Days are where we live, writes Larkin. But who dreamed up this experiment? Are we in it or are we conducting it?
In clown class I was funny exactly once, when I walked through an imaginary square made out of four hats placed on the floor saying awful awful awful awful.
The only way to manage all this not-knowing is to hope in my next life everything will be clear, just wait. In the meantime, let me spend mornings here at Malecon, on 97th and Amsterdam, bent over these pages.
What are you writing, the Bible? the waiter asks. Why are you always working?
The novelist ordered a second glass of wine before he’d finished his first, a third before he’d finished his second. Red wine. Big steak. Two kinds of potatoes. Quite beautiful crooked hands. But what was he saying about sentences? Leave out the and if you’re in a hurry. Solitude, and misery, may be necessary for a certain kind of work. You have to feel it first and if you’ve felt it you can just write the thing without explaining anything about it.
We said goodbye. We kissed on both cheeks. The subway wasn’t working at that hour so I ran until I ran out of breath or the late-night bus stopped. Which was it? Which will it be? Solitude, misery, love?
Here in the city we have buses that kneel.
Amor Fati
What do you need? the Quiet Man asked
when I knocked again at his door.
What do you want?
He was closing up.
I don’t know, I said.
Woolf, Anbesol, Baldwin, Keats,
I’ll take anything.
I knew sometimes he slept right there in his shop,
with blankets on the bottom shelf,
history above, Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists to the left.
Papers littered his desk
and the floor where we lay our heads,
letting the pure products of the shapely mind
inform the equally combustible body.
Who is it who says the closer you are
to an irreversible apocalypse the more fragile
language is?
We slid the dictionaries from the shelves
and opened them to apocalypse,
the word on everyone’s lips.
O lips!—
As if we could ever bid these joys farewell.
Notes
The Amenities
Lines in this poem borrow from Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant” and “Death & Co.” and from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire.”
En Route
Saint Catherine’s head, separated from her body, is in the Basilica Cateriniana San Domenico, Siena.
An Apprehension
This poem quotes Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” Elizabeth Bishop, and Jean Valentine. With thanks to Royal Security.
The Skin of the Face Is That Which Stays Most Naked, Most Destitute
The title of this poem is from Emmanuel Levinas.
Epistemology
Wonderful facts about trees drawn from Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. Lines 14 to 16 borrow definitions from dictionaries etymological and otherwise.
Still Life
L’Origine du monde was painted by Gustave Courbet in 1866 and hangs in the Musée d’Orsay.
Lyric and Narrative Time at Café Loup
This poem borrows from Wisława Szymborska’s poem “The Century’s Decline” (tr. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh). Thanks and credit to Mark Doty for his insights on time.
Accursed Questions, i
“He will never ride the red horse she describes” is from “Questions Are Remarks” by Wallace Stevens. This section of “Accursed Questions” (and others) borrows from Philip Larkin’s “Days”; Jean Valentine’s Lucy; and Augustine’s Confessions (tr. Edward B. Pusey).
Idée Fixe
With thanks to Pence Orchards.
Essay on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
This poem owes a debt to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and to Claire Monin, whose intensive French courses I highly recommend (www.francepass.fr). If you want to spend a night in adoration at the Sacré-Coeur, you have to let them know in advance. Please wear a helmet if you hire a bicycle in Paris, even if no one else does.
Son in August
This poem owes a debt to Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”
The Necessary Preoccupations
Lines in this poem echo Shakespeare’s The Tempest via Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The Art of the Security Question
This poem was informed by “Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret” by Anne Diebel, published in the New York Times, 28 December 2017. The full title of Nina Simone’s song is “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life.” Call Me by Your Name is a film directed by Luca Guadagnino based on André Aciman’s novel.
O Esperanza!
This poem quotes from Richard Rorty’s “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” published in The Future of Religion by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (2005).
Accursed Questions, ii
This text borrows (as many poems in this collection do) from Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. “Agitated by the phenomena of hours” is slightly misquoted from but fully in debt to Beckett’s Proust. I have lost the source for the idea about eros existing in the space between interlocutor and addressee; apologies.
The Humanities
This poem is written against the endless and unacceptable acts of racial violence in the United States. The last stanzas owe a deep debt to Dianne Wiest for her performance in Beckett’s Happy Days and incorporate lines from that play.
Calamity Jane on Etsy after the 2016 Election
With a debt to Frank O’Hara’s “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!].”
Another Divine Comedy
The kickscooter is manufactured by Xootr; ask for Steve if you call the manufacturer directly, and mention my name.
Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World
The title of this poem is a direct quote from the Declaration of Independence. There are also echoes of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Larry Levis.
Metaphor on the Crosstown
This poem quotes Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue.”
Summons
Justice Milton Tingling was sworn in as County Clerk of New York County in 2015, replacing Norman Goodman.
The Sky Flashes
The title of this poem comes from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14,” as does the quoted line.
Origin Story
The stateroom scene referred to in this poem is from the Marx Brothers’ film A Night at the Opera.
Central Park
You can adopt a bench through the New York City Central Park Conservancy (“Official Caretakers of Central Park”). The pleasures of Pilot G-Tec-C4 pens were introduced to me by Joshua Beckman and I have used them ever since. The idea of speaking directly to the universe comes from Dana Levin. Golden Bright is the name of a company that makes radio-controlled boats. This poem echoes Elizabeth Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.”
Accursed Questions, iii
The “most difficult logic problem” was presented by logician George Boolos and published in 1996; Boolos credits the logician Raymond Smullyan with devising the problem, quoted here in truncated form. For more than twenty years, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan has run an early literacy program for mothers and their young children residing in the New York City shelter system; the last section of “Accursed Questions, iii” quotes the women as they were writing a collaborative poem.
Pain Scale
The pain scale in at least one gynecologist’s office has realistic women’s faces rather than the more common cartoon faces. The Chikyū is a Japanese research ship that can drill miles into the earth’s mantle, farther than any other science drilling vessel. One of the stated aims of the expeditions is to look for “clues about the origin and
evolution of early life on earth.” This poem is indebted to Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station” and Alice Oswald’s Memorial, which it cites. The last line of the poem borrows indirectly from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.
Uncertainty Principle at the Atrium Bar
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that phenomena are changed by the act of being observed. There are two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories. In February 2016 LIGO recorded the sound of two black holes colliding in a distant galaxy more than a billion light-years ago.
Beckett on the Jumbotron
The last two lines of the poem are spoken by Pozzo in Act II of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Prayer for the Lost among Us
This poem owes a debt to Larry Levis’s “The Cry.”
Accursed Questions, iv
Jean Valentine’s poem “Sanctuary” was published in her fourth collection, The Messenger.
Amor Fati
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is both a publication and a nonprofit organization that tracks scientific advancements in order to educate the public, guide policy, and protect the planet and its inhabitants. The Bulletin created the Doomsday Clock (“a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies emerging in other domains”). The “pure products” are stolen from William Carlos Williams. “As if we could ever bid these joys farewell” is a variation on a line from John Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors of the following journals, series, and anthologies for publishing these poems (sometimes in different versions or with different titles):
The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, “Comic Morning” and “Epistemology”
The American Poetry Review, “Central Park,” “The Humanities,” and “In the Studio at End of Day”
The Bennington Review, “Summons” and “The Necessary Preoccupations”
Green Mountains Review, “Landscape with Borrowed Contours”
Harper’s Magazine, “Pain Scale”
The Literary Review, “Beckett on the Jumbotron,” “The Light from across the Fields,” “Lore,” “Still Life,” and “The Skin of the Face Is That Which Stays Most Naked, Most Destitute”
The New Yorker, “Essay on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and “Son in August”
The New York Review of Books, “The Sky Flashes”
Ploughshares, “Lyric and Narrative Time at Café Loup”
Poetry, “An Apprehension,” and “Idée Fixe”
Poetry International, “The Amenities,” “Forensics,” “Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World,” “Calamity Jane on Etsy after the 2016 Election,” “Appeal to Numbers,” “The Material World,” and “Amor Fati”
The Spectator, “Eternal Recurrence”
Tin House, “Prospectus” and “O Esperanza!”
“O Esperanza!” also appears in The Best American Poetry 2016, edited by Edward Hirsch, with series editor David Lehman (Scribner, 2016).
For their generosity, acumen, and friendship, deep thanks to Andrew Boynton, Jericho Brown, Miranda Field, Ed Hirsch, Ilya Kaminsky, Nick Laird, Deborah Landau, Alessandra Lynch, El Malecon, Donna Masini, Michael Morse, Dennis Nurkse, Helen Schulman, Tom Sleigh, Jean Valentine, Ellen Bryant Voigt, David Wells, Abby Wender, Dianne Wiest, Fiona Wilson, and Matthew Zapruder. Immeasurable appreciations to Saskia Hamilton, for her unerring compass. (What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? asked the painter Henri Rousseau.)
For his patience, wit, and discerning green pen, gratitude to my editor Jeff Shotts. (“Ignore Jeff,” he once wrote in the margin, which I did just that once.)
Inexpressible thanks to my mother and father, for their love. And to my son, for his steady heart and good humor.
CATHERINE BARNETT is the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced and The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her honors include a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the core faculty of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College, and an independent editor in New York City.
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