—Photos Courtesy of Public Domain
LONG LIVE RICHARD, ENGLAND’S WORTHY KING!
(Shakespeare’s Richard III)
For a bed of tiger cubs,
A great fly of Beelzebub’s.
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes
The incidents, quite different, the result
Quite unalike, yet some of Richard’s scenes
Recall, with Bannon as Buckingham, Trump’s cult.
Sir Laurence’s black hair sports no common genes
With Trump’s gross orange, but each does equal evil.
Trump swings a Twitter blade, blunt-edged, unsubtle,
Whereas the limping tyrant plays the weevil
Who tunnels through the flour, the meal, by scuttle.
Two narcissists: Richard plays the maiden’s part,
His gradual coy surrendering of virtue
Toward one end, to usurp the crown; the art
Of Trump’s whatever deal helps him or hurts you.
As Death’s Jest-Book exudes Thomas Lovell Beddoes,
Trump’s playbook oozes Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
The Tragedy of Orestes, by Thomas Goffe (c. 1616)
With thanks to the Oxford-addicted denizens,
clientele, hangers-on, or what you will,
of Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s
Blue Boar Tavernepisodes
Of Thomas Goffe’s The Tragedy of Orestes,
Not having read it yet, I can say nothing,
On whether he’s of the Drabs or of the Zesties.
But what Oxfordians tell of him! Quite something:
That his Orestes drama, from the Greek,
Has nevertheless digested much of Hamlet,
That “play full of clichés,” as wags will “gleek.”
You’d think such a mélange would smack of ham omelet.
But—one among not-so-roundabout confirmations
That Hamlet and Orestes are blood brothers
(Like Aeschylus and Shakespeare), of small nations,
But anti-heroes, big menaces to their mothers?
I must learn soon to praise him, not to scoff,
At this playwright, the “other” Thomas Goff.
ALAS, POOR PERCY
Percy Allen, Shakespeare scholar, public speaker
and drama critic, author of seven extraordinary
books on Edward de Vere as the real “Shakespeare”
Since I’m a twin myself, as this man was,
I know quite well how much his brother Ernest
Meant to Percy Allen; yet “buzz buzz”
Would plague old Percy’s ears. Poor chap, thou burnest,
As most remember only the silly séances
You held, those talks with your deceased twin’s spirit*
—And Oxford’s ghost, and Bacon’s—such mischances
Lit on your old age. Now no one would hear it,
Not hear the least word of your fine scholarship
And tireless talks for the Shakespeare-Oxford case.
Your radar would detect the Bard’s least blip,
The faintest quip; you’d fasten it in place…
I too read Measure for Measure, never found
The words you note: “the business [the Duke] hath helmed
Upon a warranted need.” The very sound
Reminds us of the Warrant,* from the Realm,
Which was to answer Elizabeth’s dire need
For playhouse propaganda against Spain,
To show the conscript soldiers why they’d bleed
In Holland, or expire drowned in the Main:
A thousand pounds per year to Oxford’s earl
In silence given to a post he helmed,
The business he called his “office,” set awhirl
With poets. Or else what would be overwhelmed
—By foes outside, sour discord inward brewed—
But poor miserable England? Your mistake,
Which got you deposed by uproar from the rude,
No worse than Arthur Conan Doyle’s, to slake
Great grief, was spiritualism of the age,
Yet ghosts earned you much ruthless persiflage.
You, who helped confirm it was the 1580s
When “Shakespeare” wrote, with all his
ink-stained mateys.
*Queen Elizabeth’s 1586 award to Oxford of
£1000 per year by Privy Seal Warrant Dormant,
with no accounting required, was logged in
Part XIII of her Exchequer account, with other
payments to heads of various State departments.
BEYOND THE WAR OF RED AND WHITE
for Nora
The “War of Red and White” is Oxford’s meme,
One he takes up again once turned “Shakespeare,”
The red, the maid’s face-blush: that is one theme;
Another, the white skin whiter with the fear
That shrinks the maid into her farthingale
Upon the approach of that bold gentleman
Who trembles himself, thinks cheeks so red may rail
At him, hold his love-bluster under ban.
All this is artifice: more natural,
More pleasing, you in your California skin
And Latvian mind; nor do you fail to call
On my best, call out my every fumbling sin,
But not with raillery: we’re no Shakespeare play
Where half the tragedy’s the mistake, the failure
To translate those white thoughts, that red array
Of moods in one’s best other self. Avail your
Within-skin of that beauty mark plain Truth,
That complement to loveliness of shape
Or enticing gaze: let this eternal youth
Drink of your candor, while most debauch on grape.
THE POETRY HIGH
Poetry is an LSD,
A natural high, though some, like great Thom Gunn,
Enhance the engorged perception, power to see,
With vast experimental fun.
The acid trip, the bad comedown,
Discolored the good, discouraged honest proofs
This chemistry could grow more than human hoofs
On Gunn, or brow-horns above his frown.
A brave New Yorker journalist
Contends LSD, or any altered state,
Of grass or capsules, helps us discern innate
Design in plants, root-system trysts,
What intrigues bind tree-canopies
Together, Fibonacci-style arrangements
We pass by in those egoist derangements
We’re pleased to call our normalcy.
I envy you, Gunn: hallucinogens
Helped you, not simply see, but limn with élan
That sexual centaur grafted by your sense
In your lower regions; plan,
Rule, infiltrating all whispering grass,
That turns them antennae, registering each blip
Signaled fiberoptically from tips
Down through each capillary pass-
Through tube into root and ground.
May I be no Romantic “sensitive plant,”
Yet somehow convert mere ordinary slant
Or straight gaze to a more felt, profound,
More trained, more penetrant, less drug-bought,
Whole-body-heart-brain-eye-nerve-systemic grasp
Of twisted trunk-life’s warped yet mindful clasp:
Learn from sidewalk-crack, root-rot,
Ragweed up through breaks as in the Roman Forum
Pavement: fathom all plants’ unruptured quorum.
“It was like having met/—years afterwards—/
Fanny Brawne / full of bounce…”
—Thom Gunn, “Famous Friends”
“It was like having met
—years afterwards—
Fanny Brawne
full of bounce,”
Writes Thom Gunn.
Not one ounce
Of her firm heart not
Packed with grief
Hid under art. Fraught,
Feigned relief,
The limbs of her
Swum long through slur.
The spoken sweets,
The whims of her,
Sine-wave retreats
And wisps of stir,
Mood-swings that range from bright, outgoing,
To glum, preoccupied, unknowing
What mate or child last said to her,
Her insides thinning on, and fewer
Camouflages, squelching feats
With which to play the self-renewer,
Obscure where life’s half-dead to her,
An airlock sealed with thoughts of Keats.
Her inside vault a heart of aches
And less and less of surface skin,
Though metaled, where to stow things in.
Prolonged self-requisition takes
From rightful grasp all kept keepsakes
By fits and starts when Keats assumes
Not ghostly shape in Fanny’s rooms
But lordship of her sere heartbeats.
Adored, the coughing poet speaks
Hoarse whispers through the household creaks.
That Fanny Brawne
Who’s “full of bounce”
Which is recoil, thin armor on?
Long-drawn-on energies forsake
Her: gathering, round her, long-lost heats
As sick ones tug threadbare bedsheets.
JB / TG
My fellow Gemini, Jane Blue: you
are missed, as any friend now gone
is missed, perhaps more so. Somewhere I must
have recorded my thanks for your editing:
my first chapbook, yes, but also how to edit,
that lesson too—mostly shown, not too much spoken.
How much I’d have liked us
to meet more often. To have heard more
about poets you learned from,
Celeste Turner Wright, Karl Shapiro,
Thom Gunn. Above all, Thom Gunn,
whose published Letters I’m now reading.
You got along very well with him,
studied with him at UC Davis,
but which Davis? The main campus, I hope,
where viticulture, agriculture, make
the readiest metaphors for what poets do.
The Letters, alas, have him teaching at
UCD (Extension?) Sacramento—not that
awful downtown 29th Street strip mall?
Where embryo poets are nurtured in vitro
as at Johns Hopkins, or a Wuhan lab?
Well, so long as you grew by him, sharpened
your quick eye for the human and the humor
in your moments of “evil child” at the piano,
the tour bus’s blind-eye windows through which
tourists may see whatever the frames don’t exclude,
or teaching where the pruno concoction
fills the prisoner’s holy communion
Styrofoam. Gunn and you, I learn
from his letters, had gardens in common:
Your roses, his Black Eyed Susans,
your dogwood, his “self-re-seeding”
foxgloves, your crape myrtle and your camellias,
his nemesia, hollyhocks, rosemary and lilies. All
horticulture, all striving to achieve
“the world’s best garden,” as poets compete,
or UCD grape-growers labor, major in enology.
Gunn voices his unrealized aspirations
toward an Eden in one small Cole Street garden,
a Whitmanian Eden of loving male flesh as strong as
his wish—that equals your wish for an Eden, all
self-re-seeding poems, all history stretching into
the long-ago: your “The Shower at Carmel,” words
flung far into young readers’ futures, for as long as
young readers can be inveigled to read you, on and on
till English rubs up against its Armageddon…
____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything—in the way you feel your life.
― Thom Gunn
____________________
And a hefty sack of poetry it is from Tom Goff today; thanks and more thanks for all of these! (I didn’t know you were a twin…!)
____________________
—Medusa
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