Faced with vacuous or soul-crippling Drumphian demagoguery being hurled by the recent crop of disgusting political candidates, and with language junk being cranked out by PACs, SuperPACs, schlock jock radio broadcasters, FOX, the main press which has abrogated its watchdog duty, and the myriad of think tanks and bogus research foundations funded by the Koch brothers and other million/billionaires, corporations, and fringe lunatics, I sought inspiration and solace in an old notebook of quotations from poets and other writers.

Like me, some of these writers probably have had too much contact with academia for too long, leading Robert Bly to say his moldy oldy, “A sonnet is where professors go to die.”  Judson Jerome in On Being a Poet (in regard to the problem of ambiguity in a poem) said, “Good lines resonate with all those meanings because they probe to the core, not because the poet has deliberately obfuscated meaning and piled random association on association to keep undergraduates occupied.”  While these pronouncements might be seen as poetically Donald Drumphian in themselves, Jerome’s suggestion that figurative language does heighten one’s emotional response, but it’s more effective when used sparingly if the poet wants to poem to begin low-keyed and then build makes sense to me.  What really hit home was his saying that meter is what activates both left and right brains.  Free verse appeals to only one side.”  Amen.  Good poems can be written without meter, but great poems seem to be have some kind of meter.

Which brings me to Anne Morrow Lindbergh and North to the Orient.  She struck many poetic chords in her narrative.  However, one gentle, straight-forward prose passage has always yielded delight.  “The next morning we were off again, I with an extra handkerchief tucked in my pocket.  You will probably need an extra one, you know.  That extra handkerchief seemed to set a seal of success on the trip.  It made it at once intimate and possible.  Hadn’t an extra handkerchief taken me to school and back, and put me on a train for college, and sent me out the day I was married?  One could go anywhere with an extra handkerchief–especially if it had a blue border.”

Of course, it was the “blue border’ in the emphatic position at the end that got me, as she flew off with Charles Lindbergh on their dangerous flight to the Orient.  She would see many expansive blue sky and ocean borders on her flight.

Her quotation also reflects the dual nature of poetry.  To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the poet writes of two things at once, which is the characteristic tension of poetry:  one is the subject of the poetry, the other is the poetry of the subject.  That white screen or piece of paper of the poem makes a nice handkerchief.  It’s part of our past, present, and future.  It takes in whatever the poem’s subject will be.  The blue border provides a framework of meter, or what at first seems to be an added limitation or border, but in the end stimulates the poem and the poet to say things beyond what at first could be imagined, to fly into uncharted territory in the great blue.  (The opposite of Drumpf Speak.)  As Mandelstam said, “Poetry is the plow that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appears on top.”

The handkerchief and its border expresses again the duality of poetry that exists in many different ways.  Luis Cernuda talked about this duality of opposites.  “…a terrible happiness will be born in the poet because in our lives feelings rarely fail to come to us without being mixed with their opposites; only in the union of extremes can we intuit a harmony in the powers of human understanding.”

This does not mean that the tension or life of a poem or book can’t be political.  As Pasternak once put it, “A book is a cubic piece of burning, smoking conscience….And so we go right to the pure essence of poetry.  It is disturbing, like the ominous turning of a dozen windmills (think meter) at the edge of a bare field (think handkerchief) in a black year of famine.”