"July came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska
... the best corn growing country in the world. It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green"
…
“When spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only - spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down on the red prarie, I should have known that it was spring.”
I’m reading My Antonia and loving it. It's like Enid Blyton for grownups through an American filter, a true bucolic: romance and nostalgia but with intellect! Hardy without the drama, a midwestern 'Fern Hill' - sweetness minus old world cynicism; Toni Morrison on honey-vodka-infused valium, guile-less Plath, Dickinson rewritten by Wordsworth and edited by Charles Tritten.
Apart from writing beautifully of the land, its particular charm, she has compassion. This of a suicide’s burial place:
“As grandfather had predicted Mrs _____ never saw the roads going over his head, The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south - so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never moved, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence - the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.”
… as my grandfather used to say (of Wilbur Smith, but hey) she “writes too beautifully”
Osho says "What you call poetry and passion are nothing but lies - with beautiful facades. Out of your hundred poets, ninety-nine are not really poets but only people in a state of turmoil, emotion, passion, heat, lust, sensuality. Only one out of your hundred poets is a real poet. / And the real poet may never compose any poetry, because his whole being is poetry.” (Love, freedom, aloneness. The koan of relationships)
As I get further and further away from the academy I'm inclined to agree. So much of literature is intellect without heart, or feeling so manufactured and filtered through thought and language that it's stripped on any visceral resonance.
By Osho's definition we could probably keep some of Yeats and the later Eliot; the journey of the Four Quartet, especially the end of 'Little Gidding' , the notes on time, and the dance... but then it's a spiritual poem, after his conversion and the Sanskrit studies.. But Willa Cather , Willa Cather…
“All about us we could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard. …”
In other news, I bought a dressmaker's dummy:
(Yes, OF COURSE I was tempted to head this post 'Children of the corn', but only for a minute)