Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226228075
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Nemerov gives us a lucid and precise twist on the commonplaces of everyday life. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1978."Howard Nemerov is a witty, urbane, thoughtful poet, grounded in the classics, a master of the craft. It is refreshing to read his work.... "— Minneapolis Tribune "The world causes in Nemerov a mingled revulsion and love, and a hopeless hope is the most attractive quality in his poems, which slowly turn obverse to reverse, seeing the permanence of change, the vices of virtue, the evanescence of solidities and the errors of truth."—Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review

THE NEXT ROOM OF THE DREAM (1962)

As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,

The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.

“To Clio, Muse of History”

1

Effigies

TO CLIO, MUSE OF HISTORY

On learning that The Etruscan Warrior

in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

is proved a modern forgery

One more casualty,

One more screen memory penetrated at last

To be destroyed in the endless anamnesis

Always progressing, never arriving at a cure.

My childhood in the glare of that giant form

Corrupts with history, for I too fought in the War.

He, great male beauty

That stood for the sexual thrust of power,

His target eyes inviting the universal victim

To fatal seduction, the crested and greaved

Survivor long after shield and sword are dust,

Has now become another lie about our life.

Smash the idol, of course.

Bury the pieces deep as the interest of truth

Requires. And you may in time compose the future

Smoothly without him, though it is too late

To disinfect the past of his huge effigy

By any further imposition of your hands.

But tell us no more

Enchantments, Clio. History has given

And taken away; murders become memories,

And memories become the beautiful obligations:

As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,

The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.

For I remember how

We children stared, learning from him

Unspeakable things about war that weren’t in the books;

And how the Museum store offered for sale

His photographic reproductions in full color

With the ancient genitals blacked out.

SANTA CLAUS

Somewhere on his travels the strange Child

Picked up with this overstuffed confidence man,

Affection’s inverted thief, who climbs at night

Down chimneys, into dreams, with this world’s goods.

Bringing all the benevolence of money,

He teaches the innocent to want, thus keeps

Our fat world rolling. His prescribed costume,

White flannel beard, red belly of cotton waste,

Conceals the thinness of essential hunger,

An appetite that feeds on satisfaction;

Or, pregnant with possessions, he brings forth

Vanity and the void. His name itself

Is corrupted, and even Saint Nicholas, in his turn,

Gives off a faint and reminiscent stench,

The merest soupçon, of brimstone and the pit.

Now, at the season when the Child is born

To suffer for the world, suffer the world,

His bloated Other, jovial satellite

And sycophant, makes his appearance also

In a glitter of goodies, in a rock candy glare.

Played at the better stores by bums, for money,

This annual savior of the economy

Speaks in the parables of the dollar sign:

Suffer the little children to come to Him.

At Easter, he’s anonymous again,

Just one of the crowd lunching on Calvary.

TO THE MANNEQUINS

Adorable images,

Plaster of Paris

Lilies of the field,

You are not alive, therefore

Pathos will be out of place.

But I have learned

A fact about your fate,

And it is this:

After you go out of fashion

Beneath your many fashions,

Or when your elbows and knees

Have been bruised powdery white,

So that you are no good to anybody—

They will take away your gowns,

Your sables and bathing suits,

Leaving exposed before all men

Your inaccessible bellies

And pointless nubilities.

Movers will come by night

And load you into trucks

And take you away to the Camps,

Where soldiers, or the State Polic...