"Mother Carey's Hen" by David Yezzi

Text of poem HERE

No more Versecraft until October! Sorry :( 

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Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Matthew comes for my prosodic neck (mea culpa: his reading was first foot trochee, feminine ending).

-Rabbi Neil Blumofe brings up Pirkei Avot

-Susan Spear and Catherine Chandler

-David Yezzi!

-Yezzi's new Anthony Hecht biography, Late Romance

-Matthew interviews David here

-Yezzi's new Selected, More Things In Heaven

-Mother Carey, Mater Cara, Stella Maris

-Metrical schemes and ambiguous scansions

-Salty mirages

-The Tao of the petrel

-Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, "Following Nature"

-The Post-Symbolist Method

Transcript

Versecraft 3-8: “Mother Carey’s Hen” by David Yezzi

Hey everyone, thanks for joining me today on another scintillating episode of Versecraft. If you’re a stalwart Versecraftsman or craftswoman, welcome back; if you’re new here, thanks so much for checking out the show. Before I sink my teeth into today’s poem, I do have a few items of note. First of all, if you find yourself heartily enjoying what you’re listening to here, please do consider making a donation to the show, which you can do at my link in the show notes. You can also show your support for Versecraft by getting an incredibly sick tee shirt or hoodie from the online store, the link to which you can also find in the show notes. Finally, please, please do make an effort to tell someone you know this week about Versecraft, so we can ensure that as many people as possible know what an amphibrach is. 

Also, a reminder that if you’re craving a more personal version of the Versecraft treatment, I do offer private one-on-one instruction. I only have a couple spots left, so get ‘em while they’re hot. If you’re interested, please send a raven to versecraftpodcast@gmail.com, and I’ll be happy to offer you a quote. 

The major piece of news I have for you today is that there will be no Versecraft for the next two weeks. I do apologize for that, but the reason why is exhilarating— I’m going to be going to my old stomping grounds of New York City to finally meet, for the first time, my dear friends and fellow podcasters Matthew and Alice, as well as a thrilling host of other poets I admire, hopefully including today’s poet. It’s going to be my first real experience of literary bohemia, and I’m so immensely excited. I’m sure when I come back I’ll have lots of stories to tell. In the meantime, please take this opportunity to listen to some of my back catalog that you haven’t had a chance to get to yet! 

I want to circle back to last week’s poem for just a moment because I received a couple interesting notes about it. Matthew remarked that the first line of Mehigan’s poem, “None of us understands our story better,” which I scanned as an acephalous feminine line of iambic pentameter with a second foot anapestic substitution, could perhaps more reasonably be scanned as a regular iambic line with a first foot trochaic substitution. I personally have a tough time reading “none of us” as anything but a dactyl that needs reframing, but Matthew certainly has the more elegant solution here, and that may well have been what Josh had in his ear. This is a great example of how, even though scansions can be correct and incorrect, they are not an exact science— in certain subtle situations, the voice in our heads does color how we interpret a given line. I think both readings are legitimate, but because Matthew’s reading does have Occam’s Razor on its side, it may be the one to prefer. 

I also received a note from my father the Rabbi, who was reminded by all the talk of sponges of a passage in Pirkei Avot, an important ethical text in the Jewish canon. In Pirkei Avot 5:15, there are said to be four types of students: the sponge, who absorbs all information without discrimination or discernment; the funnel, who forgets all instruction as soon as he receives it; the strainer, who forgets everything true and important but remembers what is trivial or false; and the sieve, who forgets what is trivial, discards what is false, and retains only what is true and important. Obviously in this framework the sieve is the ideal, but our understanding of Mehigan’s poem might be enriched by thinking about the sponge not only as an absorber of its environment, but of knowledge well. A universal recipient not only of perception, but conception. 

I also received very sweet messages this week from the poets Susan Spear, co-author of Learning the Secrets of English Verse, which I mentioned in my Conservatory episode, and Catherine Chandler, both of whom wrote to express their enthusiastic support for my Case For Meter and Rhyme episodes. Thank you, ladies— the campaign against prosaic pseudo-poetry has only just begun. 

Today’s poem is by one of the most consistently excellent and multi-faceted talents working in poetry today: Mr. David Yezzi. Yezzi has worn an astonishing number of hats over the years—he has worked professionally not only as a poet but a playwright, a librettist, a critic, an editor, a professor, a program director, an actor, and, most recently, a biographer: his newest book, Late Romance, promises to be the definitive life of Anthony Hecht, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, whose synthesis of ornate diction with sparkling clarity, formal mastery with inner chaos, observant wit with dark rumination is clearly one model for Yezzi’s own writing. The book comes out November 7th, and if you’d like to place a pre-order, please see my link in the show notes.

David Yezzi was born in 1966 in Albany, New York, just a few years before and a few miles away from last week’s poet Joshua Mehigan, and the two have been good friends for many years. He studied theatre undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, and four years later obtained a masters in creative writing from Columbia. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner fellowship in poetry, one of my own major goals, which enabled him to study poetry at Stanford and join the illustrious pedigree of Stanford poets stretching back to the school of Yvor Winters, which includes such luminaries as Edgar Bowers, Helen Pinkerton, Thom Gunn, N. Scott Momaday, Donald Justice, and Timothy Steele. In the years since, Yezzi has become a strong advocate of Wintersian criticism and several of the above-mentioned poets, and it was through his essays on Winters and the Stanford School that I first came across David’s name several years ago. 

After his stint at Stanford, Yezzi moved back to New York, where he became the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. There, he hosted events for legendary figures like John Updike, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, and Anthony Hecht himself. At the age of thirty-seven he published his first book of poems, The Hidden Model, which showed his perceptive eye and careful craftsmanship already fully formed. Four books of poems have followed, each expanding the range of what came before. His latest is a New and Selected Poems, entitled More Things In Heaven, a marvelous retrospective on a consistently excellent, psychologically trenchant, highly varied body of work, which you can find a link to in the show notes. I would be remiss not to mention the fact that he has also written several verse dramas and operas, including Schnauzer, On the Rocks, The Last Tycoon, and Firebird Motel.  

In 2005, Yezzi began his long and celebrated career as an editor, serving first The New Criterion and later The Hopkins Review, a post he still currently holds. He is also Professor and former chair of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country, and training grounds for such fine elder millennial poets as Ryan Wilson, Chris Childers, Austin Allen, Stephen Kampa, and my own Matthew Buckley Smith. Yezzi also, incidentally, worked for several years as a visiting professor with David Rothman and Ernest Hilbert at the World of Versecraft program at Western State Colorado University, and I’m confident that he would find this Versecraft to be very much in the spirit of his own critical and prosodic passions.

Today’s poem is the first in Yezzi’s second collection, Azores, which was chosen by Slate as one of the best books of 2008. The poem is entitled “Mother Carey’s Hen,” and before we even begin, this strange title may require some explanation. 

In 18th century nautical lore, Mother Carey was a supernatural, malevolent force of the sea, a spirit of storms that attempted to drown sailors, in some versions in order to send them down to the locker of her husband, Davy Jones. The name Mother Carey probably derives from the Latin phrase Mater Cara, meaning “beloved mother,” a moniker of Mother Mary, euphemistically inverted to serve a pagan idea. This is particularly interesting given that another moniker of Mary is Stella Maris, meaning “Star of the Sea,” a play on the fact that the name Mary sounds like “maris,” meaning sea, and which conceives Mary as a star that guides the worshipper who sails the sea of life to safety and salvation, the exact opposite function of Mother Carey.

            The sight of storm petrels, a type of sea bird, is often seen as a harbinger of storms, and these birds are sometimes called Mother Carey’s chickens, as it was believed that they were Mother Carey’s avian host, which came to announce her arrival in the form of a storm. Alternatively, according to some legends, the storm petrels were the reincarnated souls of drowned sailors, who came to warn those among the living of their imminent peril. It is the storm petrel which is the subject of this poem, and Yezzi’s folksy title both indicates his knowledge as a sailor, which crops up elsewhere in the collection, as well as imbues the bird with a supernatural valence. My guess is that he chose “hen” rather than “chicken” merely because it sounds less goofy. 

            The poem goes like this:

Mother Carey’s Hen

There are days I don’t think about the sea;

             weeks wash by in fact,

then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by

on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye,

reflected there, a shimmering reverie,

                            recalling the pact

I once made (and renew today) to hold

             to a higher altitude.

But note the difference between this bird

and me: a slight disruption or harsh word

and I crash, folded seaward, letting cold

                            life intrude;

whereas the petrel, mindless of such height,

             scales each watery hill

that rises up, adapting to the shape

of each impediment, each low escape

instinct in it, the scope of its flight

                            fitted to its will.

If we are looking at this poem on the page rather than simply listening to it, one of the first things we will be struck by is its unusual shape. We have three sestets, all of which follow a generally iambic scheme, but we are not in strictly iambic pentameter. We do however see that each sestet bears the same distinctive shape, and upon closer inspection, we see that we not only do we have a rhyme scheme in each stanza—ABCCAB— but we have a metrical scheme as well. The first two stanzas consist of the following scheme of feet per line: 5-3-5-5-5-2. The final stanza, depending on how you read it, fudges this a bit, with the ultimate line borrowing a foot from the penultimate line: 5-3-5-5-4-3. We will take a closer look at this in a moment. The important and impressive thing to notice here is how Yezzi sets himself such intricate requirements from his stanzas, in terms of both rhythm and rhyme, and then appears to fulfill them effortlessly and conversationally, even spilling a sentence over from the first to the second stanza. The ability to create and fulfill intricate nonce stanzas is a hallmark of Yezzi’s style, perhaps picked up from the Cavalier poets, and give his work not only a sense of virtuosity but a delicate, dynamic music, more fluid and spry than the solid inevitabilities of iambic pentameter. 

If we scan the poem, we quickly see that Yezzi has no qualms about frequent variation. In the first stanza, the last four lines out of six contain an anapest, and two of these also contain trochees. In fact, the longest streak of pure iambs we get in this poem runs only two lines in a row, which we find in two places: lines 9 and 10, and lines 15 and 16. 

            Several lines are ambiguous as to how we are supposed to read them. Take line 14, for example: “scales each watery hill.” We could read this: SCALES each, WAT-er, y-HILL. Trochee, trochee, iamb. Or we could read it: SCALES, each-WA, tery-HILL. acephalous iamb, iamb, anapest. I am inclined to the second reading, not only because it gives us more of what we would call iambs, but also because an anapest is pretty much also an iamb with an extra skip. 

            Now let’s return to the last two lines, which appear to break the metrical scheme established by the first two stanzas. The penultimate line runs: “instinct in it, the scope of its flight.” I scan this as iamb iamb iamb anapest: inst-INCT, in IT, the SCOPE, of its FLIGHT. This is four feet long—a line of tetrameter. In order to make it pentameter, and fit the scheme, we would need a quite strange and forced reading, something like the following: inst-INCT, in IT, the SCOPE, OF its, FLIGHT. Iamb, iamb, iamb, trochee, catalectic trochee. The latter reading fulfills the scheme, but at the cost of not only completely destroying the iambic momentum, but forcing us to place undue emphasis on the very light syllables “of its.” For these reasons, I prefer the tetrameter reading. 

            The final line, “fitted to its will,” is also ambiguous. I can think of three ways to read this. acephalous iamb, iamb, iamb: FIT, ed-TO, its-WILL; trochee, trochee, catalectic trochee: FIT-ed, TO-its, WILL; or trochee, anapest: FIT-ed, to its WILL. The second reading, the string of trochees, we can safely eliminate, as it not violates not only the stanzaic scheme but also the iambic norm. That leaves us with the first reading, which preserves the iambic norm but violates the stanzaic scheme, and the third reading, which violates the iambic norm but preserves the stanzaic scheme. I find the first reading far more natural to speak, and therefore am inclined to favor it; we can see then how we have arrived at two lines which do not follow the stanzaic metrical scheme of the first two sestets. 

            This is not to say of course that Yezzi has done anything wrong here—this is merely one more kind of variation. What formal verse teaches us is that the more patterns you establish, the more ways you can expressively break the rules.  Because it comes at the very end of the poem, this musical development helps to sonically signal a sense of conclusion. 

            Let’s now go back and read the first 8 lines again: 

There are days I don’t think about the sea;

             weeks wash by in fact,

then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by

on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye,

reflected there, a shimmering reverie,

                            recalling the pact

I once made (and renew today) to hold

             to a higher altitude.

By the second line, we are already thrown into doubt about whether or not the speaker is contemplating the literal sea: the phrase “weeks wash by” is not only an aquatic pun, but also hints that the sea may be a metaphor for something else: time, perhaps, or life. The third line introduces a shearwater, an aquatic bird related to the storm petrel of the title. The fourth line however makes clear that this bird is imaginary—it “flutters by on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye.” Obviously, anything can happen in the mind’s eye, but it is very peculiar that Yezzi would envision a shearwater traversing salt flats. A shearwater is an ocean bird, whereas salt flats are found in very arid areas, usually deserts. 

How salt flats are formed however may give us a clue to this mysterious image: a salt flat forms in an area that either used to be a body of water or would be a body of water if the atmosphere were not so hot and dry. Rainfall accumulates in these areas, but the water evaporates again before it can sink into the soil, leaving trace amounts of salt behind. Over the course of millennia, this perpetual cycle results in the accumulation of vast amounts of salt on the surface, creating fields known as salt flats. When Yezzi describes the environment of his mind as a salt flat, he seems to imply that his mind, though perhaps once very aqueous in the past, is now arid, and permits no water to remain long, whatever that might mean. Nevertheless, a shearwater intrudes upon the scene, as if to insist that the mind cannot escape the ocean. The bird is not only an uncanny sign of the absent sea, but also, as we spoke of earlier, a sign of storms to come. 

The image of the bird is described as reflected on the flats, a “shimmering reverie.” We have the obvious pun on literal and figurative reflection, but we also have an interesting and complex conception here: an image in the imagination which is itself pictured as imaginary. In the desert environments where salt flats are found, the air is sometimes so hot that it causes light to refract in non-intuitive ways, causing objects in the sky to appear to the eye as if they are on the ground. When people see mirages of oases in the desert, it is not because they are dehydrated or crazy, it is because they are seeing reflections of the blue sky on the ground, and mistaking them for bodies of water. Ironically, it is the intensity of the dry heat which creates the perception of water— if we apply this to the speaker’s mind’s eye, even if we do not yet know what the ocean symbolizes, we can see that we have an elegant metaphor for repression—the more one tries not to think about something, the more likely that thing is to surface of its own accord. 

We should also note that the shearwater makes perfect sense in this image—shearwaters are known to fly close to and skim over the surface of the ocean—they shear the water— and if there was a bird flying in the sky over a salt flat, in a reflected, shimmering mirage it would look like the bird was coasting across the surface of a body of water, much like a shearwater would do. The more one thinks about this image, the cleverer it appears. 

The appearance of this bird reminds the speaker of a pact he made with himself, and which the presence of the shearwater inspires him to renew: to “hold to a higher altitude.” Presumably, an altitude above sea level. To finally discover what Yezzi means by the sea however, we must read on. 

Let’s now read the poem again, this time all the way through:

There are days I don’t think about the sea;

             weeks wash by in fact,

then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by

on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye,

reflected there, a shimmering reverie,

                            recalling the pact

I once made (and renew today) to hold

             to a higher altitude.

But note the difference between this bird

and me: a slight disruption or harsh word

and I crash, folded seaward, letting cold

                            life intrude;

whereas the petrel, mindless of such height,

             scales each watery hill

that rises up, adapting to the shape

of each impediment, each low escape

instinct in it, the scope of its flight

                            fitted to its will.

Like Mehigan’s poem from last week, this poem seems to function somewhat like a sonnet even though it isn’t one. With the word “but” in line 9, right where we would expect a volta in an Italian sonnet, we switch gears from cryptic, hallucinatory meditation to an incredibly straightforward comparison. From a haze of semantic uncertainty, Yezzi quickly clears the air. The sea is revealed to be a metaphor for the chaotic, emotional flux of everyday life, from which the speaker, at the best of times, attempts to hold himself aloof. However, just as the arid salt flats of the mind are vulnerable to the appearance of aquatic mirages and phantom shearwaters, so too is the speaker more psychologically vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life than he would like, in large part due to his preoccupation with a contrasting extremity. Like a high-flying bird, he seeks to soar far above the tumult of the waves below— which, figuratively speaking, means he wishes to completely reject the pettiness and emotional turbulence of the ego. And yet, at the slightest disturbance to his ego, he crashes, “folded seaward, letting cold life intrude.” The higher he rises, the harder he falls. 

The speaker has attempted to be some kind of spiritual falcon, and he pays the price for his hubris. This is in stark contrast to the sea-bird which intruded upon his imagination, which he now refers to as a petrel. The petrel also attempts to avoid tumbling into the water, but it has a very different tactic. “Mindless of such height,” that is, without a thought for its exact altitude, or any concern for being high above the water, the petrel “scales each watery hill that rises up, adapting to the shape of each impediment.” Petrels actually make a point of flying close to the water, not in order to tempt their fate, but to make flight easier. Far from being impediments, the ridges of ocean waves cause proximal air currents to move upward, and the petrel exploits these upward currents to support its flight, a technique known as slope soaring. It rides the waves of air which occur above the waves of water, adapting itself to the turbulence below. The petrel thus becomes an apt symbol for moderation and flexibility, an alternative and healthier life of Stoic conduct than the rigid and radical one the speaker has attempted to live hitherto. Rather than try to grandiosely and neurotically rise above and avoid all contact with the emotional messiness of life, those who would remain free of life’s turmoil should have the confidence to live in proximity to it, face it directly, take it as it comes, and recognize every impediment as an opportunity to move forward. As Marcus Aurelius famously said: “the obstacle is the way.” 

The petrel exemplifies the Stoic injunction to Follow Nature: “each low escape instinct in it, the scope of its flight fitted to its will.” For the Stoics, to follow Nature does not mean, as Rousseau and Emerson thought it did,  to release oneself to unfiltered animal instinct, but rather, two complementary tasks: firstly, to discover the truth of one’s own human nature, and pursue those actions which causes a human soul to flourish, which we call virtue; and secondly, to adapt, like the petrel, to the circumstances and demands of outer nature, that which we cannot control, with resourcefulness and equanimity. With practice, this ethic becomes a habit, and habit becomes a refinement of instinct. Ultimately, one hopes to reach a point where “the scope of one’s flight”—one’s destiny as determined by the tides of life— is fitted to one’s will: the desires of the soul are entirely calibrated to its fate. One aspires to reach the point where one will not have to make self-conscious pacts to hold to a higher altitude, but rather glide over the waters with effortlessness and grace.

Yezzi’s deceptively plain-spoken formal exactitude, his identification of the ocean with the hazards of mental chaos, his Stoic preoccupations with emotional calibration, and his powerful synthesis of precise natural description and spiritual weight identify him, at least in this poem, as a scion of Wintersian poetics. Indeed, this poem makes wonderful use of what Yvor Winters believed was the strongest poetic technique available: what he called the Post-Symbolist method. Simply put, a Post-Symbolist poem is one in which, in Winters’ words, the “language is often sensory and conceptual at the same time,” and which is characterized by embodying a thought process that is associational rather than strictly logical, but is nevertheless highly controlled, and which makes use of precise imagery weighted with intellectual content. One can think about it as a fusion of the sharp perception of Imagism with the philosophical weight of allegory, or, as I once put it in another essay, “a way of writing poetry that unites perception and conception seamlessly, wherein every detail described in a poem makes sense on the level of physical narrative, yet also has a clearly articulated symbolic subtext.” Yezzi has studied this technique carefully, and in this rich and thoughtful poem, he proves his mastery. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s now go back and read this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Mother Carey’s Hen

There are days I don’t think about the sea;

             weeks wash by in fact,

then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by

on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye,

reflected there, a shimmering reverie,

                            recalling the pact

I once made (and renew today) to hold

             to a higher altitude.

But note the difference between this bird

and me: a slight disruption or harsh word

and I crash, folded seaward, letting cold

                            life intrude;

whereas the petrel, mindless of such height,

             scales each watery hill

that rises up, adapting to the shape

of each impediment, each low escape

instinct in it, the scope of its flight

                            fitted to its will.