Double Feature!

Good news, readers: a TBATC first!

In this week's issue of The Weekly Standard, K'Barbic and I each have an article published. K'Barbic dismantles the grande illusion of Starbucks, and I review Seamus Heaney's latest book, The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables.

We hope you enjoy them!

Eighty Candles for Derek Walcott

Today marks the 80th birthday of the Caribbean poet, playwright, and sometimes watercolorist Derek Walcott. To celebrate his work and years, I'll post a small poem-gift for you this weekend. (And yes, this is from a man who is, as you might have heard during last year's hullabaloo over the Oxford professorship of poetry, not only a man of verse but quite the fanny-pincher.)

The poem below is the first in Midsummer (1984), a copy of which I purchased in the basement of a tiny English-language bookshop in Athens three years ago. As you will notice from the opening line, this is a fine poem to take with you when traveling. Sometimes you can arrange the timing of the poem and of the plane just so, and read the last lines as the rubber wheels meet the landing strip. Without further ado, the promised poem:

The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—

clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,

nor the sea's mirror, nor the coral busy with its own

culture; they aren't doors of dissolving stone,

but pages in a damp culture that come aprt.

So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast

dereliction of sunlight, there's that island known

to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude

for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet's shadow

ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow

through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome

and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,

it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—

Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,

and steeples so tiny you couldn't hear the bells,

not the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets

from green villages. The lowering window resounds

over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

It comes too fast—this shelving sense of home—

canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

Al Gore, Poet Laureate ...of Climate Change?

As storm clouds gather and foment in the Climategate crisis (aka "The CRUtape Letters"), there is still one ray of sunshine, and it comes from the pen of Al Gore.

Mark Hertsgaard, author of the forthcoming Living Through the Storm: Our Future Under Global Warming, writes on VF's Power & Politics Blog that

with the publication of his new book, Our Choice, Gore has unveiled a fresh and most unexpected talent: the book’s opening chapter concludes with a poem he wrote—21 lines of verse that are equal parts beautiful, evocative, and disturbing.

Remember those three fawning adjectives. Now read a portion of the poem that makes Hertsgaard eager to crown Gore the "Poet Laureate of Climate Change":

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea

Soareagle in the comments section reacts, "Algore, the poetic, literary genius. What a twit." BernardL says, "oh barf!" Indeed, there are better nature poets out there. One gets the sense that Hertsgaard cares simply for what the poem is all too patently about.

What also confounds me is the illustration paired with Hertsgaard's post: Al Gore in a photoshopped black beret. Why? Why are berets here associated with poetry? Is this an instance of the hat being used as a sort of crown-in-disguise, or a wreath of Apollonian laurels? Is Hertsgaard hinting that Gore is an artist, too?

Who knows. But outside my window yesterday's snow is melting, and it still seems appropriate to think of the wavering climate. But I prefer to say goodnight to Gore's verses, pick up a book of Horace's Odes, and read 4.7, Diffugere nives ("the snows have fled"). I would invite you to share a pot of tea with me as I read, but the Internet is not advanced enough to allow that. I can provide the Latin, however, which is here, and William Maxwell reading A.E. Housman's still unmatched translation here. As Housman writes, Feast then, thy heart!