All About Books discussion

I don't think we've ever had a poem by Randall Jarrell before; so I'm taking the liberty of including two, a personal favorite (one of his last poems) along with his best known (and most anthologized) very short poem from early in his career.

Gleaning [c. 1969]

When I was a girl in Los Angeles we'd go gleaning.
Coming home from Sunday picnics in the canyons,
Driving through orange groves, we would stop at fields
Of lima beans, already harvested, and glean.
We children would pick a few lima beans in play,
But the old ones, bending to them, gleaned seriously
Like a picture in my Bible story book.

So, now, I glean seriously,
Bending to pick the beans that are left.
I am resigned to gleaning. If my heart is heavy,
It is with the weight of all it's held.
How many times I've lain
At midnight with the young men in the field!
At noon the lord of the field has spread his skirt
Over me, his handmaid. "What else do you want?"
I ask myself, exasperated at myself,
But inside me something hopeful and insatiable--
A girl, a grown-up, giggling, gray-haired girl--
Gasps, "More, more!" I can't help hoping,
I can't hope expecting
A last man, black, gleaming,
To come to me, at sunset, in the field.
In the last light we lie there alone:
My hands spill the last things they hold,
The days are crushed beneath my dying body
By the body crushing me. As I bend
to my soup spoon, here at the fireside, I can feel
and not feel the body crushing me, as I go gleaning.


The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner [c. 1945]

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.


both poems from Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 1990.

"Glean" [verb]: 1. collect gradually and bit by bit.
2. (historical meaning) to gather leftover grain or other produce that was missed during the first harvest of a field. The poor would follow after a harvest and glean what was left. (More info on historical gleaning)

I haven't heard of Randall Jarrell before, thanks for introducing me to his poetry. I enjoyed reading these two poems.

Alannah wrote: "I haven't heard of Randall Jarrell before, thanks for introducing me to his poetry. I enjoyed reading these two poems."

Thanks Alannah! Glad to see someone read the post :)

Great selections, Greg. I was also unfamiliar with Randall Jarrell, and what an introduction! I like the image of gleaning--I've never thought about it in terms of my own life. It's a powerful image. Well done.

I especially enjoyed the first poem, Glen. Thanks a lot.

Thanks Gill & Terri! :)

I much prefer the first poem too Gill, though oddly it is his less characteristic war poems that seem to get anthologized.

And Terri, I find that extended metaphor of gleaning powerful too!! I love the speaker's passion for life that's at the same time filled with a poignant sense of her coming ending. It made me cry the first time I read it. I also find it interesting that toward the end of his life when he write this poem, it's an elderly woman whose mind he enters.

Jarrell was a very lucid writer about other poets; that's how I first encountered him. But he was the equivalent of a Poet Laureate (the position had the clunkier title "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" back then). And he is still frequently anthologized, even if I don't find the poems most often chosen to be anthologized to be his most characteristic.

Did he have links with John Berryman, Greg? I may have misremembered that.

Gill wrote: "Did he have links with John Berryman, Greg? I may have misremembered that."

Possibly Gill - I know he was a close friend of Robert Lowell's, and he championed many other now famous poets.

I think it was probably Delmore Schwartz I was thinking of, Greg. This is from a poem (sonnet?) by Berryman. Not sure who Ted and Richard are.

I’m cross with god who has wrecked
this generation.
First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.
In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.
That was a first rate haul. He left alive
fools I could number like a kitchen knife
but Lowell he did not touch.

I'm answering my own query: Ted Roethke and Richard Blackmur.

Here they are: Theodore Roethke and R.P. Blackmur

Greg wrote: "I don't think we've ever had a poem by Randall Jarrell before; so I'm taking the liberty of including two, a personal favorite (one of his last poems) along with his best known (and ..."

I am only familiar with Jarrell from the many mentions of him in the letters between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, so it is great to finally have read a couple of his poems! I find it interesting that he wrote a poem from a woman's perspective... I love this bit "
But inside me something hopeful and insatiable--
A girl, a grown-up, giggling, gray-haired girl…"

I knew about gleaning; it was described in some detail in Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy. It's use here is evocative, implying an emotional gleaning as well as the physical gathering of nourishment.

Gill wrote: "I think it was probably Delmore Schwartz I was thinking of, Greg. This is from a poem (sonnet?) by Berryman. Not sure who Ted and Richard are..."

Surely Ted is Ted Hughes? {later} Oh, I missed your last post - Ted Roethke, not Ted Hughes...