My Annotated Edition of Sorley, the Lost WWI Poet

The revised second edition of the poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley is now available from Poet's Press/Yogh & Thorn Books. Robert Graves called Sorley one of the three best poets killed in World War I. Shot by a German sniper in the Battle of Loos, Charles Sorley died at age 20, leaving behind enough poems for a slender volume published by his father in 1915: Marlborough and Other Poems. Several of Sorley's poems have been featured in countless war anthologies, but the poet's complete work was kept in print only until 1932. There was a reprint sometime in the 1980s and then Sorley seems to have been forgotten again. Sorley's nature poems, inspired by English naturalist Richard Jefferies (the British Thoreau), depict the haunted landscape of the Wiltshire Downs, from the days of Roman-occupied Britain to Sorley's own time.
As a student at Cambridge, young Sorley was steeped in the classics; he then traveled to Germany to study and was in school there when the War broke out. He was arrested and sent home by the German government, and within days of returning to England, Sorley enlisted. The last set of his poems, written in the battlefield, contain both stark soundings of death, but also a kernel of wisdom and tolerance, as when he addresses a poem to the Germans he cannot bring himself to hate.
Perhaps the most poignant poem is one he sent home retelling a key scene from Homer's Odyssey and then assuring his friend that he, too, ten years hence, would be telling his own war stories by the fire. Three months later, Sorley was dead. His last poem, a blistering war sonnet, was sent home to his father in his kit. Sorley's body was never found.
This volume includes passages from letters, selected by Sorley's father as illustrative of the themes of the poems in the book. To make this volume more accessible to today's readers (and to students), I have annotated both the poems and the letters, making clear the numerous classical and Biblical allusion that would have been well-known to Sorley's contemporaries. Some 1903 photos of the Wiltshire landscape have also been added, taken from an edition of Jefferies nature writing.
The book was completely re-typeset from the 1932 edition, using typefaces from the World War I era. The book also includes an annotated checklist of the critical reception of Sorley's work from 1915 through 1973, by Larry Uffelman; a biographical sketch of the poet written by his mother for the 1919 Letters of Charles Sorley; additional letters; and juvenilia. This second edition has a longer introduction, covering biographical and scholarly sources about Sorley that were not available to me when the first edition came out in 2010.

To order from Amazon: http://a.co/eoNmWt7

African Americans and the Classics

It has been fashionable for a long time to trash the classics -- the history, prose and poetry of Greece and Rome specifically. Yet the founders of the United States could almost all read Latin, and many read Greek as well, and they knew Greek and Roman history inside out. From this they learned what democracy is, and how republics rise and fall. There would be no United States had not a group of British Colonials in America fancied themselves as new Athenians and new Romans.
When African captives escaped from slavery, or, later, were freed, they knew that two things were vital to them: literacy, and the vote. Many former slaves craved the very classical knowledge that empowered the white man, and some used the wisdom of the classics in the further argument for their rights. It's more common to imagine these former slaves reading the Bible, but they craved -- and some got -- the education in the classics that white man wanted them not to have.
Finally, there's an important book about this, on a theme that is dear to me -- re-establishing the importance of the classics in American history. My friends who teach American literature or history will want to read this book. Other friends of a classical or historical bent will find it illuminating. Please ask your library to buy it. I'm sorry it's so expensive -- academic titles are criminally priced -- so you might need to have your library get it via interlibrary loan from another library that buys these kinds of books.

See Book on Amazon 

Beverly Sills in "The Turk in Italy"

One of the happiest, happiest nights in the opera house ever was seeing Beverly Sills in Rossini's "The Turk in Italy," a sequel to his "Italian Girl in Algiers." Its empowered heroine defies her husband and makes a fool of an amorous Turkish pasha. This version is in English, in a hysterical translation by Andrew Porter. Jokes, gags and memorable lines abound, such as her aria threatening, "I'll take lovers by the hundreds, yes, a new one every night!" Lines like that you never forget. The work was never recorded, but there was a TV broadcast, and here it is, at last, copied from a VHS tape. Sit yourself down and have a romp with this joyous sex comedy. I wish Fellini had made a film of this opera!

Dvorak's Gloomy Seventh Symphony

The Carnegie Mellon Symphony Orchestra played Dvorak's Symphony No 7 in D Minor. Here is the full concerto from September 17, 2017. These programs are open to the public and are played in the historic Carnegie Music Hall. An outstanding program.

The program opens with the lively Carnival Overture, also by Dvorak, then continued with Chausson's Poeme for Violin and Orchestra. The Seventh Symphony is the second half of the program.

A Polka for Elephants, A Masque for Isabella d'Este

As the Carnegie Melon Wind Ensemble began their concert last night, one elderly audience member got up and fled in consternation at the raucous sounds coming from the stage. It was Stravinsky's "Circus Polka for a Young Elephant," a brief polka that Stravinsky actually composed for a circus. It includes a hysterical quote from Schubert's "March Militaire." The rest of this program shows a large array of CMU's wind and brass students playing some remarkable music. Renaldo Hahn's voluptuous neo-Renaissance piece for an imagined pageant at the court of Isabella d'Este; a lark for trumpet and trombone with full band; and a gorgeous rhapsody for solo flute and large band. CMU streams live from their concerts and here is the whole thing. This is a great demonstration of how vibrant the literature is for wind and brass bands, and how great these students are. The performance begins about 1:40 in, and after the intentionally honking and barking elephant music passes, it is smooth sailing. Enjoy! And remember, if you move to Pittsburgh, all this can be yours, for free! 

Two of My Piano Preludes Redux

I had posted both of these piano pieces before, but I did not yet have the ability to make the right-hand part play at a different volume than the left-hand part, so it sounded kind of mechanical, with chords "hammering." Now I have fixed that, and these two pieces sound pretty much the way I play them myself.

The Prelude in F Minor is another of my miniature preludes, as short as some of the Chopin Preludes. I fancy that a beginning piano student might enjoy playing this, as it has plenty of gloom and makes a big noise without requiring any technique whatever. I can imagine ten-year-olds terrifying the cat with it.
The F Minor Prelude Reposted Yet Again


The Prelude-Fantasia in G Major was a one-page, one-theme Prelude from 1968 that I expanded in 2003, varying the theme and adding a chorale-like statement of it with bare chords hanging in the air, making me think somewhat of last Liszt. I've tried this on electronic pianos where the several dissonant chords sound quite eerie, but on even a slightly-out-of tune traditional piano, these chords might bring mice and spiders from the woodwork. This was composed at the piano and then entered note by note manually into Finale.

Listen to the G Major Prelude-Fantasia

Lines Overheard at The Russian Tearoom

As The Russian Tea Room says about itself: "For over eighty-five years, New York's defining cultural moments have taken place at Russian Tea Room. Ever since members of the Russian Imperial Ballet founded the restaurant in 1927, it has been a second home for boldface names and the intellectual elite-an exclusive enclave where actors, writers, politicians, and businessmen planned their next deals and feted their friends' latest Carnegie Hall performances."

Ludmilla’s got herself a husband.

It doesn’t matter that you’re stupid
if you can dance en pointe. —

The tables are so close here:

There’s Donald Trump.
Three tables down, that model
from all the magazines.
That dowager between
with that look on her face?
The poor man can’t count. —

Ya piu nad razorenni dom.
(I drink to our ruined house).
Why did we have to build it
in Florida? —

It was, of course,
a Jewish conspiracy. —

There is no evidence.
Besides, we already have
the green cards for everyone. —

So we played. We knew the music.
He stood there waving his stick.
He was two beats behind us
and never knew the difference. —

No one finds the bodies.
No one. They say he keeps
the eyeballs. He pickles them. —

I have a friend at Coney Island.
For you, he will fix everything. —

Ignore the news, Sergei.
Everything goes
the way we planned it. —

How many people here
would stop dead-track
if I said “Moose and Squirrel?”

Afternoon Walk through Downtown Pittsburgh

I walked nine miles today and took 213 photos. The walk started and ended in downtown Pittsburgh. You can see some of them in this Flickr album.
Brett's Afternoon Walk in Pittsburgh Photo Album

Union Trust Building

The Gothic gingerbread atop the Union Trust Building gives little clue to what is inside: a classic lobby with an atrium that goes all the way up to the top of the building. It looks like some kind of video game, but this is real.

You can see all the photos I took on my Flickr page.
Brett's Flickr Page for Union Trust

One Night in Cyprus

This is a story I have waited decades to tell. One night in 1974 I had an intense dream, in which I was inside another person's mind and body. I was on the island of Cyprus, escaping by night from an unspecified peril. This poem relates the dream, exactly as it occurred. By the end of the next day, the world knew that a Greek junta-led coup had taken over Cyprus, and its Greek leader, Archbishop Makarios, had fled. These events led to a Turkish invasion and the permanent partition of Cyprus.

On the back of a truck
hurtling without headlamps
on a moonlit night on Cyprus,
the archbishop sat, cross-legged.

He saw great silhouettes of cedar trees
and overhanging crags black-edged,
an open sky of fierce and unnamed stars —

stars whose names he’d never learned,
though Greek and Arab astronomers
had classed and ordered them,
hard-tracing beasts and maidens,
hunters and bears, cup-bearers loyal
to the rampant, seducing cosmos,

now a mere tapestry for Christ’s passing.
Now he, a mariner without sail or star
had put his trust in strangers (strangers
who came from god and might be god),
hidden like thief beneath a flapping tarp,
a lump among fogs and onions
inhaling the incense of root earth.

The driver stopped, the men
invisible to him in the truck cab

came ’round to lift the tarp. He winced.
You may stretch your legs, Father.
We have reached the peak —
So far no sign of any soldiers.
We’ll send a scout ahead on foot,
the crossroads below a last point
of danger we’ll be stopped and captured.

He nodded, thanked and blessed them,
his hand making the crossroads sign
as he thought of the feared places
where Hecate was summoned and fetuses
buried. Thus one always shuddered at crossroads.

He walked to road-edge. If ever a prayer
was called for, it was now. No altar, no walls.

The arched cedar tree cupped praying hands,
the slope was dotted with flowers —
what color, the asphodel at midnight?

He said some words, not for himself at first,
then for himself, for so much depended
on his getting out and away, to save the country.
But where, in dark night, did prayers go?

* * *

I never knew you. I never heard of you.

I have never seen Cyprus, and yet the dream
that seized me was realer than real.
I felt the pain of your bones, I sighed your sigh
as you knelt and prayed. I did not grasp the words
or the language in which they were uttered.
Yet my self watching myself dreaming told me:

this is Cyprus, and this is happening.
Your prayer, for whatever cause, rose not to heaven:

it came to me, an atheist, and half a world away.

You fled the Greek-led coup on Cyprus, a hunted man,
and you escaped that night; you flew to London.
You returned to endure a Turkish invasion.
Your statue stands in Nicosia.
Why you, why me, Archbishop Makarios?

Wartime Fragment

Bellum
      ante
      inter
      post

was this a just war, an old men’s war?
a war of merchants who wanted their weapons used
so that the great treasures of two kingdoms passed|
o, into their hands, Vulcan’s malevolent sons?

O the why and wherefore of war, what reckoning
your heirs will make of it, beside a ruined tomb!

Nero and the Flamingo

He is the Emperor
of the known universe:
Rome, that is,
and of every place
worth having.

The gods are best pleased
by ever-more-exotic
sacrifices.
No lowly chickens here
in Rome whose temples
all but outstrip Olympus.
Give up the cattle to Jove,
and to that upstart Mithra;
meek lambs and smelly rams
fit only for Judean
hecatombs. No,
only the best for Nero,
the whole menagerie
if need be, to assure
his eventual,
glorious godhood.

Today he picks a stately
bird, a solitary feeder
that keeps to its own corner
in a flush of pink feathers.
Hook-nose wary,
it is a half-arm taller
than his Centurions.
He waits at the altar.

It is all legs and beak,
draws blood from the priests
as they hold it down.
Nero approaches
with the drawn blade,
intones the prayer,
slashes the place
where gangly neck
and pink body converge.

The head comes off.
The body leaps up
and out of the priest-hold,
spurts blood
all over Nero’s toga.
No one moves; no one utters
a syllable; all of Rome’s heart

skips a beat. Crowds part

as the headless horror,

runs out and down the temple steps,
across the plaza, a blood Aetna
bespattering the paving stones.
Crowds part for its passing
until it reaches the Tiber
and plunges in.

The Emperor stands,
the knife in hand,
his toga bloodied, ruined.
The priests avert their eyes.
Centurions watch
as less-than-god hands
wipe blood on white linen;
they look at one another
and with a not-quite smile,
the same thought occurs
to each of them.

Variations on the Ibis

1

Artists are people to whom coincidence
adheres, filings to their magnet consciousness.
My painter friend Riva points out
a small montage, a hulking splotch
with linked chains and a few squiggles.
“It won some prizes,” she tells me,
“But as for what it means —“ she shrugs.
My eyes reel into its story-window:
I see Prometheus chained, a Grand Inquisitor
in purple robes, and there, the white wings
of the gloating Zeus-eagle. “I can write this,”
I tell her. “Take it,” she said.

Another time she shows me an etching,
a crinolin’d ghost shape a-dance
before a barren landscape. It sits
the bottom-most discard in a bottom drawer.
“That is the Empress Carlota!” I cry,
“And that is Queretaro where Maximilian died.”
So off I went and wrote a play.

On a graveyard walk she stops, leans down
and picks up a squashed shard, some scrap
of one car’s fender run over by another.
“I’ll make something of this,” she told me.
I carry it home in my bag, then place
it absent-mindedly on dresser-top.
Months later, she visits and spies it,
atop a wood frame. I pick it up
to hand it back to her. Our eyes dance
upon the seeming-shapeless object,
and then to what’s inside my glass-framed box:
the Indonesian fruit-bat I nicknamed “Claudius.”
The shape of the found object precisely fills
the silhouette of the preserved fruit bat.
We smile. This is how the universe works us.

Small wonder, then, that I am reading Egypt,
the lore of Thoth and Hermes, his totem
animals the Lower Kingdom’s lordly ibis,
the Upper Kingdom’s wise baboon,
when tea with Riva reveals a water color
mystery, a scimitar shape emerging
from a blue-gray mist, a river fog,
a scythe, perhaps, with a hand to weild it.
“No!” I said. “It is upside-down.”
And there, in lordly solitude,
stood the Egyptian ibis. I have it still.
Riva is gone, her mind first, and then her body,
the ka and the ba on out-of-kilter journey
across to the Land of Reeds in the West.
So now the ibis panting is in its place
at my compound shrine of Hermes-Thoth:
the ibis with kneeling scribe before it,
the ibis-headed god himself in sculpture;
the sacred baboon;
the head of Hermes; two small pyramids,
a hippo, and The Book of Coming Forth by Day.

2

I asked a Greek who’d been to Egypt,
an Alexandrian admittedly, about the ibis.
“Don’t mention ibises! Those filthy birds,
worse than the legendary Harpies, be sure.
Not just the stately water-strider
you see in those temple scrolls — no!
Packs of them in every garbage heap,
fish-trash and butcher dumping place.
They eat what jackals would scorn to swallow.
They eat anything! They gorge themselves
until their innards can take no more —
guts forty yards long, I can assure you —
until they’re fat as a pampered goose.
The ibis knows no repose from gluttony:
stuffed full, they go off to the water.
Then, cheeks and bill blown up,
they give themselves water enemas.
The stench amid the reeds
is not to be believed.

No one will eat an ibis, I tell you,
and fishermen at night have seen them
beak to belly in oral copulation
(You can look it up in Strabo, too!
I’m not making this up.)

Now what this says about the priests of Thoth,
those ibis-headed ministers
and their mystery rites
is best left to the imagination.
Would you eat at table with a man
who had such habits? One cup
his lips had touched could fell a village.
I’m not one to leap to conclusions
but I prefer my gods sunny, Greek, and clean.”