MIDDAY IN THE CALDARIUM

While with imponderable gravity I go down
into the cauldron of the hot-tub, the empire
is shrinking, against the blazing blue
of afternoon, to a single twisted branch,

fig-laden, framed by the tub's black rim.
I am encircled also with murmurings.
The murky seeth of water. The falsetto

of cicadas. The clatter of plates and forks,
and—after the Campari—the guests
with no conversation left greeting the maid:
"Grazie, Concietta. Sa di squisito!"

Such exquisite taste. All things ask
to be circumscribed: moments when thought
is stilled like a lizard in the dusty vine.

HYPERTEXT VERSION
MIDDAY IN THE CALDARIUM

While with imponderable gravity I go down

into the cauldron of the hot-tub, the empire

is shrinking, against the blazing blue

of afternoon, to a single twisted branch,

fig-laden, framed by the tub's black rim.

I am encircled also with murmurings.

The murky seethe of water. The falsetto

of cicadas. The clatter of plates and forks,

and—after the Campari the guests

with no conversation left greeting the maid:

Grazie, Concietta. Sa di squisito!

Such exquisite taste. All things ask

to be circumscribed: moments when thought

is stilled like a lizard in the dusty vine.

And beyond the perimeter of siesta, beyond

the after-image of dark-flaming cypresses—

thwunk, thwunk—the paisano is bashing

post-holes in the red dirt, preparing

yet another defense and definition of property

in a world whose frontiers buckle and burst

The sleepless legions monitor the edge of chaos,

their pockets sagging with bombs, and I

wake with a choking cry that rips the maps

to shreds. I am simmering chin deep in luxury,

in a soothing murmur of propaganda, while

the empire gathers in the Colosseum,

a vortex that brims with Barbarian blood.

IN THE CALDARIUM: AN ESSAY ON POETRY
by Brian Taylor

Hypertext Version of the Poem

The title of this article is borrowed from a poem I wrote a few years ago. What, a reader might have the nerve to ask, is a caldarium? I provide an answer. Am I supposed to know that? Yes. At least you know it now. No harm in asking. The response to that won't be voiced: Poets have their nerve.

Indeed they do. I could have paraphrased the poem's title thus: Midday in the Hot-Water Pool of a Roman Bath-House. But poets are delighted that things have a name. That is their vocation and pastime, to find the exact words to present the world as they see it. If they are like me, instead of just doodling spirals, happy-faces or hanged men, they write lists of words, words for special occasions: clavichord, mandible, parasol, narthex, camelopard, drupe. But words that I love for their own sake are not the only things I keep on my bulletin board. There are complex memories that have yet to find an adequate name: the texture of the sky above Death Valley, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, the tears in my father's eyes.

Poets do what they do for their own reasons and maybe they have no call to articulate them. But I make my living as a teacher, and teachers like to have theories. Why write poetry? To make sense of what otherwise I would not understand. Too brief an answer to be useful? Then how write poetry? The best theory I've run across was voiced in a book my antique-dealing uncle gave me when I was an undergraduate: Arthur Koestler's Insight and Outlook. Briefly, Koestler suggests that the act of creation involves the making of a connection between one field of experience and another. When Archimedes connected his daily ritual of taking a bath with the frustrating task of measuring the volume of a crown so that he could assess whether it was made of pure metal or an alloy, he yelled Eureka! and ran down the street naked. Esthetic pleasure, Koestler contends, is proportionate to the initial distance between the things "bisociated" in that flash of discovery and the justness of the connection. When the charged poles are close together, the electricity crackles delicately across the gap; when the poles are separated, there is a thunderbolt. A poem can tickle. A poem can zap.

At the heart of all creativity and discovery is metaphor or analogy. This is seen in terms of that. For me, "this" is where I am or the world is, here and now as I write, and "that" is something on my bulletin board full of unnamed experiences, something that will now find words. I offer "Midday in the Caldarium" as a case study. How was it conceived, how gestated into being?

To say it began in a high-school English class is to ignore that chaotic bulletin board on which I was posting material when I was still in utero, but I can say the Eureka process would not have kicked in had I not asked my students to write examples of images on the blackboard. When the board was swarming with words, we eliminated such non-images as violence, nothingness and love. The assignment was to choose three images that didn't go together, to find a way of connecting them, and to make them the core of an original poem. When it came to the hard part, there were groans of course, so I challenged the class to pick any three images for me to play with. What I got was gladiator, hot-tub, and liquor. Two of these have played no significant role in my life. But in those circumstances I couldn't go, "Oh, please!" To mix my metaphors, I picked up the gauntlet and ran off with it.

The result was the poem that ended in a bloodbath. The hot-tub became both cauldron and caldarium, the former (via Macbeth) linking to chaos and the latter to luxury. The relationship between these concepts (not in themselves images) became the theme of the poem. The liquor became merely a "prop" for the life of luxury; Campari came right off a mental wordlist, a drink both "modern" and "Roman". Why Roman? I think I came up with an Italian memory even before I found a place for Colosseum (which, during revision, replaced that troublesome gladiator). Was this substitution cheating? Of course. And I told the class once they were struggling that they too were allowed to cheat if the poem demanded it. I cheated with the "Italian memory" as well, but only I knew that. A poet is under no obligation to tell the truth; the truth is what he makes. Pinned on my bulletin board was the Villa dei Cipressi, Via Santa Margherita, Florence, in the summer of 1960. Yes, there was a maid called Concietta. Yes, there were lizards and vines and fig-trees and dark-flaming cypresses (though the latter are linked to Van Gogh's Provence). Yes, I believe I first tasted Campari on that—my first—trip to Italy. But, no, there was no hot-tub. And I think I invented the fence-building peasant. Where did he come from? Arbitrarily from my own recent exertions with a post-hole digger? Not entirely. What was emerging was the poem's "idea."

Noting that modernism in writing is chiefly about "seeing, seeing as superior to thinking, seeing as opposed to thinking," Howard Nemerov observed that "most ideas are not contained in the mere names of things" and that "if you are and say you are in principle against any ideas save such as come packaged in things, you will have to bootleg your ideas in somehow-anyhow...while continuing to proclaim that you are doing no such thing." I've long been uneasy about this opinion because it seems not only to be at odds with the way I compose but also to undermine my insistence that my students compose as much as possible through images alone. My own credo has been that a complex of images, particularly of analogous images, can adequately suggest and define an idea, that idea being the structural pattern that the images share. Some reader will observe that my thinking is becoming Platonic.

The pattern of this emergent poem I could express diagrammatically: inside a circle is written the word Luxury and, outside, the word Need. The concepts of boundaries, of territoriality, of imperialism are implicit in the drawing. That which "contains" (hot-tub, private property, colony, empire) is recognized as the mythical Cauldron of Plenty. And, once that mythical level is reached, the hot-tub is recognized as the one in which Medea (among others) rejuvenated old men. But what is at the heart of the Empire? Not just the elitist gymnasium, the health spa at the Athletic Club, but the Roman Colosseum itself, where—as in Macbeth—the treasure of Nature's germens tumbles all together even till destruction sickens.

The poem, such as it is, "makes a point." But that point derives from the bisociation of memory images. I can be certain that the poem would not have looked like this if, instead of three disparate images, images that I didn't even generate, the starting point had been an assignment to write a poem about Social Injustice, about Territoriality, about Greed, about Indifference.

For me, there must be imagery. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, I protest, "What is the good of a book without pictures and conversation?" In more doctrinaire fashion Ezra Pound proclaims that "the natural object is always the adequate symbol." Yes, but. Yes, as we teachers always insist, the abstract generalization is validated only by concrete evidence. But a reader may or may not recognize the challenge to read an image as a symbol if it exists in isolation. Why should a hot-tub be a symbol? Isn't it just a hot-tub? One way of making the symbolic significance overt is to give the full equation, as does Louis MacNeice: "for all the history of grief, An empty doorway and a maple leaf." Another is to develop a motif, to string together images that are structurally analogous. That is how I generally operate: the tub's black rim ... the perimeter of property ... post-holes in the red dirt ... the edge of chaos.

As I was reading through "Midday in the Caldarium" just last night, I was struck by a notion that has little to do with the role of analogous thinking in its composition. We all know that texts change their meaning from one reading to the next. When I read Euripides last year, Medea was the archetypal terrorist, the homeless "foreigner" who knows that war invariably demands the murder of one's own children. When I read Sophocles and Shakespeare this year, Antigone and Cordelia were activists against blindly paranoid male self-assertion. A student who has a wayward brother that the rest of the family cannot forgive or who has an aged grandparent suffering from Alzheimer's disease would read the plays differently. And that's as it should be. Certainly, such "creative misprision" of the text would be more valuable to these students than merely "doing" the text under my guidance and accepting a canonically-correct reading uncritically.

So what does my poem mean now? Certainly, I cannot read the last seven lines as I did when first I decided, in 1988, that the poem was "finished." Certainly, waking with a choking cry only to be soothed by propaganda means something more in 1991 or 1999 than it did in 1988. Maybe I am a little closer to explaining why a poet writes. Like Coleridge's Kubla Khan the poet hears ancestral voices prophesying war in Central America, the Persian Gulf, the Balkans and decrees a stately pleasure dome, a pleasure dome where he or she can simmer in guilty luxury while the legions fly sorties aimed at spilling barbarian blood, sorties financed by poet and reader alike.

Saint Louis, 1999