'Late antiquity' is marvelous, it has a really depressive feel to it that is
still self-ironic enough to climb into a poem without being down in the
dumps. my potential future.. if I start looking at pedagogy &c next spring.
thanks Fred

KS

2008/8/16 Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>

> Late Antiquity
>
>
> Anomalously brash,
> provocative (but of what?),
> the voice would have belonged
> in a classroom of the Sixties, when snooty
> literacy flared briefly
> at the hour of its death.  Now in the Zeroes,
> however, his fellow-students
> writhe, silently, slightly – equally
> disgusted whether he "really" wants
> to know or is showing off
> (but what?) when he asks,
> after the lecture on the Fall of Rome,
> "But what *caused the quote Failure of Nerve
> unquote?  I mean, like,
> a few years before they were screwing
> anything that moved and worshiping
> Aphrodite and soaking in big hot tubs.
> Then suddenly they're down on
> all types of sex.  Our textbook doesn't explain it,
> and you haven't either, Professor."
>
> You know those moments when someone doesn't
> answer a direct question …
> Politicians answer another, which wasn't asked.
> Bureaucrats say, "No comment."  Businessmen, cornered,
> make pleasantries, plead ignorance,
> cry lawyer.  But professionals
> must bear the unspeakable in their very
> flesh.  Especially when,
> *qua teacher, one is a bottom-feeder
> professional, unable
> to retire because of pills, mortgage,
> sick spouse, junkie kid;
> tenure a joke decades old, stuck
> at Budweiser State, one loathes all students
> but hates this one.
> And silent and flushed, one looks at the door,
> the window, the clock, till the boy
> learns an important lesson.
> Or one pulls it together enough to say,
> "The issue wasn't purely sexual."
>
>
>
>
> The Poetry of Empire
>
>
> We were taking a course in the Poetry
> of Empire.  But so swift
> is change in today's world that the Empire
> collapsed at midterm.
> Students from the new Empire
> (they spat, talked in class,
> despised the work and anyone
> not themselves) quit.
> Students from prior Empires
> greeted the change as yet another
> sardonic, predictable and predicted
> allegory, and stayed.
> I, from a mere Culture – with
> the wit that replaces a past, a passport
> stamped by my torturers, someone's couch
> to sleep on, skill at hunger,
> and hope for a nicer couch – stayed
>
> because I like the material.
> The Poetry of Empire is spacious,
> generous.  Through it one sees
> the poet's house, neat or charmingly
> disheveled.  A sleeping child,
> and the child eating.  Beyond that child,
> a career and amours.
> Beyond the lawn, a car,
> and another, beyond the husband another.
> A vast buffet, if one tunnels past
> irrelevancies!  This poetry
> reminds me of my Culture's, which is all love –
> vertiginous love for a queenly, disdainful,
> in fact all-powerful woman whom,
> tunneling, one can see
> weeping and mutilated
> in a dark room.
>
> But when I said as much
> to our prof, a man of the Empire, he shook
> his graying pony-tail,
> dismayed that someone like me, as black
> and wise as night, should praise Empire
> over Culture.
> Unalarmed or unaware
> that his Empire was no longer there,
> and that he himself must sink
> from sensitivity to pain, he seemed
> day by day more ethereal
> to us who remained.
> He will survive like a verse,
> this one: "It is not for me
> to grade, to teach you, but for you to teach me!"
> – in one breath begging
> love and a curse.
>