Guest Poem: Dan Schneider
Dan Schneider, who owns one of the biggest and most important literary websites on the entire Internet, Cosmoetica, published a poem he wrote, in the comment section of my post Futile yesterday.
It is a bit silly in my opinion to publish great literature in the comment sections while it can also be published on the frontpage, so here you go:
There are years to go before the last perfect day
on Earth. Then the sun will begin to swell, and life
will cease, shorelines will retreat as oceans boil,
and all will glow a barren red and airless gray.
By then I will be shadow, long dead. Now, I live
amid joys and sorrows, with the love of a girl
in a backseat, behind her mommy and daddy,
as they pilgrim to a motel in New Hampshire,
blowing kisses out her window to teenage strays,
drunk in a sportscar, honking and cursing at her
family squareback’s pace, as they are full on passing,
as if they are ready to face eternal sleep,
as they leave her family behind on the highway,
that is endless, and endless, and everything.
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11 Responses to “Guest Poem: Dan Schneider”
Michael,
I have been thinking of this lately, as we have, just in the last few days, suffered the loss of my nephew, dead at 25. He was just making his way, but his death has left a huge void in our family.
The only way through, as I see it, is to take our sorrow and see our life as a vessel that has been gouged out by that sorrow and into which we may pour our joy.
Make your life a vessel, Michael. Pour in your joy and do not wonder at the futility, for nothing that is real ever dies or is futile.
In the end, God will not ask why I wasn’t Jesus or the Buddha or Ghandi. He will ask why I wasn’t Daniel.
Daniel,
My condoleances. I’m very sorry to hear that, I wish you and your family all strength you need to deal with this.
This is a marvelous approach (and a great quote “for nothing that is real ever dies or is futile”).
You are right and again very well said.
Thank you for your comment… again, very well said.
I’ve read the poem several times, but the emotional impact doesn’t lessen with repetition.
The end (the impending crash) having the beginning (the child) as a witness forms a dramatic base from which countless private refections can rise.
To Daniel, I can only extend my sympathy.
I’m old enough to have lost a number of people that I loved, and the only wisdom I’ve gained from these experiences is that there is no blueprint for grief. There is no ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t'; each person muddles through in their own way. The only certainty is that with enough time, grief starts to leave center stage, step by step, and takes a seat among all the other aspects of one’s life.
Doma- interesting that you see a crash in the poem. In writing it, I was thinking more metaphorically- with the teens as most of mankind, and the girl as a sort of primal wisdom. But, that interpretation is valid on a literal level.
COSMO,
Well, that shows that you’ve written a good poem-it is the beginning for reflexions and does not limit them.
I think you’ll find that once a work of art is finished, the author can’t control the impact it will have on various folks. That’s a good thing, because it makes the creation a living thing, not a closed book.
COSMO:
Help!
I’m missing something here, and it bothers me.
Let me just say, that I meant my vision of an imprending crash and the child to be symbolic, not literal. But all ideas in art metaphysical or otherwise, have to emanate from literal images. In poetry and literature, words form images like shapes and colors do in painting.
I can spin off a half-dozen philosophical spirals from the images in your poem, but I can’t find the ‘wisdom;’ in your primal wisdom concept – unless you mean that everything primal has its own inherent wisdom.
Can you point the way to a dense reader?
Of Course no artist controls what a work means to another. Some bad art tries to exploit this- such as much Abstract Expressionism. I once went to an arts show of Yoko Ono’s where she had a dot, made by pencil, in the middle of a sheet of paper, and a dumb singer I knew thought it was deep.
Words also are metaphoric, aside from imagistic. W/o giving away too much of a magician’s rabbit, the title sets up the idea of passings- as death or literal passing by something. It also stretches the reader out billions of yeras, like Wells’ The Time Traveler. Them we’re thrust back to a present, where the speaker- not me, who is speaking of the love of a girl. At the line break, it appears that this’ll be a love poem, esp, when a back seat is mentioned, but then the scene irises out, and we see her parents, and she’s in a car, and the girl is a literal girl- a child. But, all this is stil playing out with the imagery of a bloated sun having come before, so the highway can be seen as not literal. Thus, what does the car represent?
Then we get a second car that passes by the family in a squareback and head down the highway- a familiar metaphor of time, which we have been reminded of, wil stretch billions of years hence.
Can it literally be a highway scened? Yes, but it can also be a metaphor for time headed into the far future. Then, the things on that road are more than they are. In my mind, the drunk teens were most of humanity, rather carefree and reckless, while the family was more an idealization, with the young girl, safe in her slower driven vehicle, perhaps knowing something the teens do not, yet waving to them anyway.
Let me just quote from an essay where I reference this poem-
http://www.cosmoetica.com/D1-DES1.htm
‘ Now for an actual example of how a latter-day artist can achieve a greatness earlier artists could not- without falling into Bloom’s folly. (And how many critics would kill to be able to “apeâ€? me here- to disprove another critic with not just rhetoric but great art itself?) Let me first quote the last stanzas of 2 widely recognized great poems by two 20th Century poets. First is British poet Philip Larkin’s High Windows:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Next is American poet Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I now quote the final sonnet from my first Omnisonnets ms. (see the Omnisonnets page in this website) The Passings:
There are years to go before the last perfect day
on Earth. Then the sun will begin to swell, and life
will cease, shorelines will retreat as oceans boil,
and all will glow a barren red and airless gray.
By then I will be shadow, long dead. Now, I live
amid joys and sorrows, with the love of a girl
in a backseat, behind her mommy and daddy,
as they pilgrim to a motel in New Hampshire,
blowing kisses out her window to teenage strays,
drunk in a sportscar, honking and cursing at her
family squareback’s pace, as they are full on passing,
as if they are ready to face eternal sleep,
as they leave her family behind on the highway,
that is endless, and endless, and everything.
The debt in the last line to the 2 previous poems is obvious. Here are the 4 major elements that make up this sonnet. 1) My family’s annual sojourns via highway to New Hampshire as a child. 2) My desire to rehabilitate & expand the highway metaphor from its Victorian tones & Beatnik-era usage. 3) The image of a future expanding red giant sun engulfing the earth that I first saw, & was rapt by, in Carl Sagan’s PBS TV show Cosmos. 4) And lastly wanting a boffo ending.
The 4th element led me to Larkin & Frost. Both are great poems. Larkin’s lacks a little music & could be trimmed from its 20 to 16 lines to better dramatize its plight- however it is Larkin’s best poem, mainly because of the unforgettable tripartite ending- 2 negatives subsumed by the positive- it really sucks you one way to propel you out the other way. Also, rhythmically the building ta-tum, ta-tum, BOOM end really socks the reader. As for Frost, I am generally not a fan of his (same could be said of Larkin) although I acknowledge the dozen or so great poems he wrote. But this poem is his best- by far- it is like Affirmed- greater than any of his other great poems in kind & degree (I could rhapsodize on the poem’s virtues for pages!)- suffice to say it is to Frost’s oeuvre what Ozymandias is to Shelley’s (another great poet), and its end is legendary- the repeated last line hammering home the drowse of the speaker, the eternal recurrence of things/beauty, etc., plus the musical lulling, & on….
So I grafted, with confidence- not anxiety- Larkin’s triple ending, its positive last word, doubled/repeated that last word (for the same reason Frost used his repetition), & ended my triplet with a positive that goes beyond the mono-dimensional repeated endless; the multidimensional & infinite everything.’
Cosmo,
Thanks for the background on your poem and its construction, from which I learned quite a lot. It was not my untention to ask something complex, requiring considerable time and effort to answer.
I was just curious about your ‘primal wisdom’ concept.
It’s interesting how different the experience of art is to the creators from that of consumers. We, the audience, can take from it whatever suits, rather like leeches. I’ve sat through and engaged in endless hours of discusssion about good art, bad art and non-art, and I was always glad I was the spouse of a painter and not a practising painter myself. I was free to feed my own fancies on different levels at different times, without the need to evaluate and justify at every step.
If I were to look at Ono’s pencil dot, it might lead me to reflect on metaphysical notions of my own making. Ono whould be just the facilitator, giving me a starting point. That doesn’t make Ono an artist, nor does it make the dot a painting. but it can be fun to go slumming sometines.
Domajot: thanks for asking Dan that question and for your comments in this thread – Dan, thanks for the explanation.
Let me ask you a question Dan: how do you start your poems? Poe once wrote that one should always start with the end. You focused on the end as well so it seems…
Doma- you are correct that even Ono’s dot can read to reflection. So can shit in a bowl, but it’s not art. Bad artists, who are con artists, know this, and exploit naive te to convince others they are artists. Rhetoricians, yes. Artists, no.
MVDG- I have no set pattern. Some times I’d see a poem I knew I could tackle the subject of better, a few times the thing came in full, en masse- the ‘divine inspiration’ fallacy, and others you just let rip. If you look at the diversity of style and subject matter, there’s no way all my poems could have a similar genesis. If one writes only onnets, they may. But the way I write is gonna be diff at start and end than another. Poe’s method was prob best for him.
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni6.htm#CHIA%20SCHNEIDER.%20ALONE.
This poem was written after a personal loss of a pet
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni6.htm#THEORY:%20THE%20GAME
This on a scientific theorem
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni5.htm#WHERE%20IGNORANT%20ARMIES%20CLASH
This from the end of Matthew Arnold’s best poem, Dover Beach
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni4.htm#AMERICAN%20POLYPHEMUS
This by a serial killer
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni4.htm#LEDA%20GENOMICA
This as a reply to a Dali painting
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni4.htm#SIAMESE%20REFLECTION
This as a way to play with form, but make the form serve the subject matter
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni4.htm#THE%20MEASURING
This as an homage to the style of poet Robinson Jeffers
They were all sonnets, yet w different ideas to start.
Here are some non-sonnets:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/LB2.htm#THE%20SATANIC
This after reading The Satanic Bible
http://www.cosmoetica.com/LB2.htm#THE%20MOTHMAN
This on an American legend
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Skyline.htm
All of these poems on buildings in the Manhattan Skyline. The Twin Towers poem was written two years b4 9/11, which makes its prescience kind of haunting.
This poem:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Skyline.htm#MADRIGAL%20OF%20THE%20BANK%20OF%20MANHATTAN%20TRUST
I started on 9/11, but only got the ending after the towers fell. It’s a Frostian type dialogue.
http://www.cosmoetica.com/49%20Gallery.htm
These are all inspired by paintings- and most still are linked to the paintings
http://www.cosmoetica.com/American%20Imperium.htm
This long poem too, was inspired by a series of paintings by Thomas Cole. Not the visuals, but the metaphoric structure.
Again, different things for different things. Too many artists limit themselves, which is why greatness is so elusive.
woppa! thanks for the links to the poems Dan. I will print them out (I enjoy reading literature like that instead of on a computer screen – it also is easier to analyze imo when on paper).