The Hollow Tree: Bowie, Glück, & Bly

On any given day or in any given week, I am usually reading 4 or 5 books, to say nothing of the many I randomly consult. At the same time, music is the soundtrack of my life: I am listening whenever I can. 

So, the many connections that pop up between books and music find there way into these posts, most frequently on The Sunday Service, but often in other, less focused posts. 

Lately, I've been listening to David Bowie's fantastic new album, The Next Day, somewhat compulsively. Also, I've been preparing for some poetry meetings this fall related to my day job, one of which is a discussion of the work of Louise Glück. Here is a haunting poem by her I ran across during my preparations:


All Hallows by Louise Glück

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been
Picked clean, the sheaves
Bound evenly and piled at the roadside
Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
Of harvest or pestilence
And the wife leaning out the window
With her hand extended, as in payment,
And the seeds
Distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

During my many listenings to the new Bowie, after discovering the Glück poem, suddenly the lines in the chorus of the title song jumped out at me.

  

The Next Day by David Bowie

"Look into my eyes", he tells her
"I’m gonna say goodbye", he says, yeah
"Do not cry", she begs of him goodbye, yeah
All that day she thinks of his love, yeah

They whip him through the streets and alleys there
The gormless and the baying crowd right there
They can’t get enough of that doomsday song
They can’t get enough of it all

Listen

"Listen to the whores", he tells her
He fashions paper sculptures of them
Then drags them to the river‘s bank in the cart
Their soggy paper bodies wash ashore in the dark
And the priest stiff in hate now demanding fun begin
Of his women dressed as men for the pleasure of that priest

Here I am, not quite dying
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the next day,
And the next,
And another day

Ignoring the pain of their particular diseases
They chase him through the alleys chase him down the steps
They haul him through the mud and they chant for his death
And drag him to the feet of the purple headed priest

First they give you everything that you want
Then they take back everything that you have
They live upon their feet and they die upon their knees
They can work with satan while they dress like the saints
They know god exists for the devil told them so
They scream my name aloud down into the well below

Here I am, not quite dying
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its' branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the next day,
And the next,
And another day.


While musing on the idea of the related imagery (the hollow tree & the soul in the tree) of Glück and Bowie and thinking what I might make of it in passing here, I started to read Robert Bly's This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (which I'll have more to say about in a later post). 

And, of course, what did I run across but this, the first verse to his poem "Women We Love Whom We Never See Again:"

There are women we love whom we never see again.
They are chestnuts shining in the rain.
Moths hatched in winter disappear behind books.
Sometimes when you put your hand into a hollow tree
you touch the dark places between the stars.


So, I pulled up: there it is, three pieces that reference a hollow tree (two directly, one, perhaps, allusively), a shared image from something like the collective unconscious. I haven't quite got my mind around this, it may just be too large for that type of feat for me (though one can find citations for heroes hiding in hollow trees, children being found in hollow trees, king's escaping pursuit in hollow trees, all in Stith-Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature), but I do feel, in some ways, that the image is seeking me out. 

Either that or I certainly am paying better attention than usual. 

Or maybe, in my selection of materials, I am seeking out the hollow tree? It has something to say, doesn't it?

What might it be? 

What might it be?

Source: geograph.org.uk on Wikicommons

-------------- 

Photo by Onnola

 "Take a shortcut though me!"
the willow
suggests

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don  

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 171 songs

Louise Gluck: Gratitude

I've been spending some time recently with the work of Louise Glück. I've always been a great admirer of her work, particularly the early poems, and this one speaks for itself distinct fully and, so, here you are.


Gratitude

Do not think I am not grateful for your small
kindness to me.
I like small kindnesses.
In fact I actually prefer them to the more
substantial kindness, that is always eying you
like a large animal on a rug,
until your whole life reduces
to nothing but waking up morning after morning
cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks.

                                               Louise Glück


Here is a little glimpse of process, and result ...  

------------------ 

Photo by ToniVC

brazenly squatting
on the tatami mat...
a frog

Issa 

translated by David G. Lanoue

   

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Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 169 songs

Louise Glück on Writing

In a recent interview with the Yale Daily News, Louise Glück had this to say about how writing never gets any easier:

Q: If you had to give one piece of advice to young writers, what would you say?

A: I think young writers need to know that it never gets easy. The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there’s no struggle, there’s no torment, there’s no sense that the thing you’ve embarked on is a catastrophe. I’ve been seriously writing since I was in my earliest teens, and I suffer the same torments that I did then. And the only difference is that now I know they’re never going to go away.

For those with an interest in the Eastern forms (and the philosophy that underlies them), one might simply say "Life never gets any easier," which is much the same thing. For the full interview, check here.

Elms

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

Louise Glück

And from the master:

a long night--
the devil in me
torments me

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Etheridge Knight and Louise Glück

Sunday, April 19th was the birthday of the great African American poet, Etheridge Knight. Here's his spot-on poem on the funeral of Martin Luther King from his excellent book, The Essential Etheridge Knight:

On Watching Politicans Perform At Martin Luther King's Funeral

Hypocrites shed tears
like shiny snake skins

words rolling
thru the southern air

the scent of flowers
mingles with Jack Daniels
and Cutty Sark

the last snake skin slithers
to the floor where
black baptist feet
have danced in ecstasy

they turn
away
to begin
again

manicured fingers shuffling
the same stacked deck
with the ante
raised

Etheridge Knight

Here's is a video cast of a Knight reading from the Library of Congress. (RealPlayer)


************************************




Saturday April 18th was the birthday of one of our finest contemporary poets, Louise Glück. Her work is at once lyrical, elegaic, and powerful in a combination rarely found in today's poetry. "Memo From The Cave" is from the early collection Firstborn, which has been reprinted with three other volumes in The First Four Books of Poems. If you had to own only one book of American poetry from the later part of the 20th century, you could do worse than The First Four Books of Poems:

Memo From The Cave

O love, you airtight bird,
My mouse-brown
Alibis hand upside-down
Above the pegboard
With its dangled pots
I don't have chickens for;
My lies are crawling on the floor
Like families but their larvae will not
Leave this nest. I've let
Despair bed
Down in your stead
And wet
Our quilted cover
So the rot-
scent of its pussy-foot-
fingers lingers, when its over.

Louise Glück

And here's a video cast of Louise Glück, also from the Library of Congress. (RealPlayer)

mosquito larvae too
keep the sutra's
rhythm

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don