Poetry

Auden & Bluffing

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In the documentary, “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” W.H. Auden’s friend Thekla Clark recounts the story of one of Auden’s lovers complaining to him that he thought Auden would be more “romantic,” being a poet, after all. “But you aren’t romantic,” Clark quotes the lover telling the poet. “You aren’t romantic at all.”

“If you want romance,” Clark quotes Auden replying, “screw a journalist.” (Except the word used is not “screw.”)

Auden was not one to ruin a good line—or a good night—by spending it an explanation of the difference between the romantic and the sentimental.
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Veterans Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly—but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.”—Ernie Pyle, World War II journalist, writing about what he saw at the front. Killed in action April 18, 1945.

I do not come from a family that talks much about its military service. My father was drafted in 1958, served his two-year-long tour, and then came back home to a job that had been held for him. This was during the Cold War, so he did not see action but he did see more of the world than he had up till then, or since. He served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War as a calculator tasked with determining missile flight paths. (I believe he worked with the Atlas missile, an early ICBM model.)
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One Who Got Away

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

More so for Sylvia Plath than many other writers, readers develop protective feelings for her. Many openly express the idea that “only they” get her or are her best reader. Reading biographies of the dead poet, one encounters language akin to a lover describing the one who got away. Plath, a suicide, is a love who got away, for reader after reader.

The other Plath scholars or even her casual readers (if such readers exist) are viewed as rival suitors, as dead wrong for her, as individuals mishandling her bones. Some biographers refer to her by her given name, “Sylvia,” rather by than her personal and professional name, Plath, thus treating her as a familiar. Others are deeply offended by this practice, which does indeed appear to be something reserved for this poet alone. It has the effect of making her the star of a soap opera that she never cast herself in.

(Until her death in July 1995, I was friends with and a student of a Sylvia Plath scholar at SUNY New Paltz, Dr. Carley Bogarad. If ghosts existed, I wish hers was looking over my shoulder today.)
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