Bathroom poetry may be the purest form of poetry there is. The reader is captive and the work is anonymous, so why not let it rip with what you’re really feeling, utterly devoid of pretension?
I had two to assess at the Flying Point Beach port-a-potty on Sunday morning. One was an individual’s frank observation of another individual’s proclivity for performing a specific sexual act (at least I presume it’s not written in the third person; if it was, that invites a whole new level of analysis).
The second was more philosophical: “EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE.”
This hangs on two words: Is it directed at me, the reader? Or does the “you” signify a collective societal knowledge? And “lie” — in this context, it seems essential to consider that a “lie” implies a transfer of inaccurate information from some source, as opposed to something that is inherently false.
The bathroom poetry really on my mind, though, is not anonymous, though it still has captivity in its corner. It’s on the wall of our downstairs bathroom, painted on my wife’s wood plank art.
It is untitled (at least on the wall, which is how I know it, so how I am presenting it), unsigned and absolutely beautiful:
It was a short climb
as far as hills go, to get to where
the blueberries
were high
and the sun and the rain
had gathered together inside
all the sweetness and
passion of the day
The sound was in the pail
and all around
the heat raised a buzzing
and the wind was soft as hair
I’m not that fond of them
but giving is another thing
I’ll pick for giving any day
One day, when there’ll be
a buzzing in my ear,
I’ll climb another hill
to where the blueberries and
the sun and the rain
gather inside of me
I’ll pick for giving
that day, too.
I always presumed it was a Williams Carlos Williams gem that I somehow missed, or slept through, in college, when short poetry usually lost out in the battle for my attention to beer and Shakespeare. Williams is loved in our household by multiple generations, so it seemed a safe assumption.
But it isn’t — it was written by family, or at least extended family that I’m eager to claim: Arthur Covell, a school administrator in New Hampshire who died in 1999, my wife’s uncle.
He collects “for giving,” and that clever allusion and the fact that he collects for someone else due to his dislike for the item gathered suggests to me it’s about forgiving, an offer of alms to a loved one, but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward, best admired for its lyrical beauty and the picture painted.
And that’s the kind of poetry I generally loved: Frost, certainly, but Wallace Stevens, too.
At least until I recently Googled the meaning of my favorite Stevens poem — maybe my favorite poem by anyone, with the possible exception of Frost’s “Fire and Ice” — “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
To me, that poem just sounds perfect, and that’s enough, though there was always the fascinating and thought-provoking line “Let be be finale of seem,” which opens up a world of possibility.
The line always stayed with me, and I finally looked it up and as a result realized that “The Emperor of Ice Cream” not only sounds great but is absolutely stuffed to the gills with meaning.
The Arthur Covell poem above, like nearly everything he wrote, was never published. But “Crusade” was, by Poetry magazine in 1952, as I found out from my wife when seeking more information about Arthur’s work.
And “Crusade” showed me that a single poet, an unknown family relation, no less, could produce both poems that you could admire for how they sound and others more suitable to analyze and admire for what they mean:
There skims the tern with calculated mirth
Over the wimpled sea, caught
In the pattern of his antic motions.
Behind thin armour of air, in skewed flight,
This pilgrim bird plots on the graph of sea
The parabola of gusty emotions.
Coursing through his fellow bones, the air
Beats at his blood and flips him
Towards a cross-point at sea’s edge where
A mottled flash, shook light from a silvered fin,
Stabs at his eye, tumbles the sky,
Hurls from that shattered mosaic
A redeemer, who will devour me
And pluck me from the grave laughter of sea.
I broke it down it in great detail earlier this summer, was amazed by how much I felt could be pulled out of a handful of words. I didn’t write it down but feel certain that my thoughts in looking at it anew this week spawned greater appreciation for the work in that I found new avenues of interpretation.
My son Jack — also an English major and by complete coincidence, studying at the University of Iowa, where Arthur attended the famed Writers’ Workshop — examined it as well and came up with some keen insights. The juxtaposition of the religious and mathematical terminology, the suggestion of a divine, if not religious, destiny; there’s no room here to get into the details, but I thought his thought on a driving theme of the poem was particularly astute — that the bird seemed content with how the world is playing out in front of him, despite having no say in it.
I saw some of that, but where he saw ambiguity in the ending, I saw clarity: To me, we have a being with a lot on his mind, reduced to calculating mirth, when nature intervenes, flips or inverts him to a crossroads, at which point nature devours him from his troubles, thereby saving him the trouble of doing so himself. And so blissfully, gratefully, redeemed.
In Indiana, there’s a box of Arthur’s personal papers kept by his daughter, my wife’s cousin. It includes some poetry. How fascinating it would be to see what else we haven’t seen.
Remember the end of “The Commitments,” when the whole band falls to pieces when just on the precipice of commercial success, and the horn player, to the astonishment of the band manager, is perfectly at peace about the whole thing? Success at their art, he points out, would have been predictable; what they had instead — the striving and not reaching a contrived goal — was poetry.
Arthur Covell may not have found a wide audience for his work during his lifetime. But he, too, had poetry.
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