“What a Strange Path”

We headlined our previous poetry challenge with a line from Virginia Woolf: “I have had my vision.” And sure enough, the last sentences of To the Lighthouse provoked more poems than did our other two prompts: D. H. Lawrence’s surprising opening sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Maggie Smith’s role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Though the latter inspired the fewest number of poems, Millicent Caliban seemed to speak for the team when she wrote that the late actress “inspired awe and pride: a sense of self.”

Without further ado, Mary Jo Bang is the winner for best poem with “It Was Done”:

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision of Mary seated on the highest hill, quite possibly the highest hill ever invented, Mary stared at intently by Dante, a loyal Saint Bernard beside him, no snow in sight. Of course, in the picture at rest on the easel, she was and wasn’t Mary. “That’s how art works,” she said to her friend on the bed in the guest room. “You paint a mythic picture and put yourself in it, knowing Narcissus ends in the us that looks into and out of a mirror.” Compared to that, to and from seemed so simple, a never-ending echo of hello and goodbye.

That the “vision” is of Mary—whether the Virgin Mary or the author herself— as observed by Dante, comes as a complete surprise to the reader, even one who is aware that Mary Jo Bang has been translating the Divine Comedy. There follow the speculations regarding art and Narcissus. Terrific.

The silver medal goes to Angela Ball, whose unpunctuated prose implies an intimate relationship with the author of To the Lighthouse:

“It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

I am Lily Briscoe  Perennial  Brisk  The closest thing I have to a house is my easel  It does not ease all  but allows me to see  creates a picture plane  The closest thing I have to a family are the Ramseys  My quotation mark family  Alternatives that once troubled me have lodged in other women or floated downstream with my author  Skirts are oppressive  They trip the easel  I should simply wear trousers  We have not yet come that far  When I am painting    my back repels the family and their guests by tensing    Mrs. Ramsey   the real not geographical center  is gone except in the painting  I finish when the others have reached the house’s opposite    a lonely abstract phallic lighthouse     Unlike most characters I know myself well    perennial    brisk   My “Chinese eyes”  I comfort Mr. Ramsey by admiring his boots  so he can speak of them  My painting is not real it is a character in a book whose readers die one by one  Others take it up  My painting would like to be as lasting as the dreams of aborigines  the ones of airplanes they have never seen  Brushes paints easel fit a polished box smaller than themselves   My final stroke is an attack  an act of love

I admired Charise Hoge’s “Other Side of the Canvas,” which, at 60 words, came in second for the Polonius Prize for Brevity (read on to learn who took first) while capturing the beautiful shock of recognition that an empty canvas may prove “better” than one on which the painter has labored long:

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. And this is not it. She turns the canvas to the wall. Much better, she says to no one. Like an afterthought, her laughter rises, surprising. This taste of laughing, her amuse-bouche, appetizer for what she would do next.

Of the poets who adopted D. H. Lawrence’s ironically tragic line, it is difficult to choose between two estimable talents. Pamela Joyce Shapiro, who dared to be the first to post, won me over with her prose poem “Do Not Look Back,” which she wrote “after John Ashbery”:

Neither question nor direction, the phrase haunts me. How to continue. You tell me nothing will change, we’ve only to watch the parade and shake our heads in disbelief, our disapproval noted though impotent. And if the sky were about to fall, and the startled birds refused to fly, no one seemed to mind very much. Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Paul Michelsen’s “Neutral Samaritans in Key West, Russia” is serpentine in its movement and inclusive in its sweep before reaching, as if at the core of an amazing labyrinth, Lawrence’s line.

I made sweet love to a woman named Anaphora, but called out her name one too many times for her liking. I yelled “Movie!” in a burning theater. Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing to hear here. No one to help, Samaritans. Good ones, bad ones, neutral Swiss ones (holy). Oh, somehow you go on, “Oh, go on,” you say, usually after a compliment. You’ve got Dad jokes galore, even though you’re a Mom. I remain agoraphobic, though you just might be, must be, worth crossing the line for—you who stop at spots blocked off with yellow tape that says Police Line – Do Not Cross and do the ol’ Father, Son, & Holy Spirit, and it gets me every time. Lord, arrest me, citizens of Valhalla or whatever amorphous purgatory you’re trapped inside of, make a citizens’ arrest so we can at least be lonely together. Couch potatoes making strides (or just getting fried). Maybe a picnic at a cemetery will do the trick and cheer us up. Inspired by the other mourners sitting together staring at their phones. Maybe give them something worth looking up for. But they’re likely to miss the point and put whatever we’re doing on TikTok. No matter how beautiful what we’re doing is to us, there will be legions finding clever ways to mock it and maybe even make it political, which may be two ways of saying the same thing. Here and there it may be funny enough to make us laugh at ourselves, and perhaps in such moments we all win (or lose-but-at-the-same-time-stop-thinking-winning-is-all-that-matters). Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Sometimes one can decline to participate in an elegant and charming way, as Michael C. Rush demonstrates in “Three Strikes,” winner of the Polonius Prize for Brevity.

I don’t write prose poetry (well, seldom), I won’t write narrative poetry (only sparingly), and I quite dislike quotes in the body of a poem (I’d choose an epigraph). So though I long to engage, it’s three strikes and I’m out. But ours is essentially a tragic age, so we [must] refuse to take it tragically.

I wish I had space to commend others and to cite some impressive examples of critical exchanges between poets. But the time has come to announce our next poetry challenge. Once again, our options come from the list of quotations in the first column of “Next Line, Please” in reprise:

1. “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take,” says the protagonist of Robert Bresson’s 1959 movie Pickpocket (1959). This is so dramatic a last word, and so quintessentially Parisian, that it begs to be the first line of a lyric describing the itinerary of the “strange path.”
2. In the first sentence of The Beautiful and Damned, Scott Fitzgerald describes irony as “the Holy Ghost” of his time. In as brief a poem as possible, name your candidate for “the Holy Ghost” of our secular age.
3. Ralph Ellison concludes Invisible Man with this question: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” With or without reference to the quotation, answer the question: for whom do you speak? Twelve lines maximum.

Deadline: Monday, December 23, midnight any time zone.

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