{"id":308,"date":"2004-10-22T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-22T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/what-he-thought\/"},"modified":"2004-10-22T08:45:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-22T15:45:00","slug":"what-he-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/22\/what-he-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"What He Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Heather McHugh<\/a>. I’ve had this one linked to my home page for a while, but I’m not above recycling.<\/p>\n

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
\n
and, full of our feeling for
\n
ourselves (our sense of being
\n
Poets from America) we went
\n
from Rome to Fano, met
\n
the mayor, mulled
\n
a couple matters over (what’s
\n
a cheap date, they asked us; what’s
\n
flat drink). Among Italian literati<\/p>\n

we could recognize our counterparts:
\n
the academic, the apologist,
\n
the arrogant, the amorous,
\n
the brazen and the glib — and there was one<\/p>\n

administrator (the conservative), in suit
\n
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
\n
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
\n
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
\n
Of all, he was most politic and least poetic,
\n
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
\n
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
\n
I found a book of poems this
\n
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
\n
in the pensione<\/i> room (a room he’d recommended)
\n
where it must have been abandoned by
\n
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
\n
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
\n
I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book
\n
back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans<\/p>\n

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
\n
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
\n
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
\n
till, sensible it was our last
\n
big chance to be poetic, make
\n
our mark, one of us asked
\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “What’s poetry?
\n
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
\n
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
\n
the statue there?” Because I was<\/p>\n

the glib one, I identified the answer
\n
instantly, I didn’t have to think — “The truth
\n
is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that
\n
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
\n
taught me something about difficulty,
\n
for our underestimated host spoke out,
\n
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:<\/p>\n

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
\n
brought to be burned in the public square
\n
because of his offense against
\n
authority, which is to say
\n
the Church. His crime was his belief
\n
the universe does not revolve around
\n
the human being: God is no
\n
fixed point or central government, but rather is
\n
poured in waves through all things. All things
\n
move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is
\n
the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was
\n
his heresy. The day they brought him
\n
forth to die, they feared he might
\n
incite the crowd (the man was famous
\n
for his eloquence). And so his captors
\n
placed upon his face
\n
an iron mask, in which<\/p>\n

he could not speak. That’s
\n
how they burned him. That is how
\n
he died: without a word, in front
\n
of everyone.
\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And poetry —
\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0(we’d all
\n
put down our forks by now, to listen to
\n
the man in gray; he went on
\n
softly) —
\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0poetry is what
\n
he thought, but did not say. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Heather McHugh. I’ve had this one linked to my home page for a while, but I’m not above recycling. We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}