June 10, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Ted Hughes
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.
Ted Hughes makes people angry. His name was repeatedly defaced off of Plath's grave by Plath fanatics, who live their lives in a state of mania and rage at this man who "caused" the death of their goddess. No. He didn't cause it. The man had an affair. He didn't invade a small country, he didn't kill a puppy, he had an affair. Lots of people have affairs. It sucks, but it's not a crime on the level of genocide or something. His affair did have an unbelievably tragic and horrifying aftermath, something which he obviously could not foresee at the time. Plath had a history of mental illness and had tried to commit suicide before. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas (Nicholas recently killed himself, and I am so emotionally involved with this entire group of people that I remember thinking, "I am so glad that his father did not live to see this" and also, "Poor Frieda." Just a tragedy.) Hughes was the executor of Plath's estate, a situation which enraged the Plath-ians, because he was the Devil, don't you understand. But he, a world-famous poet himself, went along with the sad job of editing her Collected Poems, editing her last volume Ariel, and also editing her journals (his most controversial job ever). I suppose he could never have pleased anyone. He made decisions in the editing which still rankle. I get that Plath was his wife, but she was also a public figure, and my view is: her work belongs to me more than it belongs to him.
Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, wrote an article, on the re-publication of Ariel in its original order (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (P.S.)
Criticism of my father was even levelled at his ownership of my mother's copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me. Through the legacy of her poetry my mother still cared for us, and it was strange to me that anyone would wish it otherwise.After my mother's suicide and the publication of Ariel, many cruel things were written about my father that bore no resemblance to the man who quietly and lovingly (if a little strictly and being sometimes fallible) brought me up - later with the help of my stepmother. All the time, he kept alive the memory of the mother who had left me, so I felt as if she were watching over me, a constant presence in my life.
It appeared to me that my father's editing of Ariel was seen to "interfere" with the sanctity of my mother's suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous. For me, as her daughter, everything associated with her was miraculous, but that was because my father made it appear so, even playing me a record of my mother reading her poetry so I could hear her voice again. It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to my father's more temperate and optimistic nature, and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father's work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it. I'd been aghast that my perfect image of her, attached to my last memories, was so unbalanced. But my mother, inasmuch as she was an exceptional poet, was also a human being and I found comfort in restoring the balance; it made sense of her for me. The outbursts were the exception, not the rule. Life at home was generally quiet, and my parents' relationship was hardworking and companionable. However, as her daughter, I needed to know the truth of my mother 's nature - as I did my father's - since it was to help me understand my own.
Frieda Hughes's voice is a welcome change to the usual dialogue about Hughes. She is quite a good writer herself.
Hughes supposedly destroyed the last two years of Plath's journal, because they were too painful for him to look at. While I understand where he is coming from, I still wish that I could read those last two years. About 10 years ago, the "unabridged" version of Plath's journals
Following Plath's suicide in 1963, Hughes moved in with Assia Wevill, the woman with whom he had had an affair during his marriage to Plath. He must have been crazy at that time. My heart goes out to him. Assia took care of Frieda and Nicholas, who were only babies at that time. She was pregnant herself, with Hughes's child, and in 1965 she gave birth to a little girl they named Shura. No one can know what goes on behind closed doors, although there's plenty of nasty speculation, something I have no interest in. I'm basically on Hughes's side in all of this, or let's say I can see his side. No one has an affair thinking, "Hopefully my wife will kill herself from her grief." To assign that sort of malevolent motive to this man, who obviously was a bit wild, is unfair to the nth degree (I mean, Sylvia knew that from the start - their "meeting" wasn't going out for Cherry Cokes at the drivein - they met wasted at a literary party and made out within minutes of meeting each other, and Plath bit his cheek. They were married 4 months later. So the signs were there. These were both volatile intense people.) I also don't believe in judging him harshly. So he liked crazy women. That's obvious. So? Should the man be burned on a pyre of hate for all time because he was drawn to crazy women? Horrifyingly, Assia imitated Plath's suicide in 1969, only she upped the ante, killing their young daughter along herself. I do not blame Hughes for that. I blame Assia. Hughes must have ... I have no idea. Such an experience is so outside of normal life, I can't imagine how he bore it.
Ted Hughes, in a heartwrenching letter to Lucas Myers, on September 29, 1984, referred to those terrible years:
I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors - but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn't long enough to wake up from them.
That just breaks my heart. That's from the recent publication of Letters of Ted Hughes
Okay. Now let's talk about his poetry, shall we? I just had to get all of the personal stuff out of the way. Hughes has always been a controversial figure, not just because of his horrible and famous personal life, but because of his poetry, which is fierce, violent, bloody, and very much out of the tenor of his particular time. You read the work of his contemporaries (especially in the 50s, when he was becoming famous), and you can feel the difference. His poems are frightening. There is a primal energy at work, nature being red in tooth and claw and all that. Hughes is all about that red in tooth and claw.
Calvin Bedient wrote, in re: Hughes:
His weakness is not violence but the absolute egotism of survival. It is the victor he loves, not war.
It was one of the things that drew Plath to him. You can feel his influence in her poetry at that time. She was such a cerebral thing, so mannered and precocious, not to mention self-centered (which is one of the best parts of her poetry). But after meeting him, she suddenly starts writing about owls and rabbits and bogs ... perhaps trying to turn her glance outwards a bit. It's some of her nicest work. There is a symbiosis at work here, and you can feel her influence on him as well.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
She [Plath] is the deliberate poet, she devises strategies, she competes for space and attention. She is experimental, setting herself exercises. She is an ironist. If the energies of their language at times seem comparable, they flow from different sources and it was more than their human proximity than a sense of common poetic objectives that make them seem so close in their marked differences, their incompatabilities.
But enough about Plath. I'll get to her later on my Poetry Bookshelf. Oh, you can bet I will.
The Norton Anthology introduction to Hughes says:
When he looked at nature, he found predators and victims; when he showed nature looking at humanity, as in "Crow's First Lesson," the same dynamic appeared. The poet's imagination whirls with increasing wildness, until some readers long for modulations of this baleful glare. Such ferocity, however, is so rare in English poetry, and Hughes was so effective as its exponent, that he gripped a considerable audience. He could not have done so by subject alone: his compression, his daring vocabulary, and his jarring rhythms all contributed. In contrast to the rational lucidity and buttoned-up form of his English contemporaries in the Movement such as Philip Larkin and Donald Davie, Hughes fashions a mythical consciousness in his poems, embodied in violent metaphors, blunt syntax, harsh alliterative clusters, bunched stresses, incantatory repetitions, insistent assonances, and a dark, brooding tone.
It's powerful stuff. I love it. He's one of the few poets who can actually take my breath away when reading some of his work. And yes, sometimes it's TOO intense. You need a break from it. But imagine what it must have been like for HIM. Hughes was a craftsman of the highest order, and he had great discipline (at least in his working habits). He was prolific, and determined. He worked HARD.
Here is Michael Schmidt, again:
A writer of many parts, he was never content to stop with poetry. He wrote stories, children's poetry, stage pieces. He invented a "talking without words," Orghast. He translated from the poets of Eastern Europe and, triumphantly in 1996, from Ovid. He was a powerful advocate, especially of Emily Dickinson and Keith Douglas. He was drawn to manifestations of power and to those creatures (some of them human) who manage to survive the excesses of power. Singularity, the "single mind sized skull," intrigued him; in Shakespeare's tragedies how a single human displaces the more complex elements of character and compels human action much as instinct compels animal action. His poem "Thrushes" is an alarming statement of this interest, seeming to celebrate pure instinct. Here is another kind of candor, a poetic commitment to theme that does not reflect on morality but on essential energy, which is not "considered speech" in Davie's sense but "authentic speech" (some of it hard to speak aloud), the language of Heathcliff rather than Linton. Humanism is alluring but inadequate, the old symbols bankrupt.
There's a lot in Dickinson that calls to mind Hughes: the violent imagery, the sudden pricks and cuts that pepper her work, as though life itself is an assault on her. Hughes' animal poems are amazing. He does not anthropomorphize like D.H. Lawrence did. He observes. His poems on owls and pikes and jaguars are stunning examples of how poets often can teach us how to see. If we let them. Hughes was fascinated by the other-ness of animals, and had been from his earliest years. He was born in Yorkshire, in a wild woolly area, and grew up hunting, fishing, tramping through bogs. In a way, his poetry can be seen as a tribute to his own father, and the life his father lived, so different from the urban and academic bustle that Hughes became ensconced in. He went to Cambridge, and majored in anthropology and archaeology, another thing that set him apart from his contemporaries. While he was already well-known in literary circles when he met Plath in 1956, it wasn't until the late 60s and early 70s that his fame became worldwide. He had other works in circulation, but he published two volumes of poetry then - Wodwo
Schmidt writes:
[The Birthday Letters] is a partial triumph, lacing in intimacy, a confession that must assert and reassert its sincerity, a candor that wants to be believed. At the root of the poems is love, of course, but also a complex set of angers that, in order to keep them under control, Hughes had to convey in a largely matter-of-fact prosody, writing against his cadential instincts. It is a fascinating experiment, a candor that is cold, calculated and only marginally vulnerable, the ultimate in his poetry of survival, counting the cost and discounting (obliquely) the lies that have grown around the story of two young poets and their marriage.
While, on some level, he will always be "married" to Plath, in readers' minds, his work stands apart, and in order to get clear on his identity as a poet, it is sometimes necessary to try to get Plath out of the way, not an easy task. There are those who only read Hughes looking for "clues" as to what he was ACTUALLY saying about Plath, a tremendously boring way to look at his poetry, in my opinion. I am not saying I always succeed. I am a Plath fan from the time I was 16 years old, and I have had a lifelong relationship with her work (it grows, morphs, changes, it is never one thing), and I came to Hughes way later, although he was a huge figure to me in my mind because of his marriage to Plath. I was never one of those who thought that Hughes was the devil incarnate. He was a man. He effed up his marriage. But let's be honest: Plath was no angel, and she cannot have been easy to live with. She felt intimidated by her husband's work, she had demons from her childhood which gave her agonizing sometimes years-long bouts with writer's block, and her competitive relationship with her husband was something that she could barely acknowledge. At the same time, Hughes was baffled by what was happening: He had married a POET, why was she so obsessed with housewifery? Couldn't they just keep on being bohemian and not worry about that domestic stuff? He didn't understand. He openly admits that in Birthday Letters. He had married her after knowing her 4 months. There was much he didn't know. So in many ways, Plath forced him away, she needed him to be a monster, because that was the male-female dynamic she understood. Her father died when she was a child. After that, she needed men to leave her, it was essential that she keep playing out that earlier drama. She probably was not aware of all of this on a conscious level, although her poems are brutally honest about it. Hughes can't have had an easy time of it, with her as a wife. There were two victims in that marriage. Nobody "won" here.
The poem I chose today to go along with this post is "Horses", written in 1957. A strange connection (and sorry, but Plath can't seem to keep herself out of this) is Plath's famous poem "Ariel", also about a horse at dawn, and written in the terrible autumn of 1962, after Hughes left her, and only a couple of months before she killed herself. "Ariel" has some similar elements to Hughes's poem here, the whole "horizon" aspect - with Plath flinging herself at the horizon, with the rising sun - into the "cauldron of morning".
But let us let Hughes's poem speak for itself. It may not be his most famous, but it is one of my favorites of his. It really shows his power of language, his energy of image, and the strange visionary aspect of how he sees things.
Horses
I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,
Not a leaf, not a bird -
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood
Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness
Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:
Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.
I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.
I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.
Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,
And the big planets hanging -
I turned
Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,
And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,
Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them
The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,
Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays -
In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place
Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.
June 7, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Frank O'Hara
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.
Poets are often fascinating in their approach to language and their work, and I can love their work, and all that, but how many would I want to hang around with? How many seem FUN? Well, there are a few, but not many. Frank O'Hara is a beautiful character, a man with wide interests and a joyous approach to life. His "then I did this, then I did that" poems, roaming the streets of New York City, are so accessible, so fun, that all I want to do is tag along. His interests are wide and deep. He worked for the Museum of Modern Art, and a lot of his poems were inspired by the modern artists of the day - de Kooning and others. He was in New York at a vital and exciting time. How much would I love to have been alive in the 1950s and hang around with the artists and bohemians and Beats of that time. O'Hara published a couple of volumes of poetry, but they weren't major events, like the volumes of his friends. They were with small presses, and seemed personal and perhaps ... a bit trivial. Time has been very kind to Frank O'Hara, kinder than some of his contemporaries, and I think it has to do with the conversational tone of his poems, and also the fact that they don't just seem to be ABOUT life, they ARE his life. There is no separation between poet and language. He wrote his poems on scraps of paper in his spare time (and he didn't have much spare time, his job and position in the art world was quite prominent), and he died quite young. He was hit by a dune buggy on the beach at Fire Island, a freak accident, horrible. He left behind shoeboxes filled with poems, never before seen or published, a huge body of work (he was the Emily Dickinson of the 50s), and his friends (important people, big poets) ushered them into the public eye.
There's an element of camp, I suppose, in some of his poems, but to only look at it through that filter would be to miss the wider scope of it. One of the things I love about Frank O'Hara is his unabashed love for the entertainers and writers and painters who moved him. He is a "fan". He wrote poems for them. This is the kind of thing that "serious" people pooh-pooh, like it's not a topic worthy of consideration (I've gotten it on my blog from time to time; these are the "aren't there more serious things to discuss in the world than the career of Dean Stockwell?" Sure there are. There are many sites devoted to such topics. Go find them. HOWEVER: my point is: On some level, I can't think of something MORE worthy of discussion than the artists who touch us. Art is one of the things that keeps us together, connects us, opens up conversation, and admits such beautiful emotions as "enthusiasm", "joy", "happiness" - or even things that are thought-provoking and difficult. Who says Lana Turner isn't a worthy topic for a poem? Shame on you, dumbass!)
O'Hara wrote:
Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and [Hart] Crane and [William Carlos] Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.
There's something about Frank O'Hara's poems, its listings of places and names and street intersections and automats and delis that remind me of Joseph Cornell's work, and makes me wonder if they knew one another. They were in New York at the same time. Cornell never left New York, except for one trip as a kid to the Jersey Shore. Literally. He never left the city. He stayed in Queens, and took care of his brother who had severe cerebral palsy, and in his spare time, scoured the junk shops on Second Avenue for books and movie postcards and objects - all of which he used in making his magical boxes. Joseph Cornell cannot be separated from New York City. His boxes exude that entire landscape: movie palaces, museums, second-hand book stores, Edward Hopper's lonely nights ... it is 100% urban, and so is Frank O'Hara. I can think of few poets of his generation who are so connected to a specific place.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
His casual attitude to his poems tells us much about him and them: it's not that he didn't value them, but he didn't worry much about them after they were written. He was not especially interested in a final permanent text ... He preferred to work with galleries, as though the poems were entries in an exhibition catalog, an exhibition made of his daily life.
Schmidt also writes, comparing him to the Beats, who were his contemporaries:
O'Hara begins with a rather witty, spoken simplicity, the poems in the language he used with his friends, wry, light, a little naughty, but without the scatalogical grittiness of the Beats. Ginsberg may have affected some of his poems, "Second Avenue" in particular, but while Ginsberg is always comfortably unwashed and hairy of face, O'Hara is cleanshaven and unobtrusive, keeping his own rather than everyone else's counsel. There is a reticence about the man and the poems. In many ways he is closer to Whitman than Ginsberg ever gets; and to Lorca and Mayakovsky because he understands Futurism and Surrealism, and when his poetry surrealizes it is with a knowledge of what he wants the surreal to do for the poem. He doesn't blunder and risk like Crane, or rant like Ginsberg. His poems are busy in the world; they haven't the time to stand back and preach or invent monstrous forms. He is the most New York of the New York poets.
If you haven't encountered Frank O'Hara's work, all I can say is: do yourself a favor ...
The wonderful Joan Acocella wrote an essay about O'Hara called "Perfectly Frank", included in the compilation Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. She writes:
In the doomed-poet drama that has been retrospectively read into O'Hara's story, this poem ['A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island'] has been taken as a premonition of death. But to me the most remarkable thing about it is O'Hara's sense of blessedness, an emotion that surfaces again and again in his verse. Indeed, it is one of the things ("gay, glancing") held against him by those who feel that he was not a serious person. This, in turn, has led some of his defenders to overstress the sadness - presumably a warranty of seriousness - that can sometimes be detected in his poetry. The light tread of his lyrics, Geoff Ward says, "is only a step away from the grave." It is true that O'Hara had the Irish sense of life, but the note of grief would be far less persuasive if it were not accompanied, as it almost always is, by the keenest possible responsiveness to life's goodness. Even at his most depressed, when his romance with Vincent Warren is falling apart, O'Hara is witty. ("I walk in / sit down and / face the frigidaire" - presumably Vincent.) When, on the other hand, that relationship is going well, even bad things seem good to him: "Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion."Boyfriends aside, he finds a thousand things to like. Ballet dancers fly through his verse. Taxi drivers tell him funny things. Zinka Milanov sings, the fountains splash. The city honks at him and he honks back. This willingness to be happy is one of the things for which O'Hara is most loved, and rightly so. It is a fundamental aspect of his moral life, and the motor of his poetry.
I love that. A "willingness to be happy". That really really captures O'Hara for me.
Here a couple of posts by my friend Ted about O'Hara:
Because too much was never enough for him
Here is a poem that O'Hara wrote in 1964 about the day Billie Holiday died. (Mal Waldron, referenced in the poem, was Holiday's pianist from 1957 until her death. All the other references? You're on your own.)
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
June 6, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Allen Ginsberg
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.
"First thought, best thought" was Allen Ginsberg's motto, despite the fact that he edited his pieces relentlessly. He saw himself in a line with Whitman and Blake, big prophetic transcendent poets, and even his line-lengths, long and rambling, but with a serious internal structure - LOOK like Whitman's and Blake's poems. He uses repetition in an incantatory way, piling the same word through long poems, so that the drum-beat becomes relentless. Ginsberg always makes me think of Mitchell, who played him in a well-known production in Chicago, and also of my father, who loved the Beats. He said to me once (and he was not a man to live in regret - this was the only time he ever said to me that he had other dreams) that if he could have lived two lives, he would also have loved to be a Beat, and live the kinds of lives they lived at that time. An interesting insight into my father. Dad recognized balderdash for what it is, but it was their seeking questioning outlook, their lack of concern for convention, their total immersion in art, that he admired. I won't say envied, because I don't think that's what Dad meant. He tells a funny story of meeting William S. Burroughs once at the Arts Club here in New York, some literary gathering of book collectors, dealers, editors, publishers. Burroughs showed up, and by that point he was an old man, in his customary garb, instantly recognizable, and he had two young boys in tow, in their early 20s, who were dressed in an identical manner. Burroughs made his way through the crowd, and the two boys followed him, and Dad said the three of them reminded him of a "school of fish". Burroughs the leader, darting this way, the two boys darting quickly to follow, then that way, the two boys in tow.
The fact that Ginsberg and Burroughs didn't die from their excesses in the 60s is something rather extraordinary, in and of itself.
The Anthology introduction to Ginsberg states:
For some, the publication of Ginsberg's "Howl" and Other Poems (1956) was the beginning of a mindless and mercifully short-lived poetic fad, a cult of slovenly verse that encouraged dangerously slovenly behavior. For others, it was a fortunate and revolutionary change in the direction of American poetry. Like all poetic innovators, Ginsberg seemed to claim for poetry new areas of experience and new cultural situations. "Howl" is a panoramic vision of the dark side of the complacent Eisenhower years; it discovered for literature an anticommunity of waifs and strays, drug addicts and homosexual drifters. Ginsberg's poetry presented an alternative to the tightly organized, well-mannered poetry written under the influence of the New Criticism; it was emotionally explosive, unashamedly self-preoccupied and metrically expansive, and it helped create in the 1960s an audience for influential books of psychic rebellion and revelation, such as Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death.
Some of Ginsberg's stuff is embarrassing to read, as it is meant to be, I believe, and not all of it works, but as a whole it is a powerful document of a long journey: he was born in 1926 and died in 1997. And unlike many of "the best minds of [his] generation" who were "destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix", Ginsberg made it through alive, and became more famous as an old man than he was a young man. He was a Poet Emeritus for America in his final years, a familiar face, involved in the causes he believed in, but also teaching and lecturing and holding workshops, and answering voluminous correspondence with young poets looking for a way to break through. Despite the fact that he was highly educated, he was not an academic. Part of his poetry was about shuffling off the dryness of academia and looking for direct experience. Of whatever it was: poetry, the sky, love, sex. He experimented with drugs, as most of his crowd did, but he wasn't as out of control with it as were his contemporaries. He used it as a path to enlightenment, and many of his poems were written under that influence. Later on, however, he came to see that much of that behavior was a way to remain separate from his fellow man - it isolates people - and he came to see, through his travels, his meetings with wise men in monasteries and all that Eastern stuff - that the only reason we are here, on this planet, is to try to connect to one another. Taking hallucinogens helped him connect with the nonhuman: the spiritual subtext of things, the ancient sky, nature ... Once he made that connection, after traveling through India (what is it about India?), he gave up the drugs and became a dedicated advocate of meditation. It helped him to "inhabit the human form" (his words).
Peter Balakian, in his harrowing memoir (also an investigation of the Armenian genocide) Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
I've come to see poetry as the chain of language linking lands and events, people and places that make up our family story. Poetry has been a deep well of thought and feeling and language lushness that the Balakians have lived by.
So it's 1970, Balakian is a senior, writing poetry, and trying to deal with his family (it's an absolutely amazing book if you haven't read it - the Armenian family wanting to forget the past, never mentioning the genocide, and Peter growing up in an atmosphere where he knows that something bad happened back there, but nobody speaks of it - they are American now, no more of this Armenian nonsense), and he gets Ginsberg to come to the school. It's a huge event. And Balakian's mother shows up at the reading unannounced. By this point in the book, we know enough to be a bit nervous about this. His mother is strict, ladylike, and the boss of the family. She has high standards for behavior. So ... how on earth will she deal with listening to Ginsberg reading "Howl" and "Kaddish", with his lover Peter Orlovsky in tow, and everyone sitting around on the floor smoking dope? Balakian then provides an incredibly moving account of that day. It brings tears to my eyes:
With his beard and hair brushing at the sides of his balding head and his horn-rimmed glasses, Ginsberg looked serious and vulnerable as he hobbled onto the porch of 208 South Seventh Street with a broken leg in a walking cast under his blue-jean overalls, accompanied by his friend Peter Orlovsky, whose biceps bulged from a tee shirt with a huge American flag on the front. They arrived at 4:30 and I wasn't surprised when my mother drove up a few minutes later in our Vista Cruiser station wagon. She told me on the phone the night before that she was thinking about making a visit to her alma mater and that this seemed like the perfect excuse, and she said she would bring dinner. I must have been expecting her, because all I had on hand was an aluminum bowl of Lipton's instant soup onion dip, some potato chips, and a couple of gallons of cheap wine. She walked into my college apartment bright and cheery as some friends were passing joints and Ginsberg and Orlovsky were holding forth with teachers and students. My mother: in a blue suit and suede pumps, carrying two trays of lasagna covered with aluminum foil, some French bread in white bags, plastic bags of lettuce, and a jar of her own salad dressing.Before I could introduce her, she broke into the circle around Ginsberg and Orlovsky: "Allen, I'm Arax Balakian, Peter's mother; your father taught my sister at Paterson High in '33; he was her favorite teacher." My mother and Allen Ginsberg began exchanging Paterson High gossip, town gossip, northern Jersey gossip, and my mother, who had dug up the titles of a few of Louis Ginsberg's poems my aunt liked, began praising them. Ginsberg seemed so delightedly caught off-guard that he now turned his sole attention to my mother, leaving the professors and students to themselves.
Still chatting with Ginsberg, my mother began dishing up lasagna, imploring everyone to eat because the reading was in less than an hour. As she darted around the kitchen, trying to consolidate our motley collection of silverware, plates, and half-cleaned glasses, she turned to Ginsberg and said, as if she were asking him if he wanted some croutons with his salad: "Allen, would you like to see the review Helen Vendler wrote of The Fall of America? The Times Book Review is giving it the front page next Sunday." Before I could protectively nudge my mother back to the lasagna, convinced that she was making a fool of herself, she pulled out of her purse the galley proofs my aunt Nona had given her with the review of Ginsberg's new book.
I realized my mother had come with this document uncannily timed to establish her relationship to the poet and his work, to words and texts, in a way that quite frankly blew my mind. Did she wish to show me that literature was a territory she too could navigate? Faculty and students stared at her in disbelief, and Allen stared for a second and then said, "Arax, may I see that?" The bond between them now was unbreakable, and I watched as students and teachers closed in around them.
"Allen, it's not a bad review," my mother went on, as if she were a literary critic. "I hope you're not disappointed," she said, sounding motherly. Now in the inner circle with Ginsberg, she was enjoying herself immensely, and I stood there sipping some cheap wine, astonished and wondering, had my mother really read The Fall of America?"
Marvelous. He wanted real connection. She provided it. She was not like the sycophants circled around him, which must be a huge problem when you become famous. Al Pacino told a great story about how he realized he was famous when he was at a party once and everyone laughed uproariously at every joke he told. It made him uneasy. He stopped having to work hard. It was strangely isolating. It's good to have people around you who treat you normal. Mrs. Balakian, scooping out lasagna, as the pot-smoke drifts in from her son's living room, calling Allen Ginsberg "Allen", and insisting that they be friends. They were.
Now, to put some context into this: Arax Balakian's entire family was wiped out in 1915. The family tree Balakian puts at the beginning of the book is a chilling reminder of what genocide looks like. The date "1915" is the end-stop of that entire generation. Arax Balakian has never discussed the genocide, no one in the family has ever discussed it - Peter Balakian grew up not even knowing that there was a genocide. He senses something is ... off ... but it takes him years to put it together, and his final act of commemoration and memory is the writing of Black Dog of Fate, where he tells his family's incredible and harrowing story. This is where Balakian's mother is coming from, even with her judgmental stance on Peter's girlfriends, and certain types of Armenians, and her uptight insistence that her family is AMERICAN, not Armenian. Balakian then goes on to describe the reading. Orlovsky read a poem, too, about jerking off Allen, and Balakian was mortified, glancing over at his mother to see if she were horrified or outraged. She sat there, impassive, no response. Peter, however, wanted to sink through the floor. Ginsberg read for a couple of hours, people drifted in and out, smoking pot, and the crowd thinned a bit, and then:
After three hours, only a handful of people were left and I wished the whole thing were over. I was on the verge of signaling Ginsberg to wind it up, when out of nowhere, he began to recite in a beautiful, resonant voice: "Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while / I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village, / downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up / all night ... listening to Ray Charles blues about blind on the phonograph." It was "Kaddish", his epic poem about his mother. A poem that I loved.Into the tired, nearly emptied littered hall the rush of images began to flood. I sat staring at the old linoleum floor in the slightly blue light coming from the '40s fluorescent fixtures above. I watched my mother sitting cross-legged in the middle of the near-empty room, intent and poised as a young student.
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and weeks - forgetting, aggrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth, ...
Or back at Normal School in Newark, studying up on America in a black skirt - winter on the street without lunch - a penny a pickle - home at night to take care of Eleanor in the bedroom -
First nervous breakdown was 1919 - she stayed home from school and lay in a dark room for three weeks - something bad - never said what - every noise hurt - dreams of the creaks of Wall StreetAs Ginsberg's words echoed in the cavernous dining hall, I buried my head in my hands and began to weep.
Ginsberg and Orlovsky slept at Peter Balakian's that night. Here is the ending of the story:
When my mother barged into my room quite early the next morning, I don't know what she expected to find. Charlene and me? Or me under the covers, alone in pajamas? She found neither, because I had neglected to tell her that I had given my room to Allen and Peter, and that I was staying at Charlene's. What she witnessed exactly - that is, the precise details - I've never been able to find out, but my apartment mates who lived in abutting rooms said they heard her scream and run down the hallway and the stairs, and from their windows, watched her get in her car and drive away. Ginsberg and Orlovsky were in bed. Ginsberg had a walking cast on. The rest remains between Peter and Allen and my mother and it seemed clear that Peter and Allen were unruffled by the intrusion.When my mother called the next day, she was effusive with the afterglow of the occasion. "It's amazing," she said, "how much Jews and Armenians have in common. I felt so at home with Allen. Please tell him and Peter that they must come to dinner the next time they're in Jersey."
"I will, Mom," I said sullenly. "Thanks for everything."
"And one other thing," she said. "That poem 'Kaddish', I want to get a couple copies of it; can you find it in your bookstore?"
"Yeah," I said, and then there was silence.
"You know," she went on, "that poem, I can relate to it."
"You can?" I said reluctantly.
"In some way it's about Armenia, too."
Still hurting from what had happened over Charlene, I did not feel like talking with my mother at this moment, when she seemed to want to say something serious about herself to me.
"That's good," I said. "See you at graduation."
I hung up the phone feeling ambivalent. I did not want the poem, the evening, Ginsberg, to be a bridge between us, not just then, because I was sunk in my own spite. I did not tell my mother that I had wept listening to "Kaddish" in Larison Dining Hall, did not want her to know how much the poem affected me. But I was also sorry I could not talk to her just then.
An amazing anecdote, I think, and speaks to the strange deep power of Ginsberg's best work. His stuff is so personal, so specific, and yet here is an example of how it crosses over into the universal. I don't think that is true of all of his stuff, and I am not fond of his later poems, which seem coy to me. I like Ginsberg loud, messy, in a rage, on the edge, and howling his pain and fear up into the universe at the top of his lungs. "Kaddish" is a hell of a poem.
Ginsberg was notorious early on, because of the controversies surrounding "Howl" (similar to what James Joyce went through with Ulysses), and it put him (and his friends) on the map.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
In America in the late 1940s, Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a "dark night of the soul sort of," his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of [William] Blake before him - "I wasn't even reading, my eye was idling over the page of 'Ah, Sun-flower,' and it suddenly appeared - the poem I'd read a lot of times before." He began to understand the poem and "suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it," he "heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn't think twice, was Blake's voice." This "apparitional voice" became his guiding spirit: "It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son." On Ginsberg this "anciency" fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. "The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs." Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg's appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.
William Carlos Williams (another Paterson, New Jersey poet) wrote the introduction to Howl, an event duly noted by everyone that something new and powerful had arrived. What on earth is the connection between those two poets, except geography? But they had a long correspondence, and Williams was important to Ginsberg, in helping him find his own voice and stop blatantly imitating others. Ginsberg is still a big steal-er, he steals from everyone he meets, it seems, but Williams had pushed him gently towards his own path.
Ginsberg remains controversial to this day. What exactly IS his poetry? How can it be classified? Does it work, separated from him the man? Or was it his readings and performances of his poems that really helped them LAND? I suppose the jury is still out, but it is an interesting thing to think about.
Michael Schmidt has a lot of criticism of Ginsberg's poetry alongside his admiration (and his memories of seeing him perform and how insane it was, how hypnotic and powerful) and really gets a line on some of the conflicts here:
Ginsberg could be the priest of holy madness, anti-authoritarian, a man of generosity, a voice of the future; but he signed the papers to have his mother lobotomized, supported authoritarian individuals and regimes as long as they were ranged against his primary foe, the United States, was ungenerous to fellow poets if they were not of his camp and promoted himself at the expense of those around him, even after he had shaved off his beard and assumed the quiet demeanor of an almost dapper professor. The big days were in the 1950s, and his last four decades fed off the fat of the huge and unexpected pop-star success of his setting out. He remained a compelling performer, even of the awful later poems. Self-projection was his incomparable skill and it proved fatal to the work in the end: the voice could imbue a shopping list with transcendent significance.
Schmidt accurately describes Ginsberg's impact as "drop[ping] on American poetry like a bomb."
So this was a long entry. There's still a lot to talk about when we talk about Allen Ginsberg. Charlatan or muse, sell-out or prophet? Depends on where you are standing. We have Balakian's view of Ginsberg, we have Schmidt's, we have Ginsberg's view of himself, and William Carlos Williams's view. Everyone has an opinion.
And the beat goes on.
Here's a poem of Ginsberg's that I do love, a tribute to one of his two muses, Walt Whitman:
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?
A couple of clips below the jump, of Johnny Depp talking about meeting Ginsberg - really funny interesting stuff:
May 27, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - A.R. Ammons
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.
A.R. Ammons (Archie Randolph Ammons) was born in 1926 in North Carolina. He died in 2001. He's an interesting case because he had a wide life outside of poetry, and yet, come the 70s and 80s, he started winning all of the plum prizes for poetry - National Book Award in 1973, Bollingen Prize in 1975, National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1982, and then another National Book Award in 1993. He received a MacArthur Fellowship (the "genius grant"), one of the first, and he also got the Tanning Prize in 1998. It's interesting to look at those dates. This was a man born in 1926, who got a B.S. in 1949 (he was very scientifically inclined - I think the two poles: science and art - were always in him - his poems reflect that), fought in WWII, and then held down various jobs that had nothing to do with poetry. He was an elementary school principal. He worked in a glass-making firm. Yet all alongside of this ... is poetry.
I think his wide interests give his poems a spark. They are not academic. They breathe with all of his interests and passions. They seem casual, at first. His voice is chatty, informal. But by the end of the poem, you have been on a journey and a half. He is always moving towards something: a revelation, an acceptance, an epiphany. Apparently, he composed his poems on the typewriter - he was very conscious of how the type looked on the page, how the lines lined up, all that. For one poem, he typed it on an unfolding roll of tape from an adding machine. He wanted to force the poem he was writing to adapt itself to the paper it was being written on. An experiment. If you don't have as much space, to let lines flow out to the right margin, how do you express yourself? Using terminology from science - biology, chemistry, geology - gives his poems a grounded feel. I like his stuff very much. I don't know that much about him, and certainly haven't read all of his poems, but I like the MIND behind the work. I like how he puts phrases together. Some of his poems are quite short. And some are huge, epic almost.
The Anthology states in the introduction to Ammons's section:
Ammons writes poetry of motion, process, movement. In "Tombstones", he states "the things of earth are not objects" but "pools of energy cooled into place." The natural world is continuously cooling, radiating, shrinking, mutating, decaying, and reassembling, never in stasis. This vision finds its organic analogue in the loose formal shape and colloquial manner of his poems. Like the mind and like the world, the poem must move and twist and flow. It would be a mistake to try to halt this motion by punctuating its language with end-stopped lines or periods, by impeding it with abstract organization or syntactic closure. Ammons lets his syntax course forward through colons and commas, his enjambed lines, ideas, images, and clauses tumbling over one another. Because "there is no finality of vision," as he says in "Corsons Inlet", the poet should "make no form of / formlessness," "no forcing of image, plan, / or thought: / no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept." In his voluble longer poems and sequences, Ammons wants "to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope."
His long emotional poem "Easter Morning" is a perfect example of what they describe. But it's also a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier: the journey of the poem itself. Ammons is going somewhere, and he doesn't tip his hand right away. He lets the poem itself unfold - it feels like an organic process. I find this poem very moving. Profound.
Easter Morning
I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on
it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left
when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how hes shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school
teachers, just about everybody older
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in, gone
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
cant get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it cant come
back with help or helpful asides, now
we all buy the bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, not rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from
I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
air that holds the world that was my world
though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the flash high-burn
momentary structure of ash, still it
is a picture-book, letter-perfect
Easter morning: I have been for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquility: the birds are lively with
voice: I saw something I had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
and headed, came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
directly over me, high up, and kept on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on seeming
not to notice for a minute: the first
began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its wings
on the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft;
they turned a few more times, possibly
risingat least, clearly resting
then flew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return: a dance sacred as the sap in
the trees, permanent in its descriptions
as the ripples round the brooks
ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood of burn breaking across us now
from the sun.
May 23, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - James Dickey
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.
James Dickey is probably most known for his novel Deliverance
Who knows. Dickey tapped into a certain brand of horror in such a way that it left an indelible mark. The horror of men being rendered helpless. I should say: certain KINDS of men. The kind of guy that, on the face of it, nobody would mess with. You look at Burt Reynolds, you're not gonna mess with him. Burt Reynolds does not walk through the world with an ingrained sense of what it means to be victimized. He just doesn't. So to see him and his friends put into such a position ...
You still see people shiver when they even reference the TITLE of that movie.
But Dickey was primarily a poet. I know that's well-known to poetry fans, but not sure if those Deliverance buffs out there are aware of that. Born in a suburb of Atlanta, he went to college a bit, but when WWII broke out, he enlisted in the army air corps. Dickey told some tall tales about the combat he saw in WWII, most of it apparently untrue, or at least WIDELY exaggerated - and when he came back to America he enrolled at Vanderbilt University, which was a hot-bed of southern-poetry, in terms of the faculty it drew, and the program itself. This was Dickey's full immersion into the vibrant southern poetry scene. He got his Masters from Vanderbilt, and then taught poetry at various universities throughout the south, Florida, South Carolina, and others. He trained radio operators during the Korean War. He wrote Deliverance in 1970. It was his first novel.
Dickey said in 1970:
As Longinus points out, there's a razor's edge between sublimity and absurdity. And that's the edge I try to walk. Sometimes both sides are ludicrous! ... But I don't think you can get to sublimity without courting the ridiculous.
I find James Dickey's poems to be immediate, and almost urgent. Yet there isn't a word in them that feels slapdash. They are obviously well-thought-out, well-constructed, yet behind them is a feeling of life, and breath, and truth. He's not afraid to look at something without blinking, and dig deep into it, to get to the heart of whatever experience it is. The poem I'm linking to today is something that I know, in my bones, having experienced a moment identical to the one described - identical - but the experience is still so fresh and raw that I can barely think about it without falling apart. I'm tearing up as I type this. I am not placing a value judgment on emotion. Dickey may have written what he wrote years after the fact, when the dust was able to settle - this is often the case with writers (as I know, also from first-hand experience). Perhaps it is just too soon for me to write about such a moment.
But here Dickey does it.
In writing so truthfully about a moment in his own life, he gives voice to MY experience. And I read it with a dawning realization that ... I am not alone, that someone knows how I felt, exactly, it seems such a strange moment to put into words, hard to pin down, yet Dickey does it - my thought process is basically: "wow - look how PERFECTLY he describes such a moment ..."
A lot of his poems have that, actually.
If all you know of Dickey is Deliverance, then all I can say is, do yourself a favor and check out some of his poems. His is an important regional voice, certainly, and Southerners have much to be proud of in their poetic and literary tradition, but I count him as an important American voice, period.
The Hospital Window
I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.
Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.
Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.
Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,
In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father
Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not
Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world
That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,
High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.
May 21, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Philip Larkin
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume.
As I've said, with some exceptions, I'm more of a "modern" fan than a "contemporary" fan - and a lot of this particular volume doesn't interest me. I'm pulling out the poets I am familiar with, and that I feel I have something to say about. Maybe not something original, but at least SOME response. That is what these "daily book excerpts" have always been about for me. Not only do they force me to write every day, on a topic that maybe I didn't feel like writing about (the funnest part of the exercise), but they force me to think about something that perhaps I had never thought about before.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
[Philip Larkin] certainly did as much as Housman to turn back the clock of English poetry; like Housman, he is the modern poet most often quoted - in church, in Parliament, in the classroom - by folk who latch onto a phrase or a stanza, without bothering to understand what the poem as a whole might mean. His was the characteristic voice of the 1950s and 1960s, regarded by some as the most significant English poet of the postwar.I like Philip Larkin a lot. But what do I actually think about him? That's the fun of my "book excerpt" project (which has been going on for 5 years now (with a couple breaks here and there). 5 years, with one excerpt a day. This tells you the daunting size of my library.
Once you tune in to poetry news, and poetry blogs, one of the names that comes up most often is Philip Larkin. His fans are numerous, his influence wide. I don't think I read him in college, no memory of it - but in the late 90s, I joined a daily poetry newsletter (that I am still on), and that was how I encountered Philip Larkin. The editor of the newsletter (Ernie Hilbert - I reviewed his own book of poetry here) introduced me to Larkin by posting his poems in the newsletter with regularity. Larkin was born in 1922, and he was part of what is known as "The Movement", a group of Oxford University undergraduates (along with Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and a couple other guys who are now all literary giants) - who defined themselves against excess in language and sentiment - basically saying, "We are against Dylan Thomas". They were in an odd in-between generation, these guys. The giants of the modernists - Eliot and Pound - were right behind them - and the confessionals were right ahead of them - These guys did not like the abstractions of the modernists, the sort of reference-heavy language of Eliot and Pound. Although highly educated themselves, the Movement poets didn't want their poetry to be abstract, or only for the elite.
Larkin himself said:
What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound ... first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly you've got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in. But to me, the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer's duty to be original.
"the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little" ... A very radical statement of purpose, putting him in line with folks like Hardy - another poet who was original, in a way that still stands out today. Larkin had the same religious doubts and cynicism (although he seems more nostalgic than Hardy does. Hardy slams the door shut on faith forever, the second he loses his belief. Larkin still yearns for belief, even when he can no longer believe. His poem called "Church Going" - look it up if you are not familiar with it - is an ache of pain and longing. I love it. You wouldn't catch Hardy writing something like that.)
Regardless. It was Hardy who set Larkin free from the influences of the giant modernists (and this was true of a lot of people who found the modernists too artificial, even their contemporaries). Larkin said.
"After [Hardy], Yeats came to seem so artificial - all that crap about masks and Crazy Jane and all the rest. It all rang so completely unreal."
To give you an idea of Larkin's sensibility, and his love for speaking plainly and saying what you mean: he was also a music critic, and he attacked avant-garde jazz repeatedly, feeling the "abstraction" of the modernist poets in those improvisations, and he truly felt that such experiments threatened the cohesion of civilization. Larkin wasn't kidding around. He may have been extreme, most of the Movement poets were, but he was sincere in that extremity. It wasn't a pose. Also, the poetry that came out of this extremity, pulsing with nostalgia and pain - pain that his cynicism has now left him an exile from the world of warmth and love and companionship - are just masterful, and he's the kind of poet that people fall in love with. The anthology editors say it best:
The reverse of grandiose or straining, Larkin's poetry is so evidently integral with its author, and so witty and deft, that it speaks with singular authority and aplomb.
I find his stuff very powerful. I relate to it. (But I love Yeats and Eliot, too. Room for all of them. I enjoy their in-fighting, their self-described identity crises ... it helps to clarify the artform. But I am not an acolyte of this or that movement. Yeats and Auden are probably my favorite poets of all time, which means Larkin would think I'm an idiot. I'm okay with that! I love him too!) I have similar conservative outlooks at times (meaning: a respect for tradition and history - "conservative" in the Burkean sense of the word, not the current nit-wit sense of the word), but I also have issues and caveats with my own viewpoint - as Larkin did with his. It helps keep me honest, certainly, and helps keep me on the side of ART, as opposed to ideological rigidity, thank Christ. That struggle/push-pull is in Larkin's poetry, is in the language. I love him for that.
His nostalgia is tempered with cynicism. With doubt. That's the best kind of nostalgia. Nothing more boring (and also more potentially dangerous) than unexamined uncynical nostalgia, especially when it's politically driven. Look out. Look out for those who yearn for the "good old days". Those people are just mourning their own loss of privilege. The "good old days" didn't exist, at least not as these folks imagine it, and those days were certainly not "good" for vast vast swathes of the population, not to mention the entire globe - so I am always wary of such people, even when I meet them in person. It's not so much politically that I disagree with them, although that is the case as well. It's that I find them vaguely stupid to actually believe that there was some time, in history, when things were BETTER than they are now. Selective memories. Willfully blinkered. Ahistorical.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
He does not idealize the past. He does not see it, in Hardy's terms, as unrealized, either. It is simply unrealizable. Not Wordsworth's infant trailing clouds of glory behind whom gates of the prison-house close; not Brownings' "Never the time and the place / And the loved one all together" or even Hardy's "Everything glowed with a gleam; / But we were looking away." There was no cloud-trailing infant, no all together, no glow. Yet from these poets Larkin took crucial bearings. Death is his abiding muse, not love or even lust, with its temporary solaces.
Larkin's got that mix I really respond to - and he never leaves out the love. His is a passionate poetry, plain-spoken, heartfelt, honest - but without the stream-of-conscious nature of the confessional poets. His poems are highly structured. Larkin died in 1985. In 1984, Larkin was offered the poet laureate post in England - which is hilarious to imagine, knowing his work. Larkin writing some commemorative ode to a monarch? Funny. But Larkin, true to form, turned down the post. He died shortly thereafter.
I'll end with yet another quote from Michael Schmidt, my awesome go-to guy for context, if I feel I need it. He writes:
Why is a poet of such unoptimistic temperament so popular? Perhaps most of all because of the insidiousness of his verse, the way that after one or two readings it lodges in memory. It has, with its characteristic details, its spoken tones, its formal assurance, the sound of truth, and a poet who speaks bleak truths is probably more valuable than one who gives us airy and empty consolations. The candor of Larkin is different in kind from the candor of Lowell and Plath, not more English, precisely, but more democratic. His truths (if they are true) carry at least the consolation of clarity, unfuzzed by darkly autobiographical resentment.
I love his poems "Faith Healing", "Church Going", "The Whitsun Weddings", "Talking in Bed", "Here" - but today I will post his poem "High Windows", because it seems to me to capture what I've been trying to say here. The danger of nostalgia is that it can reject the "new", as inherently bad. (I have always thought that people who have an overwhelmingly unexamined nostalgic outlook are basically saying, "It was just better to be young" - but they can't say that, so they say, "Things were so much better when I was young" - a subtle but important difference.) But here, in "High Windows", written in the late 60s, and then published again in 1974, shows Larkin - an older man by now - looking at the changes, changes that socially conservative folks may label a decline in values but Larkin declares "paradise". Go, Larkin. And that last stanza ... that's the Larkin touch.
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
May 14, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Gwendolyn Brooks
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume.
I think I first encountered Gwendolyn Brooks's stuff in Humanities in high school (her most famous is, perhaps, "We Real Cool") - but once I branched out and read her other stuff, I fell in love with her. Having lived in Chicago myself, Gwendolyn Brooks is a big big deal there - but I suppose she's a big deal anywhere. Born in 1917, she died in 2000 - so the woman saw a lot. She was the descendant of a runaway slave, and her parents instilled in her a ferocity in terms of getting an education. She started writing poetry very early on, and was publishing stuff regularly as a teenager. She clearly meant business. She had gone to both white and black high schools, giving her an entryway into the white world, which, in turn, gave her a very interesting perspective on the racial divide in Chicago. Her father encouraged her, wanting her to push on in her dream to be a writer.
The Harlem Renaissance poets were very important to her, as well as to her parents. In the Anthology, the editors write, of Brooks's influences:
Brooks learned the hard discipline of compression from two sources. The modernists famously demanded that superfluities be eliminated, that every word be made to count (le mot juste), and this seems to have been the guiding principle of the Chicago poetry workshop she attended in the early 1940s, in which she read T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings. Brooks also learned this lesson from the spare, hard, stripped-down idiom of the blues, which Langston Hughes urged her to study. Like the authors of the blues, she uses insistent rhymes and terse simplicity, and she can be at once understated and robust. Despite Brooks's reputation for directness, her poetry, like the blues and other African American oral traditions, evinces a sly and ironic indirection.
Brooks often wrote in vernacular. Her world was the inner city. Although she was upwardly mobile (her parents made sure of that - her father building her bookshelves and a desk from the get-go, like: "This is where you are going to spend most of your time"), she saw what was going on. She didn't remain detached from it, not exactly - there's a poem she wrote called "The Boy Died In My Alley" which shows exactly Gwendolyn Brooks's strength and individual voice. She observes. But not from afar. She is a neighbor. The boy died in my alley ...
Brooks climbed to the greatest heights a poet can climb to, being appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1985 (the first black woman to be so honored), and Chicago is full of streets dedicated to her, and there's a junior high school named after her in Harvey, Illinois.
Her work is subtle. The poems work ON you. She does not insist on your involvement. But that's one of the reasons why I find myself so involved. She had an epiphany later in life. In the late 1960s, she went to a black writer's conference and by this point she was in her 50s, a published poet, an established voice. But she met and talked with the younger poets coming up, many of them black nationalists, far more politicized and angry, and while she said she found it "uncomfortable", she also felt that she "woke up".
"Until 1967, my own blackness did not confront me with a shrill spelling of itself."
Brooks could not turn back. She organized a poetry workshop for young black kids, and invited the members of a neighborhood gang to join. The gang was called the Blackstone Rangers (she wrote a lengthy poem about them). She became involved in her community, and worked with young people, hoping to inspire them, and raise them up, as her parents had done for her.
"We Real Cool" may be her most famous, and I love her short stark poem for Emmett Till, but "The Bean Eaters" is my favorite of hers, so I will post that one today. Like I mentioned - Brooks rarely goes for the big gestures, the obvious sucker-punch. But still, I find this to be a powerful and strangely moving poem. The editors at the Norton Anthology compare her to Edgar Lee Masters (my excerpt of him here), and I love that. It may not be obvious on the face of it, but she wrote of one community, in all of their voices, sticking to what she knew, and her poems - like the one below - have this way of cracking open an entire life in a couple of short lines, just like Masters did in Spoon River Anthology.
The Bean Eaters
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
May 6, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Dylan Thomas
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. I find that there just aren't as many poets in the Contemporary volume that I either 1. like or 2. even have heard of. To me, much of the volume shows the fracturing of the confidence of much of poetry in the 20th century. Much of it, to me, reads as nothing better than navel-gazing. It lacks the transcendence and universality of the moderns, which is funny because the modernists were seen as (are still seen as) difficult, challenging, "not clear", all that. I agree with those assessments, but I find them to be assets, rather than negatives. A lot of the contemporary poetry (and let's not even discuss the poetry that now appears in The New Yorker, which - I have to admit - I don't even read anymore, it's so boring and surfacey - purely descriptive, with nothing to SAY) feels TOO personal for me to really care about it. There are exceptions, but more often than not, I find myself bored with the identity politics, the "I am from THIS minority, and that is why my work is important" vibe of so much of it. "I am a one-legged deaf gay Inuit, and therefore my work is relevant." No, it's not. If you're not a good writer, I don't care if you have one leg or two, I ain't reading your stuff. As a poetry lover, I am always on the lookout for new voices that I respond to. Much of it, however, is not anthologized - you'd have to come across it elsewhere.
Dylan Thomas wrote in the introductory note to his Collected Poems in 1952:
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.
Famous during his lifetime (for his drunken shenanigans as well as his poetry), I know many people who count him as their favorite poet of all time. He has written some poems that are 20th century giants, poems that are woven into the culture. How often is "rage against the dying of the light" referenced? It's a perfect quote, from a perfect poem - rigorous and intellectual, a villanelle, for God's sake - and more than that, that poem has what so much of the contemporary poetry doesn't, in my opinion: philosophy. Thomas was one of those poets who seems to have a philosophy of life, not just a good observatory eye - You need MORE than just a good eye to be a poet who leaves an indelible mark. Robert Frost had a good eye, but the overwhelming sense of his poetry, when read as a whole, is of a man grappling with big issues, issues bigger than himself. I don't want to paint with too wide a brush. These are personal poets. I love personal poetry. But Thomas has a facility with language, as well as overriding themes that he worked out in poem after poem - not to mention the sense that there is man behind it all really THINKING about poetry, which sets him apart.
Thomas wrote in a letter to a friend:
I make one image - though 'make' is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellect and critical forces I possess - let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time ... Out of the inevitable conflict of images - ... the womb of war - I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem.
Seamus Heaney, in an essay he wrote about "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" writes of Thomas's ways of utilizing paradoxes and multiple meanings:
This is a son comforting a father; yet it is also, conceivably, the child poet in Thomas himself comforting the old ham he had become; the neophyte in him addressing the legend; the green fuse addressing the burnt-out case. The reflexiveness of the form is the right correlative for the reflexiveness of the feeling. As the poem proceeds, exhortation becomes self-lamentation; the son's instruction to the disappointed father to curse and bless him collapses the distance between the sad height of age and physical decay in the parent and the equally sad eminence of poetic reputation and failing powers of the child. 'Do Not Go Gentle' is a lament for the maker in Thomas himself as well as an adieu to his proud and distant schoolteacher father. The shade of the young man who once repressed a fear that he was not a poet, just a freak user of words, pleads for help and reassurance from the older, sadder literary lion he has become, the one who apparently has the world at his feet.
Thomas was unlike many of his contemporaries, and there were many poets who basically launched themselves in opposition to him, and his religious mysticism and high-flung language. He was not well-respected, although prolific and diverse. He wrote scripts and radio plays, he was famous, he did long tours of the United States, notorious for Thomas being drunk most of the time, and yet he was brilliant as a showman. It must have been something else to hear him read his stuff (and other people's stuff) live.
The term that Seamus Heaney uses "a freak user of words" is a direct quote from Dylan Thomas, speaking of himself, and in that, I can feel some sadness, a sadness that he is not as good as he might be. He had no desires other than to be a writer. He grew up in Swansea, Wales - his father was a schoolteacher, and encouraged Thomas to go on to university, but Thomas was in a rush, and started trying to make his living as a writer right away. He burned brightly while he was here among the living. Controversial (other poets wondered if there was anything there BEYOND a "freaky" facility with words), Thomas drank himself to death. Legend has it that he was at the White Horse Tavern, here in New York (he was here for rehearsals of his beautiful play Under Milk Wood), and he was in bad bad shape. He was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and he returned there from the White Horse Tavern, and stated, "I've had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's the record". Apparently, those were his last words. There is a plaque on the wall at the White Horse Tavern for Dylan Thomas, kind of a depressing thought if you consider the state he was in while there.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
Thomas weaves spells. He engages language, rather than expresience. When the spell releases us, nothing is clarified. There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular late poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret, it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality. There are exceptions. "Poem in October", with its brilliant details, works like "Refusal to Mourn" and "Do Not Go Gentle" against the tragic grain. In "A Winter's Tale" Thomas's rhythmic achievement is at its most subtle. The later work is rhetoric of a high order.
That's what I get from Thomas, and one of the reasons why I love him. I love Under Milk Wood, too, a beautiful haunting play so packed with gorgeous rich language that it's a little bit overwhelming. He was one of the poets we had to learn in high school, a couple of the famous ones, and so - like most of the stuff I had to learn back then - the poems seem a part of my emotional/intellectual landscape - kinda like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and other huge poems we had to learn.
Turns out, Dylan Thomas had already been introduced to me, through one of the most harrowing books I read as a kid, which takes a quote from a Thomas poem as its title: Robert Cormier's After the First Death
So that's the poem I will post today.
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
May 4, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Elizabeth Bishop
Next book on my poetry shelf: I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. Elizabeth Bishop is the first poet in the Contemporary Anthology.
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets, and she actually didn't write all that many poems throughout her life (not compared to other poets who lived as long as she did). She was meticulous, picking and choosing every word she wrote with the utmost care (it is similar to Joan Didion, who literally agonizes over punctuation, and works on one sentence for weeks at a time). This, naturally, slows her down, in terms of output. But the poems of Bishop: wow. If you have not encountered them, all I can say is: do yourself a favor. She was not hugely famous during her lifetime, but since her death her reputation has skyrocketed. She is very much in vogue now, and I am so happy to see that.
She had a harrowing childhood. She was independently wealthy. She traveled the world. She was best friends with Robert Lowell; they had a kinship that can only be described as intimate. A symbiotic artistic marriage. She lived all over the place, and finally settled down in Key West.
"It took me an hour or so to get back to my own metre."
Elizabeth Bishop wrote that to Robert Lowell, after reading one of his poems. I am most interested in how the work affected each other. Lowell was much more famous in his own day than Elizabeth Bishop was, although now, as I said, I am SO pleased to see that she is having a bit of a renaissance. Lowell's stuff, confessional, shocking at the time, doesn't hold up as well, ironically enough, as Bishop's, which can seem more descriptive, more distant, until you really read them, and get inside the poems.
Bishop and Lowell kept up a correspondence for the 30 years of their friendship, and while some have already been published (in a collection of Bishop's letters
They never married. Lowell had many lovers, and a wife. Bishop stayed with one woman for many many years (sadly, this woman committed suicide - yet another plot-point in the tragic story that was Bishop's life, she was surrounded by mental illness from a very young age). But theirs was a soulmate kind of connection. Lowell did ask her to marry him, and her cooler head prevailed. It seems, though, that they were each other's "perfect reader". Every writer needs one. Not a critic, not a gushing fan ... but someone who is able to really hear not just the words, but the intent. Who can speak to the theme, the greater picture. Last summer I read one of my pieces out loud to Rachel and Mitchell - it was one I had been struggling with. As we settled in for my reading, Rachel said, "What do you want us to be listening for?" Now THAT is a good reader. It helped me to focus my own intentions and goals - and it helped me to think about the piece in a larger way, so that I could work on that LARGER element, not just the language or the progression of events.
Bishop and Lowell were two very different poets - it is hard to imagine their rapport. She was solitary, with a tiny literate following. She wrote about fish houses and the beach and small observational moments. He upended his psychology, pouring passion and unrequited feeling into his poems. They worked FOR one another, over decades.
William Logan writes, in the NY Times piece:
Their admiration even made them light fingered — they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishop’s dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them — that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. The only time Bishop took exception to Lowell’s poems was when, in “The Dolphin” (1973), he incorporated angry letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick — “Art just isn’t worth that much,” Bishop exclaimed. She flinched when poets revealed in their poems too much of themselves, once claiming that she wished she “could start writing poetry all over again on another planet.”These poets, in short, inspired each other. Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking “Life Studies” (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as “The Waste Land”); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them. Bishop was loyal enough to admire, or pretend to, even Lowell’s mediocre poems.
If Lowell and Bishop often seem to love no poems more than each other’s, as critics perhaps they were right. A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th century’s Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs, their letters so alike — so delightfully in concord — the reader at times can’t guess the author without glancing at the salutation.
For a long time she was known as a "poet's poet", but I think her appeal is much broader than that (although her works may not be as well-known as those with more populist appeal). In my opinion, she's up there with Robert Frost. She's in the same continuum. Her work has that grandeur, and also that homeliness. She writes about "small" things - the look of waves, a moose in the darkness, fishing rods, in the same way that Frost writes about "small" things - an axe, a snowfall, an apple. Yet nobody could ever say that these are trivial poets, or "surface" poets. They plumb the depths of the human condition itself, not by focusing on their experiences with electric shock therapy, or their family psychodramas (and some of the confessional poets are terrific, my faves, this is not an either/or proposition), but by excavating the meaning and grace and import in things, objects, nature. Bishop's poem 'One Art' stands out as different from the others, in voice, theme, and context. It is directly personal. In it, she speaks in an "I" voice, rare for her. You can feel the influence of her soulmate Robert Lowell in "One Art", even though the expression, the poem itself, is all hers. People who know about poetry love Elizabeth Bishop - and rightly so - but her work is not inaccessible, you don't need Cliff Notes to "get" it. At the same time, she is as deep as the ocean.
Marianne Moore was also a huge influence and early champion of Bishop's stuff. Moore wrote in re: Bishop:
Some authors do not muse within themselves; they 'think' - like the vegetable-shredder which cuts into the life of a thing. Miss Bishop is not one of these frettingly intensive machines. Yet the rational considering quality in her work is its strength - assisted by unwordiness, uncontorted intentionalness, the flicker of impudence, the natural unforced ending.
Moore said that Bishop was "spectacular in being unspectacular."
It takes great restraint to NOT go for the big effects, if said effects are not right, not essential to the poem itself.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
Few poets of the century are as candid as Elizabeth Bishop. We know more about her from her poems, despite her reticence, her refusal to confess or provide circumstantial detail, than we do of Plath or Lowell or Sexton, who dramatize and partialize themselves. Bishop asks us to focus not on her but with her. Her disclosures are tactful: we can recognize them if we wish. Her reticence is "polite". Given her vulnerability, she could have "gone to the edge", as A. Alvarez likes poets to do, praising Plath and Lowell for their extremity. Instead she follows where William Cowper led, using language not to go to the edge but to find her way back from it; using poetry - in an eighteenth-century spirit - as a normative instrument. Even in her harshest poems, such an art is affirmative.
It's a toss-up as to what is her best-known poem. There are two that seem to consistently make it into the anthologies "At the Fishhouses" and "One Art". If you read these poems one after the other it is very difficult to not be in awe of her versatility with language. The voice used in each is so completely specific, and perfect to the subject matter.
I love "At the Fishhouses" (I suggest reading it out loud to get the full effect). Maybe I love it because it is familiar to me, as an East Coast girl who grew up 10 minutes from the vast heaving Atlantic. The fishing industry is a part of the landscape of my childhood, and there's something about it that Bishop captures - and it's in the images, yes - but ... more than that ... it's in the language. Bishop is truly a master. She makes it look so easy that it is hard to remember just how good she is.
But in my opinion - it is "The Moose" that is her greatest poem. Somehow I had missed it, I was not familiar with it (it's not as commonly anthologized, first of all) and for whatever reason, a couple years back Dad brought it to my attention. I think it was re-published in The New Yorker, and he sent me a note saying, "Have you read "The Moose"? You have to read it."
So I sat down and read it. Its greatness speaks for itself. It also is a connection with my father, so I love it especially.
Poet Randall Jarrell said a great thing about Bishop:
All her poems have written underneath, I have seen it."
Yes.
THE MOOSE
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;
on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,
through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;
down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.
Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.
Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;
the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.
One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.
A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.
On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.
A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.
The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .
In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices
uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;
deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.
He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.
"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."
Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.
Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."
Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"
Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.
May 3, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Louis MacNeice
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Born in Belfast in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to public school, and then attended Oxford. When you read reviews of MacNeice's stuff from other poets, it's wildly divergent in its opinions. Some are annoyed, some are enthusiastic - there does not seem to be a consensus. He was a brilliant scholar of the classics, and did many translations - his background was public-school all the way, and Oxford really set him free. He then went on to work for the BBC, producing radio plays that he often wrote. In fact, this job would end up being the cause of his death. He was producing a radio play and recording it in a damp cave (for proper sound effects, I suppose? Not sure why). He caught pneumonia and died.
Louis MacNeice had many stages as a poet. He experimented. His experiments did not always go over well. People didn't like him, misunderstood him, whatever - and I have a feeling that MacNeice died thinking he still had a lot more to do, that he was only at the middle of his career, so much more development of his art to come ... So what he probably thought were his "middle" poems are now his "last" poems. There is a bit of the journalist in MacNeice, and an unwillingness to "take sides". This separates him from his generation in a huge way.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
Temperamentally he was engaged by facts rather than programs; solving orthodoxies made no sense to him. Auden moved across the political spectrum, but MacNeice stayed politically "between," not passionately, like George Orwell, but quizzically. "Between" is a favorite word and stance in the early poems, different from Auden's connective "between". In MacNeice it signifies suspension: "In a between world, a world of amber" one poem begins. In "Epitaph for Liberal Poets" it is clear that he is not even able to conform to liberal humanism. He acknowledges the approach of the "tight-lipped technocratic Conquistadors"; his stance is Mark Antony's, lamenting in acceptance the inevitable triumph of Caesar, hoping the poems will survive to thaw out in another age.
His generation - and his contemporaries - particularly Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis - (poets he loved and wrote about a lot, and knew personally) - had to deal with the giants of the generation immediately preceding it. Imitate? Influence? Define yourself against them? How do you deal with a Yeats? Or an Eliot? The next generation all had different answers to these questions, and everyone struggled in a different way. But the struggle is apparent in all of them. MacNeice wrote, on this score:
Yeats proposed to turn his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other peoples' emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity ... The whole poetry, on the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis implies that they have desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things ought to be desired and others hated ... My own prejudice ... is in favour of poets whose worlds are not too esoteric. I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
MacNeice lived most of his life in London. He supported Home Rule for Ireland. I don't think he ever thought of moving back there. But he never felt truly English, and I think that separateness he felt was exciting for him. He loved living in London. But he was very proud of his Irish roots. The "between" state of the exile. And his poems feel very Irish to me. He takes on Irish subjects, and speaks of Ireland repeatedly. It was a source of inspiration. But he was a realist, too. There was no Golden Age for MacNeice - no glorious time in the past when everything was awesome. I suppose nobody knows this better than classical scholars who spend years studying the ancients. Same shit going on as going on now. His nostalgia was tempered by realistic expectations - it makes for an interesting mix.
Here's one of his poems I love. It doesn't transcend (in my opinion) the particulars ... you can feel the journalistic drive here, just the facts, ma'am, and so maybe it isn't a great poem - but I do love it, and the world he describes, which comes to life.
Carrickfergus
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.
The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave.
I was the rector's son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long.
I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
And the soldiers with their guns.
May 2, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Patrick Kavanagh
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Patrick Kavanagh, great and titanically angry Irish poet, was born in 1904, and while the Celtic Renaissance was still going on as he came of age, he thought it was all a bunch of balderdash. That is not a direct quote. He was much more profane about it. He grew up poor and Catholic, and so had a huge scorn for the Anglo-Irish tradition (of which Yeats was the biggest star), which he felt was, despite all the Gaelic frippery, English in sensibility. What did those rich Protestants know about what it meant to be Irish? His first major poem, an epic, really, was called "The Great Hunger", about the famine in 1847 - and it's a giant work. He later disavowed it (he was big on that - he didn't really stand by his own work, he would look back on stuff in later years and say, "Wow, that sucked.") But it remains a very influential poem, and many Irish poets of today (Seamus Heaney being the main one), consider Kavanagh to be their greatest influence. Kavanagh was brutal in his critiques, which got him into trouble with the Irish censors. He did not mince words. He went after the British, yes, but he went after the Catholic church, and the vested interest it had in keeping the populace submissive and sex-phobic. James Joyce covered this territory as well. Is there any reason for a perfectly fit man to go through his life a virgin, as Patrick Maguire, the lead character in "The Great Hunger" does? What on earth is the good in that? Kavanagh raged against the prudish restrictions of his society, and tackled the famine on all its fronts. The helplessness of the people was terrible, but much of the helplessness was self-chosen. They had been GROOMED by their culture and their priests to be submissive. This is something Kavanagh could not forgive.
With lines like:
He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to his destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
you can feel the power of "The Great Hunger", why he ruffled feathers.
Kavanagh is a major major voice in 20th century Irish literature.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
The rich measured achievement of his early poems is betrayed by the prolixity and unbridled anger of his later satires. Beginning with rural poems about real peasants (he was a countryman), Kavanagh left this world for Dublin, rejected much of his early verse and prose, and in indignation and self-pity marked his exclusion from a world that at once attracted and repelled him. A heavy drinker, he concedes that his excesses marred his later career. And yet at the end of it, he produced some of his best work.
A man with a typically Irish tragic outlook, Kavanagh also felt (and this is also truly Irish) that "comedy is the abundance of life". He consigned himself to oblivion, often with middle finger in the air towards the world that rejected him (he felt).
"My purpose in life was to have no purpose," he said in 1964.
He felt that the poet's vocation should be to: "name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events" - and that he did. He was furious that Yeats had the place that he did, that Yeats appointed himself the arbiter of that which was Irish poetry. He wanted to carve out another space.
Schmidt writes:
His is an easier poetry to get hold of, more conventional in its forms and in what it expects of readers than [Austin] Clarke's verse. [my excerpt of Clarke's stuff here.] It is not surprising that from Kavanagh stems much of the popular Irish poetry of recent decades. But not necessarily from The Great Hunger, which is inimitable, an invention, like a sturdy plough at the edge of an abandoned field.
While much of his stuff is the epitome of rage, political, social, sexual, and otherwise, thought I would anthologize a poem that cuts me to my very core. It shows the depth of feeling that Kavanagh is capable of, how personal his work always is. The poem is killer, just a warning.
In Memory of My Mother
I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily
Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday -
You meet me and you say:
'Don't forget to see about the cattle - '
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.
And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life -
And I see us meeting at the end of a town
On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.
O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us - eternally.
April 21, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Countee Cullen
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Countee Cullen is another poet new to me, and I am so happy to have discovered his work. Another poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Melvin Tolson called Cullen and Langston Hughes (my post on him here) "antipodes" of that movement: "The former is a classicist and conservative; the latter, an experimentalist and radical". As I mentioned in the post on Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance was a diverse movement, producing many artists, and while they may have been grouped under the same heading, you would never read a Countee Cullen poem and mistake it for a Melvin Tolson poem, or a Langston Hughes poem. It is a rich and many-layered movement, and it's been really fun to read some of the other figures, the ones not so commonly anthologized (or taught in school). For example, I clearly remember reading Langston Hughes in my Humanities Class in high school, but I have no memory of Countee Cullen's work being studied. That's a shame. To study one poet of a movement, is only to peek through a crack in the slates. There's a big world in there, many voices, many styles.
Hughes took as his inspiration for his verse American forms, mainly black American forms: blues, jazz, spirituals. He was criticized for this at the time, mainly by other black writers and black columnists, who naturally had a vested interest in how they were being portrayed to the white world. Countee Cullen used strictly European forms. Old forms. Sonnets, ballads, he used rhyme schemes from the Elizabethans. (He wrote a poem to John Keats, a clear statement of his sense of his own tradition). He was ALSO criticized for this (you couldn't win, apparently). But he remained firm. He had a working philosophy, and felt strongly about why he did what he did. He called out to other Negro writers to do the same:
Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance.
Provocative stuff, even more so today. His views, stated there, are probably the main reason that he is not more anthologized today, the politically-correct police on the prowl for "right" attitudes (Cullen says in one poem, "What is Africa to me?").
He wanted to wrap himself in tradition, the long tradition of European culture, he felt that that was his true inheritance. He was called a traitor, far and wide. I am sure he still is. Which is ridiculous, because his poems are WONDERFUL. Not every poet can write in the same way, regardless of their skin color, for God's sake.
However, his topics are that of a black man, living in America in the early years of the 20th century. He could not remove that context, because it was who he was. It was what he knew. It is that reason that some of his poems are so startling. Elegiac, formal, highly structured, with sometimes archaic language - but handling the subjects of racism and prejudice and oppression. It's great stuff. Heartbreaking. He was one poem about a waiter in Atlantic City (which, sadly, I have been unable to find online - although it is included in the Norton Anthology) that is sweeping in scope, devastating in its details, and manages - in four stanzas - to articulate the sadness of a man held down, by circumstances, racism, bigotry. ("For him to be humble who is proud / Needs colder artifice") - Damn, that is some good stuff.
Countee Cullen did not live long. He was born in 1903, died in 1946, but in his short life he accomplished a great deal. He married the daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, but she left him a couple months later. He was probably gay. He published a ton. The man must never have stopped working. He got a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris, he published 5 books of poetry, a novel - he translated Euripedes' Medea, and was a major figure at the time. His star fell in the coming years, due to his "incorrect" attitudes.
Here is a poem I read of his, again, while I was out on Block Island, and it has a perfection of rhythm that reminds me of Longfellow. And it packs a huge punch. There's a child-like quality to it, he "makes a point", but without even saying what the point is - he doesn't need to. It's a powerful poem.
Incident
Once riding in Old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger".
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
April 20, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Lorine Niedecker
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I had not heard of Lorine Niedecker, until this past January, when I took the Norton Anthology out to Block Island with me, in the hopes that it would help me get back to reading again. Something big and varied, that wouldn't require a ton of concentration. Flip through it from time to time, read the poems, read the intros ... It did help me get back to reading. And it was fun to re-read things like "The Waste Land" and some of Pound's Cantos, things I know well - but haven't read in their entirety in a long time. And somehow, I came across Lorine Niedecker, who is anthologized. There is a brief introductory note for her - not a long one, since she lived in the same place her entire life - not many "events" to speak of - but her poems are incredible.
I am so glad I encountered her. She was born in 1903 in Wisconsin and spent her whole life on Black Hawk Island. She lived with her parents, and took care of them when they became elderly. She went to college briefly. She had many jobs, some menial, some not. Somewhere along in here, she started writing poetry. In 1931, she read Louis Zukofsky's "Objectivist" issue of Poetry magazine, and traveled to New York to meet him. They ended up carrying on a long correspondence. The "Objectivists" wanted to create poems that were not sentimental, or ornamental - simple, clean, clear. Lorine Niedecker is a classic example of an Objectivist poet. Her poems have no "needless words", they almost feel like haikus: miniature little sketches - and the way she used indentation and spaces makes them unmistakably hers.
She was obviously a well-read curious intellectual woman, and her poems are not about the flowers, and the leaves, and her emotions. She wrote poems about Darwin, the Chinese poet Li Po, the North American explorers - and in this way, she is an heir of Ezra Pound, whose poems have a collage effect, full of references to existing material.
While I was out on Block Island, I read all of her work anthologized - the first one being her long poem on Thomas Jefferson (bestill my heart) - and now I'm a fan forever. She's also not for dummies. She expects people to be familiar with the events of his life (or Darwin's life, or whoever), and the references come fast and furious. She doesn't slow down for morons. There are footnotes in the Norton Anthology, and with Niedecker, at times, you really need them. But don't let them slow you down. Keep going. Niedecker waits for no one.
Niedecker uses quotes and fragments from the letters of Thomas Jefferson in order to create the poem (if you've read his letters, you'll recognize a lot of this).
I think it's an extraordinary poem.
Thomas Jefferson
I
My wife is ill!
And I sit
waiting
for a quorum
II
Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked
Borrowed a farmer’s
unbroken colt
To Richmond
Richmond How stop—
Arnold’s redcoats
there
III
Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves
Jefferson:
Were it to give them freedom
he’d have done right
IV
Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity
I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy
V
The South of France
Roman temple
“simple and sublime”
Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mind
white column
and arch
VI
To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy
No person full of work
was ever hysterical
Know music, history
dancing
(I calculate 14 to 1
in marriage
she will draw
a blockhead)
Science also
Patsy
VII
Agreed with Adams:
send spermaceti oil to Portugal
for their church candles
(light enough to banish mysteries?:
three are one and one is three
and yet the one not three
and the three not one)
and send slat fish
U.S. salt fish preferred
above all other
VIII
Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:
“He spoke as Homer wrote”
Henry eyed our minister at Paris—
the Bill of Rights hassle—
“he remembers . . .
in splendor and dissipation
he thinks yet of bills of rights”
IX
True, French frills and lace
for Jefferson, sword and belt
but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not—
house rent would have left him
nothing to eat
. . .
He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded
He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine
and yet
stand up
X
Dear Polly:
I said No—no frost
in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe
I’d have heard—I’m in that kind
of correspondence
with a young daughter—
if they were not
Now I must retract
I shrink from it
XI
Political honors
“splendid torments”
“If one could establish
an absolute power
of silence over oneself”
When I set out for Monticello
(my grandchildren
will they know me?)
How are my young
chestnut trees—
XII
Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage
I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—
I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science
or not at all
Next year the last of labors
among conflicting parties
Then my family
we shall sow our cabbages
together
XIII
Delicious flower
of the acacia
or rather
Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax
XIV
Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed
to father and sister in Paris
by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said
“in all my life I never saw
more charming child”
Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello
XV
My harpsichord
my alabaster vase
and bridle bit
bound for Alexandria
Virginia
The good sea weather
of retirement
The drift and suck
and die-down of life
but there is land
XVI
These were my passions:
Monticello and the villa-temples
I passed on to carpenters
bricklayers what I knew
and to an Italian sculptor
how to turn a volute
on a pillar
You may approach the campus rotunda
from lower to upper terrace
Cicero had levels
XVII
John Adams’ eyes
dimming
Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism
cantering
XVIII
Ah soon must Monticello be lost
to debts
and Jefferson himself
to death
XIX
Mind leaving, let body leave
Let dome live, spherical dome
and colonnade
Martha (Patsy) stay
“The Committee of Safety
must be warned”
Stay youth—Anne and Ellen
all my books, the bantams
and the seeds of the senega root
April 19, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Stevie Smith
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Born in 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire England, Stevie Smith was christened Florence Margaret, but was called "Stevie" by her friends. (She was a very petite woman, and
"Stevie" was the name of a famous jockey of the time.) Her first poems were published in 1935, and she was advised to write a novel, which she did. She wrote a couple of novels, all autobiographical, and her poetry took some time to gain the reputation it enjoys today. Smith, to me, is one of those "sucker-punch" poets. A poet with a sense of the dramatic, who takes you through their verse, and then, repeatedly, rips the rug out from under you, socks you in the gut. Her most famous poem is "Not waving but drowning", and I remember reading it in high school and finding it haunting and terrible. The sense of isolation, of being trapped, of calling out but no one will hear you - and even worse, even more terrible: being misunderstood. The man swims in the ocean. He waves. It is only later they realize that he was "not waving but drowning". A brutal case of missed communication, with fatal results. Smith was obsessed with death. Often she would illustrate her poems with creepy funny little caricatures (and she had a big publishing battle in the 50s with a publisher who did not want to include her drawings with her poetry), and because there's something whimsical about them, almost like the sketches I saw recently at the Tim Burton show at MoMA, it can make the poems seem funnier, lighter, than they really are. Perhaps that was Smith's point. Again, with the sucker-punch.
Stevie Smith was an isolated singular person. When asked whose contemporary poetry she read, she answered, "Why nobody's but my own." (This is similar to James Joyce's response to the question "who is the greatest living author who writes in English?": "Well, aside from myself, I don't know.") The family moved to a north London suburb when she was three, and that was the house she lived in for the rest of her life, with her aunt and her sister. She did not pal around with other poets. She did not identify herself with any poetic movement, or "school". For this reason (poetry can be very clicque-y), her stuff was either ignored at first, or not taken seriously. But that's one of its strengths: she is an individual, an original. In the late 50s, Poetry contributor David Wright wrote of Stevie Smith:
"... one of the most original women poets now writing, [Stevie Smith] seems to have missed most of the public accolades bestowed by critics and anthologists. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no 'school'—whether real or invented as they usually are—but her work is so completely different from anyone else's that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.
She uses nursery rhyme rhythms, which make her poems even creepier (although, conversely, it also made them seem "lighter" - which also may have been an element in not taking her seriously) - and I find them all full of something like dread. She said she lived in an "age of unrest", which certainly puts her in line with the other modernist poets of the day, she was working with the same themes, the same landscape, she saw a lot of terrible things go down in the world, and her poetry was in response to that.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
Her verse is haunted by tributary rhythms which she incorporates into her various characters and voices. There is a formal residue of rhyme and runs of meter, but her anarchic approach will not allow her to follow a form through. There are fairy tales and actual stories seen from fairy-tale perspectives, and echoes of Poe, the Coleridge of "Christabel", "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Longfellow, the Tennyson of the Idylls and "The Lady of Shalott", Blake, Cowper, the hymn writers and many others sound. So do popular tunes like "Greensleeves," which provides the backing for a poem. It is a world of troubled innocence. Mother Goose, Alice, and also Struwelpeter. The way in which popular and deliberate echoes play through the poetry is unique.
Unique, indeed. If you have not encountered her stuff, or if you have seen some of it and were turned off by the little wacky drawings, or the nursery-school rhymes, do yourself a favor and check her out. She cloaks her rage in sing-song, and it's incredibly creepy: when she wants to be, she is totally direct. She despises God, and addresses him face to face many times. Her anger is huge. But again, all of it is sort of hidden beneath her rhythms, which are innocent-sounding, like something on a playground. "Ring around the rosie" is a terrifying poem, if you know the context of it. That's sort of the realm in which Stevie Smith works.
Michael Schmidt again:
Given the preponderance of Victorian and Edwradian models, a diction ruefully littered with "Oh" and "Alas", the painful rhymes, the doggerel, how does she evade banality? Not through irony but through a wit and tone that wrest sense from cliche and near nonsense. Her humor revives an outworn language. She makes a patchwork quilt of old rags of verse. It is not exactly new but it is bright, wise and silly.
Her life was turned into a play by playwright Hugh Whitemore, which was then turned into a movie, starring Glenda Jackson.
The following poem takes as its jumping-off point the famous story told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about that mythical "man from Porlock" who interrupted the writing of "Kubla Khan". Coleridge was asleep, and the entire poem came to him in a dream. He woke up, excited, thrilled, and began to write it down. Then a knock came at the door. Coleridge writes:
On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
"Kubla Khan" remained unfinished and the "man from Porlock" will forever be known as a metaphor for all of the things that interrupt artists, or get in the way of inspiration.
Listen to Stevie Smith here. I love her clarity and humor. Her willingness to blame ("Come on Coleridge, why did you open the door??") but also, her humanistic response: "Often we all do wrong.")
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.
He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.
It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.
*
May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why, Porson, didn’t you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill
So had a long way to go,
He wasn’t much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock,
And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo,
And had a cat named Flo.
I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,
Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.
I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.
*
I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock
To break up everything and throw it away
Because then there will be nothing to keep them
And they need not stay.
*
Why do they grumble so much?
He comes like a benison
They should be glad he has not forgotten them
They might have had to go on.
*
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
April 16, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Langston Hughes
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Hughes, not just in his life, but in his work and the style of it, is one of the most American of poets. There were other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and the amazing thing about that crowd of people is how diverse they were. They were part of a movement, yes, but, like any poets in any movement, they each went at it in their own way with their own concerns. There were other black poets who looked to Europe for their poetic forms, to the old masters, or who were really part of the modernist tradition, who wrapped themselves in the existing culture (by that I mean FORM, their poems sound like modernist poems), and yet wrote the experience of black America at that time. Langston Hughes was not one of those poets, and that is what makes him stand apart. He looked to black music at that time, the blues, jazz, Negro spirituals - homegrown American forms - instead of trying to write in "white" forms, and his poems reflect that. There were others like him. Melvin Tolson - although you would never mistake a Tolson poem for a Hughes poem. Tolson wrote long rollicking story-poems, full of characters and voices - he's more like Carl Sandburg (although Hughes counted Sandburg as a huge influence) - Hughes' poems strike me as simpler. More to the point.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
During the Harlem Renaissance, which centered on the vital musical culture, the novelists wrote some powerful, though conventional novels that included dialogue, but the narrative was generally in a standard form. What Langston Hughes set out to do was to use the cadences, the natural metaphors and dialect elements as the primary material for his verse and for his famous Jesse B. Semple letters. "Speak that I may see thee," said Ben Jonson. In Hughes's work a whole community is made visible.
Hughes wrote, about his influences:
The Blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter ... of a sadness where there is no god to appeal to.
It may seem like a done deal now, that Hughes would rise to the top of that group of poets, and be anthologized still today, but it was not at all clear at the time. He got a lot of flak, mainly from the rising black middle class at that time, who wanted nothing to do with black forms, black influences - they thought it lacked dignity. One middle-class black newspaper referred to Hughes as a "sewer dweller". Those were tough times. I can't say I blame anyone involved. It's easy to sit in the present day and judge those for not having the foresight to recognize that it ALL is America ("I, too, am America", said Hughes) - but it certainly wasn't clear on the ground. Other black poets of the same generation criticized Hughes for his rhythms, his "black" sounding poems. These people wanted to advance in life. They thought that Hughes was a step backward. It was white writers who supported Hughes, who championed him. This was also a strike against him in certain black quarters, especially later in the century, the 50s and 60s, as "black power" was rising. He had the whole "house Negro" insult thrown at him, which is ridiculous, how insulting, but it happens all the time. He couldn't win, if you look at it one way - and yet, who's the last man standing?? He wasn't writing for an insulated audience - that's another thing about Hughes. Of course he knew blacks would be reading him, but he wrote for everyone. He was quite conscious about this.
Hughes kept doing what he wanted to do, and in his way, made the space larger. Meaning: his work said: "This is poetry too. This language can be included in poetry." It was a time of great upheaval - in the world, yes, politically and socially - but poetry too was going through some major changes. Hughes was a huge part of that. Those who come forward and say, "Let's change it up a bit" are rarely (if ever) congratulated and embraced immediately. People fear change. People resist change.
A very well-read man, he moved to New York in 1921 to attend Columbia. He went there for a year, then moved to Paris in 1924. He returned a couple of years later, and by that point, he was starting to get published. He wrote all kinds of things - novels, political writing - and in 1926 he published an essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", which became "a manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance" (according to Norton). In it, he called for black artists to not deny their race. That they could create a literature out of their own home-grown forms. This was a message not immediately embraced, at least not by many, but it was a hugely influential essay, and an important document in the history of 20th century American cultural life.
Langston Hughes was the first black poet to make his living from poetry. He didn't need to have other jobs. He didn't have to hustle. What an amazing advancement. It was not easy for him. He experienced racism and prejudice of the most vicious kind. As a child, he witnessed lynchings (but that was par for the course at the time - many poets, white and black, wrote stories of what they saw, as children - and it's harrowing stuff).
His reputation has just grown. He influenced a generation of poets. The roots of his poetry was in black American music, not white European literature - and I would say, knowing that about him, you really can't even measure his influence. He is everywhere. He is definitive.
Michael Schmidt again:
Time has moved on, and Hughes's poems of protest, while they are still resonant, belong, as much protest poetry does, primarily to their moment in history. What makes them durable is their voice.
This is one of his later poems, late 40s, early 50s, and I really love it:
THEME FOR ENGLISH B
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
April 14, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Hart Crane
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Chief Justice Evans Hughes said of Lindbergh's flight over the Atlantic: "We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement. Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything." The same could be said for poets. There are good poets. There are master poets. And then there are the ones who cause displacement. Walt Whitman caused displacement. T.S. Eliot caused displacement. Yeats did. And so, too, did Hart Crane, he of the very short life, but his influence can't be measured. It actually seems to just grow in intensity as the years pass. He was the inspiring force for a whole new generation of writers, who struggled to get out from under his shadow (as Crane openly struggled to get out of Eliot's shadow). Tennessee Williams was honest about his feeling of debt to Crane. He used Crane quotations as epigraphs in many of his plays, and dedicated many of them to him. He kept a picture of Hart Crane over his writing desk for decades. They did not know one another. Hart Crane killed himself in 1932. Or, at least, it is believed he killed himself, the events are still somewhat mysterious.
He realized the weight under which he worked, the legacies of Whitman and Eliot, he was a truly American poet, born and raised. Much of his work attempts to put America into words. Similar to e.e. cummings, and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, but he was aiming at a larger high-flung universal vision, putting him in line with Whitman, a daunting prospect. He loved Eliot, but he felt the view was too pessimistic. However, he wasn't one of those arrogant younguns, who try to show the old folks how to do things, without having proper respect. He realized the impact of Eliot's work, but had serious philosophical disagreements with the outlook. He didn't "take on" Eliot lightly. He struggled. He studied Eliot exhaustively. His letters show that he was absolutely obsessed with T.S. Eliot. He wasn't looking for flaws, he was looking for a space within Eliot's vast landscape where he could make his own mark. That's what happens with those greats. Sometimes without even trying, sometimes just only to please themselves, they write a work that so dominates the landscape that nobody can get around it or through it. There were certainly other playwrights and poets in Shakespeare's day. You have to literally move Shakespeare bodily out of the damn way to get to them. Same with Eliot. Same with Joyce. Irish writers today still have to either pit themselves AGAINST Joyce, or try to work within his tradition. Crane, in letter after letter, shows how he was working WITH Eliot, all by himself, looking for a "way in".
He wrote to fellow poet Allen Tate on June 12, 1922:
I have been facing [Eliot] for four years, - and while I haven't discovered a weak spot yet in his armour, - I flatter myself a little lately that I have discovered a safe tangent to strike which, if I can possibly explain the position, - goes through him toward a different goal. You see it is such a fearful temptation to imitate him that at times I have been almost distracted ... In his own realm Eliot presents us with an absolute impasse, yet oddly enough, he can be utilized to lead us to, intelligently point to, other positions and 'pastures new'. Having absorbed him enough we can trust ourselves as never before, in the air or on the sea. I, for instance, would like to leave a few of his 'negations' behind me, risk the realm of the obvious more, in quest of new sensations, humeurs.
What is so interesting to me about this is that you hear poets after Crane talking about him in much the same way. Tennessee Williams blatantly stole from him, always making sure to give him a nod, but the influence was so great he couldn't separate himself. It was an homage.
In another letter to Tate, a couple months later, Crane writes:
I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if I must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal. I should not think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstacy were not (at odd moments, and rare!) a very real thing to me. I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say in the time of Blake ... After this perfection of death - nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind.
Fascinating. Awesome.
Crane had a very unhappy childhood. Harrowing, actually. His mother had a nervous breakdown in 1908 (Crane was 9 years old), and his parents then divorced. Crane was torn between his parents. He was drawn to his mother, but she suffocated him with love. He finally severed all ties. He dropped out of high school and moved to New York City. He was overwhelmed by technology (much of his poetry has to do with the modern world and new technology) - and had an apocalyptic outlook, very typical of that time. It seemed like the end times. He was probably gay, although he had troubled romances with women as well. His important love affairs were all with men, one in particular (a sailor, Emil Opffer) - who was the inspiration for "Voyages", a series of love poems, called by the Norton Anthology "among the most significant love poems of the twentieth century". A troubled guy. Obsessed with writing. As he mentioned in the letter to Tate, Blake was a big deal to him. He felt that modern poets often ignored the sublime (and, it must be said, rightly so - what with the cataclysm of WWI) - but he was drawn to it. He was into visions, transcendence, dreams - his view of America somehow fit into that dreamscape, and he put himself the challenge of putting it into verse.
All of this is to say that I love Hart Crane. He is what I call one of the poets "of my heart". He's in there. I love his poem about Herman Melville. I love his poem about Charlie Chaplin (a man he revered). (Go check out Ted's post with a couple of Hart Crane poems, including "Chaplinesque"). Crane said about Chaplin: "Chaplin may be a sentimentalist, after all, but he carries the theme with such power and universal portent that sentimentality is made to transcend itself." This may be a case of seeing in your idol the very things you most want to have in yourself - but here, Crane was right on the money. There is a "sentimentality" to Crane's work, but its goal is to transcend, and in poem after poem, he does that.
Crane had no formal education. He was self-taught. His poems are not academic, although quite rigorous. He didn't have a bogus "let me give voice to the common man" thing that so many poets have - he was sincere, in all things. That's probably why Tennessee Williams loved him so much. He was unafraid of sentiment. He turned it into lyricism. There is an elegiac quality to most of it, although I'm not sure if it just seems that way to me because of Crane's early death, throwing himself off a ship into the Caribbean, and drowning. His poems feel, to me, like they are whispered down from a great height of space and time. He can see things, and see them whole. He determined that he would climb high enough to be able to see far, far into the past, the future, other dimensions.
What the hell, I'll post his most famous poem. It was written as an introduction, actually, to his long poem "The Bridge" - and it's called "To Brooklyn Bridge". It is what he is most known for today. It certainly calls to mind Whitman's brilliant emotional "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", perhaps it's a response to it. Whitman's generation crossed the river by boat. Crane's generation crossed by bridge. Progress. American progress. A big big deal. The Brooklyn Bridge was a big deal. Crane had feelings about that. Conflicts. Perhaps, too, it is a response to London Bridge that shows up in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste land". A response to the rot of Europe, perhaps? Bridges are such symbols. But notice how he doesn't get stuck on the details. He flings himself up into the ether in order to write about these things. Transcendence is what he is after. Transformation.
A poet I adore. We know him by all that he displaced.
To Brooklyn Bridge
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
April 12, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Basil Bunting
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
By all accounts, Basil Bunting was some kind of genius prodigy. He also was Iran correspondent for the London Times for a bit, and was very interested in Persia and Persian poetry, so I love him for that. Born in 1900 and died in 1985 (God, that generation - what they saw), he grew up in the north of England. A sort of Ezra Pound type, didactic and bossy (when he was a teenager he apparently "edited" Shakespeare's sonnets, because he thought they needed a bit of work - hahaha) he embraced modernism and all of its themes wholeheartedly.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
[Bunting] may have spent several years in Persia, on the edge of a real desert, yet the poetic landscapes he created are greener, often English - the England of his native Northumberland, with its history. "I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice," he writes. Voice again, and "nipped", suggesting Objectivist concision. But Bunting as an English poet could lend himself to a movement only in part. The rest of him was empirical, pragmatic; he trusted himself more than he trusted dos and don'ts. He might sit at Pound's feet, but he never merely imitates Pound. Attending to the mature mastery of another writer, he sets out to find his own.
In the early 1950s, he was sent to Iran as a correspondent. As a youth, he had taught himself Persian, so that he could read Persian poetry. Aha. So he was one of THOSE. Like Joyce, as a college student, teaching himself Norwegian so he could read Ibsen in the original. Bunting was in Iran during a time of enormous upheaval, the CIA-engineered coup against Mossadeq, the Prime Minister, a defining event for Iran as a country. It made CERTAIN that 1979 and the hostage-situation would occur. (Here's some excerpts about "Old Mossy"). Bunting was in Iran at that time, and things got nuts, and his life was threatened repeatedly, and he finally was tossed out of the country.
Bunting, like the rest of his generation - Pound, Williams, Eliot, Yeats - really thought about and wrestled with poetry. It wasn't enough to do your own thing. You had to tell others how to do it as well. You had to have opinions about poetry itself, what it should be, what its purpose was. I love all of the different struggles of this period, in poetry - the titanic arguments between giants - all about POETRY. Humankind is a beautiful thing. Because if we can't argue about poetry, in the same way we can argue about politics and war, then we are nothing.
Bunting wrote something called "I Suggest", which is a list of tips for poets - which gives a good idea of who he was, his concerns, his sensibility, and to my mind, he followed all of these "suggestions". Good tips for writers of any genre:
I SUGGEST1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shapePut your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.Never explain - your reader is as smart as you.
I don't know all of his work, but I do know that there is a rough immediacy to the things I have read, a grappling with reality - as it comes across in objects - that is original and fresh. He wrote Odes, that's one of the things he is most known for, and also a long poem called Briggflatts, his master work, I suppose - but a poem is included in the Norton Anthology that I'll post here as the excerpt of the day. Bunting was big on "voice" - as he wrote in "I Suggest". He thought poems should be like music, and he also felt that everyday speech should not be jettisoned from poetry. I love this poem, because it is an indictment of populist thinking, and also a perfect example of the kind of sneer that artists encounter, every day, all day, for their entire lives, by people who honestly believe that they should "get a real job". The arrogance of the ignorant. It's all spoken in the voice of the "chairman", a self-righteous "man of the people" (look out for those "everyday folk" - they often seethe with resentment, as we can see everywhere today, towards anyone who does anything different, or learned, or in any way tries to separate from the pack). The poem is called "What the Chairman Told Tom". "Tom" is modeled on Tom Pickard, a British poet who studied with Basil Bunting, so perhaps there is a grain of truth in this encounter.
What the Chairman Told Tom
Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.
Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.
But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve.
How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?
Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.
I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.
They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?
Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.
They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.
Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.
April 11, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Louise Bogan
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I don't know that much about Louise Bogan, but I do know I love her poems, even though they are a little bit scary to me. Scary in that she seems cold, clear, and brutal in her observations. She doesn't "fuss" about things. She doesn't go on and on about things. She boils things down to their essences. She liked other poets to do the same (she was poetry editor of The New Yorker for years, so she was responsible, at the time, for setting the standard for the poetry selected - The New Yorker could use her now!!) She is not ever sentimental. She can't afford it. She had a bunch of nervous breakdowns through her life, yet still managed to be productive in her life, not an invalid. But she certainly couldn't afford to "dwell" on her feelings. Her interest was in carving out all the extraneous elements of things like fear of death, womanhood, nightmares, pain - and seeing what was left. At least that's my impression of her from her tight formal poems. Yet she was not a prude, or some kind of reactionary. She was glad that the 19th century, and its accepted assumptions and lies, was over - she was glad there was such a thing as psychoanalysis - and she was glad to see things progress. In 1951, she wrote that it was good to open up "fresh sources of moral, as well as of aesthetic courage", and she felt poetry could certainly handle "subconscious and irrational processes".
She loved Rilke, and Yeats.
She was born in 1897. Her parents were Irish, but she was born in Maine. She was married, had a child, went to Boston University. I am not sure what her clinical diagnosis was, but she did have many breakdowns.
If you are not familiar with the work of Louise Bogan, you should really check her out.
"Women" is perhaps her best-known poem. There is a deep keening sense of irony here. Because, after all, Louise Bogan is a woman. This is not just an unsisterly sentiment. It reads to me as a wish-fulfillment, a yearning. She looks at other women and wishes she had less "wilderness" in her. Wilderness meaning: madness, chaos, griefs, confusion. Someone said they admired my intensity recently, and it was a very sweet comment, but my response is: I'm not sure such intensity is actually healthy or good, although it certainly just is the way I am built. It is nothing to be romantic about. It is actually quite terrible. Or - it can be.
Like an exchange from Men in Black that I referenced yesterday on Twitter, it's been a bit on my mind lately:
Jay says: "You know what they say. It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
Kay replies: "Try it."
My view is definitely Kay's. It's not an intellectual standpoint. I come to this view from experience. You can only come to that view through experience.
So I read Louise Bogan's "Women", and I certainly feel her separateness, from her gender - how isolated she feels - how different - but the poem isn't smug. It's brutal. And like I said, although it sounds quite critical, I feel a bit of wistfulness in Bogan here. Like, she may be saying, "God, your life is so dull" - but after a time, you get sick of "excitement" and would like a little "dullness". Only maybe by that point you are no longer capable of it.
WOMEN
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead.
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.
They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.
They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.
They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.
April 10, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Dorothy Parker
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Dorothy Parker was famous for her wit, her sharp tongue, and her incisive (sometimes brutal) opinions. After seeing a young Katharine Hepburn in one of Hepburn's first Broadway roles, Parker wrote, "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." But that is just one of too many examples to count. You wonder if the woman ever said anything that WASN'T quotable. I have read interviews with her, and she seems the same in person as she does in print, which is extraordinary - it was just how her mind worked: fast, caustic, always having to win (I wouldn't get into a battle of wits with her), lethal - LETHAL. There are so many anecdotes about her, and who knows if they are all true, but I prefer to believe they are true, because somehow, strangely, it makes me believe in the possibility of WINNING. Of crushing an opponent, with only words. It may not be a lovable quality, but it is certainly a theatrical and literary quality. One of the most famous anecdotes is the story of Dorothy Parker and actress Clare Booth Luce approaching a narrow doorway. They both stopped, not being able to walk through it side by side. Clare Booth Luce, trying to be witty, said, gesturing for Parker to go first, "Age before beauty." Parker swept through the door first, retorting, "Pearls before swine."
Mean. She was mean mean mean. But why I love her so much (well, I love her for her mean-ness too - I think mean-ness of that kind is highly under-rated) is that her wit was not empty, or facile. It was a true expression of her sensibility (one aspect of it anyway), and it was always funny, which is not an easy task.
Another reason why I love her is that you do get the sense that there is so much more there. That perhaps she "fell into" something that she was really really good at, better than anyone, but there is also a sadness, that she was pigeon-holed. What about her sadness? Her losses? Her fears? Those are evident in some of her poems as well, but it certainly wasn't how the public saw her. There was sadness for her in that. Here she is, during an interview with The Paris Review in 1956:
Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let's face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated - as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn't getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.
Bitter. But making bitterness funny ("magnificent gesture"). A real survival skill, so so useful to writers.
Another quote from the same interview:
I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
This was her main struggle as a writer. I may be reading into it, but I actually feel her "sick"-ness and "unhappiness" IN her writing, which gives it some of its oomph. She's not a shallow person, as "wits" are often supposed to be. Quite the opposite. She's devastated by phoniness, cruelty, bad writing. It hurts her.
She says in the Paris Review interview:
Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is a great book. And I thought William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness an extraordinary thing. The start of it took your heart and flung it over there. He writes like a god. But for most of my reading I go back to the old ones - for comfort. As you get older you go much farther back. I read Vanity Fair about a dozen times a year. I was a woman of eleven when I first read it - the thrill of that line "George Osborne lay dead with a bullet through his heart." Sometimes I read, as an elegant friend of mine calls them, "who-did-its". I love Sherlock Holmes. My life is so untidy and he's so neat. But as for living novelists, I suppose E.M. Forster is the best, not knowing that that is, but at least he's a semifinalist, wouldn't you think?
She said once that humor needed "a disciplined eye and a wild mind". To me, that perfectly describes her verses, which are tight as a drum, the rhyme schemes and rhythms almost a throwback to Longfellow, who writes rhymes and rhythms so perfect, that they must be read out loud for the sheer joy of them. There are, perhaps, verses more famous than the one I'm excerpting here today (her poem about suicide - "razors pain you", her poem about "one perfect rose") - but her four-line stunner about Oscar Wilde is one of my favorites.
Obviously, Wilde was a huge influence on Dorothy Parker. He had the same brutal eye, the same caustic perfection of thought encapsulated in his epigrams - and I would say that Parker, here, is "disciplined" and yet also very "wild". It takes a wild broad mind to write something like this, but she has reined it all in to something perfect and cool and self-contained. One of her biggest gifts.
I love that crazy mean dame.
Oscar Wilde
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
April 9, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Austin Clarke
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
In case you are wondering, the Norton Anthology is organized chronologically, by birth date of poet. I am not including every poet that shows up here, because many I am either not familiar with, OR I have separate volumes devoted only to that poet - and I'll do excerpts from those books, rather than this one.
Austin Clarke was a poet Dublin-born, and is the leading Irish poet in the generation after W.B. Yeats. John Montague (another poet I love) called Clarke "the first completely Irish poet to write in English." He was born in 1896, and had similar journeys to other Irishmen at that time. 1916 radicalized him (he was in college at the time), although the pump was already primed, his parents being nationalists. He went to University College, Dublin - and I think ended up teaching there. He is a very Irish poet, his topics are Irish, his language and phrasing recognizably Irish - but it just goes to show you that there are a million ways to be Irish. He sounds nothing like Yeats - at least not once he found his own way. He imitated him quite a bit in the beginning, before setting himself free. Yeats has a grand and mystical lyricism, which Clarke doesn't share at all. He is much more grim. Thomas Kinsella, who was a great supporter and advocate of Clarke wrote:
The diction of his last poems is a vivid, particular voice, rich and supple; nothing is unsayable. But it is no natural voice.
He liked limitations. He used assonance a lot. He wrote:
Assonance is more elaborate in Gaelic than in Spanish poetry. In the simplest forms the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by an assonance in the middle of the next line. The use of internal pattern of assonance in English, though more limited in its possible range, changes the pivotal movement of the lyric stanza. In some forms of the early syllabic Gaelic metres only one part of a double syllable is used in assonance ... and this can be a guide to experiment in partial rhyming or assonance and muting. For example, rhyme or assonance on or off accent, stopped rhyme (e.g. window: thin: horn: morning), harmonic rhyme (e/g/ hero: window), cross-rhyme, in which the separate syllables are in assonance or rhyme. The use, therefore, of polysyllabic words at the end of the lyric line makes capable a movement common in continental languages such as Italian or Spanish.
Michael Schmidt (my go-to guy for additional context) in Lives of the Poets
Yeats cast a long shadow. The endless debate about what constitutes Irishness in art and literature, continued, as it had for Joyce in his self-imposed exile and for Samuel Beckett. Readers were reluctant, given the achievement of Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh's accessibility, to accept Clarke on his own terms. It can't have been easy, as he emerged, to reconcile personal vocation, deep learning, a time of historic change, and an indifferent or hostile milieu.
He wrote a lot. He wrote plays, editorials, book reviews (he could be quite caustic) - and also novels. He got into trouble repeatedly with the censors in Ireland, a powerful force. He had a nervous breakdown later in life, and in the 60s published a book of verse about it.
Schmidt writes (and this is very interesting to me):
He gains much from being rooted in Ireland in ways Yeats was unable to be. Impoverishment comes from having to acknowledge and define that rootedness, to manifest it in prose and verse. History would not allow him to take his country of origin for granted. Tomlinson insists that Clarke's nationalism is not "the inertia of chauvinism, but a labour of recovery". Clarke adapted elements from a tradition alien to the English, working toward a separate Irish, not Anglo-Irish, poetry. It was for him a project, a required labor added on to his primary vocation, and it is responsible for peaks and troughs in his work. Yeats assimilates the Irish struggle into a preexistent rhetorical tradition. Clarke introduces the struggle, preserved in a language long suppressed, into the rhetoric itself, to forge a new poetic idiom.
I love his stuff, as I love most Irish literature, in all its complexity and diversity. His is another kind of voice, contemporary to the great early 20th century giants, but somehow still managing to do his own thing.
Schmidt writes about his "place" in Irish literature:
The uncompromising force of his best satires, the vividness of his love lyrics and visions, and the cool candor of his "confessions" set him apart. He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term "Anglo-Irish" is meaningless.
That is a big big deal.
Here is one from 1928. I love it because you can feel an oral tradition in it ("They say ... Men that had seen her ...") You can feel the gossip of small towns, and also the long memories of a people who have lived in the same place for generations. The Norton Anthology has a footnote to the poem which I will include, since it's by Austin Clarke himself, his own note to this haunting poem. It's a footnote that gives really important context to what we are reading here. The language is simple, but as with a lot of Irish stuff, there are buried meanings and symbols that everyone there at that time would get - but are lost to us now.
The Planter's Daughter1
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went -
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
1 "In barren Donegal, trees around a farmstead still denote an owner of Planter stock [that is, a Protestant], for in the past no native could improve his stone's-throw of land" [Clarke's note].
April 8, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - E.E. Cummings
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
E.E. Cummings was one of the few poets I responded to emotionally and viscerally when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I just LOVED him. I didn't know what it was all about, but I loved his weird syntax, I loved how the poems looked on the page - they became like little jigsaw puzzle pieces - where you get fragments of meaning. The words seem to make sense, but lots of times they are not in the right order. And I wondered about that. Why did he do that? I just loved him.
I think the poems I read back then were "next to of course god america i" - that one I very much remember reading early on. The last line: "He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water" freaked me out a little bit. It seemed so bureaucratic, so PTA meeting. I think we read "anyone lived in a pretty how town" too - but the "next to of course god america i" is the one I really remember from back then.
He shows up a lot, if you pay attention. Perhaps the most famous example is how "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond" is woven into the plot and emotional themes of Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters. I know a lot of people who count that as one of their favorite poems of all time, and I would certainly rank it with some of Shakespeare's sonnets as one of the best love poems ever written.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
That is a killer poem. I have a personal association with it as well. A guy I was madly in love with, early on, sent it to me in an email once, with no explanation, no note from him. Just the poem. I already know it well, and it is such a naked open expression of love and desire that naturally I thought: Well, you have to be sending this to me for a REASON - you're not sending it to me because you like the rhyme scheme. It's the SENTIMENT you want to express - and cummings expressed it better than anyone. "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands". Perfection. Heart cracks open every time I read it. It's a dangerous poem. It should be used only wisely and well.
Cummings was doing stuff that yes, had been done before - Gertrude Stein and others had been obsessed with how things LOOKED on the page - but he went at it in his own very very specific way. Even in his own generation, he really stands apart. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine back then, and midwife to lots of the modernists, loved Cummings's stuff, but she did say, "Beware his imitators!" - which is very good advice. He is easy to imitate - but hard to capture.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
He split himself between Paris and Greenwich Village, and later in life between the Village and his New Hampshire farm. He died in 1962. Never happy in a single form, cummings dabbled in painting and drawing, based a satirical ballet on Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, Eimi (1933), because he was fascinated with the human experiment of communism. Poems were his primary activity, but set against those of Moore and Loy, Williams and Stevens, his verse is soft-centered. It is often said that dialect poetry, translated into standard English, can prove standard-sentimental, the charm imparted only by the distortions of language: cummings is a dialect poet in this sense. His belief in the Individual, the sacred unit, the anarchic "I" in tension or conflict with the world and its institutions, issues in inventive distortions of language, but not the radical vision of a Loy or the bleakness of Jeffers. The experimentalist and iconoclast takes his place in the Elysian Fields among the conservatives.
That, to me, seems quite insightful. (But then, Schmidt always is.)
If you read some of cummings's lesser known poems, not just the anthologized ones, and if you read a bunch of them in succession, you start to get the impression ... the feeling ... of the philosophy behind all this. I suppose he had a philosophy about language, sure he did, he liked mucking it up, but it seems to me that what I sense as one of the driving engines of his poetry is a hatred of phoniness, officiousness, pettiness - he is brutal when it comes to bureaucrats, anyone who seems outside of the real thrust of life. He can be very very judgmental. There are those who "get it", and that is a small number, according to cummings, and outside of that charmed circle, is a vast ignorant populace. He wants no part of convention. He is of that generation (born in 1894, died in 1962) who saw two World Wars overtake the entire world like a flu virus. It changed how writers dealt with language. He was, in his own way, grappling with the same issues as TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound - the giants - but unlike them: you can recognize an e.e. cummings poem just by looking at it. It is not MANNERED, though. It's not a trick. His poems end up feeling incredibly organic and true, full of very real feeling. The forms he chooses, the way he reverses word order, ends up feeling like a vehicle for all of his strong emotions - that's the only way he could get it out.
But I think Harriet Monroe is right. Beware his imitators for they are a plague! They have the mannerisms, but not the heart.
I love the poem below. He's one of the few poets of this period who are truly funny.
may i feel said he
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she
may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she
but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she
(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she
(cccome? said he
ummm said she)
you're divine! said he
(you are Mine said she)
April 7, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Hugh MacDiarmid
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
All I know is is that Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve) is one of the best known Scottish poets of the 20th century - although I think he was seen as a local poet, mainly, due to his focus on Scottish language and Scottish nationalism. He was highly political, as most oppressed people are - and was determined to restore the Scottish tradition (its language and rhythms), after being battered down by British domination. Similar to the Irish Revival going on at the very same time, in the early years of the 20th century, with Gaelic Leagues popping up, and a real effort made to restore the Irish language, Hugh MacDiarmid took it as his mission to revive the Scottish language, its pride and separateness. He was a man of his convictions, a communist and nationalist, and abhorred any half-measures, seeing them as the cowardly cop-outs that they so often are. He writes from a place of titanic anger.
I don't know much about him, but I do know that (like Joyce, another writer-in-exile-in-his-own-country), he looked to "the continent" for his inspiration (as well as in his own nation), finding kindred spirits in the French Symbolists and all those decadent guys like Mallarme, et al. He said that he felt it was his mission to be a "cat-fish that vitalizes the other torpid denizens of the aquarium". English is obviously the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats, but it was not the native language for those in Ireland, Wales and Scotland - and it was an explosive issue, highly political. Their languages had been systematically discouraged and snuffed out. So much of 20th century literature is from former colonies of the British Empire, world-wide, finding their legs again, their voice, their own traditions. Much of that stuff is terrible, granted - I find most modern poetry of this kind basically unreadable and unmemorable. Identity-politics and nationalism do not necessarily make great poetry. But MacDiarmid's stuff is rich and funny and when seen in the context of the time - quite courageous. Now, it might seem quaint. Or a throwback. Like a sign that says "Candy Shoppe", or some other ridiculous archaism. But no. This is political poetry, even if politics is never mentioned. This is angry, raging stuff. Speaking in your "native tongue", even if it was just to say "How are you this morning" was a political act. Remember the moment in James Joyce's The Dead when Miss Ivors, the Irish nationalist, leaves the party, she calls out to the crowd, "Beannacht libh!" - a benign farewell statement, but seen as aggressive and almost hostile to that particular crowd, an indictment of their total acceptance of British domination. "I'M speaking Irish, because I AM Irish." is her angry subtext.
MacDiarmid writes from that place. He had a lot of enemies, a lot of naysayers, whom he slayed left and right in prose, like William Wallace of yore. He loved a fight. He was Scottish, after all. He found most Scottish poetry to be unacceptable, and he wasn't one of those people who just "does his own thing". Most of these nationalistic poets, ones who live in an oppressed or dominated land, can't just "do their own thing". It needs to be a movement. Other poets must be encouraged to embrace their Scottishness, to look back to their roots, pre-British, and write from THERE.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
Because many of MacDiarmid's best poems are in a language heightened by his own invention (called Lallans, Synthetic Scots, or Vernacular Scots) based on the vernacular of the Borders and Scottish Lowlands, not on standard English, he seems at first as linguistically difficult as his forebears Dunbar and Douglas (he lacks the repose of Henryson).
MacDiarmid found Joyce's Finnegans Wake to be a revolutionary work (as indeed it is), and thought it was an exciting example of the future. Language is a big BIG deal to MacDiarmid. As it was to Joyce. Perhaps someone born in England proper could not understand this. But Joyce was always aware that the language he spoke, the language he grew up speaking, had been IMPOSED on his people. It gives you a different relationship to language, there are fewer assumptions, fewer unexamined elements. MacDiarmid wrote a long poem for James Joyce called "In Memoriam James Joyce", which was a celebration of Joyce's supra-national, intra-national, extra-terrestrial, whatever you want to call it, relationship to language. An example to everyone.
Seamus Heaney writes of MacDiarmid:
The recorded words and expressions ... stretch[ed] a trip wire in the path of Grieve's auditory imagination so that he was pitched headlong into his linguistic unconscious, into a network of emotional and linguistic systems that had been in place since childhood.
He had some monstrous political views (thought Stalin was a great guy), although understandable seen from his perspective. He was listed in Who's Who, naturally, and when asked to name his favorite recreation, he wrote: "Anglophobia".
Michael Schmidt again writes (and he's so good at providing connections, references, influences):
[MacDiarmid's] was an inclusive talent like Lawrence's or Whitman's, only more austere and particular, more Presbyterian, less subjective. It is intellectual, satirical, deliberately inelegant, yet at the same time prophetic... Like another great Scot, Thomas Carlyle, he knew his own arrogance and could make fun of it. Hard on others, he could be hard on himself. The romantic and mystical impulses that trip up his materialist mission are part and parcel of his achievement and his shortcomings, all of which he exposed in In Memoriam James Joyce, particularly in the section that in extract is called "The Task". The poem is filled with hostages to fortune. It calls his paradoxical, antinomian structures to account and finds them wonderfully wanting. Paradoxical choices are evident throughout, even in the choice of Scots, an act at once reactionary and revolutionary, articulating as it does against the broad complacent nationalism of Britain a narrow, redefining and positive nationalism of Scotland. MacDiarmid's nationalism is not triumphalist or at any point complacent. Its intention is recuperative; he is wresting something out of the past and out of the present, an area of distinct identity, independent value. He explores this theme inexhaustibly in prose, not least in his richly eccentric study Scottish Eccentrics. Scots is not a regional dialect but the reconstruction of a national language. The project may be doomed, but it is heroic, and in making the new - or remaking the old - language, he creates some of the greatest poetry of the century.
I like to read his stuff out loud, especially the really Scottish-sounding ones, because - like with Chaucer, or Finnegans Wake - these things are meant to be heard. They LOOK nonsensical on the page, but once you open your mouth and start to muddle through, they make beautiful sense. You don't even need a glossary.
T.S. Eliot wrote of MacDiarmid:
It will eventually be admitted that he has done ... more for English poetry by committing some of his finest verse to Scots, than if he had elected to write exclusively in the Southern dialect.
Here are two of his poems - one is obviously written in a Scottish dialect, the other not. The second one is a great example of how Hugh MacDiarmid ARGUED with people through his writing. The second poem is a response to A.E. Housman's poem "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries". MacDiarmid couldn't let it pass, had to respond. As you can tell from the first line, he never ever held his punches.
Cloudburst and Soaring Moon
Cloodburst an' soarin' mune
And 'twixt the twa a taed
That loupit oot upon me
As doon the loan I gaed.
Noo I gang white an' lanely
But hoo I'm wishin', faith,
And clood aine mair cam' owre me
Wi' Jock the byreman's braith.
Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
April 5, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Edith Sitwell
I am going to get back into my Daily Book Excerpt thing that I haven't done in over a year, for various reasons. The main one being my inability to read last year, and outside events that impacted my desire to write, or blog, or anything else. When I left off, I was on my poetry shelf, so I will pick up from there. If I keep going, I would (of course, because I am OCD), go back and go through all the shelves again - doing posts and excerpts on all of the books in the various genres that I have read SINCE I started doing the Excerpt thing. In a way, it's a fun cataloguing exercise, and I am the daughter of one of the great all-time cataloguers. With poetry, I have a lot of anthologies, so I was going through them, and picking out poets that I felt I had something to say about. That, to me, seems fair. So, in the case of poetry (as well as short story collections), I would do multiple excerpts from one book. This was an executive decision I made, and I will stick to it. Picking up where we left off ....
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Edith Sitwell is one of those people whose name is known to me - it's woven into the poetry-conversation, and she does command her own spot, her place seems secure - but I was not all that familiar with her work. I don't remember her being "read" in my poetry class in college, and I don't remember her being covered in my English or Humanities classes in high school. She doesn't seem to be one of the "big ones" anymore, although it may just be that I have not been paying proper attention. I'm not a scholar. More of a casual fan, so sometimes I miss the signs.
Edith Sitwell reminds me a little bit of Martha Graham. Graham had a strict classical ballet background, and then veered off into "modern" dance, although it wasn't called that at the time. For the most part it was called: "WTF is she doing???" Arching the pelvis, legs bent, she broke down classical ballet and found the underbelly of it, going for the mythical and sexual themes. But her background was strong and traditional, and the dancers in her troupe were known as some of the best ballet dancers in the world, in terms of technique. She pushed them in other ways. But if you didn't have that strong background in the mainstream tradition, you wouldn't have lasted a day with Martha Graham. Edith Sitwell has a similar reactionary attitude. Not reactionary, in terms of politics, but reactionary in terms of trying to define herself against all that had come before. She is not quite modern, but also not quite traditional. She's on the divide. The thing about her that is also interesting is that she seems quite bohemian (check out photos of her!), but she lived in a huge ancestral house, surrounded by the heavy tradition of family and riches and a long long family tree. A strange dichotomy.
She was (like so many other poets of the day) blown away by T.S. Eliot's Prufrock. It validated her own experiments, and helped her push farther in that direction. The past was dead. Move forward into the new.
She wrote:
At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
Dame Edith didn't pull her punches. She was inspired by Baudelaire and Mallarme (putting her in line with Oscar Wilde and his aesthetes), and wanted, above all else, to find language that was appropriate to the new modern age, its technology, its danger, the bleak catastrophe of World War I - it was an amazing time for literature. How to put it into words? The 19th century forms flat out would not do. Sitwell wrote:
The great quality of the modern masters is an explosive energy, the separating up of the molecules, exploring the possibilities of the atom.
You can feel the entire upheaval of the 20th century in that sentence. After the first atomic bombs were dropped, she wrote some incredible poems about it, the main one being "Three Poems of the Atomic Bomb".
She would do readings of her poems that were actually elaborate performance-art pieces. People were annoyed by her, as people are often annoyed by pretentious over-seriousness. Sitwell experimented with sound and repetition, and she was also very tall (her mother had been so disappointed in what her daughter ended up looking like - Edith wasn't really a loved child, by either parent) - so she made quite a striking impression. Perhaps the fact that she was so rich, with old OLD money - had something to do with her ability to just not give a crap, and do whatever she wanted to do. She never had to work for a living. She did her own thing. She was editor of a literary review in the years leading up to World War I. She published Wilfred Owen's war poetry, she published poems by her brothers (also poets), and her own stuff. The Sitwells were representative of a lot of things the British found disgusting: privilege, class, money, isolation - so she had a lot going against her to be taken seriously.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
In England reinvention took many forms, but none quite so eccentric as Edith Sitwell's. She exerts a fascination - not the fascination of Poe, whose wild music and tragic life are part of the birth of something substantial, but the fascination of a languid social and cultural tradition coming to an end in a falling chandelier of metrical sententiousness. The surprise here is that the social type she represents survived so long, that her writing can be so funny when it least means to be, so flat when humor is her intention. She might seem to embody, more than Wilde ever did, what we now know as camp. But camp involves self-conscious projection. There is no reason to believe that the heavily ringed, heavily rouged poet ever took herself anything less than seriously.
That, to me, seems quite accurate.
But she was a fighter. She was a great hater. She loved attacking her attackers, and continuing on to just do whatever the hell she wanted to do. Coming from a baronial mansion in the countryside, she was determinedly avant-garde, in outlook and practice. The funniest thing is that eventually she did become part of the establishment - she was made a "Dame" of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth - and went on huge reading tours around England and America - a big crowd-pleaser.
Schmidt again writes:
For one who flouted convention, she surrounded herself in later years with rituals that required strict observance: a monster of whim and self-importance, she also sometimes had a magical way with words.
I am not familiar with a lot of her work, but here's one poem I do know and like. It's about the Battle of Britain, 1940 - when the Germans carried out bombing raids, from the air, over England. It's also appropriate because it was just Easter.
Still Falls the Rain
The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn
Still falls the Rain---
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss---
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us---
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Still falls the Rain---
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear---
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare.
Still falls the Rain---
Then--- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune---
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,---dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain---
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."
January 2, 2009
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - T.S. Eliot
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot's influence in order to be able to write in their own way. He was so huge, so dominant - and in his own time - that it became difficult for other poets to find their own voices. Everything sounded like an imitation of Eliot. Interestingly enough, Eliot felt that way about Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, of which he said (among many other things), "I wish for my own sake that I hadn't read it." I love that quote.
I went through an Eliot phase in high school, mainly because my drama class had gone to see Cats in New York, and also we had had to read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in English class, and there was something about the descriptions (the yellow fog and I loved the part about the yellow smoke rubbing its back against the window panes - it just sounded so satisfying and real to me, I could SEE it) that I really liked. I was very into ADJECTIVES back then, which maybe one day I will write about - because it took a truly frightening obsessive form (frightening in that I had to break myself of the habit, and it really took some doing) - and I'm not sure what that was all about. And Eliot's work was really good with the adjectives. They transported me into another world. But the meaning of the poems?? Not sure I really grasped it back then!
I like that Eliot had - like many artists - a struggle really committing to be a poet. His parents thought it would be a waste of energy, wanted him to have a "real" job, so for a while, he did keep up the pretense - studying philosophy, going for his dissertation - but all the while, the poetry was growing in him. It began to occur to him that that was what he wanted to do. That and that alone.
So guess who entered the picture around this time?
Take a wild guess.
Ezra Pound. Was the man everywhere at once?
Pound read early drafts of Prufrock and basically browbeat Harriet Monroe (editor of Poetry) to publish it. Monroe didn't want to at first. She said no. Pound tried again. And again. Until finally she caved in 1915.
I don't think I knew that T.S. Eliot was American until, oh, last year or something retarded like that. If I was told the facts, I certainly didn't retain them. Cats seemed really British to me, especially because of the composers being British (not that that has anything to do with anything, just describing my own journey here) - and then "T.S. Eliot" the name sounds oh so British ... but no, dude was from St. Louis. I remember when I found that out, and I had to re-think my entire concept of the guy. "What?? He was American??" Eventually he became a British citizen, and he lived in Europe for most of his life - but he was US-born. Interesting, though: his family was originally from Massachusetts, but T.S. Eliot was raised in St. Louis. Eliot ended up going to Harvard and suddenly felt himself to be a Midwesterner. Although during his time in St. Louis, he felt like a Northeaterner. There was geographical displacement in this man from the beginning, and you can really see that in his poems. It wasn't that he belonged nowhere. It was that he belonged everywhere.
He said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1948:
In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those who inhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is a meaning to the phrase «the poetry of Europe», and even to the word «poetry» the world over. I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it be apparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential.
That all sounds very nice and grown-up, doesn't it? But Eliot had witnessed the fracturing of "understanding", in World War I and World War II, and his later poems express the fear, the anxiety, of that desolate time in Europe and elsewhere. Eliot had a troubled first marriage, and lost a dear friend in World War I. There were other events, too, the death of his father ... and these all worked on him and his psyche - a terrible time for him, obviously - and the result was The Waste Land, published in 1922 (completed in 1921). It's one of the most important poems of the 20th century, obviously - and, like Yeats's Second Coming, describes the overwhelming sense of doom and fear, evil stalking the land, slaughter, carnage, chaos. Eliot was, of course, in England at the time, which I think also made a huge difference. Americans were greatly affected by the two world wars, obviously - we made enormous sacrifices, and raced in (to quote Eddie Izzard) like "the cavalry in the last reel" - and those who fought witnessed the carnage - but it wasn't on their own soil. Huge difference in psychology. Imagine the trenches and air raids sweeping across our own continent and how that would have affected us differently as a people. Eliot's The Waste Land is a giant poem, and was immediately famous, and immediately placed him not just in the canon, but at the top of it.
In order to understand the 20th century, The Waste Land is essential.
Interestingly enough, the form of The Waste Land represented a break with Pound. The poets Pound promoted found themselves eventually having to 'break' with him, because his influence was huge as well, and he was pushing them all towards a certain kind of expression, what he felt poetry was. He was responsible for many of their breakthroughs. Pound was instrumental in helping Eliot put The Waste Land together, which had existed in fragments. I love that the fragmentary nature of the poem remained intact, though - because that is what war does. That is what great cataclysmic events can do. Psychologies and cultures fragment. Eliot had suffered a nervous breakdown too, and needed help with the poem. Pound stepped in. Pound took all of the different drafts and acted as an editor, piecing it together. It says a lot about Pound that he saw what Eliot was working towards, and although his goals differed from Pound's, Pound put that aside. Perhaps Eliot would have leaned towards a more streamlined approach, perhaps Pound sensed that the poem needs its fractured format ... The form the poem takes expresses the experience of the poet (and also of the world at that time). Brilliant.
Eliot said later, about The Waste Land:
In The Waste Land I wasn't even bothering whether I understand what I was saying.
The poem is the stronger for it, for that lack of control.
My Norton book says, in its introduction to Eliot:
When the poem itself was first published, in 1922, it gave Eliot his central position in modern poetry. No one has been able to encompass so much material with so much dexterity, or to express the alienation and horror of so many aspects of the modern world. Though the poem is made of fragments, they are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that might be joined if certain spiritual conditions were met. In this way, Eliot's attitude toward fragmentation was different from Pound's - Eliot wanted to recompose the world, whereas Pound thought it could remain in fragments and still have a paradisal aspect that the poet could elicit. In other words, Pound accepted discontinuity as the only way in which the world could be regarded, while Eliot rejected it and looked for a seamless world. He began to find it in Christianity.
Eliot was quick to diss his own importance (you can see it in his Nobel speech), and he said, at one point, that The Waste Land wasn't so much a treatise on the alienation and fragmentation of the modern man - but just a piece of "rhythmical grumbling". Regardless, it is a huge accomplishment.
Here is the poem that started it all (for him and for me). Lots of things that I fell in love with when I was 14 I outgrew. Like colored legwarmers and Rick Springfield. But "Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" remains.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
January 1, 2009
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Marianne Moore
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
T.S. Eliot wrote in 1923, early in Moore's career:
"I can only think of five contemporary poets - English, Irish, French and German - whose works excite me as much or more than Miss Moore's."
He felt that her poetry was probably the "most durable" of all the greats writing at that time.
Sadly, I have no idea how to recreate what Moore's poems LOOK like on my own site - does anyone have any tips? Movable Type irons out her jagged beginning lines - and half of the fun of Moore is what her poems look like. The start of each line is staggered, like little steps (or, in a lot of poems they are) - and so the reading of the poem becomes something almost experiential, as opposed to passive, or intellectual. Her poems really look like something.
Moore was great friends with people like H.D. (more on her here) and Ezra Pound (more on him here) and she had many admirers. Her work as a critic was unfortunately cut short, due to the collapse of the main journal she wrote for - but you can see her critical mind at work in her poems. She was one of those poets who wrote a lot about poetry itself. She had many ideas, she wanted to let images talk to one another through the verse - and perhaps the connecting links were opaque to us, the reader - but that just adds to the power of her stuff. Her poems have been compared to Cubist paintings. They are not literal. She goes into a dreamspace, and the words tumble out (at least that is the impression - not only from the sounds, but from, again, the LOOK of the words on the page) - almost like things happen in dreams. The unconscious is paramount. Poetry is not meant to reveal all. What you leave out is almost as valuable as what you include. She wrote: "Omissions are not accidents."
My view of Marianne Moore was, for a while, tainted by her rather snotty response to an overly fawning Sylvia Plath. Plath was ga-ga, a young woman at the time, not famous yet - and they met in 1955. Plath had sent Moore some of her poems, and she feared she made some gaffe by sending her carbon copies. Moore sent her a pointed letter that hurt Plath's feelings. Anne Stevenson writes in Bitter Fame:
In July, to Sylvia's surprise and keen distress, Miss Moore sent her in reply what Sylvia saw as "a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter... 'Don't be so grisly,'" she commented; "you are too unrelenting.'" And she added "certain pointed remarks about 'typing being a bugbear.'" Sylvia concluded that Miss Moore was annoyed because she had sent carbon copies instead of fresh top sheets. That seems unlikely. While Marianne Moore usually admired Ted's work, she never warmed to Sylvia's, disliking the early traces of the very elements that later were to carry her to fame: macabre doom-laden themes, heavy with disturbing colors and totemlike images of stones, skulls, drownings, snakes, and bottled fetuses -- hallmarks of Sylvia's gift.
Marianne Moore very much admired the poetry of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband for a time, but Hughes never forgave her for her slighting of Plath, and wrote a poem about it in his collection Birthday Letters.
A Literary Life, by Ted Hughes
We climbed Marianne Moore's narrow stair
To her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest, in Brooklyn.
Daintiest curio relic of Americana.
Her talk, a needle
Unresting - darning incessantly
Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers.
Birds and fish of the reef
In phosphor-bronze wire.
Her face, tiny American treen bobbin
On a spindle,
Her voice the flickering hum of the old wheel.
Then the coin, compulsory,
For the subway
Back to our quotidian scramble.
Why shouldn't we cherish her?
You sent her carbon copies of some of your poems.
Everything about them -
The ghost gloom, the constriction,
The bell-jar air-conditioning - made her gasp
For oxygen and cheer. She sent them back.
(Whoever has her letter has her exact words.)
'Since these seem to be valuable carbon copies
(Somewhat smudged) I shall not engross them.'
I took the point of that 'engross'
Precisely, like a bristle of glass,
Snapped off deep in my thumb.
You wept
And hurled yourself down a floor or two
Further from the Empyrean.
I carried you back up.
And she, Marianne, tight, brisk,
Neat and hard as an ant,
Slid into the second or third circle
Of my Inferno.
A decade later, on her last visit to England,
Holding court at a party, she was sitting
Bowed over her knees, her face,
Under her great hat-brim's floppy petal,
Dainty and bright as a piece of confetti -
She wanted me to know, she insisted
(It was all she wanted to say)
With that Missouri needle, drawing each stitch
Tight in my ear,
That your little near-posthumous memoir
'OCEAN 1212'
Was 'so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful' -
She bowed so low I had to kneel. I kneeled and
Bowed my face close to her upturned face
That seemed tinier than ever,
And studied, as through a grille,
Her lips that put me in mind of a child's purse
Made of the skin of a dormouse,
Her cheek, as if she had powdered the crumpled silk
Of a bat's wing,
And I listened, heavy as a graveyard
While she searched for the grave
Where she could lay down her little wreath.
It is not Moore's fault that a casual comment about carbon copies would send an overly-sensitive young woman into such a tailspin - but it is such tiny moments that make up art (for the artists, I mean) - moments where misconnections or loss are clearly revealed. Hughes had the sense of Plath's sensitivity, he knew it back then, and tried to protect Plath from her own excesses (not an easy job). And now, decades and decades later, he still has some words for Moore.
Such is life.
Moore was a GIANT, by the time Plath and Hughes met her - the "grande dame" of American poetry. She was an eccentric (Moore was), although the outer aspect of her life was always quiet and narrow. She lived with her mother. She did needlepoint. She worked at a library. She wore hats with little veils and fur stoles. She never married.
But her poetry - with its breathless rhythms and counterintuitive images - its fascination with exotic animals - its SCOPE - shows that the enormity of life is not just represented by the events of our lives, but what is going on inside us, how we see. Plenty of people have had phenomenally interesting lives, with scandals and sex and drugs and months living in a tent in Tunisia - but that doesn't necessarily mean that the poetry is going to be good.
Marianne Moore walked a straight and narrow life, and her poems are HUGE.
Also, I have to say: I love that she was an enormous baseball fan. Actually, she was a huge sports fan, in general - but baseball was her passion. She wrote poems about baseball and I treasure them.
Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes
Here is a piece Ted wrote about Marianne Moore.
Here is one of my favorites of her poems. Again, I can't replicate what it looks like - but the beginning lines are all staggered, so the poem looks almost fragmented, breathless. I love her imagery. Nothing about her is expected. Nothing is traditional. Only she could put these lines and these words together. I find her to be a rigorous poet to read. I can't relax. She doesn't let me. The images are too unexpected, I have to pay attention. Like: " its rock crystal and its imperturbability, / all of museum quality..." To me, not only is that line perfect and evocative ... but a surprise, a little gift.
ENGLAND
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral;
with voices - one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept - the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy
with its equal shores - contriving an epicureanism
from which the grossness has been extracted,
and Greece with its goat and its gourds,
the nest of modified illusions: and France,
the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,"
in whose products, mystery of construction
diverts one from what was originally one's object -
substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grass-less, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!
The letter a in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of "a" in candle, is very noticeable, but
why should continents of misapprehension
have to be accounted for by the fact?
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?
Of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite,
of heat which may appear to be haste,
no conclusions may be drawn.
To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough.
The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment,
the cataclysmic torrent of emotion
compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language,
the books of the man who is able to say,
"I envy nobody but him, and him only,
who catches more fish than
I do" - the flower and fruit of all that noted superiority
if not stumbled upon in America,
must one imagine that it is not there?
It has never been confined to one locality.
December 31, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - H.D.
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
The woman's name was Hilda Doolittle. I can't help but think about My Fair Lady when I hear that, and it is difficult for me to really realize that she was born in Pennsylvania and not Liverpool. She spent the majority of her life outside of America, but she was, indeed, American-born. Known as "H.D.", she is another one of those poets who benefited from her friendship (and also, sometimes love-affair with) Ezra Pound (more on Pound here). She had met him early on in America, and once she got to England, he arranged the introductions necessary to get her close to the heart of those with pull and power. Pound was at the center of the literary circles in Europe, and he was instrumental in introducing her into that world. She was also very good friends with Marianne Moore (who I'll get to soon enough) - I think their friendship dated back to college - they both went to Bryn Mawr.
H.D. was at the center of the Imagist movement in poetry, and is thought of as its finest representation. She lived long, however, and died in 1961, so her poetry moved on from its Imagist phase - and her most prolific and successful time as a poet was in the 50s and 60s. Pretty amazing. Her first poems were published in 1913.
When you read even a sketch of her biography, it is amazing the people she intersected with. She had one of those lives. She lived near the center of all of the literary and cultural upheaval of the time. She hung out with Amy Lowell, and Ford Madox Ford. Amy Lowell was responsible for bringing H.D.'s work to America.
H.D. was married, but it didn't work out. She had a long relationship with D.H. Lawrence, before finally settling down with Bryher, a woman - her companion for years, until she died. The two moved to Paris, where they hung out with the literary ex-pat community (I mean, what I would not give for a time machine, to go hang out at one of the cafes or bars with all those poetic ex-Americans whooping it up!), and also got involved in the burgeoning business of film-making, forming a production company. So not only did H.D. hang out with Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, but also Sergei Eisenstein.
As if all of that isn't enough, H.D. suffered a couple of nervous breakdowns and it was recommended to her that she start analysis (a revolutionary idea at the time). She was given the name of a psychiatrist. You know, maybe he could help her out with her problems. That dude's name was Sigmund Freud.
Okay, enough with her personal life which could fill several books.
H.D. had a lifelong love affair with all things classical, and made many pilgrimages to Greece. It was her main inspiration.
Here's a really nice post from Ted about H.D. Some great links to follow with more information about this fascinating talented woman.
Like the rest of the Imagists, H.D. was interested in direct and simple expression (even more so than her contemporaries) - their way of rebelling against the Victorian curlycues and lengthy descriptions. H.D., at times, seems to be experimenting with how few words she can actually use. Pare it down, pare it down. Her early poems have real energy. They almost look like fragments - reminiscent of Emily Dickinson (at least what the poems look like on the page) - and H.D.'s intellectual and emotional obsession with all things Hellenic come into play here. It is almost as though those Imagist poems are fractured statues from ancient Greece - perfect, eloquent, simple, and evocative. H.D.'s idol was Sappho (not hard to imagine why), and her overriding desire was to be overwhelmed (which explains her interest in mysticism later in her life). She wanted the poem to act as an agent, something that would not only transport her, but obliterate her. She seeked transcendence, a state of being that was exalted, high-flung. Not easy to sustain.
I love H.D.'s description of Pound from Glenn Hughes' Imagism and the Imagists. Here, Pound acts like an agent, an old-school theatrical agent or manager, wrestling her into position - pushing her towards the "new" - and even giving her her new and mysterious moniker:
Ezra Pound was very kind and used to bring me (literally) armfuls of books to read ... I did a few poems that I don't think Ezra liked ... but later he was beautiful about my first authentic verses .. .and sent my poems in for me to Miss Monroe [the editor of Poetry magazine]. He signed them for me, 'H.D., Imagiste.' The name seems to have stuck somehow.
H.D.'s poems, stark and simple as they are, reverberate with energy, anguish, and power. She's marvelous.
Here's her poem "Helen", written in 1924.
Helen
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
December 27, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Ezra Pound
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I grew up hearing stories of Ezra Pound - not just the stories of his fascism and his time in a cage in Italy out in the open air, or being indicted for treason or his breakdown - I mean, all that is interesting and fascinating and almost frightening. But Pound was a character in my childhood lexicon because of his support and promotion of James Joyce. His name came up all the time. Ezra Pound. Even the name calls up the rows and rows of books on my father's shelves, and my father's gravelly voice talking to me about these titanic clashes of the 20s and 30s, spearheaded by Pound.
Ezra Pound. The name is an onomatopoeic device. The man was tireless. He didn't just do it for Joyce, he did it for all of the Modernists. He was amazingly generous with new talent. Ferocious in his regard, and relentless. He promoted people until the public really had no choice but to accept the new voices. The relationship with Joyce is fascinating to me - but it is just the tip of the iceberg with Ezra Pound. Pound wasn't a rich man. He couldn't afford to be a Renaissance-era-type benefactor. But he had pull and power. He used his power wisely and well, yanking new writers into the spotlight, forcing them to stand still so that they could be fully regarded. Pound's dictum "make it new" is famous, and perhaps overused now - it is an oversimplification of Pound's general philosophy. Pound was a poet too, of course, but I think his true legacy lies in how he promoted other people. We owe him a great debt for that. His poems are controversial to this day, mainly because of his political beliefs and his eventual insanity. He was an anti-Semite, and worked against the United States openly during WWII. He paid for that, obviously.
Pound's poetry can be dense, difficult - and his contemporaries (like Eliot, Yeats) were conflicted about how good it was. I guess I am, too. Some of it blazes off the page with a truth that sears right through me - there are times (like the poem I post today) when his voice is clear, open, with nothing in between it and the reader. Pound can be awfully clever, and that can act as a smokescreen, or a barrier ... his cleverness ... but when he is NOT clever, when he speaks from the heart - I don't know, I find him to be pretty damn powerful. His engagement seems to me to be with abstractions. I could be wrong about that. I don't know much about Pound - although because he is such a giant figure to my father he resonates for me on that level as well. But it seems to me that Pound had that gift-slash-curse of the insane - which is to inflate abstractions into something almost unlivably austere. It is when people strive to live by their theories - come hell or high water - that they lose their humanity. The great political cataclysms of the 20th century, the genocides and slaughter, can all be somehow explained (again, oversimplifying) by heaving apocalyptic love affairs with theory. Let us take this THEORY of politics and force it into being. Abstractions imposed from above on a living breathing populace. It is amazing how powerful those delusions really are. One of the harbingers of living-by-theory is a belief in utopia (on the left-wing as well as the right-wing side), a true belief that the world can actually be perfected ... and it is my general belief that anyone who talks about utopia is someone to be feared. I've written about that before. Utopians may have the best intentions, but LOOK OUT for people with good intentions. Utopia requires the mess of humanity to be ironed out, eradicated. That is the only way it can work.
Now, again, I'm not a Pound scholar, so I don't want to go too off on a tangent here, because I am not on certain ground. But his insanity was obviously something clinical, a mental illness - but much of its manifestation had to do with the rigidity of abstractions. Rigidity cannot hold. There will be a snap sooner or later. There's controversy too surrounding Pound's eventual retraction of his fascism and anti-Semitism ... but all of that doesn't interest me as much as his poetry does. And even more than his poetry - his BELIEF in people of talent. James Joyce MUST find a wide audience. Pound was a dog with a bone when it came to his contemporaries with talent. My dad loves him for that, and so do I.
I also love Pound because that very tendency towards abstraction - which was so detrimental to his mental health, and led him down some very unsavory philosophical paths - also helped him be a master theorist of verse. He really engaged with poetry (that is also shown in the poem I posted below). He wrestled with it. He tried to divorce himself from his influences. He hated anything that was passively received. Everything must be examined, pulled apart, and evaluated on its own merits. Accept NOTHING at face value. He wrote about writing, he wrote about poets and poetry and what a poem SHOULD be (again with the dogmatic certainty, the pushing towards abstraction - which loves rules) ... and if he couldn't do it himself in his own work, he recognized the genius of others. He was not a bitter Salieri. Or who knows, maybe he was - but the impression I get of him is not of mediocrity, seething at the grandiose talents of his contemporaries. What I get from him is that he understood his poetry to be at the level it was at ... he worked hard at it, he was ambitious ... but his "mediocrity" (and please, I would count my lucky stars if I could be as "mediocre" as Ezra Pound) did not cause him to be ungenerous or stingy. Quite the opposite.
Modernism needed a champion. That champion was Ezra Pound.
He wrote in 1915:
Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (ie. simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions. It must be as simple as De Maupassant's best prose, and as hard as Stendahl's ... Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindeside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as 'addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing - nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Every literaryism, every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.
This was a revolution at the time.
Pound was breaking away from the Victorian stylings of the former generation. His belief was that Yeats was the greatest writer in English (and I can't disagree with him) and it was because of Yeats's emotional yet stark language, its lack of fripperies and embellishments (at least in his later great work) ... its sense that it was something "new". And indeed it was. Yeats began with lots of fripperies, lots of fancy-pants language, and while it always feels sincere - you can sense the struggle in Yeats. You can sense him trying to wrench himself out of the 19th century into the unknown 20th. Pound was instrumental in pushing him in that direction, encouraging him, saying, "yes, yes, yes, THAT way ... THAT is where you need to go ..." If you read Yeats's work in chronological order, the development is startling. It's like you are reading the works of two entirely separate poets. You wonder where that second guy, the guy who wrote poems like "Among School Children" came from. Pound was part of that breaking-free of the past for Yeats.
A fascinating man. There's a new biography
It sits on my father's shelf right now, taking its place beside all the other Pound books.
Pound's politics may have been controversial, and they certainly ruined him (along with a host of other factors). His reputation has not recovered, and maybe it shouldn't. Who knows. It's not my place to worry about Pound's reputation, or to try to explain to annoyed people who ONLY know him for his politics why he is such a giant figure in the world of 20th century literature, and why he must not be discounted. To discount him, to ignore him, is to render the entire Modernist movement opaque. He is too big. He cannot be gotten out of the way.
Here's a poem he wrote that I really like. Any artist must grapple with his influences - either accepting or rejecting. It is a process. Once upon a time I hated Herman Melville. Now I love him. Ironically, after all of this talk about Pound's political rigidity ... what I am struck most in this poem is its flexibility. Its willingness to accept, to change.
His reputation has not surpassed those of his friends whom he championed. Eliot, Joyce, and many many others ... they loom far larger on the literary map, casting shadows that are far longer. But if you look into their journeys on even a superficial level, one name comes up again and again and again.
Ezra Pound.
A Pact
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
December 16, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - D. H. Lawrence
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
A real pioneer in his day, his stuff can seem rather silly now. I never really got into his novels, although my dad tells stories about how, as a youth, he (and his friends) would flip through them, looking only for the dirty parts. Kind of like me with Forever, by Judy Blume. Ahem.
Some of his poems I ADORE - especially the dreaded anthropomorphizing ones (about the sparrow, the one about elephants being slow to mate) ... He finds a metaphor in animal behavior which can sometimes end up in incredibly moving results. I know anthropomorphization drives some people batty, but I think those people need to get a life. Aren't there bigger things to worry about than people projecting their feelings and wishes and hopes onto animals? Lawrence's animal poems are his best. Granted, I haven't read them all, so I am open to persuasion.
There's a lot of what I would call balderdash in his poetry. Like, it is very difficult to not roll your eyes at all that mystical commingling and yearning phalluses and etc. Yeah, we get it, sex is wonderful, we all love to do it. But there's also something really intellectual about Lawrence - he's not really a libertine, not at all ... and so his sex stuff can seem rather labored, like ... he's just thinking about it too damn much. I realize that I say this from the comfy confines of the 21st century and I certainly give him the props for pushing the boundaries of what could be said, what would be allowed to be said, and all that. His books were controversial for decades, and you read them now and you wonder, "Good lord, what is all the fuss about." He's not a down-and-dirty Henry Miller type of guy. He's more airy-fairy than that ... and that's where the rolling-eyes comes in.
I know that Whitman was his main inspiration and you can hear Whitman ringing through the lines of Lawrence. That same high-arched ceiling of SELF SELF SELF ... the awareness of the transcendence of the soul, embodied in the actual FLESH ... all of that. But for some reason, Whitman's poems just have more ... staying power, to use a sexual phrase (a propos in this case).
I don't know much about Lawrence but I do know that he was married to a kind of extraordinary wild woman named Frieda, who was a proponent of the "zipless fuck" decades before Erica Jong came along. Here they are together.
I mean, is that not a brilliant photo?
Tennessee Williams was obsessed with D.H. Lawrence and worked on many plays over his life that had to do with Lawrence and his wife. Some are one-acts, some unfinished full-lengths ... and I know he made a pilgrimage to New Mexico, I believe, on one of his early cross-country journeys, to meet the Lawrences, hoping to get their blessing for his project. You can hear the influence of Lawrence on Tennessee Williams. I think Lawrence may very well be a man of his time and his time only (although, like I said, I am open to persuasion) ... but he casts a very long shadow, and you can hear echoes of his work in other writers even today.
The Beats were influenced by Lawrence. They liked the sense they got from his poems of going "into a zone", where the connections can fly freely and not just literally - where you can "riff". You can see why the Beat guys were drawn to him, with quotes like this one from 1908:
"My verses are tolerable - rather pretty, but not suave; there is some blood in them. Poetry now a days seems to be a sort of plaster-cast craze, scraps sweetly moulded in easy Plaster of Paris sentiment. Nobody chips verses earnestly out of the living rock of his own feeling ... Before everything I like sincerity, and a quickening spontaneous emotion. I do not worship music or the 'half said thing'."
It was Allen Ginsberg who said "first thought best thought" and that's kind of what Lawrence is getting at here.
Here's one of Lawrence's animal poems. I post this because I like it, and I post it because it goes with the "Rikki Tikki Tavi" theme around here these days.
Snake
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
December 15, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Elinor Wylie
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I love her stuff. I am not familiar with the full scope of her work, but what I do know really strikes my fancy. I wonder if A.S. Byatt used her (or at least her verse) as some of the inspiration for the poems Christabel Lamotte writes in Possession
She had a rather scandal-driven life, leaving her first husband and her child to elope with another man, who was also married. She followed her own star, similar to Edna St. Vincent Millay (who comes off rather horribly in the beautiful recent biography of her
The Norton Anthology also compares her to Wallace Stevens, which I think is a more apt analogy than Millay. Wylie writes about objects and the senses and images with an exquisite clarity, almost like she is looking through a microscope - and you just don't know how she can bear to see things so clearly. It is very Wallace Stevens-esque.
Not as well-known now as her contemporaries, she is well worth a look if you haven't read her before.
I haven't read any of her novels.
I love the poem "Incantation". It is what really calls to mind the lesbian poet of A.S. Byatt's great novel Possession - the short little lines (that call to mind what Sylvia Plath's later poems all looked like on the page - "Lady Lazarus", "Daddy", "Fever 103" - see what I mean? - they all have that short box-like structure, each line about 3 or 4 words long - it's rather chilling, even just to look at. It makes the poem look breathless, if that makes sense. I also love how the title of Wylie's poem actually describes what she is attempting in the poem - and she does it through image.
She's a real poet's poet, I think. Her structure is immaculate.
Incantation
A white well
In a black cave;
A bright shell
In a dark wave.
A white rose
Black brambles hood;
Smooth bright snows
In a dark wood.
A flung white glove
In a dark fight;
A white dove
On a wild black night.
A white door
In a dark lane;
A bright core
To bitter black pain.
A white hand
Waved from dark walls;
In a burnt black land
Bright waterfalls.
A bright spark
Where black ashes are;
In the smothering dark
One white star.
December 14, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - William Carlos Williams
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
For me, William Carlos Williams was one of the poets where my first response to him was of the arrogance of youth: "What the hell is the big deal about a red wheelbarrow? I could write that poem, just string some objects along together, SHEESH." It's the same thing as people looking at the modern art of symmetrical colors or a canvas of white with a small blue circle on it - or whatever and scorning it as "anyone could do that, i could do that." Yes, but
1. You didn't "do that", and
2. It is how these works of art fit into the larger whole that is the interesting and important conversation.
It may not be your cup of tea, and frankly modern art like that is not my cup of tea - but why it was such a radical departure, and where it all came from - is really the conversation to have, not "It sucks" and brushing things off out of hand. William Carlos Williams' poems felt, at first glance, like that. The ones I had to read in my famous poetry class in college were the red wheelbarrow one and the one about the plums in the icebox. And while, let's face it, the poems are so short that I can recite both of them by heart - and I didn't even have to work on memorization - I didn't "get it". I got that the images were beautiful but "is that all there is?" The funny thing is that even now, if the red wheelbarrow poem comes up, a three-dimensional specific image comes into my mind, fully fleshed out, of the rain-wet grass, the wheelbarrow ... Like: even without my working on it, or even thinking about it all that much, the images of that poem LAST. That was mainly William Carlos Williams' point and that was what it was so difficult to grasp as a college student whose favorite poets were Sylvia Plath and Yeats. It may not be your cup of tea but to dismiss something as having no value merely because it is not your cup of tea is ridiculous. Recently, my friend David said to me, "I wish people could understand the difference between 'It sucks' and 'I don't like that'." Exactly.
Ted has a lovely post on William Carlos Williams.
My admiration for William Carlos Williams just grew, as I read more and more poetry - his reputation certainly precedes him, but if you just read a lot of stuff, you start to see his influence EVERYWHERE. It's strange because he is overshadowed in many ways by T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" - but in a way I think his influence has been deeper (or at least wider). He's not really a "poet's poet" but it certainly is true that the more you know about him, the actual man, the more interesting the poems get. First of all, he was a doctor his whole life. So there's that. Like Wallace Stevens, he had an actual "career" separate from his poetry. Second of all, his battles with Ezra Pound (and his regard for Ezra Pound) are well-known, and through their broadsides, one against the other, you really start to get a picture of poetry at that time. Especially because they were both American - yet Pound had chosen to live as an expatriate, and Williams scorned ex-pats. He stuck in Rutherford, New Jersey - where he was born - and never moved. He traveled to Europe, of course, but his focus was always on America, on the slang and language of America, and creating something that was "new". Interestingly enough, Ezra Pound's command to poets "Make it new" was somehow not enough for William Carlos Williams - who thought that Pound, and others, by living in Europe - were connecting themselves unnecessarily to a long and dead European tradition ... Williams was I guess what you would call a radical. A real radical. He was a socialist, and that's pretty apparent in a lot of his poems - but his belief that the world could be made anew, totally, goes along with his political views. He went further than Ezra Pound in his theories about "new ness". LIke I said, their battles are essential reading. It's not important to come down on one side or the other ... we all have our personal preferences, but that's the least interesting part about this whole thing. Pound had taken Williams under his wing (as he did with so many other poets), arranging for publication of his work, chatting him up to the powers-that-be, and really highlighting him, pushing him into the spotlight. In this case, the "student" surpassed the teacher - and had his own ideas about things - mainly that poetry should be plain and simple and direct. Williams openly lambasted poets like Pound and Eliot, attacking their ideas directly, and then Pound would respond in kind. It is all very entertaining, but more than that: illuminating. William Carlos Williams DID surpass his teacher ... and his ideas about objects are just fascinating to me. He wrote:
No ideas but in things. The poet does not ... permit himself to go beyond the thought to be discovered in the context of that with which he is dealing ... The poet thinks with his poem.
The red wheelbarrow poem is rightly famous. It goes like this:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
To Williams, the divinity, the revelation was in the object itself. He wrote:
The particular thing ... offers a finality that sends us spinning through space.
Williams' poems are separate from autobiography, theory, philosophy, even thought. I find him to be one of the most transcendent poets that is out there. Perhaps it is because I am older now. And I have lost much. So that I can now perceive the glory in simple objects. I can see the life therein. I don't know.
I just know that his work seems more and more relevant and awe-inspiring and interesting the older I get. I go back to him again and again. I wonder how he sees so much. I wonder at his inspiration. I love him, basically.
Here is one of my favorites of his poems. Maybe it's because I hail from the Ocean State, I don't know.
Flowers By the Sea
When over the flowery, sharp pasture's
edge, unseen, the salt ocean
lifts its form - chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone
but color and the movement - or the shape
perhaps - of restlessness, whereas
the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem.
December 13, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Robert Frost
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I have always thought that Robert Frost was darker than he is given credit for. His poems sometimes have this cheery homespun wisdom tone, but that's never what moves me about his work. It's there ... but I feel that it's more a defense against madness and darkness. He "goes there" in his poems, the awareness of death, of the other world, of events that we can't understand ... and then he usually does wrap things up with a bit of wisdom, an aphorism, a two-line ending that seems to say that everything is going to be okay. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps (or Gilstraps), and look at the sunset, and you'll be fine. But I can't forget the rest of the poem, where he hears the quietness of the house around him, or where he is aware that things could get prickly with that neighbor of his, or where he knows the long journey ahead of him before he will arrive home.
There is also the "road not taken" which comes off as rather self-satisfied in a first reading. This man is proud of himself and his choice, it "has made all the difference", the one road he took. Well, bully for you, aren't you special. BUT if you read the poem more carefully, you can see that there really isn't that big a difference between the two roads - they are both "just as fair", and "the passing there had worn them really about the same". So okay what do we get from that? What I get, again, is the sense of Frost erecting a defense against the madness of not choosing. He is the type of man who makes a decision and then erects all the justifications and reasons afterwards. He looks back on the "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" - and what is NOT said is that if you contemplate that the other road might have been better, therein lies madness and doubt. Hence, the self-satisfied tone. He is damned if he isn't going to be pleased with his choice. This is what I mean when I say that I'm not sure he's given enough credit for how uncertain he is in his poems. Sometimes the voice is so SURE, it dispenses wisdom, it tells you what to do (erect a wall because 'good walls make good neighbors'), it knows it is right. But why? Why is it important to be right? The uneasy tension that those kinds of questions creates makes Robert Frost seem very different than his reputation would suggest. I like him better that way. I'm not wacky about people who think they're right, anyway, more often than not they are either just boring people OR they NEED to think they're right, because to contemplate the opposite is just too frightening. Robert Frost puts that tension into all of his poems. It's quite wonderful. But I think sometimes people just see the "wisdom", the folksy advice ... and take it for its surface. To my view, the poems suffer if you read them that way.
Robert Frost said that he didn't like big idea poems - or he didn't like there to be big ideas without actual objects and dirt and shovels and turnips. He also said:
Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, 'Why don't you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
Frost, in that quote, shows that he is fully aware of what he is doing. He was a master at "saying one thing and meaning another".
His life is a mixture of great joy, determination, lackadaisacal indecision (he dropped out of college multiple times) and unbelievable tragedy. The mid-30s were full of tragedy - his daughter and his wife died in quick succession. In 1940, his son committed suicide and then in 1947 his daughter went mad and was put into an institution. Horrifying. Just reading the bare bones of those events make me shiver. Not to mention the fact that WWII was heating up and exploding at the same time. It must have been unbearable for him.
He won the Pulitzer four times. He had traveled to London with his family and met all the big poets of the day - Pound, Yeats, Amy Lowell. He started getting published, and was quite lucky in that regard. He was well-received. Honored. He made it into the canon during his own lifetime, which is really rare - and lived a long long life, even reading a poem at the inauguration of President Kennedy. This was a man who was born in the 19th century.
The introduction to Frost in my Norton Anthology reads:
Although no poet need do more than Frost did, and few can do so much, he presents, in comparison with other eminent writers of his time, an impressive example of reserve or holding back in genre, diction, theme, and even philosophy. This at times bitter man left his readers poems that they quite simply love; and to love a poem by Frost is to begin, at each rereading of a poem, to hear a voice that does not set aside its task before that task has been performed.
For some reason I have tears in my eyes.
Because Robert Frost is so casually quoted, by high-brow and low-brow, by college professors and cross-stitch wall hangings ... I went back and re-read a lot of his stuff as an adult. I felt I wanted to re-encounter it, see what I felt about him. I knew many of his poems by heart because you have to read them in almost every class you have ever taken, from age 14 to 22. You're like, "Oh God, Road Not Taken AGAIN? If I have to read Stopping By the Woods one more time, I'm cracking skulls ..." It was well worth the trouble to re-read them. There are voices and dialects, and as a New Englander, his landscape and cadences and weather are all as familiar to me as my own neighborhood at home. I love his local-ness, but more than that - I love the complexity there, hidden beneath the folksiness, the too-easy truths spouted forth. I feel a poet needing to assert his truth, not because he knows it is true, but because he fears it is not. And "that has made all the difference" in how I read him.
Here is one of his poems that I love. It weaves a spell of weirdness. It is not what it seems to be. He's just picking apples, right? But ... look at where he goes in the poem.
After Apple-Picking
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
December 12, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Edgar Lee Masters
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Edgar Lee Masters was a lawyer and a poet. He had published a couple of books and biographies (one of Walt Whitman, a poet he admired). He was no slouch. But a major poet? No. That was not his thing. However, he ended up writing a series of poems told from the point of view of the dead of a small town called Spoon River ... and it's called Spoon River Anthology
I can't imagine Edgar Lee Masters would have been known if he hadn't taken on the job of "mimic", or "mouthpiece", whatever you want to call it ... because what happens in these poems is that you begin to hear specific voices, cadences, accents - these people are raw. They have nothing to hide anymore. They are dead, but they plead with us, the living. They plead for understanding, retribution, forgiveness ... They reach out from beyond the grave, trying to either make things right, or be heard, or to defend their horrible actions. None of these people are happy. None of these people are sitting in the blessed light of Jesus. The afterlife is seen as a pretty bleak place, of writhing personalities still torn-up about what happened back on earth. The poems can be tough to read. There is no distance in them. These characters scream at you, "hear me, hear me ..."
Masters imagines his way into another person's psyche, and speaks AS THEM. That is his gift. If he had been writing verse about the beautiful sunset over his town or the way the river looked at dawn or about his childhood memories, we'd never be anthologizing him. Spoon River Anthology put him on the map. I believe it was a success during his lifetime, too. He didn't have to wait (like all the characters in Spoon River Anthology) until after his death to have his say.
I have a personal connection with Spoon River Anthology.
My acting teacher in college (or one of them) had his classes, every year, pick out poems from "Spoon River" to work on. Because each poem is a mini-monologue, with character details - and past history - and objective, and obstacle - they are really good for actors to work on. Making anguish real, or ... what is the objective of this character? To plead for forgiveness? To try to get what REALLY happened across? Whatever it is, you the actor have to make it specific, and you have to make it real. It is NOT easy. But it was gratifying work, and I still remember my "person", poor little cross-eyed Minerva Jones. Trying to make those last two lines real and alive - when you're an 18 year old actress - is NOT EASY.
Minerva Jones
I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when "Butch" Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will someone go to the village newspaper
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?--
I thirsted so for love!
I hungered so for life!
I mean, this is tragic maudlin stuff. Masters' gift was in capturing all of the griefs and anger and seething resentments of small-town America - but breaking it up into small chunks like that, each one different - so by the end of that book, you have a full tapestry. It really hit a chord at the time. No matter who you are, where you come from, you will find a little bit of yourself in Spoon River Anthology. It might be spread out over 5 or 6 poems - you relate to a little bit of this one, a little bit of that one ... and taken on as a whole, it starts to feel like he has somehow captured all of humanity in it. You recognize people when you read it.
In general, it's not a cozy world-view he has, and the poems are pretty tough to read, especially if you read them all together. I like to break them up. I'll just pick up the book and read one poem, put it down again.
Each poem is a mini-WORLD. Like in a snow globe or something. Only with tragedy. Minute exquisite detail, people are naming names, man, after death - they want us to know WHO did this to them ... the voices, you can hear the old men, young girls, frowsy housewives, mechanics, the local doctor ... It's really an extraordinary accomplishment.
I love the book.
And if any of you out there are acting teachers of beginning actors in the age-range of, oh, 17 to 22 ... consider using Spoon River Anthology as a source of monologues for your class. Or read the book yourself, and assign a poem to each person - based on what you know about that person, what they might need to work on, etc. I would say any younger than 17 would not be good, because of the subject matter of the poems. But it's a great acting exercise, a great way to exercise the imagination of young actors. They are also great to teach what it means by "high stakes". People, in general, don't want to live in a state of "high stakes" all the time, and actors are no different. There isn't a poem in the collection where the stakes are not as high as they can be, and actors need to learn to always go for the highest-stake situation.
I mean, here it is 20 years later, and I still remember "I thirsted so for love, I hungered so for life!"
Here is another poem from Spoon River Anthology:
Elsa Wertman
I was a peasant girl from Germany,
Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong.
And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene's.
On a summer's day when she was away
He stole into the kitchen and took me
Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat,
I turning my head. Then neither of us
Seemed to know what happened.
And I cried for what would become of me.
And cried and cried as my secret began to show.
One day Mrs. Greene said she understood,
And would make no trouble for me,
And, being childless, would adopt it.
(He had given her a farm to be still. )
So she hid in the house and sent out rumors,
As if it were going to happen to her.
And all went well and the child was born -- They were so kind to me.
Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed.
But -- at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying
At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene --
That was not it.
No! I wanted to say:
That's my son!
That's my son!
December 11, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Rudyard Kipling
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
The great Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote in her journal about Barrack-Room Ballads:
"They are capital -- full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world ... We can never be quite so narrow again."
I love that. "They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing ..."
That is pretty much my experience of him as well.
I'm a Kipling fan from way back, from childhood. It was the cartoon version of Rikki Tikki Tavi, shown on television back then, that did me in completely. I saw it when I was, what, 8 years old? I remember it vividly and I LIVED it. Kipling is good for kids. I took his stuff out of the library and read some of it. I liked the adventure of it, the exotic setting ... and I also loved books about animals. So with Rikki Tikki Tavi I was all set. The story opens:
This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry, as he scuttled through the long grass, was: '_Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!_'
I mean, how could you NOT keep reading after such an opening? Even now, re-reading that, it makes me want to pick it up again!
I was haunted by the image of the bird PRETENDING to be wounded in order to lure Nagaina the cobra-wife away from her eggs. I was so frightened by that! I wondered if I would have the courage to behave in such a way if I needed to.
Anyway, Kipling's controversial nature went right over my head as a child and I just loved the stories and the beat of the poems, which reminded me of Longfellow ("hardly a man is now alive who remembers that day and year"). It is compulsively readable stuff. There is much that is distasteful in Kipling's views but to throw him out completely because of that is retarded. I feel sorry for those who feel that way because God what joy they miss! Now, on the flipside, if I walk into your room and find that you have a shrine to Oliver Cromwell on your dresser, then yeah, I will flag you as a nutbag and I will think badly of you. We all have our limits. Kipling's views on Irish independence suck, and obviously I have strong feelings about that issue. But Kipling is a WRITER. He was also a man of his time. As we all are "of our time". To hold that against him is, again, retarded. Shakespeare was of his time. Yeah, let's just write him off, too, because he doesn't line up with our precious 21st century way of thinking. grrrrrr. Yes, Kipling shilled for Empire. So? Every Empire should have such a talented shill!
Orwell's essay on Kipling is not to be missed - and Christopher Hitchens (the heir of Orwell) has also written quite a bit on Kipling. All very interesting stuff for Kipling lovers. It's not about turning a blind eye to the more unsavory aspects of the world Kipling describes. It's about appreciating his talent as a story-teller, first of all, and putting him in the correct context. At least that's what it's about for me.
Besides, anyone who captivated my imagination from before the age of 8 has a "forever" place in my heart because ... well, you never forget those people who sweep you away before you really know who you are, before you worry about things like context and controversy ... when you just like what you like because you like it. It's that simple.
In the end, there are just the stories. The stories remain. You could say to me, "Yeah, but did you know that Kipling did THIS such-and-such awful thing?" Yeah, I know it. But have you read those poems? Have you read the stories?
Both can be true. Both ARE true. I am able to hold more than one idea in my brain at a time, thank Christ, and contradictory opinions do not need to be resolved. SOME do, but not ones like the one I describe. Not for me, anyway. Lots of my favorite writers held views I think abhorrent. So? What am I, the arbiter of morality? Besides, I'd rather not miss out on something WONDERFUL. And I think Kipling is wonderful.
Kipling's work clamors with voices. Shouts, catcalls, different dialects ... You can feel the dust and heat of India in them, the cacophony of accents, the world ... These are not poems in quiet isolation. They rustle, rumble, jostle for position ... Kipling has his ear to the ground.
I will also always love Kipling for the following line, which I would actually remember on occasion in high school, when I felt insecure about not being like other people, or not wanting to go along with the pack ... I had read the story when I was a kid, and it struck a nerve, and these words would come back to me. Actually, they still do. I really find them comforting. They are from Kipling's story "The Cat That Walked By Himself."
The Cat. He walked by himself. He went through the wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone.
God, I just think that is marvelous. So it helped explain me to myself. Not that I didn't have friends - I had the best friends! - but to see myself as the cat who "walked by himself" as opposed to some FREAK who didn't want to drink or have sex or the other things going on in high school ... it was really helpful. I am just "walking by my wild lone", and that's my nature. It's okay. It's okay.
Here is one of Kipling's better-known poems.
Shillin' a Day
My name is O'Kelly, I've heard the Revelly
From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore,
Hong-Kong and Peshawur,
Lucknow and Etawah,
And fifty-five more all endin' in "pore".
Black Death and his quickness, the depth and the thickness,
Of sorrow and sickness I've known on my way,
But I'm old and I'm nervis,
I'm cast from the Service,
And all I deserve is a shillin' a day.
(Chorus) Shillin' a day,
Bloomin' good pay --
Lucky to touch it, a shillin' a day!
Oh, it drives me half crazy to think of the days I
Went slap for the Ghazi, my sword at my side,
When we rode Hell-for-leather
Both squadrons together,
That didn't care whether we lived or we died.
But it's no use despairin', my wife must go charin'
An' me commissairin' the pay-bills to better,
So if me you be'old
In the wet and the cold,
By the Grand Metropold, won't you give me a letter?
(Full chorus) Give 'im a letter --
'Can't do no better,
Late Troop-Sergeant-Major an' -- runs with a letter!
Think what 'e's been,
Think what 'e's seen,
Think of his pension an' ----
GAWD SAVE THE QUEEN!
December 10, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - A.E. Housman
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
At first I didn't get just how sad Housman was. I am not sure how I missed it. I suppose because the verse itself is so perfect, the rhyme scheme immaculate ... and there are funny lines, and the whole thing can come off as rather arch if you don't pay attention. I wasn't paying attention. Then, when I lived in Philadelphia, I was cast as Agnes in a production of Lanford Wilson's wonderful one-act "Ludlow Fair" (excerpt here) and - first of all - Wilson gets the title of his play from one of Housman's poems. The play itself takes place in Queens, New York - so to have it called "Ludlow Fair" is mysterious, never fully explained, and it just gets deeper and more interesting the more you look into it. When I was in that play, I needed to really understand what the hell I was talking about, so I looked into "Shropshire Lad" again, but this time I was doing so not to appreciate the poetry but to understand why the hell Lanford Wilson had called his play that, and why on earth my character would remember that poem almost line for line. There is no right answer. Wilson does not provide the answer. It's like a poem itself, best when not taken too literally. But that was my re-introduction to Housman after reading him in a college poetry class, and I saw so much more there. I was learning how to read poetry, I guess. The rhyme scheme can lull you into thinking that what Housman is talking about is easy for him. But that was my mistake.
Now I know that Housman is one of the bleakest of poets, and was obsessed with death and suicide. One of those tragic Victorian homosexual poets - I will also love him forever because when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for doing OPENLY what everybody else was doing in PRIVATE, and most of his friends had abandoned him - Housman sent him some books in prison. Bless him.
Housman had an unrequited (mostly) love affair in his youth - and eventually that man left for India, where he eventually married. Housman was devastated. He didn't start writing poetry for realz until he was 30 years old, very rare. He said later, "I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over."
OUCH.
Most of his poems do focus on youth - something he was also obsessed by. He did not like many of the contemporary poets of his day, and struggled to stay apart from them. His idols were William Blake and Shakespeare. Housman was attracted to madness, to mad flights of fancy - to a non-literal approach to things. Yeats loved Housman and it is not hard to see why.
Reading his stuff now I am truly baffled at my college-girl response to it as light, arch and rather funny verse. I guess I hadn't had enough heartache of my own yet to perceive Housman's eternal sadness.
Here is what is probably his most famous poem. Breathtaking.
LXII. Terence, this is stupid stuff
‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’
Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
December 9, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Gerard Manley Hopkins
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I know very little about Gerard Manley Hopkins, besides a bare-bones biography and a couple of his poems. I know he was against the grain of traditional Victorian poetry, and the way he worked and the way he put words together was quite controversial at the time. He's on "the list" that I always have going on in my head of Things/People I Need To Learn More About. His poems astonish me. They are unbelievable. I'm just sorry I hadn't found them when I was in high school because I think I would have loved them. His Catholic themes, his reaching out to God in the night, his awareness of the pain of life waiting for him ... that was all stuff I would totally have related to as a young Catholic girl. He was a deep thinker, and a man who really struggled with himself. He was drawn to Catholicism, against the wishes of his parents, and was ordained as a Jesuit priest. He had already been writing poetry for years by that point - and he judged his early verse as too worldly and burned it all. His vision of God is that God loves His children, God is always present ... there is an eternal bond between humanity and the eternal, we are not forgotten.
His life seems to be about not just reconciling the two halves of himself - worldly and spiritual - poet and priest - but living with the contradictions. And you know how a lot of people just can't deal with that! It is thought that one must CHOOSE. Hopkins was determined NOT to choose. Couldn't the poet live alongside the priest? Etc. Hopkins is no smiley-faced Christian, however. Pain is everywhere. His understanding of his Catholic faith was that it was one of endurance and anguish. He was a faithful man, but he was not comfortable in his faith. He always felt unworthy - and that sense of unworthiness before God comes through in his poems. It is agony. His poems have a lushness of language that makes it seem (to me) like he almost enjoys that agony. Most Catholics will understand that sensation if they really think about it (or maybe it is the late converts who will understand it best) - it seems part and parcel of the faith. The awareness of the soul being on the rack. Hopkins was homosexual, and this also tortured him at the time. When he was a younger man, he had a great love who obsessed him. He wrote poems, letters (many of which still exist) showing the depths of his obsession. This young man, unfortunately, drowned and Hopkins never really recovered from the loss.
Michael Schmidt writes in his wonderful Lives of the Poets:
At university Hopkins's discipline began: self-denial in the interest of the self. He evokes the effect of religious faith on the imagination. Imagine, he says, the world reflected in a water drop: a small, precise reflection. Then imagine the world reflected in a drop of Christ's blood: the same reflection, but suffused with the hue of love, sacrifice, God made man, and redemption. Religious faith discovers for a troubled imagination an underlying coherence which knows that it cannot be fully or adequately explained. In its liberating, suffusing light, Hopkins could relish out loud the uniqueness of things, which made them "individually distinctive." This he called "inscape" - an artist's term. "Instress", another bit of individual jargon, refers to the force maintaining inscape. Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.
Hopkins was at war with himself. This is clear in the things that he said and also - just in the shape of his life - you can see it in the main events. Gay relationships at universities were, in many ways, accepted, but to take it further into adulthood meant you became a criminal. So ... what to do? Many men were faced with that tragic choice. Hopkins wrote this about Walt Whitman, and I LOVE it because it shows that he was if not comfortable with his competing contradictory impulses, he was at least aware of how they interacted, and how he responded to them.
I might as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.
Amazing.
Hopkins understood, deeply, his own tendencies towards other men, but his feelings about religion (and also, just the time in which he lived) counteracted that. He could not, like Oscar Wilde, decide to live as an aesthete, and push the boundaries of what was acceptable in Victorian life. At least not in his lifestyle. But he DID push the boundaries of what was acceptable in poetry at the time - and I think his stuff is still relevant, it feels breathlessly modern - His word choices are unexpected, and yet never less than perfect. His language does not call attention to itself just to call attention to itself. It seems to be the truest expression of what this difficult tormented man was feeling. Hopkins worked HARD at his poetry. He agonized over every word.
Like I said, I haven't read all of his stuff - and I would love to know more about him. He was a very conscious poet. He wrote:
No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness ... I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style
He wrote a lot about poetry - he had theories, ideas, philosophies ... For example, he wrote to his friend, Robert Bridges, the poet laureate at the time:
"It seems to me that the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally; freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one. This is Shakespeare's and Milton's practice and the want of it will be fatal to Tennyson's Idylls and plays, to Swinburne, and perhaps to Morris."
Gerard Manley Hopkins' last words were, "I'm so happy ... I'm so happy ..."
This is enough to bring tears to my eyes, knowing the ultimate sadness of his life, and the unrelenting sickness he endured for his last couple of years.
It is that tension - between ultimate "happiness" because of his belief in God, and terrible unhappiness due to the muck of unpredictable life - that makes Hopkins's work so moving.
It's good to read him out loud. He almost reads better when you hear it.
I love him. What the hell, I'll post my favorite of his poems. Those last two lines - my God!!
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
December 7, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Thomas Hardy
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
One of my favorite quotes from Thomas Hardy in regards to writing is something I have thought of, often - in my own work - it reminds me to stay specific, to not worry so much about universal, to let that (and the reader) take care of itself:
"A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done."
He was criticized often for the "provincialism" of his novels. They took place in a 10-mile radius. He delved deep into that one particular slice of society and never left it or branched out. But DEPTH is as valuable as WIDTH and nobody was deeper than Hardy. I love his novels, although I had to come BACK to them after being forced to read them in high school (here is my post on Tess).
Speaking of Auden, he was obsessed with Thomas Hardy and for over a year read nobody else. It was Thomas Hardy 24/7. Interesting, because on the surface of it they seem very dissimilar. But Auden wrote:
"[I admire his] hawk's vision. his way of looking at life from a very great height ... To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history ... gives one both humility and self-confidence."
Hardy is helpful to writers, in general.
The interesting thing is that I think that most people do not understand how anti-establishment he really was. It's difficult to discern at times, merely because he is "in the canon" and revered and all that, but sometimes I wonder: are people reading what he actually wrote? Dude was a radical! The establishment now "claims" him but, like so many other writers in so many other times, they shunned him when he was alive. Thomas Hardy had an epiphany one day that God didn't exist (he wrote about it in a startling poem called 'God's Funeral') - and that's the kind of thing that ruffled feathers then and still ruffles feathers. Hardy believed in larger forces, but he did not name it as God. A priest wrote to Hardy once asking him how the horrors of the world could be reconciled with God's goodness. Hardy replied, in the third person, a chilly little note:
Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer and other agnostics.
Hardy wasn't fucking around.
Thomas Hardy wrote novels for many years. And at some point, he switched to poetry (although obviously he had been writing verse all along). He felt, eventually, that fiction was a kind of cage - and he went absolutely insane with writing poetry. His "Collected Poems" is over eight hundred pages long. Think of that!
I LOVE his poetry. It's not happy stuff, as a matter of fact I would call it raw, unhappy and bleak. But the language! It can't be beat.
Thomas Hardy was married for many years and it was not a good match. They barely spoke. When she died, he found some things she had written - things that were vicious towards him - her hatred and contempt of him revealed after her death. Regardless of all of this, Hardy never really recovered from her death - and his eulogies for his long-hated wife are some of the most achingly sad and romantic poems in the lexicon. If you didn't know the backstory, you would think this was one of the greatest love stories of all time. And who knows, maybe it was. You also can't ever tell what will inspire you to write. She didn't inspire him to write when she was alive, but after her death, the floodgates of poetry opened. I love his poems to his wife. I ache reading them.
Ezra Pound said, after reading Thomas Hardy's poetry:
"Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first."
Here is a poem that kills me.
A Broken Appointment
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.
You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me.
December 6, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Emily Dickinson
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I gotta be honest.
EMILY DICKINSON FREAKS ME OUT.
I can't settle into her poems and flip through the pages of her volumes with satisfaction and happiness and enjoyment of the verse. It's all too jagged for me. It's too raw. The long dashes in her lines, the lack of titles, the fact that she wrote all of this with the assumption that they would not be read - so there is a dashed-off immediate quality to almost all of it ... like she would be sweeping the parlor, an entire poem would pop into her brain full-blown about, oh, death, or love, or fear - and she would stop sweeping, jot it down on a scrap of paper she kept in a pocket of her dress, and then go back to sweeping. Like that's what all of her poems feel like to me, and it freaks me out. There is a great mystery surrounding Emily Dickinson (what happened to her? Why did she become a recluse?) and I, for one, hope the mystery is never solved. I enjoy reading the theories, I enjoy speculating ... but I think I like the mystery better.
She CAN'T have really existed, can she?
Here is Ted's post on Emily Dickinson. Ted and I collaborated, years ago, on a show about Joseph Cornell (my post about him here) who made some of his most famous "boxes" for Emily Dickinson (even though she was long dead). The entire cast immersed itself in Dickinson's work, looking at it in a whole new way - trying to see it through Cornell's eyes. Here is one of his most famous boxes, made for Emily Dickinson - it is called "Towards the Blue Peninsula".
The Emily Dickinson boxes usually involve a caged space, like for a parrot, with an open window in the background. He is creating for her a lovely cage. But the window is open, the blue sky is beyond. Has she escaped? The box is haunting.
I went through a big Emily Dickinson phase in high school, even though she freaked me out even then. I remember being devastated once - I think I had asked a guy to the prom and he said no. I had cried for 24 hours. It was a tragedy. Friends called me up to comfort me. I wailed into the night. The next day I was exhausted from all the crying. And I wrote in my journal, "After great pain a formal feeling comes."
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Like, yeah, I think Emily Dickinson might have been talking about something a bit more wrenching than not going to the Prom - but still! I remember vividly the feeling of being washed out, and almost timid and quiet in the aftermath of all the tears - and I realized that I did feel rather "formal". She was right!
But still. It makes me laugh to think of today.
Camille Paglia in her giant book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Again, she seems virtually impossible to me. I love her for it.
Michael Schmidt wrote, in his wonderful book Lives of the Poets
She sewed her poems into little books and put them away, one after another, in a box, where after her death her sister found them, nine hundred poems "tied together with twine" in "sixty volumes." And it's not an untenable theory that the beloved whom she mourns, departed, may be Christ, the soul's lover, rather than a particular man -- or a particular woman.
Her poems vibrate with pain, feeling, thought, humor. She scares the shit out of me. The emotional life is a vast universe. You don't have to travel widely to "have a life". You don't have to have tons of experiences. You are alive. What does it feel like to be alive? That's the place Emily Dickinson writes from.
Here's a poem.
214
I taste a liquor never brewed --
From Tankards scooped in Pearl --
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of Air - am I --
And Debauchee of Dew --
Reeling -- thro endless summer days --
From inns of Molten Blue --
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door --
When Butterflies - renounce their "drams" --
I shall but drink the more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --
And Saints - to windows run --
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the -- Sun --
December 5, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Walt Whitman
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
A gorgeous two-volume edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry - this is really a must-have for poetry lovers. It has pretty much everything you would want, and so then - if you want more, you can just supplement what is already provided in these encyclopedic volumes. I cannot even tell you how many times I go to these books. I never fully put them away. They're always lying around. They are highlight-reels, essentially, of the great poets of the mid-19th to early 21st century ... so if you're a Whitman fanatic, you'll want to grab his actual volumes of poetry, because sometimes it's great to read the poems that AREN'T as famous or anthologized ... you can get a real sense of the entire scope of the man. But these volumes are essential as a starting point.
I'll be sticking in this volume for a good while in my excerpts - there's just so much here, and this is only Volume I - the "modern" volume. The next volume is "contemporary".
I actually don't know that much about Walt Whitman. His lines resonate, and he's obviously a giant figure, but I've never immersed myself in him - the way I have in Auden or Yeats or Plath. It's interesting - I just finished Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde
Wilde initiated the conversation by saying, 'I come as a poet to call upon a poet.' Whitman replied, 'Go ahead.' Wilde went on, 'I have come to you as one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle.' He explained that his mother had purchased a copy of Leaves of Grass when it was published; presumably this was in 1868 (Wilde put it two years earlier), when William Michael Rossetti edited a selection of Whitman's poems. Lady Wilde read out the poems to her son, and later, when Wilde had gone up to Oxford, he and his friends carried Leaves of Grass to read on their walks. Whitman, in pleased response, went to the cupboard and took out his sister-in-law's bottle of homemade elderberry wine. Wilde drained without wincing the glass Whitman had filled, and they settled down to consume the rest of the bottle. 'I will call you Oscar,' said Whitman, and Wilde, laying his hand on the poet's knee, replied, 'I like that so much.' To Whitman, Wilde was a 'fine handsome youngster.' Wilde was too big to take on his lap like other youngsters who visited the sage, but could be coddled if not cuddled.
There is just so much in that description! The encoutner goes on. It was not all smiles and adoration. There were disturbing undertones.
The den was filled with dusty newspapers preserved because they mentioned Whitman's name, and Wilde would complain later to Sherard of the squalid scene in which the poet had to write. It was hard to find a place to sit down, but by removing a stack of newspapers from a chair, Wilde managed to. They had much to talk about. Whitman was eager to know about Swinburne, who had long ago been his English advocate and had written the tribute 'To Walt Whitman Across the Sea'. Wilde knew Swinburne well enough to promise to relay Whitman's message of friendship to him. ...Wilde pressed his advantage to ask what Whitman made of the new aesthetic school. Whitman replied with an indulgent smile befitting his sixty-three years, 'I wish well to you, Oscar, and as to the aesthetes, I can only say that you are young and ardent, and the field is wide, and if you want my advice, go ahead.' With comparable politeness Wilde questioned Whitman about his theories of poetry and competition. Prosody was not a subject on which Whitman had ever been articulate, except in relentlessly extolling free verse. He responded with wonderful ingenuousness, 'Well, you know, I was at one time of my life a compositor and when a compositor gets to the end of his stick he stops short and goes ahead on the next line.' He went on unabashed, 'I aim at making my verse look all neat and pretty on the pages, like the epitaph on a square tombstone.' To illustrate, h e outlined such a tombstone with his hands in the air. Wilde treasured the remark and the gesture, and re-enacted them to Douglas Ainslie some years later. But Whitman concluded with impressive simplicity, 'There are problems I am always seeking to solve.'
God, if we could all always see ourselves as being faced with "problems we are always seeking to solve" ... as opposed to feeling that we have the answer, that we know the answer ... it would be a better world. And at least for an artist, it is essential to never be "done". It's like Rainer Maria Rilke's great line: "Live the questions."
After this encounter, Wilde had this to say about Whitman:
He is the grandest man I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age and is not peculiar to any people. Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times.
A bit of code there ("Greek"), but everyone would have known to what he had referred. Wilde also said something like, "The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips". Whitman, while troubled by some of the aesthetes' poses, defended Wilde from criticism. I am not sure if the two men, both homosexuals, admitted such a thing openly to one another - I don't know if those words would have even been necessary. Wilde lived openly as a gay man, and Whitman? Well, you need only read his poems with the glorification of the male body, to understand what his tendencies were.
He is a self-involved poet, predicting the confessional poets of the 50s and 60s. He looks inward, and looks to see himself reflected in the outer world. He is one of the first major American poets to really use the "I" in a powerful way. The "I" that speaks in Walt Whitman's verse is not general, or universal, or in any way a character - it is a voice, it is the poet himself. His poems are not abstract, although there is much abstract thought going on within them. The celebration of self - of the "I" - is one of Walt Whitman's greatest contributions. He certainly put America on the map, didn't he??
Again, I really don't know much about the man, so I can't speak to his struggles or his triumphs. I do know that the Civil War (as it was to everyone at that time) was not a far-off struggle, but something that impacted his life personally. He was pro-Union, but he traveled to Washington, to the battlefields as well - and saw the carnage - and felt the agony of BOTH sides. He was obsessed with Abraham Lincoln. He gave lectures on Lincoln after Lincoln's death - here is a ticket stub from one of those lectures I found online!
Whitman was one of those rare things: a poet celebrated and famous during his own lifetime. He was controversial. If you read Leaves of Grass, you can feel the sexual energy behind it. It ruffled feathers.
Whitman did not live a life of tragedy, as Wilde did. I think he might have even been disturbed by how open Wilde flaunted who he was. That wasn't Whitman's thing. He became an elder statesmen of sorts, and one of the ways that America was expressed to the rest of the world at that time. America had always been looked down upon as a place where art couldn't really happen, because everyone in America was so damn industrious, it wasn't set up for artists! That was the cliche. And it actually was true for some time. We didn't have much homegrown literature here for the first century or so of our existence - there was just too damn much to do. In the 19th century that began to change, and voices began to emerge. Voices that were not imitating Europe, or following in that tradition - but voices all their own. The American cadence.
Walt Whitman wasn't the first, but he was certainly the most well-known.
I love his stuff. Some of it I find to be balderdash, I admit ... but I recognize it for the stunning breakthrough that it is. There was nothing like this in American letters before he came along.
There is not neatness to his work, or politeness. It is self self self ... and lots of people get annoyed by that (to this day), but it was the raw material of his life, and it was the only possible way he could create. You read his stuff and you can hear Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton ... He was so far ahead of his time that he was a complete anomaly. Like: where the heck did he come from?
"Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry" is my favorite of Whitman's poems. It still, to me, expresses the beauty and energy of New York, and, by association, all of America. It is a song of celebration, a lifting-mine-eyes-up evocation of all that is good and beautiful here.
Often poets are silenced by war. Whitman was not. His Civil War poems are some of his best. Here is one. It was written in 1865.
By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame
By the bivouac's fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow--but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline,
The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
By the bivouac's fitful flame.
December 4, 2008
The Books: "W.H. Auden: Selected Poems" (W.H. Auden)
Next book on my poetry shelf:
Selected Poems
Auden comes up for me all the time in my life. His words are in my brain. The only other poet I can think of who takes up that much brain-space, who helps me figure out how to say things, is Yeats. (Then there's Shakespeare, too, but any time you put Shakespeare in any kind of a list with other people, he throws the whole thing off-balance). I'll be in some situation and suddenly I'll remember Auden's words "let the healing fountains start ..." (which is from his poem, coincidentally, on Yeats) Or I'll be troubled and remind myself that I need to try to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. (This post about "doing my best" is a great example of that). I know I'm crooked. We all are. But we must love anyway. Or try to.
Then, of course, he has written two lines which - as difficult as they are - are words I actually try to live by. "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me." This is a phrase that comes up in my head, what, once, twice a day? I have a hard time picking a favorite anything - but if I had to choose to re-read only one poem for the rest of my life, it would be "The More Loving One". I can honestly say that that poem has helped me in living my life. Again, I need to leave Shakespeare out of this discussion (although probably Auden would want him included
What can I say. Auden is in my brain.
The wonderful Clive James said about Auden:
"The need to find an expression for his homosexuality was the first technical obstacle to check the torrential course of Auden's unprecedented facility. A born master of directness was obliged straightaway to find a language for indirection, thus becoming immediately involved with the drama that was to continue for the rest of his life - a drama in which the living presence of technique is the antagonist."
There is sometimes an almost unbearable tension in Auden's best poems. It seems to be that he is expressing everything, but you ache to hear more, you wonder what else this amazing voice has to say. Like most great artists, what he withholds is almost just as interesting as what he reveals.
Michael Schmidt wrote, "He overshadows the poets of his generation." In the same way that Shakespeare overshadows the other playwrights and poets of his current day. You have to kind of get Auden out of the way to see what else was going on. And there was a lot going on!!
There are too many poems to even talk about, too many that I love and go back to, again and again and again. He comforts me. He expresses the horror I felt on 9/11. He understands terror and despair. He lived in "interesting times", and was responsive to them in his work. Many poets were undone by WWI and WWII. The horror took away their voices. Auden was just the opposite.
Edward Mendelson, who edited this lovely selection of Auden's poems, writes:
"Then, in June 1933, Auden experienced what he later called a 'Vision of Agape'. He was sitting on a lawn with three colleagues from the school where he was teaching, when, he wrote, 'quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly - because, thanks to the power, I was doing it - what it meant to love one's neighbor as oneself.' Before this, his poems had only been able to celebrate moments of impersonal erotic intensity, which he called 'love'. Now, in the poem 'Out on the lawn I lie in bed,' prompted by his vision, he had praise for everything around him."
I think of this poem as the "vision of agape" poem, even though that is not its title. So so good. I mean: "lion griefs"? I wish I could write like that. Too many good lines to even count. Here is the whole poem. It was the first moment Auden felt he really "broke through" in his work, and you can feel the difference in his poems forever afterwards. Before "vision of agape" he was one type of poet, after "vision of agape" he was another. He had been able to see the universal.
A Summer Night
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day's activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
Now north and south and east and west
Those I love lie down to rest;
The moon looks on them all,
The healers and the brilliant talkers,
The eccentrics and the silent walkers,
The dumpy and the tall.
She climbs the European sky,
Churches and power stations lie
Alike among earth's fixtures:
Into the galleries she peers
And blankly as a butcher stares
Upon the marvelous pictures.
To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here, though we
Whom hunger does not move,
From gardens where we feel secure
Look up and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love:
And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
What violence is done,
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.
Soon, soon, through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.
But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,
May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong,
As through a child's rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song.
After discharges of alarm
All unpredicted let them calm
The pulse of nervous nations,
Forgive the murderer in the glass,
Tough in their patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motions.
December 3, 2008
The Books: "Power Politics" (Margaret Atwood)
Next book on my poetry shelf:
Power Politics
I was obsessed with this book of poetry in college. I had just discovered Margaret Atwood. I read The Handmaid's Tale: A Novel
Power Politics was published in 1971, the year before her second book was published, Surfacing
you fit into me
like a hook into an eyea fish hook
an open eye
Ouch. That's all there is on the first page so it's all blank white space with those few words in the bottom right-hand corner. It's scary just looking at it, not to mention the violence and bloodiness inherent in those words. It's a sucker-punch. You think it will go one way - "you fit into me" could be construed as romantic or sexual ... but then she rips the rug out from under you by putting the image of a fish hook into your head.
The whole book is like that.
It's also really important to remember that Atwood put Canadian literature on the map. She is eloquent about what it was like for her in the early days, with her first books. There was no set-up the way there is in the States for new authors. She drove around to bookstores in her own station wagon and gave impromptu readings. There is a literary SCENE in the States ... there wasn't one in Canada until she came along. There were others, of course, she was part of the first wave ... but Power Politics helped make Canada seem important. (Not as a nation ... I know it's important to itself as a nation - I am talking about being perceived as a place where ART happens). Those early Canadian authors were making it up as they went along. They needed to be local. Most good art is local and cannot be removed from the cultural context from which it sprung. Atwood helps explain Canada. Now, Power Politics has nothing to do with Canada. It is a ruthless love poem, from beginning to end, but its relevance to the larger political issues of the day, the gender wars going on, women's rights, all that ... made her voice seem louder than others, and turned all eyes to Canada.
Here is one of the poems in this chilly raging little volume.
He shifts from east to west
Because we have no history
I construct one for you
making use of what
there is, parts of other people's
lives, paragraphs
I invent, now and then
an object, a watch, a picture
you claim as yours
(What did go on in that red
brick building with the fire
escape? Which river?)
(You said you took
the boat, you forget too much.)
I locate you on streets, in cities
I've never seen, you walk
against a background crowded
with lifelike detail
which crumbles and turns grey
when I look too closely.
Why should I need
to explain you, perhaps
this is the right place for you
The mountains in this hard
clear vacancy are blue tin
edges, you appear
without prelude midway between
my eyes and the nearest trees,
your colours bright, your
outline flattened
suspended in the air with no more
reason for occurring
exactly here than this billboard,
this highway or that cloud.
December 2, 2008
The Books: "The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry" - Wallace Stevens
A small word about my book excerpts: I have reached the end of my "entertainment biography" shelf. There is more to come in that arena, since I probably buy more entertainment biographies and autobiographies than any other genre (except for, maybe, any book ever written on any US President) ... so I already have a couple of books that I have added to the shelf since I started this whole thing. However, I've already decided - since my bookshelves are always in expansion - that I will not "go back". What I will do is when I eventually get through all of my books in this first round (and please realize I have been doing this since, what, 2005???) - I will go back and start again, genre by genre. There are already probably 30 books of fiction that I have bought and read since I stopped posting on the fiction shelves ... so ... the daily book excerpt will go on in perpetuity is what I am trying to say. I find it comforting.
I am going to move on to a new genre now.
Genres I still haven't covered:
-- regular biography
-- memoirs/letters/diaries
-- sports books (mainly Red Sox)
-- books on writing
-- books about Hollywood
-- interviews with film directors (I have a ton of those)
-- books about Shakespeare, not to mention his plays
-- books about the American theatre scene through the 20th century
-- acting technique books
-- ones that I categorize as "random" but usually get listed under "culture" - books about architecture, the stock market, epidemics, Malcolm Gladwell's stuff
There are probably more I am forgetting.
If you look over on the right-hand nav of my blog, and you scroll down a bit, you will see a section entitled DAILY BOOK EXCERPT and you can see the categories thus far (I will be adding to them).
For now, I am going to move on to my poetry section. It's kind of difficult to figure out how to go about it because I have so many "survey" books, which are actually great - because they compile all the great poems from all the great people ... but how should I handle it? As one book? Pick one poem from a book of 700?? I'll figure it out as I go. I think what I might do is pick out multiple poems from each of these big books - poets that are not covered elsewhere in my shelves. Sheila, stop talking about this so seriously. You sound insane.
Because my knowledge of poets is not as, shall we say, obsessive as my knowledge about movie stars - I'll talk mainly about the poem I choose and why I choose it. I love poets. I'm picky in my tastes, and I'm a "fan" of certain people and always will be. I am also open to new poets. I don't like a lot of new stuff. My favorites are the early 20th century guys - Auden, Yeats, Eliot - but there are some newer poets I love, too.
My poetry books are not well organized. I stack them up hither and thither. So I won't worry about it. I'll just pull them out book by book and figure out what I want to do as I go along.
Hope I have some poetry fans out there!
My first book on the poetry shelf is:
The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry
A nice big book that covers poets from Wallace Stevens to Rita Dove. One of the things I do NOT like about this book is it includes only excerpts of some poems, instead of the whole poem. Like there is an excerpt of Ginsberg's "Howl". I do not like that. Thankfully, I have those long poems covered in other volumes - so I don't have to suffer.
As I have mentioned multiple times, although I live in a small apartment that is basically a glorified studio - I take pride in my library. I don't think of them as "my books". I think of them as "my library". I am a librarian's daughter after all. When I was a lonely teenager, who had no friends, I used to hide in the local library, and books were my only solace. (Beth? Michele? Mere? Jayne? Betsy? Just wanted to tell you all: We were not really friends. None of you ever understood me. Just wanted to say that publicly.) I use my library for reference all the time. I am happy that I can go look something up and not use the Internet. I love having reference books where I can flip through, looking for what I need. I can pull a book off a shelf, just like my dad did. I can pull up quotes or excerpts if I need them for my work, I can reach out and find Machiavelli or Burke or Artaud or any of those people that might be relevant to something I am writing. So having poems at my disposal in my library is important to me. I love big panoramic books with poems chosen throughout the 20th century, or the 19th, or whatever. Yes, there is a lot of overlap but there's always one or two new things in each book that is a gem.
So. Despite the annoyance that only parts of longer poems are included here - there is much to recommend this book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wants to build up their poetry library. This is more for people who already HAVE a poetry library and want to supplement.
Wallace Stevens is a poet dear to my heart. I love the whole SHAPE of his life. Here's a post I wrote about him on my birthday. Well, I didn't write most of it - just dug through my whole library for quotes about him. See what I mean? LOVE my library. But I just love that Stevens was this amazing poet - sometimes shocking in his clarity and vulnerability - and the entire time he was writing poetry he worked as an insurance salesman in a regular 9 to 5 job, working his way up the ranks of the company until he was vice president. He hated his job but he somehow felt he needed it ... that it, and its soul-sucking deadening atmosphere, somehow made the poetry possible. If he had accepted a more regular poet-type of job (teaching, running workshops) - he felt he would lose the spark of creativity. He basically wrote these un-fucking-believable poems in his spare time and I love him for that.
I have too many favorites to really choose, so I decided to go with "The Course of a Particular". God, it's good. I like how he distances himself from the whole thing by using "one" instead of "I". It is so obvious that he is talking "particularly" about his own particular experience ... but he needs to step back a bit. It gives the poem more universal oomph, although you might think it wouldn't.
The Course of a Particular
Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.
It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.
The leaves cry ... One holds off and merely hears the cry.
It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.
And though one says that one is part of everything,
There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;
And being part is an exertion that declines:
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.
The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,
In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.