There is a sound my car makes. It’s used but I just bought it, so it’s “new to me.” I’ve had two mechanics look to try to find the cause. The sound only happens in very specific circumstances. There’s a clank, like the spare tire is sliding around when I brake quickly. Maybe it’s like the sound a metal gas can makes when you push in the side and release. The first thing I did was remove the tire and jack, get in, accelerate, and brake short. The sound was still there.
My wife and I disagree about the origin. I think it’s over the right wheel. She thinks middle rear. The first mechanic didn’t hear it at all until I drove her around. The second claimed he didn’t hear it at all. He’s insane. Both pros are clear: the car is sound, right as rain, hunky dory (honky doory, because it’s a car.) I’m allowing the Carvana send-back date to pass and keeping it.
In any case, I know how to make the sound and have learned how not to make it. Regular stopping was never an issue. Any stop that’s abrupt enough for the driver to say, “Sorry about that,” to passengers and cu-clank. But I learned to ease off the brakes at the very end. That doesn’t quite describe it. Anyway, I’ve adapted and the noise that maybe only my wife and I can hear is no longer an issue.
Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s a beautiful day for a drive and the roads are more fun pre-rush hour than during. It’s safe out there again. I’m not randomly braking to see if the maybe-phantom sound is still there anymore. Much.
Just in case: If you see a silver Nissan, don’t tailgate for the next couple of weeks. First, some verse.
***
Archibald MacLeish wanted to put on a musical retelling of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and take Broadway by storm. The play would be a torch passing. Bob Dylan would write the score. MacLeish won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1933, again in 1953, and another Pulitzer for his free verse drama, a retelling of the book of Job, J.B. Dylan was the counterculture balladeer sensation. Producers had to be happy.
It was a disaster. The established poet and hip-with-kids next generation songwriter didn’t work well together.
Adam Langer writes in the NY Times,
“A disagreement over lyrics to “Father of Night” epitomized the difference between the two visions. Dylan’s song was full of oppositions (‘Father of day, Father of night/Father of black, father of white’). MacLeish liked the melody but thought the song should comment more exclusively on the nature of evil; he suggested alternative lyrics: ‘Father of night, father of dread/Father of cold in the void overhead/Father of serpent under the stone/Father of fear in the dark alone.’”
Dylan quit, said a few gracious comments on parting when gracious comments were needed. One of MacLeish’s friends said there wasn’t much collaborating. MacLeish would have Dylan over to write and Dylan would drink brandy until he passed out. Scratch debuted as a non-musical with MacLeish as the sole author and closed two days after.
MacLeish was a type of guy and Dylan was a type of guy and I can’t see them getting along, brandy or not. I’m old enough to reflexively assign blame to anybody under thirty. Also, Dylan was a hippie and I’ve read Joan Didion. The thing is, I’ve been reading a lot about Archibald MacLeish the last few days. Most reviews and accounts I’ve come across assure me that he’s a poet to be reckoned with, “however…”
After “however” and its kin, I’ve read that some of his early work is “justly forgotten” and “The first major period of MacLeish’s poetic career—some would say the only major one” (Poetry Foundation “Archibald MacLeish”), “competent, workmanlike—and dull” (“The omelet of A. MacLeish”, Jeffery Meyers, The New Criterion, May 1992), and a favorite from William H. Pritchard (“MacLeish Revisited” Poetry, February, 1983):
“This willingness to consort with the high and mighty, along with the penchant for noble, large-sounding affirmations of the deathless spirit of man, or poetry, or America, caused many students of modern poetry to treat MacLeish’s own work with condescension at best. Here I must account myself one of those students.”
I’m of the opinion that his poetry can be very good. I just don’t think people like him. I don’t think I like him.
His best known work is probably “Ars Poetica.” In it he lays out his poetic philosophy, or at least it’s claimed he does.
Ars Poetica
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—A poem should not mean
But be.
I say claimed, because after even an afternoon spent sifting through his shorter lyrics, “Ars Poetica” is more some stuff that sounded cool at the time than an ethos. I’m sorry for the quote-heavy entry this week, but here’s more from Meyer’s New Criterion piece: “But he went on to write a great quantity of poems that ‘mean.’”
No one can argue that the man wasn’t impressive. My notes on his CV fill three notebook pages. Poetry Foundation offers this succinct account of his most famous public services:
“MacLeish committed himself to such public offices as Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, assistant director of the Office of War Information in 1942, Assistant Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945, and chair of the US delegation to the founding conference of UNESCO in 1945.”
He was Skull & Bones, edited reviews at Yale and Harvard, practiced law, edited The New Republic, wrote for Fortune, set direction at the OSS that carried over to the CIA, wrote a Nixon commissioned poem for the moon landing, won the poetry and drama Pulitzers… it goes on and on and on. He was a college president.
Most impressively, he was Librarian of Congress and made sweeping changes that modernized the organization. I have no idea what those changes were, but multiple sources were very impressed. “The President decided I wanted to be Librarian of Congress,” he’s quoted as saying. Roosevelt (not the cool one) made use of him in a variety of offices. One of his better-known acts as Librarian of Congress was the creation of the position Poet Laureate of the United States.
Before all that, he and his wife spent time in Paris and salon-ed about bars with Hemingway (both drove an ambulance in WWI so they had that in common) and everybody else who was ever famous for writing or painting in the 1920s. The smart set seemed to like him. He and Hemingway fell out on a fishing trip in Key West, but there were good times.
I wonder if his success in so many fields elevated his poetry, forcing comparisons with better poets, those who were as well-known as he was, but solely for the excellence of his verse. Again, MacLeish was at times a very good poet. (However…) He just wasn’t great.
“You, Andrew Marvell” is tedious, however… I like the idea. There’s tension. He’s playing off Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” Marvell’s persona conjures ravaging time to create romantic urgency, trying to convince a girl (“Thus, though we cannot make our Sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”) MacLeish tells that persona that the fear of passing time may be a useful ploy, but it’s still a real fear. Time is coming for us all. More from the Meyers article,
“As he suppressed his lyric instinct, became a cultural icon, and moved from poetry to social protest, adopting a high-sounding, ceremonial, propagandistic public voice, Morton Dauwen Zabel rightly spoke of ‘the open banality’ of ‘You, Andrew Marvell’”
Again, I think it’s tedious, but I like the idea.
You, Andrew Marvell
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow growAnd strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia changeAnd now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward passAnd Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal onAnd deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblownAnd over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hullsAnd Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that landNor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …
And another thing. In his NY Times article, Langer mentioned MacLeish’s problem with Dylan’s black/white and day/night oppositions. MacLeish wasn’t innocent of such things. He was an honorable, respected statesman. He cut an upright figure, projected an image propriety. He and his wife were described as practically priggish society types. However… He carried on multiple affairs, more than once with wives of his friends. He and Ada, his wife whom he knocked up before marrying, were hot and bothered over the propriety of their daughter’s marriage to a working-class man. I don’t like him.
I’ve made no secret of my fascination with Ezra Pound. MacLeish suffered from the same fascination, writing on occasion in the style of Pounds’ Cantos (from Meyers again, “as Rolfe Humphries acutely noted, as no more than ‘a talented, industrious and successful mimic of poetic activity.’”). In fact it was the upright government man who arranged the traitorous Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s mental facility. Robert Frost was involved, as was Hemingway – I suppose they put aside their fishing differences – but looks like it was MacLeish’s stature within the halls of government that clinched the deal.
MacLeish sought Pound’s approval early in his career, sending him his long poem Conquistador for critique. Per MacLeish, Pound said it was “damn bad.”
Ezry
Maybe you ranted in the Grove—
Maybe!—but you found the mark
That measures altitude above
Sea-level for a poet’s work.Mad if you were or fool instead
You found the bench-mark in the stone—
Horizon over arrow-head—
Alder and dock had overgrown.These later and more cautious critics
Think themselves high if they look down
From Rome’s or England’s steeple—spit
On fools below them in the town:Not you! Although the absolute sea
Is far down from the Muses’ Wood,
You gauged the steep declivity,
Giddy with grandeur where you stood.
I scribbled down all sorts of stuff while reading. There are lots of leftovers don’t fit, but I want mentioned. He was born in 1892 and died in 1982, just seven months before the debut of The A-Team. He joins Robert Graves, 1895-1985, as a poet I’ve written about whose year of death is a rearrangement of his year of birth. He denied being a Communist but was called a Communist ally by Whittaker Chambers. Jan Smuts is credited with writing the Preamble to the United Nations Charter, but MacLeish either had a hand in writing it, edited it, or was in the room while a bunch of people talked about what it should say. He rejected John Updike’s application to take his writing class twice, and later said Updike never applied. He did everything. He was an amazing and energetic talent and a better than decent poet.
Edmund Wilson Skewered him in 1939 on the pages of The New Yorker with “The Omelet of A. MacLeish,” which became one of the best-known satirical poems of the Twentieth Century.
I don’t like him.
