conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Bodies, Motion, Rest with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Essays & Correspondence?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Bodies in Motion and at Rest'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Bodies in Motion and at Rest
  And the week before that it was Kentucky for the undertakers, and the week before that, Scotland and Ireland on the poetry biz, and the month before that, a kind of midwestern, Buddy Holly tour of mortuary conventions—five states in six days—and the week before that one, some poetry jobs at Eau Claire and Winona and Williamsburg, Virginia. All of it's a litany now of literary and mortuary confabs that stretch back through the winter and fall of last year—Belfast and Barcelona; Galway and Boston; Glasgow, Manhattan and Amsterdam; Ocean City; Rapid City; Seattle; Atlantic City; Edinburgh; San Francisco; Denver and Atlanta; London and Dundee and Cornwall and Dublin and Portland and Chicago and Philly and D.C.; and Bozeman, Montana; Indianapolis; Minneapolis; Wichita, Kansas; godhelpus—blather and racket until I'm all but struck dumb with it and these blinking lights that are all beginning to blend together now into a kind of blindness. The more of the planet I see, the less I see it.
  AMONG MY WRITERLY FRIENDS, the hushed talk eventually comes round to the fact that I'm a funeral director. How is it, they want to know, that someone who writes sonnets also embalms, sells caskets, drives a hearse and greets the mourners at the door? It strikes them a strange commingling: the mortuary and literary arts. Why, they wonder, don't I take up a day job teaching grad students something meaningful about dactyls and pentameters at the university?
  Of course, my publishers have made some hay off this, to their advantage and to mine. An "undertaker/poet," like a cop who sings opera or a wrestler turned governor, makes for good copy and easy interviews. Oddity and celebrity are near enough cousins. Ink and airtime—coin of the realm in the info-tainment industry—are easier when you have a quirky angle.
  BUT HERE'S THE QUIET LITTLE TRUTH of the matter. Requiems and prosodies, sonnets and obsequies, poems and funerals—they are all the same. The arrangement of flowers and homages, casseroles and sympathies; the arrangement of images and idioms, words on a page—it is all the same—an effort at meaning and metaphor, an exercise in symbol and ritualized speech, the heightened acoustics of language raised against what is reckoned unspeakable—faith and heartbreak, desire and pain, love and grief, the joyous and sorrowful mysteries by which we keep track of our lives and times.
  Sometimes I see in the stillness of the dead the blank space between stanzas, the held breath of inspiration, the silence that rhymes with almost anything. The math of each enterprise is imprecise—wholesale, retail, rhyme and meter, the counting of syllables, the tally of charges: all numbers games that end in bottom lines. Still, the words we cut in stone or shape in poems are worth more, somehow, than the usual palaver.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I was among the fortunate hundreds who heard Seamus Heaney—one by whom the language lives—in Galway's Town Hall Theatre a few Aprils ago during the Cuirt Festival of Literature. The Nobel laureate, noting this borrowing of Yeats's meter and rhyme, paraphrased Auden to the effect that "poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead." And extending Auden's metaphor, Heaney added, "If so, then surely rhyme and meter are the table manners." He is, of course, correct.
  Poetry is a kind of communion, the chore of ordinary talk made sacramental by the attention to what is memorable, transcendent, permanent, in the language. It is the common tongue by which the species remains connected to the past and bears its witness to the future. Each age offers variations on the themes of love and grief, reason and desire, prayer and homage, epic and elegy and honor. Some things are constantly changing. Some things never do. Poets and their poetry keep track of each.
  But before it was a written and read thing, poetry was a spoken and said thing that happened in the ears and mouth before the eyes and intellect were engaged. It belonged to the body as much as the mind. It earned its place by pleasuring the senses. Before there were daily papers and news anchors and talking heads, there were bards who made their way from village to village bearing the news—Who was king in the next county; who stole whose cow; who slept with whose wife; who slaughtered whose son. And they were paid, well paid, to praise in verse a comely bride, a valiant warrior, a loyal dog; and paid to curse the blackguard, the enemy and the enemy's gods. And all of this was done out loud—for the sound and sense of it—the way we sing in the shower, practice our proposals and listen for our own voice before we fall asleep at night. Rhyme and meter were tools of the trade, a way of making words memorable and memorizable, a pace tied to the footfall of the poets' journeys.
  We are drawn to the acoustic pleasures of poetry by nature and metabolism. Our hearts beat in iambs and trochees night and day. Our breath is caught between inspiration and expiration. Our pulse divided by our breathing equals the five-finger-tapping pentameters of Frost: "The land was ours before we were the land's." And Shakespeare: "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes." And Millay: "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why." Is it any wonder that we know these things by heart?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Page 229: "Death Leading an Old Man to Grave." Etching and engraving. by Stefano della Bella (Italian), 1648.
  Page 251: "Scene in the Desert." Albumen print by J. Pascal Sabah (Turkish), 1880. The University of Michigan Museum of Art. Transfer from the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.
  Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, the Credits page constitutes an extension of the copyright page