Kenyon

I think Oberlin is a better fit for Planet - but if I was seventeen and choosing between the two, I'd choose Kenyon. I'd tell myself it's the English Department, that I'd be studying and sitting and discussing poetry in the same lounge

that Robert Lowell and (especially especially especially) James Wright sat and studied and discussed poetry in, but that's only one aspect of the monastic vibe that appeals to me about Kenyon. For all my hate of commercial and political Religion, I am the most religious motherfucker I know, or to perhaps put it better, I am attracted to the trappings and rituals of religiosity more than any other atheist motherfucker I know. Why do you think I evangelize Kind even as I cut myself exorcising my indoctrinated faiths?

That is was raining helped evoke the mood:

Gorgeous gray drippy dreary day, accentuating the limestone buildings and slate tile roofs, the stain glass windows illuminated not from without but from within, accentuating the wood floors and foot-worn staircases and wainscotted rooms, backgrounded the fairies playing flutes

the thousands of trees, the brown pine-needles on the footpaths, the steeples, the buildings' cornices and peaks

everything. Turn me eighteen, give me my staff and shawl, order me to my cell and my books.

Planet, eh... not so much.

One last picture, a stunning glass sculpture hanging in the alcove of one of the three new buildings in the science quad

 

and then more below the fold at the end of some links, another James Wright poem, a song....

• Fuck Obama.
• On Wikilinks (IV).
• New strategy, old strategy.
• Catch me, I'm falling.
• Skidding toward fall.
• Everything you need to know in two sentences.
• Stop the presses.
• Newt Gingrich is an al-Q operative. He's certainly their best weapon.
• Muslim-haters edition.
• Finding no irony in these quotes.
• They do it anyway (posted as much to prove Montag is alive as for the worth of what he's saying).
• Simon v Simon.
• Outsourcing bobobashing was one of my better decisions.
• Snortle!
• And never forget: BE SCARED!
• Alligators in the Patapsco!
• The Gaithersburg Semen-Squirter!
• As predicted, election year Pepco-demonizing.
• Malvo still pulling police's chain.
• 4-2-1-3?
• Rereading Vineland.
• Why I hate Henry James.
• Silliman's usual generous links post. Scroll to the bottom for a debate on comment trolls and killing the comment function.
• This week's new releases, w/MP3. The only thing I'm going to say about collective orgasm over the new Arcade Fire is that this is the only thing I'm going to say about the collective orgasm over the new Arcade Fire. I hope.

ON THE SKELETON OF A HOUND

James Wright

Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body. Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer. Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

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