Stewart - Columbarium

COLUMBARIUM

SUSAN STEWART

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

susan stewart is the Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of three previous books of poems, the most recent The Forest, as well as many works of literary and art criticism, including On Longing, Crimes of Writing, and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2003 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2003
Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-77443-0 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stewart, Susan (Susan A.), 1952
Columbarium / Susan Stewart.
p. cm. (Phoenix poets)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-226-77443-0 (alk. paper)
I. Title. II. Series.

PS3569.T474C65 2003
811.54dc21

2003048354

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

columbarium

a. pigeon-house; dove-cote

b. a subterranean sepulcher, having in its walls niches or holes for cinerary urns

oxford english dictionary

Now let us make in each soul a sort of aviary of all kinds of birds; some in flocks separate from the others, some in small groups, and others flying about singly here and there among all the rest.

Then we must say that when we are children this receptacle is empty; and by the birds we must understand pieces of knowledge. When anyone takes possession of a piece of knowledge and shuts it up in the pen, we should say he has learned or has found out the thing of which this is the knowledge; and knowing, we should say, is this.

Now think: when he hunts again for any one of the pieces of knowledge that he chooses, and takes it and has it, then lets it go again, what words are appropriate here?

plato , Theaetetus

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of publications in which these poems, or versions of them, first appeared:

American Poetry Review: Bees, Braid, Dark the Star, Ellipse, Pear, Rewind, Scarecrow, Weather, Wings, and all of Sung from the generation of air

Critical Quarterly: I had a little dove, as the final section of Authentic Songs

Electronic Poetry Review: Forms of Forts and Unless and Until

Free Verse: Lost Rules of Usage, Vigil, and To You and For You

The Kenyon Review: Wrought from the generation of earth and The Rose (New Series, summer/fall 2003, vol. 25, no. 3/4)

Ploughshares: Shadow/ Lintel and Shadow/ Shadow (vol. 25, no. 4)

Salt: Drawn from the generation of fire , Cross/X, Shadow/Isaiah, Jump, Kingfisher Carol, The History of Quiver, and X/cross

Stand: Let me tell you about my marvelous god and The Seasons

TriQuarterly: Apple, Night Songs, Now in the Minute (under the title Awaken), Flown from the generation of water , What You Said About the Moon, Zero, Lightning, and These Trees in Particular

X-Connect: From Lessons from Television Writers of the Information Age II, CrossConnect, Inc., 1997

Wings was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove and David Lehman and in the Jahrbuch der lyrik 2001, edited by Christoph Buchwald and Adolf Endler. Munchen: Verlag C. H. Beck.

Now in the minute, under the title Awaken, was first issued as part of an edition of an art work by Ann Hamilton entitled, Awaken. The work is a wool blanket hand-stitched with the poem in a bookbinders box with accompanying printed text of the poem as well. New York: Mary Kelly; Cypher Editions, 2000.

Apple was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman.

Let me tell you about my marvelous god and The Seasons were reprinted with Two Brief Views of Hell in Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary Poets, ed. Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh, 2002.

Sung from the generation of air , Drawn from the generation of fire , Wrought from the generation of earth , and Flown from the generation of water were written for The Elements, an artists book with lithographs by Enid Mark, published by ELM Press in 2002.

O was reprinted in Robert Harrisons The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

My thanks to the MacArthur Foundation for a fellowship that helped me complete this book.

I THE ELEMENTS

When I was a child, like you, I thought like a child,
and asked how all things began

Sung from the generation of air

Yet air is the element most bearable most bearable to every mortal thing.