Stapler

Sometimes poetry feels very easy. At other times it feels practically impossible. It seems to depend too much on contingencies. I pick up a poem. The words don’t do anything, and they’re supposed to do something. Maybe I’m not pulling my weight as a reader. I’m supposed to contribute something, maybe attention, which is difficult. I don’t really like to work when I read.

There’s the option of escapist literature, or moving to another track altogether. Right now I’m reading a novel and also a book about art. I find myself being very critical of the novel, even though for the most part it holds my attention. I think it’s the subject that holds my attention. It takes place in a particular historical and social ambience that interests me. On the other hand, the art book is interesting because of the artist’s ideas, or her attempts to find a way to express her ideas. In an earlier phase her work raises certain issues, contradictions. But the works look too much like certain real things and she doesn’t want her meaning to be restricted to those things. She wants it to be the same yet different. She also doesn’t want it to be pretty, or even to look composed. So she moves on to another phase, getting a little closer to what she wants, though she finds it hard to define it in words. Ultimately, if she is successful, each work will simply exist and people will want to look at it. If they want to discuss it, well, that’s their business, but it’s not the point. She wonders if she really ought to be making a point in the first place.

The novel is a satire. The author even mentions Juvenal, a poet I am coincidentally considering reading. But what interests me is that the novel takes place in New York in the late Forties. So I listen to Gil Evans’s arrangements for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, with songs like “There’s a Small Hotel” and “Arab Dance,” based on Tchaikovsky. I also watch Looney Tunes from that era. I try to remember what the movies were like. It doesn’t make the novel any better, but I hope it improves my understanding of the world it describes. I also think about myself at that time. I remember the Blizzard of 1947 in Brooklyn, for example. Fred, a retired meteorologist I know, worked at La Guardia Airport at that time and forecasted the blizzard. The vocal on “There’s a Small Hotel,” by the way, is by the Snowflakes. It’s not just jazz and movies and weather. Stravinsky was composing his opera The Rake’s Progress, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, during the same period. What was Balanchine doing? What was John Cage doing? Why were Russian composers so popular?

The sun is out. It shines on the dust covering the stapler my father used in his job as a dress cutter. It’s a good, substantial stapler, a real tool, though it seems to jam a lot. I’d like to have it fixed.