Meanings for the Millennium

...Walcott has been perfecting the extended narrative form since his Omeros—a retelling of Homer's epic in a Caribbean setting...

...One is the impulse that makes us seek a love we feel will complete us, yet at the same time fear will compromise our autonomy...

...Walcott searches paintings—not only those of Rococo and Impressionist masters but his own too, because all of his recent books have been illustrated with his own watercolors—for what has been left out...

...It would be 13 years until Robert Frost wrote A Boy's Life...

...Walcott interweaves his own story—he grew up on St...

...Contemporary cultural curmudgeons lament that no poetry today could compete for an appreciable audience against prime time television...

...Yeats was still writing airy lyrics...

...Full of seeming irrelevancies, circumlocutions and distractions, it recreates the mental process of reflecting on climactic horrors, despite the fact that it is not possible to tell what the changes will entail...

...Eliot began to publish at all...

...Their viewpoint is the same as the spectators who look at the artwork—usually a religious scene, Ml of activity, but not for the animals or for us who only watch passively...

...Here is his description of the world he grew up in—virtually unchanged since Pissarro was born in 1830, just a century before the poet: Despite their middens excremental stench, their pristine rivulets so clogged with garbage, the villages clung to a false pride, their French namesakes, in faith, in carpentry, in language, so that the harbour with its flour-bag sails, the rusted vermilion of the market's roofs made every wharf a miniature Marseilles when, slow as a cloud, a high cruise ship airives...

...Both prologue and epilogue are given to Sappho, a poet we know through fragments, whose voice fades in and out like a weak radio signal...

...As Carson explains, "How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them...

...Pinsky's poems often seem to be bridging the gap between popular and high art...

...You may think that readers haven't noticed this congruence yet...

...But themes from earlier poems and essays keep emerging...

...But as half-breeds they do not quite fit into the cultures of France or the United States, either...

...Carson's latest compilation should be read as a whole, for images and concepts accumulate meaning throughout the work, like a rolling snowball...

...People being filmed cannot control audience reaction the way they might before live viewers...

...Pissarro's rabbinic ancestry, his childhood in a mixed race society, the blue-green sea surrounding palmfringed islands, must surely be part of his depictions of sparse French hills and villages...

...More important, he wants to help us understand how to appreciate the role poetry plays in the historical and contemporary record...

...The books I am about to discuss all make strong connections between visual and auditory arts—especially cinema and song—and the construction of their own lyrics...

...ROBERT Pinsky has certainly thrown himself into the task of trying to create a broader audience for poetry...

...Derek Walcott's latest poem, Tiepolo's Hound (Farrar Straus Giroux, 162 pp., $27.00), at first seems to hark back to an era where storytellers began at the beginning and described a sequence of events in order...

...If nothing has happened yet, we are treated to file tapes of similar disasters...

...Throughout the poem dogs are a symbol for outsiders—those who stand on the edge of the action, observing...

...Tolstoy's philosophy is reshaped by war...

...Here phrases from a lengthy interview can be spliced and reordered for concision, or to change the point being made...

...Tiepolo's Hound follows the career of Camille Pissarro, who left his native island, St...

...By the 1940s, this attractive, approachable kind of lyric was damned by modernist critics as frivolous...

...The Tragic Chorus" compares the ancient Greek dramas with the rites of our own era—a combination of sublimity and vulgar spectacle, idealism and commercial sellout—where the celebrations of civilization ignore the injustices that underpin its lifestyle: eminent citizens Sponsor the dramas, paying the chontsmaster and writer...

...Yet the Nobel Prize winner's newest work is also concerned with disjointed time, loss, exile...

...The refugees became successful merchants in the Virgin Islands and intermarried with the local populace...

...His poems form a kaleidoscope of pictures and sensations...

...Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts...

...Walcott sees himself and Pissarro as such figures...

...images are transposed to illustrate or editorialize on what is said...

...The disjointed cutting back and forth between disparate images popularized by music videos, the surreal touches enlivening Ally McBeal (the snakelike tongues, for instance) or the mysterious incantations of Xena, Warrior Princess, correspond to techniques much favored in modernist and postmodernist verse...

...Robinson, bumptious Rudyard Kipling, and the classicist A.E...

...Black, but with an English father, the poet can identify with Pissarro, who came from a Jewish Sephardic family that fled from Portugal to escape the Inquisition's persecution...

...A long series of poems called "TV Men" transports Sappho, Antonin Artaud, Leo Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, and Anna Akhmatova into the world of camera scripts...

...In "New Rule," the poet watches a squirrel trying to negotiate an ice-covered branch while, at the same time, she recalls her desertion by a longtime lover...

...Thoughtful and passionate, Robert Pinsky is determined to record impressions of who we are—we Americans—on the cusp of this fresh millennium...

...Nevertheless, the climate of current entertainment may be beginning to contribute to a broader understanding of certain aspects of poetic construction...

...Canines are often so portrayed in 17th-century paintings...

...Instead, the director manipulates words and visuals to impose his vision on the material...

...Fairly popular magazines print his articles...

...Walcott always manages to evoke Caribbean landscapes and customs in all their contradictory facets...

...In her introduction to the sequence, Carson remarks cryptically, "TV makes things disappear...

...Appropriately for an era in which communication increasingly comes not through voice or printed page, but in bombardments of visual and aural stimuli, Pinsky defines meaning as lying "not in the words, not even/Between the words, but a torsion,/A cleavage, a stirring...

...The "slash of pink on the inner thigh/of a white hound" he keeps trying to rediscover may not, indeed, have been part of a painting at all, but something transposed from childhood skyscapes that he and the Impressionist artist can never shake off: not Oise, where a wind sweeps famous savannas, with farms and poplars and a piercing steeple, but cobalt bays and roads through high bananas...

...The new objective was to say something profound but cryptic, packed with multiple meanings and arcane references...

...Most verse collections are a miscellany of pieces written over a number of years, without much connection, and of uneven consistency...

...The audience for verse became more and more fragmented as schools multiplied...

...The improvisational, provisional spirit is in the poems of Wallace Stevens and in the denim pants of Levi Strauss...

...Now I too am someone who knows marks...

...Feel it at the revival, Train station, ballgame: the breathing public organism...

...The outbreak of World War II coincided with the death of easy poetry...

...Soon this manifold will fuse into one time and system under the name of war...

...Last summer, on Cape Cod, he organized a "reading of favorite poems" in which writers, known and less so, declaimed everything from John Keats to Edward Lear, to the delight of a standing-room-only crowd...

...City of actual sacrifice, The scapegoat slave crowned with horns...

...It is an Edwardian woman's perspective on an event she will never experience firsthand as a man might...

...Carson finds the way television shapes our sense of time and place fascinating...

...This illuminating book thus ends like a fragment of Sappho, communicating intimacy through its very brokenness...

...To her, though, it becomes the sign of demarcation between the peaceful era that is ending and the future...

...Thomas, to become one of the French Impressionists...

...Lucia and now lives principally in the United States— with that of the painter...

...After the War, fashion turned against metaphysical complexity, though no one dared return to simplicity...

...Akhmatova, during the siege of Leningrad, notes the mark on the wall...

...Oddly the word [television] comes from Latin videre 'to see.' " By the finale, we have seen her meaning: What these scripts omit is as vivid as what they contain...

...Like Anne Carson and Derek Walcott, he realizes that when we try to separate our own thoughts and feelings from the content of what we read or watch, much is suppressed...

...As the book progresses, we become increasingly aware of the difference between Virginia Woolf's perspective and how we encounter events at present...

...The squirrel bounced down a branch and caught a peg of tears...

...In an article published last October in the Atlantic Monthly, he wrote that Americans are famous for being "perpetually in the process of devising ourselves as a people...

...Representative poets of 1900 included moody E.A...

...An improvised, eclectic, synthesizing quality pervades our cultural products...

...Rhyme was a powerful mnemonic element, helping people to memorize their favorite poems...

...you had to leam the language first, and for many readers that seemed like too much effort for too little enjoyment...

...so that we look down as if at a map of the Greek states and see lives churning forward there—each in its own time zone, its own system of measures, its own local names...

...If you paraphrased them, the way students used to be assigned to do with Shakespearean monologues, the effect would not come through very well...

...Involved with the arts, both men feel out of sync with the colonial culture of the islands...

...Now television bombards us with pictures of disaster—no need to wonder what it might look like...

...She has followed this with an equally original volume, Men in the Off Hours (Knopf, 166 pp., $24.00...

...almost two decades before Ezra Pound and T.S...

...They are like death: by a simple stroke—all is lost, yet still there...

...Verse still sang, carried along by flowing meters...

...Writers throughout much of the 20th century saw the past as a series of uninhabitable ruins whose very significance was disappearing from cultural memory, but new poetic voices are making building blocks from those ruins, hoping with such fragments to reconnect past and present cultures...

...A poem's virtue now seemed to he in how much could be read into a single line...

...In the last pages, an "Appendix to Ordinary Time" reveals the book to be an elegy for Carson's mother...

...Ultimately, we come to "Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War',' where he becomes the director telling her how to narrate and emote the horrors most effectively...

...Whatever that may mean, there is no question that his hucksterism for verse has made people sit up and pay some attention...

...Even in the off hours, men know marks...

...Her utterances become all the more mysterious for their elisions...

...He gets on television and radio to read with the brio of a sports announcer, to discuss like a pundit, to exhort like a tent revival preacher...

...The second is the pain of loss: a past no longer entirely comprehensible to us, relationships that decay, holes in our memory, regret over missed opportunities...

...The final absence is death...

...Anne Carson is a classicist, noted for her work on Sappho...

...She cannot fight or make decisions, but she knows her life will be deeply affected nonetheless...

...The ancient historian of the Peloponnesian conflict (450 to 400 BCE) "sets us on a high vantage point...

...The poet concludes with a meditation on crossed-out passages in Woolf's letters which she read while mourning...

...Maybe so, but poets are on to it...

...Pulitzers, All focused on the City arena—city of'slavery, of oppression Of women willed by their husbands, who got them from theirfathers, As property to their own sons...

...This quality seems unmistakable in both the most glorious and the stupidest of our cultural manifestations—in the transcendent music of Charlie Parker and in the embarrassing dumbness of Super Bowl halftime shows...

...A peruser might wonder why such diverse forms belong together, yet upon closer reading the work's coherence becomes luminous...

...Men in the Off Hours opens with abrief essay titled "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War...

...The concept that an average person could simply pick up a book of poetry and read it for pleasure appeared lost...

...The way to hold on is afterwards so clear...

...Looking is an art, no less than painting or writing, but in the end we vanish while the canvas and page are there for future generations...

...To the male in the room with Woolf, the mark on the wall is merely a snail...

...What once confused audiences accustomed to sequential narrative today coincides with the devices of pop culture...

...Two subtexts, in particular, run throughout Men in the Off Hours...

...Woolf herself wrote an essay at the outbreak of the European conflict inl914called "The Mark on the Wall...

...If meaning seemed too obvious, then the work was either superficial or else possessed hidden depths that needed to be painstakingly dug out...

...Housman, whose combination of irony, cutting wit and pathos created a tone that lasted well into the early decades of the new century...

...A year ago, she published Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse —a remarkable poem in which a myth about the Greek hero Heracles and a monster becomes a contemporary love story...

...Pinsky's evangelistic zeal comes from his conviction that poetry records and helps formulate how we see ourselves...

...The book includes individual poems, poetic sequences, prose musings, autobiography, and a scholarly essay (with footnotes) on the nature of pollution and boundaries in ancient Greek culture that culminates in a brilliant reading of two Sappho poems...

...Volumes of poetry were as accessible as novels, and sometimes sold equally well...

...And since the tragedy makers the rich men commission Vie for prizes awarded at the drunk god's festival It also resembles Academy Awards, Emmvs...

...Walcott's title refers to the detail of a painting by the Rococo master Tiepolo, which the poet believes he remembers seeing on his first trip to the United States, but has not subsequently been able to find...

...Walcott's mellifluous voice echoes in the holes made by those omissions, singing a lament for our own disjointed, mongrel selves...

...Each sees himself as a mongrel, at home nowhere, pursuing an elusive idea...

...The promotional material for his latest book, Jersey Rain (Farrar Straus Giroux, 52 pp., S21.00), dubs him "America's most public poet...