done in brushstroke – are deemed priceless. Samuel, too, could will a work of art into being merely by copying out four or five lines in his elegant cursive. Not that Samuel was a prolific letter writer. (He often declared that if his posthumous reputation depends on correspondence, he’s done for.) He was more of an inveterate self-editor who, having altered a poem, often worried that the earlier, obsolete version would endure if he dropped dead before he could alert anyone to the edit. On more than one occasion, I received two or three drafts of the same poem in the space of a few days, each arriving separately and labelled with the time and date, overriding the last version. His notes, scrawled beneath the poems, hinted at a contest that occupies the aging artist—the race against time:           March 10, 2009           Dear Jason,           The attempt above was done quickly – a few hours between two days – and sent           to you in haste           With my thanks           and my best wishes—           Samuel           June 6, 2009           9:10 AM           Dear Jason,           Is the merger [of two poems] above possible. It occurred five minutes ago. I had           to unseal the envelope & put it in.           Years ago I said all escapes are narrow.           Best wishes,           Samuel           June 30, 2009           4:35 PM.           … “Time Out of Mind” was finished a half hour ago—after a week or two. (It will           probably change by tomorrow.[)]           Best wishes,           Samuel           I hope we speak very soon The drafts arrived with the frequency and force of gusts from Parnassus. Reading them – and imagining the octogenarian racing to a mailbox to dispatch their replacements – I would absorb some of Samuel’s anxiety. I had better care for these, I thought; the soldier-poet’s struggle had recruited me. But that was the war that had posted all that hard copy. It had put a bayonet point on Samuel’s sense of mortality. You hear a lot of people who claim to live as if each day was the only day: a boast. But Samuel really did live that way. He wrote somewhere that he was amazed when confronted with the curiosity of people who carried on about their plans for, say, the following summer; he was amazed they assumed they would survive to see it. The handwritten poems and revisions he sent weren’t just hedges against death; many of them were gifts, too. Having discovered that I especially liked a particular poem, he would reproduce it for me. He would also dispatch poems to mark occasions. When I got married, he sent a beautiful lyric as a benediction:           Eaves at dusk           beckon us           to peace           whose house,           espoused,           we keep. He even produced a fair copy of “Forever and a Day,” one of my favourites, and mailed it off. He hadn’t had a lot of guile about his career, but he knew enough to please the fans he found. Noting his book was out of stock in some store, he would return with copies of his own. What’s marvellous is not that he did this – don’t we all front-face our accomplishments periodically? – but that he volunteered the fact to others. The younger reader will have wondered why Samuel didn’t just send his work – or answer my questions – by E-mail. “Young man,” he might’ve replied, “I’ve never mastered more than the telephone, which is very handy.” Once or twice, I had the honour of transcribing some new poems for Samuel. He would have had these photocopied and mailed to Poetry magazine, which had recently given him the Neglected Masters Award, or First Things, the Catholic periodical that had taken a sudden interest in his work, to his surprise. Sometimes he even wondered what I thought of a particular work in progress. He seemed genuinely interested in my opinion, this poet who had once earned the admiration of Robert Graves, Hugh Kenner. I wonder now if Samuel found it odd, even dispiriting, that he was recounting his life to a young Canadian with limited influence and not, say, a crack interviewer from The Paris Review. But he never let show that he was anything less than grateful to be talking to me. Months after he’d answered all my questions, we continued to talk. In time, though, we fell out of touch. (I was still a couple of years from writing my chapter.) But I called in the summer of 2011 to let him know I was drafting it finally. By this point, Samuel was living in a nursing home. He sounded frail, but elected to take down my number and address dutifully. He asked about my father, as he always had. (My father had passed away a few weeks before, which I hated telling Samuel, given his own age and state.) He also asked, as he often did, when I was coming to New York. I said, as I did too many times, I was going to try for the fall. Would more drafts of new poems arrive? He passed away a couple of weeks later. On occasion, Samuel would try to pass off some line or image out of which he’d never been able to make poetry. (“I never am concerned with originality,” Samuel often affirmed.) I hardly knew what to do with these cast-offs, though I was flattered to be entrusted with them. Is this how an apprentice felt, when his Renaissance mentor, thrusting some vellum his way, said, “Here, see what you can do with this sketch?” I was no apprentice, and Samuel, no mentor. To be sure, students of literary history could lap up some juicy anecdotes at his feet. He was a sharp observer of the poetry world, and the sheer observation of such artefacts as Allen Ginsberg’s orderly address book confirms the keenness of Samuel’s eye. Indeed, in another life, he might have made a fine literary journalist. (After the war, he entertained aspirations to be a “foreign correspondent.”) But mentor? If Samuel had lessons to impart, they weren’t the sort the industrious MFA workshop, hammering away at poems, wants to hear. There's a podcast in which Samuel steps outside of his apartment and declares, “I have nothing to add to this day…. An old friend of mine, we’re admiring the sunset, and she says, ‘You should make a poem out of it.’ I said, ‘No! The sunset is enough.’” One time, as he talked, I watched a snowfall build-up in my backyard. After I got off the phone – Samuel having signed off with, “Good morning, my dear,” the way he did – I noticed that the plastic swan and rabbit were very nearly buried. All you could make out of the rabbit were its ears. It was all ears. The snowfall should have been enough, of course; but I couldn’t help but write up the moment anyway. There was even a line from one of Samuel’s letters that would make a perfect epigraph. I figured I would show the poem to the old poet when I got it just right (and maybe even typeset in a decent magazine). I would make the trip to New York and thrust the publication into his hands. If only he had known what I was up to, he might have laughed. It’s not always worth what you lose, getting poems right.           Poetry Is Barbarous           “The extra lines are probably all wrong, but—right as you are—I could not stop.           By the time you get this note, I will have gotten rid of them, myself.”           —Samuel Menashe, in a letter           The snow is rising and erasing           two rakes forgotten on the lawn.           It’s not just fall the snow’s effacing;           two static lives—a plastic swan           and rabbit, paired on patio stone—           are being buried to the throat.           But in the time it took to hone           these lines the level like a moat           has risen. The rabbit’s now all ears,           antennae tuned to snowy gusts.           (That was Brodsky—“I’m all ears!”—           that time you called him. Now he gets           an earful from the earthworm.) The swan’s           all neck, a cane for leaning on,           and the rakes are primered-over lines           that lie below like old designs. * * * This essay is excerpted from Jason Guriel's forthcoming book The Pigheaded Soul: Essays and Reviews on Poetry and Culture (2013), which features work that originally appeared in Poetry, PN Review, Parnassus, The New Criterion, and other magazines. Jason Guriel is a poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The New Criterion, Reader’s Digest, and Poetry Genius. “Poetry Is Barbarous” first appeared in The Walrus.