17 Dollars

17 Dollars

That's how much the man who owned DuBey's gave me

  for my books that time you insisted

they were taking up space and we needed the money.

  We were poor, sure--you a painter,

me a student--but 17 dollars? I remember looking at it--

  a ten, a five, and two ones--and thinking

how little it was compared to the cardboard box

  you'd lugged into the store that afternoon,

all the days and nights those people--Russian aristocrats,

  English ladies, Southern dingbats, Irish wild men--

taught me how to be human: flawed, yes, but with aspirations

  of divinity. Where were Prince Myshkin,

Dorothea Brooke, Hazel Motes, Stephen Dedalus?

  We could maybe buy groceries for a week

or go to the café down the street for dinner or lunch,

  but how could I get by without my Borges

or Wuthering Heights? When I think back on that day,

  that's when my heart hardened in my chest

like a walnut gone bad, so when another man

  told me he loved me, I looked at him

and didn't ask myself would he love me forever

  but would he love my piles of books.

When they began to grow by the bed, teeter on every table,

  and topple to the floor, would his mouth

become thin and his voice rise like an accountant's 

  with a ledger? I handed you the money

and walked away. You ran to catch up,

 said, "We can take it back," but I felt

like the poor mother who has given her child

  to the rich couple because they can buy her

frilly dresses, give her piano lessons, send her to fancy schools.

  I couldn't take care of my Jane Eyre,

Molly Bloom, Anna Karenina, but maybe some else could.

  Even now I go to the shelves to look for The Trial

or The Day of the Locusts or Thus Spake Zarathustra,

  and when I can't find them, I know

they were in that box. What did we do after? Walk home,

  eat dinner at the cheap Chinese place,

where you picked the shrimp out of the eggrolls and asked,

  "Is that pork? It tastes like pork." Later

a French couple bought the building, ripped out the red silk

  dragons, the lanterns with gold tassels

and turned it into the bistro my new husband and I went to

  most weekends when we were first married,

where I learned to drink wine, eat escargots and bitter greens.

  Now it's the parking lot of the federal courthouse,

and I can't drink red wine without sneezing. Why did I keep

  The Manifestos of Surrealism, which I haven't opened

in thirty years? Where are The Moviegoer, Nightwood,

  Tender Buttons, Wise Blood? Years later,

both married to other people, you said you were sorry

  for making me sell those books. We were standing outside

your studio in Chicago. It was summer and you were holding

  your daughter's hand, and I said it was nothing,

but even that day long ago I knew it was everything and it was.

-Barbara Hamby

This is from Barbara Hamby's new and selected collection, On The Street of Divine Love, which came out in 2014. (It's no longer the newest and there are two volumes since then.) This is from what was then the new section, and the poem first appeared in the literary magazine Agni. She's the writer-in-residence at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

I like her poems a lot and have read a couple of other volumes. They're mostly in this style, and she calls them odes as a rule, though not this one. An alternation of long and short lines, they might also be thought of as elegiacs. (Though that suggests elegy, instead of Propertius, and that's certainly not right.) They're funny, but also with some heft, at their best. (Hazel Motes a dingbat?  Maybe!) 

I put the book on my Books of Summer list, but am making my way through it slowly, and so can't yet count it. But I expect I will soon! (And might have more to say then.)

Mimnermus 1 (#poem)

 

τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης,

  τεθναίην ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι,

κρυπταδίη φιλότης καὶ μείλιχα δῶρα καὶ εὐνή,

  οἷ᾽ ἥβης ἄνθεα γίγνεται ἁρπαλέα

ἀνδράσιν ἠδὲ γυναιξίν: ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ὀδυνηρὸν ἐπέλθῃ

  γῆρας, ὅ τ᾽ αἰσχρὸν ὁμῶς καὶ κακὸν ἄνδρα τιθεῖ,

αἰεί μιν φρένας ἀμφὶ κακαὶ τείρουσι μέριμναι,

  οὐδ᾽ αὐγὰς προσορῶν τέρπεται ἠελίου,

ἀλλ᾽ ἐχθρὸς μὲν παισίν, ἀτίμαστος δὲ γυναιξίν,

  οὕτως ἄργαλέον γῆρας ἔθηκε θεός.

-Mimnermus

Mimnermus is an ancient Greek poet about whom almost nothing is known. The Suda, the Byzantine encyclopedia, says he lived around the 37th Olympiad, which occurred in 632-629 B.C. He may--or may not--have lived in Smyrna (now in Turkey). His works only survive in quotations from other authors. This, which is generally labeled as Mimnermus 1, (and may be a complete poem--we don't know) is found in the Florilegium of Johannes Stobaeus, a collection of fragments assembled around the fifth century A.D.

What? You don't want to deal with that great wodge of ancient Greek up there? No? Conveniently...I wrote a translation which came out here earlier this week.

What is life? What's joy? When golden Aphrodite's gone,

  I'd rather die should she fail to fire me.

Hidden kisses, cajoling gifts, and bed, those are

  the blossoms we kids grabbed so greedily,

girls and boys both. But then tedious old age attacks--

  it makes a man both worthless and ashamed--

so much does stressful care abrade your ability

  you hate to look upon the sun enflamed.

You're boring to boys, no longer glorified by girls;

  miserable age--god's gift!--has you tamed.

Possibly 'then' in line 5 should be 'when', I went back and forth on that. Line 9 could also be thought of as children and wives rather than the more explicit reading I gave it. Then it would be something like 'hated by your kids, dishonoured by your wife.'

Still thinking about Propertius is how I got to this. In his ninth ode in Book I, Propertius says he prefers Mimnermus to Homer. That's supposed to be a bust of Homer up above, though we don't have any idea what he looks like either.

Asses of Parnassus is a pretty fun poetry website. One of my poems came out there earlier. More are yet to come. So pay attention! 😉

The Dance of the Intellect among Words, or Thinking about Propertius

 Round, round, the roof does run;
  And being ravished thus,
Come, I will drink a tun
  To my Propertius.

-Robert Herrick, from 'To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses'

The only literary celebration of the spins that I know of.

But anyway, Propertius:

The word around town these days is that I've become lazy
  and that Cynthia must be the reason. Alas, not so.
She is as far away from my bed as the River Po
  is from...What's out there, remote and exotic? The Bug!
Cynthia hasn't been feeding my passion lately. My soul
  is starved for her kisses. My ear thirsts for her whispers.
It's not the way it was when we pleased each other, defying
  Envy itself. It's as if some god had decided
I was in need of a little refresher course in human
  pain. Or is it some herb from Prometheus' peaks
that Medea kept in her kit to interfere with lovers?
  Whatever it is, I'm sadly diminished. Distance
changes a woman's heart, and the great strength of our passion
  is undermined. I spend my nights alone,
morose and full of self-pity. (I begin to bore myself.)
  That man who, in his pain, can complain to his mistress
who is there with him in the room, ought to be

counting his blessings,

  for love, when it's sprinkled with tears, will grow like a weed.
At the worst, he can work himself up to a kind

of righteous anger,

  enough to give him the nerve to break it off
and look somewhere else for love. I'm unable to do that.
  For me, it's Cynthia, first, last, and always.

That's Ode 12, from Book I, translated by David Slavitt. W. A. Camps, Pembroke College, Cambridge, writes, "Very little is known of Propertius' life beyond what he tells us himself in his works." What Propertius tells us, the last line of that ode, is, "Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit." He was in love with a girl. Cynthia. First, last, and always. (Though more literally: Cynthia was first, Cynthia will be the end.)

We can piece together a few other details. Propertius was born around 57 BC, in Umbria, probably close to Assisi. The Roman civil wars were ongoing and this was a region not yet fully absorbed into the Roman state; Propertius' family lands were confiscated for the benefit of Augustus' (still Octavian and not yet Augustus) veterans in 41 BC. His father died while Propertius was in his teens, his mother somewhat later. Still there was money enough left for him to go to Rome where he was no doubt supposed to study law or oratory or something useful, but spent his time writing poetry instead. He meets Cynthia around 30 BC.

In fact, poetry could be a paying gig at the time. His poems, all written in the elegiac meter, are divided into four books. The first, called the Monobiblos, is the one most absorbed with Cynthia, and seems to have become famous already while Propertius was still young. Which meant he caught the ear of Maecenas, Augustus' cultural commissar, and voilá, Propertius' fortune was made. Once you were in with the new hegemony...

There's not much evidence, and anyway, I'm probably entirely wrong, but I imagine Maecenas as having good taste in literature, not necessarily political, but feeling obligated to support the new way of things. By 27 B.C.--when Octavian becomes Augustus--Rome has suffered fifty, almost a hundred, years of civil war, and everyone is just so damned tired. Sure, Augustus is a square, daddy-o, but he's got the money, and he's fixed everything up real sweet, and if you just would write a few poems about how things now are cool, like it was a return the good old days, well...you know, it would help...Vergil did it, Horace did it, too. So it's OK for you, too. Propertius does appreciate the new calm, writes some 'Roman odes' in honor of the new politics, but can't quite pull it off, or maybe doesn't entirely want to. He just wants to write about a girl.

Anyhoo, that's a bit what I like about Propertius. There's a whole world there you can only get glimpses of; real people, half seen, half filled out by your imagination; people interacting with the events of the day, but not enslaved by them, still living their own romantic lives. These characters feel like real people, well, they are real people, but characters, too: Propertius himself, and Cynthia, that learned girl, but also Lygdamus, Propertius' slave--we all know about tricky servants, the Leporello type--his poetry-writing friends show up here and there, maybe some rivals in his worship of Cynthia, of whom he could be jealous--should he be jealous?--, other romantically possible girls. A whole circle. It goes on until it fades; some die; some just abandon poetry. It's Bolaño telling the story of the Visceral Realists in The Savage Detectives.

Enough for now. I've slogged at this post a while. And still I didn't get to Dante or Goethe and Ezra Pound is no more than an allusion in the title of the post. Housman. Housman remains to be considered. Imagery. Ears and boats. Maybe more Highet. I also didn't babble on about elegiacs, Goethe or Schiller or Coleridge or Clough, though I had every intention of doing so...

Thinking about Propertius:

Dates, and other 'facts', taken from the introduction to Propertius' Elegies, Book I, edited by W. A. Camps, Cambridge University Press, 1961, shown above. They're reasonable, but not to but to be taken as gospel truth. The year of his birth is particularly doubtful.