Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69327

Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Necessary Minimum
Dunstan Thompson slides out of the shadows.
By Clive James
Introduction

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to.

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to, and the only hankering was to get something said in a memorable form. Alas, we would have to go a long way back. Samuel Daniel(1562–1619) certainly wanted to be thought of as a poet—it was his career, even when he was working for nobles as a gentleman servant—and there must have been critics who wanted to deny him the title, or they would not have attacked him for too often revising his work, and he would not have defended himself thus:

And howsoever be it, well or ill
What I have done, it is mine owne, I may
Do whatsoever therewithal I will.
I may pull downe, raise, and reedifie.
It is the building of my life, the fee
Of Nature, all th’inheritance that I
Shal leave to those which must come after me.

—From To the Reader

The battle was fought out more than four hundred years ago, and Daniel won it. Unless we are scholars of the period, we might have small knowledge of his work in general, but this one stanza is quite likely to have got through to us. It is often quoted as an example of how there were poets much less important than Shakespeare who nevertheless felt that they, too, might be writing immortal lines to time, and were ready to drub any popinjay who dared to suggest that they weren’t. But clearly the stanza did not get through to us just because of the story it tells or the position it takes. It got through by the way it moves. Within its tight form, it is a playground of easy freedom: not a syllable out of place, and yet it catches your ear with its conversational rhythm at every point.

It would be tempting to say that any poet, in any era, needs to be able to construct at least one stanza like that or he will never even join the contest. Daniel’s technique was so meticulous that it can teach us how words were pronounced in his time. The opening line of one of the sonnets in which he complains about harsh treatment from his vainly adored Delia runs “Fair is my love, and cruel as she’s fair.” Thus we can tell that the word “cruel” was probably pronounced with a full two syllables, or there would be a syllable missing from the line. (If he had written “she is” instead of “she’s,” we would have known that he scanned “cruel” as one syllable, and presumably pronounced it that way too, as we do now.) Unfortunately Daniel seldom wrote an entire poem—not even his beautifully entitled “Care-charmer Sleep”—in which every line was as vivid as that. But he did compose that one stanza, and we only have to read it once before we are drawn in to see how it is held together, and to start asking why we put up with so much unapologetic awkwardness from poets now. Limping numbers from poets writing in free verse are presumably meant, but limping numbers from poets who are avowedly trying to write in set forms must be mere clumsiness. The perpetrators might say that they are getting back to the vitality of an initial state, in which Donne demonstrated the vigor that roughness could give before the false ideal of smoothness arrived. But Daniel was already writing before Donne, and we have at least one stanza to prove that lack of vigor was not his problem. All too often his lines lacked semantic pressure, but they always moved with a precise energy, and he could put them together into an assemblage that danced.

Perhaps to ask for a whole stanza is asking too much, and just a few lines will work the trick. The drawback there, however, is that the few lines tend to break free not just from the poem, but from the poet’s name. Very few readers of poetry now, however wide their knowledge, would be able to give a name to the poet who wrote this:

At moments when the tide goes out,
The stones, still wet and ringing with
The drained-off retrogressive sea,
Lie fresh like fish on market stalls
And, speckled, shine. Some seem to float
In crevices where wavelets froth
Forgotten by the watery
Departure towards the moon.

As a thought experiment, I see myself presented with this fragment in a practical criticism class of the kind that I took in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. Even with the benefit of the knowledge that I have acquired since, I might still be at a loss to name its author, partly because it could have had so many authors. Almost certainly it stems from a period when free form Modernism was already being reacted against: all the scrupulous tension of Modernist diction is in it, but there is also a conscious heightening, as of a return to well-made elegance, so we are probably, at the very earliest, somewhere in the years after 1945, when the American formalists were already operating and Britain’s phalanx of Movement poets were on their way up. The line “The drained-off retrogressive sea” might have been turned by Philip Larkin, who was fond of coupling his adjectives into a train. The fresh fish on the market stalls might have come from “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” the long poem in which Galway Kinnell took out the patent on fish imagery. Except that Elizabeth Bishop took out a rival patent when she, too, got into the seafood business. Could it be her? With my supervisor looking at his watch and pressing for an answer, I would have to say that the watery departure towards the moon sounds like Richard Wilbur writing just after the end of WWII, or perhaps James Merrill a bit later, or perhaps Stephen Edgar writing last year, or perhaps . . . But the flock of names, mere shorthand for a flock of tones, would only mean that I had found a single voice unidentifiable. And indeed the poet’s name is probably still unidentifiable when I reveal it: Dunstan Thompson.

I would have liked to say that Thompson (1918–1975) is the missing man from the post-WWII poetic story, but the sad truth is that he has gone missing for a reason. Born and raised in America, he had an enviably cosmopolitan education that culminated at Harvard, from which he went into the army. During the war, his poetic career started off brilliantly with his collection Poems (Simon and Schuster, 1943) and continued after the war with Lament for the Sleepwalker (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1947). These were big-time publishing houses and he won big-time recognition, his name often included in the magic list of voices built to last. Stephen Spender gave Thompson a papal imprimatur, thereby, perhaps, signaling that there might be a fertile context waiting for Thompson across the Atlantic. When Thompson’s second book came out he had already resettled in England, and there he began the long business—difficult, for one so prominently placed in several of the “war poets” anthologies—of ensuring that he would be forgotten. There was quite a lot to forget, and how exactly he managed to translate prominence into oblivion raises some unsettling questions. He wrote one poem, “Largo,” whose qualities should have been remembered, even though it runs to some length and not all of it is in tight focus. Here is a sample stanza:

All friends are false but you are true: the paradox
Is perfect tense in present time, whose parallel
Extends to meeting point; where, more than friends, we fell
Together on the other side of love, where clocks
And mirrors were reversed to show
Ourselves as only we could know;
Where all the doors had secret locks
With double keys; and where the sliding panel, well
Concealed, gave us our exit through the palace wall.
There we have come and gone: twin kings, who roam at will
Behind the court, behind the backs
Of consort queens, behind the racks
On which their favorites lie who told them what to do.
For every cupid with a garland round the throne still lacks
The look I give to you.

This majestic form, one of his own devising, is continued through all ten stanzas of the poem, with a scarcely faltering interplay between the hexameters, tetrameters, and trimeters—everything except pentameters, in fact. Anywhere in the poem’s wide panorama, the half rhymes are handled with an infallibly musical tact: the modular balancing of “well,” “wall,” and “will” in the quoted stanza is only a single instance of a multiple enchantment. You would say that a man who could build such an exquisite machine could do anything, technically. But even though bringing all this mastery to bear, he couldn’t do anything definite with the subject matter. From what thin biographical evidence exists, it is possible to conclude that Thompson was one of those gay male poets trapped between the urge to speak and the love that dare not speak its name. Auden escaped the trap by scarcely dropping a hint until the safety whistle blew decades later. But Thompson wanted to spill the beans, not just about Damon and Pythias and Richard II and A.E. Housman—whether named or merely alluded to, they all crop up during the poem—but about himself and his lover, evidently a fellow serviceman. Unfortunately he could spill only a few beans at once. There were limits to what he could say, and the result is a flurry of tangential suggestions, a cloud of innuendo.

“Largo” was a clear case—the only clear thing about it—of a poem written before its time, and by the time its time had come, the poem was gone. Oscar Williams, the best anthologist of the post-war years on either side of the Atlantic, published it in his invaluable A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, but I have never seen it anywhere else. I would like to call the poem magnificent. But it gives only flashes of the total effect it might have had, and there lay the problem that dogged Thompson’s poetry for the rest of his career, and eventually buried him.

In England after the war, Thompson went on writing poems, most of which were collected posthumously in Poems 1950–1974. The book has an impressive physical appearance, rather along the lines of a Faber collection of the shorter poems of Auden or MacNeice. But the publishing house was an off-trail outfit called Paradigm Press, who can’t have printed many copies. During decades of haunting second-hand bookshops all over the world, I only ever saw a single copy, and that was in Cambridge in 2006. I picked it up, wondering who he was, read the lines about the seashore quoted above, and took it home to read it through.

Fragments of high quality were everywhere, but a completely integrated poem was hard to find. “Seascape with Edwardian Figures” came nearest, but even that one tailed off: when the tide departed towards the moon, the poem went with it. There was a long poem, “Valley of the Kings,” about Egyptian tombs. Freighted with his curious learning, it could have rivaled the stately march of “Largo,” but its points of intensity were scattered, like the momentarily illuminated wall paintings in the tombs themselves, and nothing held them together except the darkness between them. Flaring moments slid away into shadow:

This painted food will feed
Only imperishable people. Stars which glow
Like real stars lose
Their seeming lustre when you need
Them to disclose the way. From what? I do not know.

I talk about “Valley of the Kings” in the past tense because it is no longer alive, and the same applies, alas, to the whole of his later achievement. There is just too little of Samuel Daniel’s “It is mine owne,” and too much of Dunstan Thompson’s “I do not know.” Throughout the book, Thompson’s talent—in the complex sense that involves perception, precision, and musicality—is everywhere, but that’s just the trouble. It’s everywhere without being anywhere. The lesson, I think, is that a talent might be the necessary minimum, but it will not be sufficient if it can’t produce a poem, or at least a stanza, assured enough to come down through time and make us ask, “Who wrote that?”

James Merrill(1926–1995), another gay American poet who came to prominence a little later, wrote a poem about his upbringing, “The Broken Home,” that would have ensured his survival even if his every other manuscript had gone up in smoke. The poem doesn’t bring his sexuality into focus—other poems did—but it does illuminate his early life. This single stanza about his father would have been enough to prove that a masterful voice had arrived:

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

I quote the stanza because it was the first thing I read of Merrill’s that made me realize I would have to read everything else. When I began to, I soon realized that the assurance of his early formal patterns provided the warrant for following him when his patterns became more complicated and finally ceased to be patterns at all. In the twentieth century, this was a not uncommon progression among revolutionary spirits in all the arts. Picasso had conspicuously mastered every aspect of draughtsmanship and painting that had ever been applied to the recognizable before he moved on into the less recognizable, and the best reason for trying to follow what he was up to was that he had proved he could actually do what he was no longer doing. Stravinsky composed melodies you could hum and whistle—I can still do my version of the major themes from Petroushka unless somebody stops me—before he moved on to composing what could only be listened to, and the best reason for listening hard was your memory of the authority he had displayed when the listening was easy. In poetry, Eliot went on proving that he was a master of tight forms even as he became famous for works that apparently had no form at all, and that was the best reason for supposing that those works still depended on a highly-schooled formal sense. So there was nothing new about Merrill’s progression from poems with apprehensible boundaries to poems whose lack of boundaries was part of their subject. It was in the tradition of Modernism. But it depended on an assurance that made paying attention compulsory.

This compulsory quality was what Dunstan Thompson lacked even in his brightest moments. Thompson didn’t have Merrill’s vast financial resources—which enabled Merrill to do pretty much what he liked all his life, including, commendably, helping other poets when they were short of cash—but Thompson did have nearly all of Merrill’s technical resources. Exploiting those, he might have built an impregnable position for himself, but you can’t help feeling that he didn’t really want to. His relocation from America to England need not necessarily have been fatal. Earlier in the century it had worked triumphantly for Pound and Eliot, and the only reason that Lowell made a hash of it later on was that his intermittent psychic disturbance had become almost continuous, and had weakened his strategic judgment to the point where he failed to recognize that he wasn’t getting beyond the discipline of his wonderfully self-contained early poems, but was neutralizing that discipline in the name of an illusory scope. And it wasn’t as if Lowell lacked a welcome in London. (If anything, he was too welcome: the locals would print anything he gave them.) The possibilities of working on both sides of the pond were rich, as was proved in the next generation by Michael Donaghy, who was born in New York in 1954 and died in London at the age of only fifty.

At the time of writing, Donaghy’s complete works are being published in Britain by Picador in two neatly matched volumes: Collected Poems, which contains all four of the collections published in his lifetime plus a sheaf of previously unpublished poems uniformly excellent, and The Shape of the Dance, which amounts to his collected prose. I was asked to write the introduction for the prose volume and was glad to do so, because I think Donaghy was an important critic, even a necessary one. But the reasons to think so would be crucially fewer if he had not been so authoritative as a poet. Within the first few lines of any poem he writes, he has made paying attention compulsory. There are simply dozens, even scores, of poems by which this fact could be easily demonstrated, but let’s make it harder for ourselves, by choosing a poem where the reader has to dig a bit to figure out what is going on. That we feel compelled to dig is, I think, a further illustration of the quality of command that we are talking about. The poem, “Shibboleth,” was the title poem of the first collection he published in 1988. Here is the poem entire:

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.
Another couldn’t strip the cellophane
From a GI’s pack of cigarettes.
By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We’d become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,
Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

For anyone of my generation it is obvious that this poem is about the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when a special SS unit formed by Otto Skorzeny penetrated the American lines with a view to creating havoc. The SS men—most of them Volksdeutsche who had been brought up in America—wore American uniforms, carried captured American weapons, spoke perfect English, and could be identified only by what they didn’t know, because they had spent the last few years in Germany. One could make an objection based on just that point: none of the suspects would have sh

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...louis-zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky
Poet Details
1904–1978
Louis Zukofsky is an important American poet. The son of immigrant Russian Jews, he was born into the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1904. His conception of himself as a poet was indebted to Kaballistic Judaism, with both its emphasis on the magically transforming power of language and its division of the world into a tiny circle of initiates and a great mass of ignorant outsiders.

Zukofsky was a New York Jewish poet, responsive to the cacophonous voice of the cosmopolitan city and determined to find a place for himself in the world beyond the ghetto. Zukofsky's route out of the ghetto was poetry. In his brief Autobiography he reported how he began to appropriate the heritage of Western literature, first in Yiddish and then in English: "My first exposure to letters at the age of four was thru the Yiddish theaters.... By the age of nine I had seen a good deal of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Tolstoy performed—all in Yiddish. Even Longfellow's Hiawatha was to begin with read by me in Yiddish, as was Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.... By eleven I was writing poetry in English, as yet not 'American English.'"

At age sixteen, Zukofsky entered Columbia University, where he wrote for and helped edit various student literary magazines. He identified with the literary avant garde (as represented especially by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot) that saw itself as an elite committed to a revolutionary assault upon a dead bourgeois culture. Zukofsky's first major poetic work, "Poem Beginning 'The,'" written in 1926 and published in Exile in 1928, demonstrates his commitment to a modernist poetic. "The poem's obvious predecessor," said Barry Ahearn in Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction, "is [T. S. Eliot's] 'The Waste Land.' In an attempt to surpass Eliot, Zukofsky pushes formal details to an excessive, but liberating, limit." "Poem Beginning 'The'" cultivates a tone of Eliot-like irony, as the poet tries to mediate between the insistently alien, Jewish particulars of his experience and an aspiration toward a broader American, "English," vaguely Christian culture.

If "Poem Beginning 'The'" resonates with echoes of Eliot, Zukofsky soon abandoned Eliot for Ezra Pound, who was at once more approachable and more overpowering. Pound's warm response to "Poem Beginning 'The'" led to a flurry of letters between the two men, and Zukofsky eventually visited Pound at his home in Rapallo, Italy. Pound gave Zukofsky's poetic career an important boost by urging Poetry editor Harriet Monroe to appoint the young New Yorker as guest editor of a special issue devoted to new English and American poets.

For this Poetry issue Zukofsky invented the name "objectivists" to describe himself and the other poets—including Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting—whose work he liked. (Zukofsky, however, never used the term "objectivism" and never claimed to be the leader of a movement named "objectivism.") Most of these objectivists also appeared in Zukofsky's An "Objectivists" Anthology, where they were joined by Pound and even Eliot. The core group of Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Bunting, Oppen, Rakosi, and Niedecker eventually cohered into something approaching a movement, with Zukofsky established as both the principal theorist and—until World War II—the most diligent critic of and advocate for the poetry of his friends.

Objectivist verse owed a great deal to imagism. Indeed, in his preface to An "Objectivists" Anthology Zukofsky quoted Pound's 1912 Imagist credo: "direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective." But in two respects objectivist poetry went beyond imagism. First, unlike such imagists as Amy Lowell, most of the objectivists were unwilling to treat the poem simply as a transparent window through which one could perceive the objects of the world. Rather the objectivists wanted, as Zukofsky declared in his Poetry essay "Sincerity and Objectification," to see the "poem as object," calling attention to itself by, for example, deliberate syntactic fragmentation and by line breaks that disrupt normal speech rhythm. Second, following Pound's poetic practice of the 1920s, the objectivist poets were at least as much interested in historic particulars as they were in immediate sensory images. All the objectivists shared Pound's aspiration to create a "poem containing history"; and Pound's incorporation into his Cantos of various historic documents showed these poets a way of incorporating history into their poems without violating the principle of objectivity.

As the Western world slid into the economic and political crisis of the 1930s, a concern with history more and more often translated into some form of political engagement. During the 1930s Zukofsky regularly described himself as a communist. At times in the 1930s, Zukofsky's Leftism took the form of a vague, sentimental admiration for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but Zukofsky was also outspokenly critical of the crude dogmatism characteristic of certain Stalinists. During this period Zukofsky did become, however, a serious student of the writings of Karl Marx.

The short poems that Zukofsky wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, ultimately gathered in the opening two sections of All, bring together in various complex ways three currents: a Pound-like faith that truth can be achieved through a poetry which stays with the movement of "the particulars"; a neo-formalist concern with the poem as a shaped object; and a Marxist concern with social oppression and class struggle. A case in point is "Mantis" and "'Mantis,' an Interpretation," written in 1934 and constituting a single two-part poem. The theme of "Mantis" is overtly political: a praying mantis becomes a symbol of "the poor," lost and harried in a harshly mechanical world. Individually the "separate poor," like the solitary mantis, are powerless; but the work ends with a vision of the mantis drawing up the "armies of the poor," which, inspired by this fragile bit of nature that has managed to survive in the stone subway, will "arise like leaves" to "build the new world."

In "'Mantis,' an Interpretation," which is written in free verse, Zukofsky annotates his own poem; describes his own compositional process (providing, for example, lines from early drafts); and deconstructs the very symbol that he has created within the poem. ("The Mantis," he says, "might have heaped up upon itself a / Grave of verse, / But the facts are not a symbol.") As his commentary demonstrates, Zukofsky isn't so much interested in the perfectly shaped created object, the "well-made poem," as he is in the process of objectification; and the full text of the mantis sequence demonstrates his conviction that poetry faithful to this process will justify both the particulars of the world (the mantis as fact rather than symbol) and a history in which the poor are struggling to become the masters of their own destiny.

Generally, the poems in All seek the condition of song, a distilled lyric quintessence. In "A," Zukofsky allows himself a much looser method. Like Pound's Cantos, "A" is a ragbag: in theory anything can go in, and the sheer heterogeneity of the materials is itself the point. Yet there are thematic continuities in "A," and the opening ten sections return repeatedly to the social and political concerns of "Mantis." Beginning with an image of a young Jewish man (apparently Zukofsky) listening to a Carnegie Hall performance of The Passion According to St. Matthew, these opening sections of "A" revolve obsessively around the relationship between insider (economic, artistic, ethnic, religious) and outsider in American society—the young poet at once finds himself identifying with German composer Johann Sebastian Bach's artistic purity and repelled by the capitalist world that has, among other things, built Carnegie Hall and paid the musicians.

Zukofsky composed the first seven sections of "A" between 1928 and 1930, and then abandoned the project for five years, returning to it in 1935 with the much longer "A"-8, where paraphrases of Henry Adams and Marx interweave in an extended meditation on "Labor as creator/Labor as creature." Here Zukofsky struggles to redefine art itself, still represented chiefly by Bach, as a form of labor in Marx's sense—that is, as the creation of use value. The Marxist concerns of "A"-8 return in the first half of "A"-9, an intricately musical text made up largely of phrases from Das Kapital. And in "A"-10 written in 1940, Zukofsky laments the Nazi violation of Europe and summons the people of the world to fight back.

After "A"-10, however, the social and political concerns that dominated Zukofsky's work in the 1930s retreat into the background. The years around 1940 mark a major rupture caused not only by the fading of the revolutionary hopes that had stirred Zukofsky and others during the 1930s but also by a re-centering of Zukofsky's life around home and family. Zukofsky met Celia Thaew, a musician and composer, in 1933, and they married in 1939; their only child, Paul, became a concert violinist in his early teens. (Zukofsky's only novel, Little, is a roman a clef centered on Paul's musical career.)

The short poems that Zukofsky wrote in the 1940s often record the music of domestic life, as in the delicate "Song for the Year's End" collected in All: "Daughter of music / and her sweet son / awake / the starry sky and bird." But in the 1940s Zukofsky both suspended work on "A" and wrote considerably fewer short poems than he had written in the previous two decades. He also largely suspended the various entrepreneurial poetic activities to which he had devoted much of his energy through the 1930s. This partial withdrawal from poetry may have been dictated by the need to support his family. At least while Paul was a small child, the combined demands of job and family seem to have left Zukofsky with relatively little time for writing.

In 1950 Zukofsky returned to "A" with the brief, dense "A"-11 and the expansive "A"-12. As Ahearn explained in Zukofsky's "A", both these new sections "use the family Zukofsky as a foundation." "A"-12 is built thematically, like the final section of Bach's The Art of the Fugue, on the letters B, A, C, and H. At both the beginning and end of the movement is a repeated sequence of words: Blest, Ardent, Celia, Happy. The sequence dances harmoniously, impelled by a love which is, for Zukofsky as for Dante, "the force that moves the sun and the other stars," and which is music—the music of the spheres, of Bach, of Paul practicing his violin. The outside world disrupts this harmony from time to time: in the middle of "A"-12 a young family friend is drafted and sent off to Korea, and Zukofsky incorporates his wistful letters into the poem. But the harmony here sounded can absorb into itself even such discords, for the poem breathes a confidence that the poet has found a place within a larger order.

Despite the sense of confidence and control pervading "A"-12, this poem seems less a new beginning than the finale of the first part—what might be called the neo-Poundian part—of Zukofsky's career. "A"-12 is still essentially a collage text, layering incidents from domestic life with passages paraphrased from such sources as Spinoza and Aristotle. Zukofsky's line in the first twelve sections of "A" is shorter than Pound's, but it too is Poundian in that it attempts "to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase," as Pound declared in "A Retrospect." Thus Zukofsky says, in an often quoted passage from "A"-12: "I'll tell you. / About my poetics— / music / speech / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music."

But after "A"-12 the flexible Poundian line, ranging freely between speech and music, gives way to another kind of line, more artful, perhaps more brittle, certainly further from the cadences of everyday speech; and the musical pattern of organization also gives way to something new, heard in the opening of "'A' 13" and continued through its thirteen-page first section: "What do you want to know / What do you want to do, / In a trice me the gist us; / Don't believe things turn untrue / A sea becomes teacher; / When the son takes his wife / Follows his genius, / Found in search / Come out of mysteries."

Roughly two decade separates "A"-12 from "A"-13—which was written in 1960—and during this period Zukofsky's poetic method underwent an enormous change. Hints of this new method appeared in some of the earlier short poems, where there the intricate, mannered patterns justified themselves as varieties of song—distinctly modern, often jaggedly atonal songs, but songs nonetheless. However, in "A"-13 and thereafter, Zukofsky began composing long poems organized not by music but by arbitrary, quasi-mathematical patterns. Zukofsky worked out the principles of this new poetics in a monumental prose work titled Bottom: On Shakespeare, written between 1947 and 1960 and published in 1963.

If Pound influenced the first half of Zukofsky's career, Shakespeare influenced the second half. To Zukofsky, everything Shakespeare wrote revealed that love is ineffable: The language used to describe it is always too little or too much. Seeing love is no problem, but in speaking of it, love and reason split apart, creating a tragic world. The distance between eye and tongue troubled Zukofsky, as it troubled Shakespeare. This distance in turn meant that a "true" language must constantly reinforce the idea that it is a more or less arbitrary construct, not an infallible vehicle for conveying certainties about the world. Shakespeare's language, Zukofsky proposed, enacts its own arbitrariness by constantly changing the terms of its engagement with the world. But poetic language, at least since William Wordsworth, has sought to validate itself by its claim to embody the felt truth of experience. When this claim becomes untenable, what happens to poetry? This is the question that Zukofsky's later poetry systematically explores.

The new direction in which Zukofsky's poetry moved during the 1950s is perhaps most clearly evident in his English adaptation of all the poetry of Catullus. Zukofsky's versions of Catullus are best described as transliterations rather than as translations, for they seek to reproduce the sound as well as the sense of Catullus's Latin. Or more accurately, it might be said that they reproduce the sound first and the sense only secondarily. He had given himself an insurmountable task. As Davenport noted, "To translate all of Catullus so that the English sounds like the Latin Zukofsky had to pay attention to three things at once: sound, rhythm, and syntax. The choice of each word therefore involved three decisions. This is of course impossible."

In the later sections of "A" Zukofsky also explored language. For example, "A"-14, forty-four pages long, is composed entirely of three-line stanzas. In the first sixteen pages almost every line consists of two words; then it shifts to a three-word line, with occasional passages in one-word lines. The poet allows himself dashes, question marks, and quotation marks, but only an occasional period or comma. The resulting sense of syntactic indeterminacy was described as follows by Bruce Comens in a 1986 Sagetrieb article: "Rather than excluding meaning, Zukofsky's increasing suppression of context ... expands meaning.... [His] method results in a multiplicity of meanings having no central 'point,' so that, while the poem itself is remarkably assured, the reader is likely to feel considerable insecurity among the rapidly shifting perspectives available in reading any given line. Becoming more or less constantly ironic, the text achieves that ... skepticism which [in Zukofsky's words] 'doubts its own skepticism and becomes the only kind of skepticism true to itself.'"

The remarkable opacity of Zukofsky's later poetry offended many critics and even some his former friends—for example, Zukofsky quarrelled bitterly with George Oppen, his objectivist comrade from the 1930s, after Oppen accused Zukofsky of using obscurity as a tactic. But the 1960s and 1970s also brought Zukofsky a degree of public recognition that he had never before received. By the late 1960s, critics were also beginning to acknowledge the importance of Zukofsky's work. In particular, the influential scholar Hugh Kenner became a close friend of Zukofsky and an advocate of his work. More important still, the later years brought Zukofsky the warm admiration of many younger poets. Such major poets as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley ha

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69724

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Uncollected Hecht: An Introduction
By David Yezzi

Do poets, as Auden wrote of Yeats, become their readers when they die? In one sense, it’s unavoidable: the work, if it continues to attract readers, remains and is “modified in the guts of the living.” Poems are often modified for the living by the clarifying light cast on them by archival material—the poet’s worksheets, letters, notebooks, and uncollected poems. It is rare that these supplementary works contain lost masterpieces, but they do frequently round out our appreciation. That said, some uncollected work stands with a poet’s best.

“Omissions are not accidents,” Marianne Moore insisted in an epigraph to her Complete Poems. Yet every poet—unless particularly assiduous with the shredder—leaves behind work of value that, for whatever reason, did not find its way into published collections. What follows in this portfolio is a selection of poems—all uncollected, some previously unpublished—by Anthony Hecht. They are striking in their own right and even more so for the resonances they share with Hecht’s signature poems of love and death, wit and melancholy. A selection of archival photographs has also been made available by Hecht’s estate and by the poet’s widow, Helen Hecht.

When Anthony Hecht died in 2004, at the age of eighty-one, his Collected Later Poems had been out from Knopf for three years. Along with his Collected Earlier Poems (1990), the volume constitutes all of the work that Hecht chose to keep in print. Missing from the two volumes are a number of poems from his debut collection, A Summoning of Stones(1954). (These poems fell away when Hecht’s editor, Harry Ford, appended half of them to Hecht’s second book, The Hard Hours[1967].) J.D. McClatchy’s new edition of Hecht’s Selected Poems places the poems from Stones back in chronological order, and presumably a Complete Poems will restore the entire text.

Much has been written about Hecht’s experience as an infantryman in wwii, both in combat and at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp. “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension,” Hecht said of the camp, an annex of Buchenwald, in an interview with Philip Hoy. “For years after I would wake shrieking.” The survivors were naked, skeletal, their yellowed skin stretched over bony frames; contemporary reports note that the smell was unbearable. Hecht explained to Hoy how he let go completely any illusions of heroism when on another occasion he saw American soldiers mow down a group of women and children who were attempting to surrender.

Hecht’s war poems are among his finest—“‘More Light! More Light!’,” “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.’,” “The Book of Yolek,” “Persistences,” and the third section of “Sacrifice.” The war poems here provide background music to these well-known works, adding notes of visionary intensity to Hecht’s often understated depiction of horror. “The Plate” is taken from an undated typescript and refers to the silver-like metal plates (of tantalum, most likely) that were used as prostheses to repair severe head wounds during the war. In the fire that burns the body into extinction, one hears the wordplay on gunfire. The poem ends with the word alive, an oxymoron, since it is the fire of death that exhibits such vitality. (The humorous riff on Wordsworth, a bit of spirit-bolstering from Hecht’s early days in the Army, is touching given how difficult Hecht’s war experience would prove.)

The subject of “A Friend Killed in the War” (which appeared in the Spring 1948 number of Reed Whittemore’s Furioso) has not been identified. Hecht saw a number of friends and fellow soldiers die in combat. The description of the opening wound and the heavy bandoleers recalls the account in section three of “The Venetian Vespers” of a death Hecht witnessed:

He haunts me here, that seeker after law
In a lawless world, in rainsoaked combat boots,
Oil-stained fatigues and heavy bandoleers.
He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire.
His helmet had fallen off. They had sheared away
The top of his cranium like a soft-boiled egg,
And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon,
His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.

“Mathematics Considered as a Vice” describes L’Âne qui veille, the upright figure of a donkey playing the lyre on a buttress of Chartres Cathedral. The significance of the figure is the subject of wide speculation. Hecht suggests it is the donkey that Jesus rode, placed there to sing his story. By alluding to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Hecht points readers to Erasmus’s adage: asinus ad lyram (an ass to the lyre), which correlates roughly with “pearls before swine.” Hecht also nods to Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whom we hear echoed in “man is but an ass.” For Hecht, the ideal signs of mathematics are ill-suited to describe our contingent world. This unpublished poem was enclosed in a letter from Ischia, where Hecht first met W.H. Auden, to Hecht’s younger brother, Roger (also a poet), in November 1950.
“An Offering for Patricia” is a bittersweet poem from Hecht’s first marriage to Patricia Harris, which lasted from 1954 to 1961. Hecht later described the marriage as an unhappy one. This poem, which exists in typescript in the Hecht archive at Emory University, and (according to Jonathan F.S. Post) likely dates from 1955 describes the couple’s time together in Italy, before Pat returned by herself to the us. In a letter from June 1955, Hecht asks his father to be supportive of her:

Please try to be gentle with Pat when you see her. She is very sick and she knows it, but tries hard to forget it most of the time. I hope she will want to try to do something about it.

(The entire letter appears in Post’s edition of Hecht’s correspondence forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press.) Though “An Offering” suggests perhaps a happier time together, its undercurrent of melancholy is palpable throughout.

Also in the archive at Emory is the typescript of one of Hecht’s early attempts to translate Baudelaire’s “Le Jet d’eau.” He ultimately preferred the version (under the French title) that appears in his last volume, The Darkness and the Light(2001). As Hecht wrote to his son Evan, in a letter dated April 2, 1998:

The original is a poem that has haunted me since the time I was a college undergraduate, and I have tried time and again to produce some English version that captured some of the magic, beauty and pathos of the French.

“The Fountain” is the only record remaining of those earlier attempts.

“Dilemma” came out of Hecht’s long collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin. Two collaborations between them appear in the collected poems—“The Seven Deadly Sins” from The Hard Hours and “The Presumptions of Death” from Flight Among the Tombs(1996). “Dilemma” was intended to accompany a Baskin woodcut in their Gehenna Florilegium, but was ultimately dropped. “I’m aware of course,” Hecht wrote to Baskin in October 1997,

that the columbine poem is something of a cheat, but I found it a stumbling-block, its name supposedly derived from a “cluster of five doves, which the blossom is thought to resemble.”

Columbine’s charming dilemma, in which she eats her cake and has it too, employs Hecht’s wry mastery, at once “dark and amusing.” I have heard from people who knew Hecht well that he had seemed to them initially intimidating—perhaps because of his impressive achievement and authority as a poet, perhaps due to a quiet melancholy of his own. But those I have spoken with also shared the experience I had, when meeting Hecht late in his life, of a wit that admitted glints of mischief and of a thoughtful and patient generosity.

—David Yezzi

Originally Published: September 1st, 2011

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69357

Prose from Poetry Magazine
To Let You Pass
Remembering Craig Arnold.
By Christian Wiman
Introduction

It is now seven months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at forty-one a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

It is now six months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at forty-one a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

I first met Craig about ten years ago at a little college in Virginia, where he was part of a symposium of young poets I had organized. Tall, lean, and with his head shaved, clad in black leather pants and tight white T-shirt, he didn’t “read” his poems: he performed them, strutting elastically about as if he were on stage, whipsawing lines and limbs in precise, rehearsed ways, electrifying that quaint little lecture hall as if it were the Moulin Rouge. I tend to be allergic to this kind of self-dramatization in poetry, but I loved it. All of it: the flair that seemed to arise naturally out of his character rather than being appliquéd on; the mercurial and protean nature of his subjects (and, I would learn, his own life); the hell-bent hungers and raptures kept in check—or at least kept intact, intelligible—by the tough-minded conscience and craft that ran through the poems like a spine.

Those were the poems of Shells, Craig’s first book, which had been selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1998 (published in 1999). The poems hold up, to say the least. In fact, what strikes me when reading them now is how little they need any embellishment of drama or gesture, how absolute their integrity is on the page. “Hot,” a long, tightly-wrought narrative which is emblematic of the book as a whole, is about—besides life and death and art, I mean—two friends who share a passion, of a sort, for ever-hotter peppers:

I called in sick
next morning, said I’d like to take

time off. She thinks I’ve hit the bottle.
The high those peppers gave me is more subtle—

I’m lucid, I remember my full name,
my parents’ birthdays, how to win a game

of chess in seven moves, why which and that
mean different things. But what we eat,

why, what it means, it’s all been explained
—Take this curry, this fine-tuned

balance of humors, coconut liquor thinned
by broth, sour pulp of tamarind

cut through by salt, set off by fragrant
galangal, ginger, basil, cilantro, mint,

the warp and woof of texture, aubergines
that barely hold their shape, snap beans

heaped on jasmine, basmati rice
—it’s a lie, all of it—pretext—artifice

—ornament—sugar-coating—for . . .

For what? Well, that’s the whole heart of “Hot,” the whole heart of Craig, really, who seems to me as powerfully present in these poems as when I first heard him perform them all those years ago—and as teasingly elusive.

Nine years would pass between the publication of Shells and the appearance of Craig’s next book, Made Flesh, nine years in which Craig lived in Rome and Bogotá and Wyoming and Utah and I don’t know where else. It was in some ways the typical twenty-first-century up-and-coming American poet’s life—the pick-up jobs and the scramble for publishers, the fellowships and relationships (for the past six years of his life, Craig was very happily partnered with another poet, Rebecca Lindenberg), the constant effort to find a way of staying alive without allowing one’s lifeblood to congeal into a career.

And yet it wasn’t so typical, too: Craig was perhaps the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet. Don’t get me wrong: Craig had all of the existential friction and psychic disquiet we’ve come to expect from post-Romantic poets—an excess of it, actually. You don’t have to read his poems autobiographically—and they’re too cunningly, winningly imagined to do that—to get a hint of the tempest that was their source. But he also had, right down to his soul (I guess it was his soul), a calm and clarifying equanimity about his purpose on this earth, and always over the years when I would encounter him—a few days in Virginia again, a dinner in San Francisco, a breakfast in Chicago—I would discover my own bristling insecurities melting away in his presence, and would feel my own relationship with poetry renewed. This wasn’t because Craig had achieved some sort of monkish calm with regard to ambition (ha!), and it certainly wasn’t because he was placidly and brainlessly open to everything he encountered (in fact, he could be quite sudden and sharp in his opinions). No, what Craig had, besides his endless and endlessly inclusive charisma, was a capacity to be at once absolutely grounded in the physical world, and in his own body, and yet utterly, mysteriously permeable. I’m not sure how this played out in his daily life, but I know it affected mine, and for the better. I also know that this quality gives the concrete things of his poetry, and especially his later poetry, a powerful sense of being more themselves by being more than themselves:

Here is a small café
opening for breakfast
a zinc counter catching the light
at every angle in bright rings of glitter
A cup of black coffee is placed before you
brimming with rainbow-colored foam
a packet of sugar a pat of butter
a split roll of bread
scored and toasted and still warm
The butter is just soft enough to spread
the coffee hot and sugared to perfect sweetness
the bread grilled to the palest brown
crisp but not quite dry
You tear it neatly into pieces
eat them slowly when you finish
you are exactly full

Here are bread butter and coffee
Here you are your own body
eating and drinking what you are given
as one day you in turn will be devoured
and that is all You were never the lord
of a lightless kingdom any more
than she has ever been its queen
and the world you talked into a prison
suddenly seems to be made of glass
and your eyes see clear to the horizon
and you feel the molecules of air
part like a curtain as if to let you pass
—From “Couple From Hell”

This is from Made Flesh, which is a different sort of book from Shells. Shells is often about the immediacy of experience, but there is just as often a detachment to the poems, a very palpable (and altogether successful) sense of artifice, of talent that is in some way distancing a world even as it brings that world wildly alive. In Made Flesh that distance is gone. The language is sparer, all irony is obliterated, the poems are less obviously “formal,” and their raptures are at once quieter and more complete. There is something both precise and encompassing about these poems, something at the same time piercing and liberating (for a straight shot of what I mean, flip a few pages back and read the more recent “Meditation on a Grapefruit”). Time abrades talent. Some poets don’t seem to notice this and continue to make the same ever-thinning sound right on into oblivion. Others lapse into embittered silence. In some, though, the abrasions bloom:

On the fire escape of your rented room
we sat and felt the empty city
sweat and fret we passed a cigarette
back and forth as once we passed
words like these between us without
hope of keeping
Now I write
without hope of answer to say
that what we gave each other nakedly
was too much and not enough
To say that since we last touched
I am not empty I hear you named
and my heart starts the pieces of your voice
you left are interleaved with mine

and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes I miss how love
may make us otherwise
—From “Asunder”

The bracing, rule-breaking (show, then tell), completely convincing move from detail to abstraction, from sensation to realization; the space-ghosted form of the lines so apt for their subject; the careful, graceful assurance of the poem as it charts an entirely new route through a minefield of emotional and poetic cliches: it takes an enormous amount of skill to speak one’s pain in this way, and it takes a rare, clear heart.

I last saw Craig back in February, when he came into town for the AWP conference. He showed up at the Poetry offices one afternoon and practically lifted me off the floor in a hug. As always, the twitchy intelligence, the solar flares of his energy, surprised me—and, as always, surprised a happiness in me I hadn’t known was there. We locked him in an office all afternoon in hopes that he would write the long-overdue prose note to the translation he had done for our April issue, and for hours he sat there (weird: how suddenly still he could become, how creaturely focused), finally emerging near dusk with a single brilliant and self-revealing page on a poet he had recently met while living in Colombia (“to hit upon such an image requires an intimate acquaintance with all the flavors of pain and persistence and hopelessness—here, I thought, was a conscience to reckon with”). The next day he led—with great kindness, and much to my surprise—a reading he’d shaped as a celebration of the magazine. He’d given up the extravagant reading style of years before because, he said, he began to think it was actually deflecting people’s attention and detracting from the work. Still, even understated (as if that word could ever be used for Craig!), he was searing, mesmerizing, unforgettable.

Craig stayed with my wife and me that week, and somehow in between the dozens of friends he was seeing, or tending to, or shuttling to and from the airport, we found time to talk. I remember most clearly his last morning here, when he made us “migas” for breakfast, and the conversation turned to something he and I had talked of many times over the years: the necessary but destabilizing intensities of poetry, and the life that one risks by cultivating those intensities, and the life that—in some cases, our cases, we both felt—poetry also rescues. Out in the front yard he gave me another of his no-holds-barred hugs and promised to be back in August. Only as he drove off did I realize I’d forgotten to get him to sign our copy of Made Flesh, which is a shame, since the inscription he wrote for me on Shells all those years ago is a gem. Filling the entire page, and linking quotations from Fight Club and Baudelaire with a self-consciously absurd smiley face, it’s Craig all over. “I hope this stays with you,” he scrawled on the very last bit of space at the end of the page. “I certainly will.”

Originally Published: October 1st, 2009

What is the life of a man?
A mere blink it often seems when looking from the outside in.
Yet looking inside out, the person is massively filled with hope, promise,burning desire and living yet to be done
Always the magnificent treasure- the hopeful promise of---- "sweetest living yet to be done"!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70112

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Reputation Is a Funny Thing
The Complete Poems of  James Dickey, ed. by Ward Briggs
By Michael Robbins

The Complete Poems of  James Dickey, ed. by Ward Briggs.

The University of South Carolina Press. $85.00.

I would begin with a word against collected editions — or at least against the current trend of issuing them in gigantic, overpriced formats that resemble the compact OED. You should not be able to stun a moose with anyone’s Complete Poems. In recent years, we’ve had enormous, expensive editions of, inter alios, Robert Lowell, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frederick Seidel, James Merrill, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Jack Gilbert, and Denise Levertov. Even so skinny a poet as Philip Larkin, in FSG’s recent (and superfluous) Complete Poems, has bloated beyond recognition. I’m all for having these folks’ oeuvres in print (although I’d also say a word against the fantasies of totality that compel editors to include drafts, revisions, juvenilia, and the like). But what’s wrong with affordable and portable? The Library of America and Faber and Faber, for instance, manage to produce wieldy omnibuses (the former’s, admittedly, not exactly budget-friendly). Another world is possible.

This rant was inspired by the University of South Carolina Press, whose 4.2-pound Complete Poems of James Dickey will run you eighty-five dollars. If you have any interest in (and are not writing a dissertation or monograph on) James Dickey’s poetry, may I suggest a used copy of The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992, published by Wesleyan University Press, which lacks ninety-three poems published in the USC edition and contains many typos but has the virtues of arranging the poems by individual collection (editor Ward Briggs has printed the poems in order of initial publication) and of fitting in a messenger bag or backpack?

Illustration by Rob Funderburk

So much for The Complete Poems of James Dickey. What about the complete poems of  James Dickey? Reputation is a funny thing. Dickey was once king of the cats — winner of the National Book Award (for Buckdancer’s Choice, 1966), consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (1966–68), author of the novel (1970) and screenplay (1972) Deliverance (but not of the immortal line “I bet you can squeal like a pig”). In the sixties, Peter Davison pronounced Dickey and Lowell the only major poets of their generation (Davison appears to have backed away from this; such are the hazards of cultural prophecy). The poet appeared on national talk shows, wrote Jimmy Carter’s inaugural poem, and commemorated the Apollo missions in the pages of Life. In 1976, the Paris Review said his name was “a household word.” A sense of the critical veneration to which Dickey was subject can be gleaned from Robert Kirschten’s introduction to The Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998): “I think you will agree that one would as soon read James Dickey as live.” Hmm, let’s see  ...    read Dickey; live  ...    read Dickey; live  ...    

It is possible that the relative dim of  Dickey’s star since his death is simply a reversion to sanity. But it’s also, I think, an implicit recognition that his best poems, as Richard Howard implies in his brief 
foreword to the Briggs edition, are those collected under the title Poems 1957–1967, and particularly the ones published in the last few years of that decade. In the last thirty years of his career, Dickey too often gave full-throated vent to an oracular windiness. Consider these lines from “The Surround”:

Pray, beginning sleeper, and let your mind dissolve me as I
Straighten, upright from the overflow crouch: pray with all
Your heart-muscle,
The longing-muscle only, as the bird in its hunting sorrows
Bides in good falling — gone
The gather-voices, and more the alone ones.
Pray with the soul-straining of echo

Of the lost ax, that the footprints of all
Predators, moving like old-stone, like
Clean leaves, grey and sensitive as willows’,
Will have left their intensified beauty
And alertness around you, when you wake,
And that the blood and waste of them
Will be gone, or not known. Become
All stark soul and overreach the ax in the air
Now come, now still half-way.

Part of me wants to respond: Whose longing-muscle prays not, as the bird in its hunting sorrows bides in good falling?

But my better angel protests that the artificiality of this register is not inherently ridiculous — that its true fault lies in settling too easily for the bombastic, and it attains to a certain power even so. “Pray, beginning sleeper  ...    as I / Straighten, upright from the overflow crouch” has a satisfying oddity that is undermined by the blurriness of dissolving minds and longing muscles. The trope of death as a form of sleep is shocked into life by the addition of  “beginning,” with its ambitious suggestion that the newly dead are initiates into cultic mysteries, with ropes to learn. All stark soul and overreach: that’s James Dickey in a nutshell. But you could say the same of  Whitman, or Stevens, or Pound.



•



I fell in love with the poems of Dickey’s friends James Wright and Richard Hugo at too early an age, blessedly, to hear how often they sound like the smartest drunk at the bar on any small-town afternoon. I didn’t come to Dickey until after I’d been delivered by the good news John Ashbery brings to middle-American poets manqué in their early twenties, and by then it was too late. Reading him again at forty, I’m amused to find my prejudices both confirmed and upended. Flipping from some of the almost priggishly static early work — 

Shines, like a marsh, the sun
On the crossed brow of listening.
He beats his empty hands on his ears, and twists
All around his leg, white, edged gold, sewn flat
Beside a hooded falcon burned in grass.
— From The Work of Art

— to the war whoop of the last poems — 

Real God, roll
roll as a result
Of a whole thing: ocean:
Thís: wide altar-shudder of miles

Given twelve new dead-level powers
Of glass, in borrowed binoculars, set into

The hand-held eyes of this man

And no other, his second son coming to his head

Like Armageddon, with the last wave. Real God,
Through both hands and my head, in depth-bright distance, roll
In raw free sharpness.  
— From Show Us the Sea

— you get the sense someone told him he was holding the reins too tightly and he thought, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The later poems have a Poundian energy, an arrogance, that can be both daft and charming. But they seem to want to say more than they do — they would speak of final things in thunder but must settle for yelling into a megaphone about next-to-last things. Howard says “Dickey grew too big for mere poetry,” but poetry, even at its merest, is big enough for anything James Dickey could have thrown at it. It’s rather that his own poetry grew too small for its unruly grandiloquence. Even while acknowledging, with the trope of binoculars, that his eyes are borrowed and too powerful for the scene — the Beowulf poet at the beach — he compares his son’s riding in on the surf to the Last Days.

It’s in the middle poems that Dickey flashes out into “raw free sharpness.” A real god rolls through “May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church,” a diesel-fumed negative hallelujah of backwoods terror:

Each year at this time I shall be telling you of the Lord
 — Fog, gamecock, snake and neighbor — giving men all the help they need
To drag their daughters into barns.    
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
each May with night coming I cannot help
Telling you how he hauls her to the centerpole how the tractor moves
Over as he sets his feet and hauls hauls ravels her arms and hair
In stump chains: Telling: telling of  Jehovah come and gone
Down on His belly descending creek-curving blowing His legs

Like candles, out putting North Georgia copper on His head

Dickey moves into the sermon form like the devil himself, flicking his forked tongue above the congregants, preaching at full throttle for ten giant pages, his voice never breaking, soaring past country girls “dancing with God in a mule’s eye,” “the black / Bible’s white swirling ground,” past an incestuous father “rambling / In Obadiah,” past a needle passing “through the eye of a man bound for Heaven,” past hogs and quartermoons, an old man “with an ice-pick on his mind, /  A willow limb in his hand,” the kudzu advancing, “its copperheads drunk and tremendous / With hiding, toward the cows.”

And I would just go on quoting if I could, because Dickey finds in this poem — and in “The Christmas Towns” and “For the Last Wolverine” and “Adultery” and a dozen more — a canvas large enough for his palette. The closing lines of “May Day Sermon ...” are worth a hundred Armageddons:

the animals walk through
The white breast of the Lord muttering walk with nothing
To do but be in the spring laurel in the mist and self-sharpened
Moon walk through the resurrected creeks through the Lord
At their own pace the cow shuts its mouth and the Bible is still
Still open at anything we are gone the barn wanders over the earth.



•



Dickey remained to the end a votary of that period style that liked its bourbon neat and its hawks locked in spiritual combat. “The Surround,” Dickey said,

is a kind of elegy for the American poet James Wright, a close friend of mine for years, who feared the change from day to night and the coming of the predators, when the whole climate of fighting in the animal world changes to that of prey and predator, in the dark: he used to say that he feared the dark because he feared the change “in the surround.” I am telling him in the poem that he is not to fear this any more, for he is the surround; the whole thing good and bad, and that the moon is beautiful on water, and that the tree grows its rings in the dark as well as the light.

This is, on the one hand, sentimental trash, and, on the other, an eloquent deployment of a vocabulary in which Dickey and certain of his contemporaries were so at home that they mistook it for a kind of natural language. Robert Bly, who accused Dickey of macho warmongering, had more in common with him than he imagined.

For all their stylistic differences, these poets shared a somewhat desperate (and somewhat ridiculous) refusal to accept that the cultural authority of the Poet had been eclipsed. If I’ve lapsed into psychological criticism, it is because their poetry was so often nakedly psychological — a sifting of correlatives of moods and inner states. For Dickey, these were often “old-stone,” deliberately archaic, as if the only horses alive enough were painted on the recesses of Altamira. Someone should count the appearances of  the moon — that old bone — in Dickey’s poetry. Even now he is crouched beneath it, wrapped in a bearskin and stoned on glory, trying to shape-shift into a wolf.

Originally Published: May 1st, 2014

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69178

Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Linebacker and the Dervish
Lowell stormed the literary world; while Bishop orbited its periphery. On closely reading their collected letters, a poet and critic uncovers a new way to read their mythologized friendship.
By Michael Hofmann
Introduction
"This is the poet as house plant, as aspirin-munching studio beast, as day-for-night alice band. Lowell is the linebacker-turned-pasha as poet, Bishop is the lifelong dervish."
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton.Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00.

This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that's absolutely the wrong place. Here then are 459 letters, three hundred of them not previously published, exchanged over thirty years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late-twentieth-century America first met—Robert Lowell just thirty, Elizabeth Bishop thirty-six, each with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering, all told, some nine hundred pages, from Bishop end-papers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell end-papers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print ("I know I'm myself beyond self-help; and at least you can spell"), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our post-epistolary (no joke), post-literary, almost post-alphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don't know where else I've been. "Why, page 351," I would say. "Letter 229; March 1, 1961. Where did you think?"

But what is it like? How in fact do you read it? "I am underlining like Queen Victoria," Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its eight-hundred pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, controversy, revelation—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It's like starting with a city, and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk re-read.

It's an epistolary novel, if not a full-blown romance then at least at moments an amitié amoureuse. It's a variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it's an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets (echoing the title of David Kalstone's study), as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It's an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It's a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It's a further episode in Bishop's increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It's a rat-a-tat-tat ping-pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell's traditional northeast seaboard to Bishop's serendipitously-arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951 on, having arrived on a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid ("we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don't know," writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies); for loyalty and demurral, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other's perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, for gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop's agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell's books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961 and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop's difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell's visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop's companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop's uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell's absence, if you please), and Lowell's ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late seventies. It's social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It's not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

The haunting issue in these letters is how much the vast difference between their authors brings them together and how much it pulls them apart. Because Lowell and Bishop are unmistakably and unignorably and quite intractably dissimilar—of that there can be no doubt. The letters might as well have been printed in different type or different colors, so little is there ever any question of who is writing. (Which, if you think about it, is rather striking over some eight hundred pages of often close personal communication.) Even when, in the manner of friends, Lowell mimics Bishop, or Bishop teases Lowell, there is no real blurring of identities. "Parce que c'etait lui, parce que c'etait moi" is Montaigne's classic definition of friendship in his essay on the subject. It's a definition that itself resists further definition. It glories in something arbitrary and utterly unappealable. To try and soften this, we standing outside and looking on at such a friendship would hope or expect to see the "lui" and the "moi"—or here the "elle" and the "moi"—as at least converging in a sort of dynamic narcissism, in the way of people coming to resemble their spouses, or dog-owners their dogs. But this is a friendship, it seems to me, across the lines, that from the very beginning asserts itself in spite of everything, that enlists the whole sum and detail of its two divergent personalities to satisfy its absolutely irrational and resolutely Montaignesque basis. The attraction of opposites is a simplification in this context, but the Lowell-Bishop association does bring to mind the school construction of a molecule: the proton (Lowell) massive, positively charged, hugging the center, and the electron (Bishop) almost weightless, negatively charged, speedy and peripheral and orbiting.

All this is exacerbated, of course, by the way one reads, which is to question, to cross-refer and compare, to doubt, to go behind the back of words, to tap for hollowness and cracks and deadness. One reads not with a vise or glue, but with a hammer and chisel, or an awl. It's not—or at least not by intention, or not immediately—a consolidating or fortifying activity, but more like looking for safe passage across a frozen river. Hence, the very form of this book—not one voice, but two voices, and then such different voices and such completely different temperaments—inclines one to further doubt. It's as though two incompatibles had re-based themselves and in some Nietzschean way sworn undying loyalty. The loyalty, whether unspoken or occasionally voiced along the lines of "I don't know what I'd do without you," one tends to disregard—it makes, as it were, the hard covers for this book—while the reader is again and again made aware of the incompatibility, which is everything in between.

The thought came to me early on that this is a dialogue of the deaf, or to put it in the way I first conceived: it's like an arm writing to a leg. It's all a matter of what you want to do, tickle, or walk. Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive, solicitous, moody, Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly productive; she is anxious, he when not shockingly and I think genuinely self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this is an understatement—"sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing"; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small-scale, barely worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed. It seems symptomatic that as these letters begin, Lowell is working on his long poem, "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," "12 hours a day—it's now 24 sections almost 400 lines, and I think may go to about 50 sections," only for that to be followed by his prose memoir in the fifties, various translations and dramatic adaptations in the sixties—Imitations, The Old Glory, The Oresteia, Phaedra—and the several versions of another "section" poem, Notebook, followed by another long poem, The Dolphin. He writes like a man consumed—and not at all made happy—by his own industry, a sort of tin Midas: "I have a four hundred line sequence poem which might make a book, twenty pages on a New England essay, and my obituary on Randall. Thank God, we two still breathe the air of the living." If Lowell proceeds like a brickie—you see the string and the plumbline, everything is so and so many courses of bricks—Bishop is like a butterfly hunter, now one, now another, in pretty pursuit, a little forlorn, and quite likely to come home at night with nothing to show for a day's gallivanting. (Strange to think that they were both fishermen, and on occasions fished together.) She is much more protective of her poems too, either not mentioning them at all, or else habitually deprecating them: "I have two new ones I'll send you when I get back, but not very serious ones I'm afraid." Even length—and the term is relative—is not comforting to her, but rather the opposite: "However I have just about finished a long & complicated one about Key West." The poem in question is "The Bight," which barely goes over a page.

The catalog of differences goes on. Not only is Lowell a sort of monad of literature, with little interest outside its bounds—his occasional comments on painters seem dull and contrived, and in music as well he lags way behind Bishop, a one-time music major, who is capable of recommending jazz clubs in Boston, Gesualdo, Purcell, Webern, and Brazilian sambas, all with deep knowledge and understanding—even within it he is drawn with laddish (or loutish) insistence to the monumental, the papier-mâché, the Ben Hur. The contrast in their reading is illuminating: he comes to her, at various times, with Faulkner, Pope, Middlemarch, Chaucer, Dryden, Tasso, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Macaulay, Dr. Zhivago, "all of Thucydides. Isn't Moliére swell!"; she counters with such things as Marius the Epicurean, Frank O'Hara, Captain Slocum, Mme de Sévigné ("so much better than most things written on purpose"—which might be an epigraph for the present volume), Sergey Aksakov. It's not that her writers are impressively obscure or recherché—though they are that, too!—they bespeak a taste as his, frankly, don't. They are the product of longer and more grown-up searching. This emerges beautifully in one of the most lovely and softly assertive passages of hers in the book, where she is talking initially about an Anton Webern record, then makes this into nothing less than an ars poetica:

I am crazy about some of the short instrumental pieces. They seem exactly like what I'd always wanted, vaguely, to hear and never had, and really "contemporary." That strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost everything contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne, or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters . . . Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.

This brave and smart piece of improvisation, on an aesthetic that is not even wholly her own (and fighting contrary tendencies in Kokoschka and Eliot, at least), is surely quite beyond Lowell, whose programmatic remarks in books and interviews are few, lazy, and approximate—which might not seem to matter very much, except that the regrettable "confessional" label goes unopposed.

Literary style is another constant source of difference. Bishop has humor—the lovely air of amusement and being amused that plays over almost everything she writes—Lowell has the more deliberate, more solitary quality of wit. I don't think Oscar Wilde ever wrote or said anything wittier than Lowell's observation—itself a witty variation on Juvenal—on his friend (and perennial bone of contention in this correspondence: he likes him, she doesn't) Randall Jarrell: "Then Randall thinks nothing adult is human." Bishop seeks balance and harmony, even in her most far-flung sentences, so that one's impression is of a chord: "The man wore a very strange buttoned bow-tie, and as a youth he had carried gold, around his waist, for Wells Fargo." (Who else would have thought to make one sentence out of that?!) Lowell is drawn to energy, imbalance, exaggeration, caricature; here he is on his son, aged just one: "We'll be at Bill Alfred's sometime after the 15th, though I dread the effect of Sheridan on Bill's fragile furniture. Unfortunately he has made great strides in the last month and now walks, and I think takes strength exercises. A little girl visited him and he looked in contrast like a golden gorilla." To such a distanced, perhaps word-bound, way of looking (remember, please, those "great strides" are actually literal), everything is apt to seem monstrous; and did anyone ever use the little word "girl" with that undertow of sexual speculation with which Lowell always endows it?! Bishop noticed it too: in "North Haven," her marvelous elegy for him, she has, "Years ago, you told me it was here / (in 1932?) you first 'discovered girls.'" There seem to be almost two competing notions of literature at work here: to Bishop it is seeing everything clearly and fairly and in complicated harmony, through to the horizon; to Lowell it is something compacted and impacted, often a single quality driven in and in on itself, somehow caricatured even when kind. He does have some wonderful passages, but they seem—compared to hers—so utterly planned and worked: the account of a literary conference in New York, the description of a weekend's sailing in Maine with the Eberharts and others, a piece of passionate recollection of Delmore Schwartz (on July 16, 1966) which reaches the level of his brilliant published memoirs of Jarrell and Allen Tate:

Delmore in an unpressed mustard gabardine, a little winded, husky voiced, unhealthy, but with a carton of varied vitamin bottles, the color of oil, quickening with Jewish humor, and in-the-knowness, and his own genius, every person, every book—motives for everything, Freud in his blood, great webs of causation, then suspicion, then rushes of rage. He was more reasonable than us, but obsessed, a much better mind, but one really chasing the dust—it was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider—no hurry, no motion, Delmore's voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive, pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage—too much, too much for us!

This is hammer work, a hammer on the piano or a hammer on the drums; Bishop makes writing seem like breathing.

If one leaves the sheltered hunting grounds of literature—as to an extent we have already—then the differences grow still more apparent. Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he's not sure). Bishop is the one who brings in words: desmarcar, "when you want to get out of an engagement," or "found a lovely word at Jane Dewey's—you probably know it—ALLELOMIMETIC. (Don't DARE use it!)." And she is the one too whose work requires a dictionary: "Dearest Elizabeth: It was fun looking up echolalia (again), chromograph, gesso, and roadstead—they all mean pretty much what I thought. Oh and taboret, an object I've known all my life, but not the name." It's as though these correspondents have separate vocabularies! And of course separate lives, or rather—to put it a little too brusquely—one life as well: hers. She is the one who travels on freighters, who likes bullfighting, whose "favorite eye shadow—for years—suddenly comes in 3 cakes in a row and one has to work much harder at it and use all one's skill to avoid iridescence . . ." (I belatedly realize what a strangely Hemingwayesque collocation this is). It's not just that Lowell didn't do these things, but that even if he had done them, it seems probable that they would have been wasted on him. He after all was at different times in three European cities—Florence, Amsterdam, and London—and was reminded in all three of them of Boston. Meantime, from Boston, his Boston, she wrote him in 1971: "It is nice autumn weather—the ivy turns bright colors but the trees just an unpleasant yellow. On the library steps I realized the whole place smelt exactly like a cold, opened, and slightly rotten watermelon." It is hard not to contrast this gift to him of his own place with his hard, raptor-like, plaid-golfing-slack announcement: "We would like to come and see you and then rapidly a little more of South America."

A great majority of the arresting and beautiful observations in this book are Bishop's; and one's sense of the book as a whole is largely conditioned by her part of it. From tiny sparking details like the salutation "Dear Lowellzinhos" or the signing off "recessively yours," to a charming haiku-like sentence on a postcard from Italy, "Lovely weather—green wheat, wild-flowers, swallows, a ruin with a big fox," that is like a fast-forward of the creation, it seems she is always good for a vivid and pell-mell and noticing transcription—if not, to use I think it was Derek Mahon's neologism, "danscription"—of the natural world that is a match for anything in her poetry:

All the flowering trees are in blossom, delicate patches of color all up the mountains, and nearer to they glisten with little floating webs of mist, gold spider-webs, iridescent butterflies—this is the season for the big pale blue-silver floppy ones, hopelessly impractical, frequently frayed, in vague couples. They hover over our little pool, and pink blossoms fall into it, and there are so many dragon flies—some invisible except as dots of white or ruby red or bright blue plush or velvet—then they catch the light and you see the body and wings are really there, steely blue wire-work. We sat out in the evenings and the lightning twitched around us and the bigger variety of fireflies came floating along like people walking with very weak flashlights, on the hill—well—you missed this dazzlingness—and the summer storms. Lots of rainbows—a double one over the sea just now with three freighters going off under it in three different directions.

The Lowells had paid a more or less calamitous visit the previous year ("hopelessly impractical, frequently frayed"), and this magnificent paragraph is nothing less than a remaking of paradise ("steely blue wire-work"), and a sign of forgiveness ("a double one") for them all. Even an occasional striking-a-pose of brisk, tweedy, maiden-auntish refusal is delightful in her: "A very cursory look at the Munch Museum—it was too beautiful a day and I was feeling too cheerful to be bothered with all that nordic nonsense." For much of this book, Lowell makes really remarkably little showing compared to Bishop's ironically proferred "superbly underdeveloped country and this backward friend."

Why this matters, I suppose, is that—other things being equal—one likes a poet to have some hinterland (ugly Tory word!)—some hinterland basically of prose: to have experiences, to hold opinions, to store memories, to lead a rich and varied life of the senses. (The other type of poet is a unicorn who lives in an ivory tower: he's frightening and different and real, and we don't get him. When Lowell spends an evening reading poems aloud with I.A. Richards, that feels like unicorn behavior to me.) It's the famous Louis MacNeice prescription: "I would have a poet . . ." and so forth. This Elizabeth Bishop embodies triumphantly, to the extent that over the course of her life her poems—four short books—have a hard time emerging. She gets involved in the turbulent Brazilian politics of the fifties and sixties (and the characteristically ham-fisted American responses to them); Lowell writes: "Let's not argue politics. I feel a fraud on the subject," but that sort of retrenchment applies everywhere, and to some extent the feeling of fraudulence too. Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention, interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him (even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down to something like focal length—his is about a foot. See him in his heavy, black-rimmed spectacles, recumbent on a leather sofa in the Fay Godwin photograph ("my tenth muse, Sloth"), in a study described (in the poem "The Restoration") as: "unopened letters, the thousand dead cigarettes, / open books, yogurt cups in the unmade bed," and writing things like:

Now, heart's ease and wormwood,
we rest from all discussion, drinking, smoking,
pills for high blood, three pairs of glasses—soaking
in the sweat of our hard-earned supremacy,
offering a child our leathery love. We're fifty,
and free! Young, tottering on the dizzying brink
of discretion once, you wanted nothing
but to be old, do nothing, type and think.

This is the poet as house plant, as aspirin-munching studio beast, as day-for-night alice band. Lowell is the linebacker-turned-pasha as poet, Bishop is the lifelong dervish.

Small wonder that Lowell (maybe) felt fraudulent. He knew the value of Bishop's letters—when he sold his papers to Harvard, he made sure she was paid a decent sum for hers, but that's not what I mean—even as he apologized ("your letters always fill me with shame for the meager illegible chaff that I send you back") for the thinness of his own. "You & Peter Taylor always make me feel something of a fake—so I love you both dearly," he remarks in 1949. It sounds flip, but of course it was deadly earnest. Lowell understood that there was an agility and a naturalness that Bishop had that he would never have; he and most of the rest of his generation were manufactured. To my possibly anachronistic modern ear, he sentimentalizes and patronizes her all the time. His letters keep her in place, and almost invariably the wrong place; telling an audience that with her he "felt like a mastodon competing with tanks" is typically inept, but maybe no more than telling her, "Honor bright, I'm not a rowdy." For decades he champions her prose, the story "In the Village" in particular ad nauseam (an obviously ambiguous accolade t ................
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[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/69327

Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Necessary Minimum
Dunstan Thompson slides out of the shadows.
By Clive James
Introduction

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to.

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to, and the only hankering was to get something said in a memorable form. Alas, we would have to go a long way back. Samuel Daniel(1562–1619) certainly wanted to be thought of as a poet—it was his career, even when he was working for nobles as a gentleman servant—and there must have been critics who wanted to deny him the title, or they would not have attacked him for too often revising his work, and he would not have defended himself thus:

And howsoever be it, well or ill
What I have done, it is mine owne, I may
Do whatsoever therewithal I will.
I may pull downe, raise, and reedifie.
It is the building of my life, the fee
Of Nature, all th’inheritance that I
Shal leave to those which must come after me.

—From To the Reader

The battle was fought out more than four hundred years ago, and Daniel won it. Unless we are scholars of the period, we might have small knowledge of his work in general, but this one stanza is quite likely to have got through to us. It is often quoted as an example of how there were poets much less important than Shakespeare who nevertheless felt that they, too, might be writing immortal lines to time, and were ready to drub any popinjay who dared to suggest that they weren’t. But clearly the stanza did not get through to us just because of the story it tells or the position it takes. It got through by the way it moves. Within its tight form, it is a playground of easy freedom: not a syllable out of place, and yet it catches your ear with its conversational rhythm at every point.

It would be tempting to say that any poet, in any era, needs to be able to construct at least one stanza like that or he will never even join the contest. Daniel’s technique was so meticulous that it can teach us how words were pronounced in his time. The opening line of one of the sonnets in which he complains about harsh treatment from his vainly adored Delia runs “Fair is my love, and cruel as she’s fair.” Thus we can tell that the word “cruel” was probably pronounced with a full two syllables, or there would be a syllable missing from the line. (If he had written “she is” instead of “she’s,” we would have known that he scanned “cruel” as one syllable, and presumably pronounced it that way too, as we do now.) Unfortunately Daniel seldom wrote an entire poem—not even his beautifully entitled “Care-charmer Sleep”—in which every line was as vivid as that. But he did compose that one stanza, and we only have to read it once before we are drawn in to see how it is held together, and to start asking why we put up with so much unapologetic awkwardness from poets now. Limping numbers from poets writing in free verse are presumably meant, but limping numbers from poets who are avowedly trying to write in set forms must be mere clumsiness. The perpetrators might say that they are getting back to the vitality of an initial state, in which Donne demonstrated the vigor that roughness could give before the false ideal of smoothness arrived. But Daniel was already writing before Donne, and we have at least one stanza to prove that lack of vigor was not his problem. All too often his lines lacked semantic pressure, but they always moved with a precise energy, and he could put them together into an assemblage that danced.

Perhaps to ask for a whole stanza is asking too much, and just a few lines will work the trick. The drawback there, however, is that the few lines tend to break free not just from the poem, but from the poet’s name. Very few readers of poetry now, however wide their knowledge, would be able to give a name to the poet who wrote this:

At moments when the tide goes out,
The stones, still wet and ringing with
The drained-off retrogressive sea,
Lie fresh like fish on market stalls
And, speckled, shine. Some seem to float
In crevices where wavelets froth
Forgotten by the watery
Departure towards the moon.

As a thought experiment, I see myself presented with this fragment in a practical criticism class of the kind that I took in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. Even with the benefit of the knowledge that I have acquired since, I might still be at a loss to name its author, partly because it could have had so many authors. Almost certainly it stems from a period when free form Modernism was already being reacted against: all the scrupulous tension of Modernist diction is in it, but there is also a conscious heightening, as of a return to well-made elegance, so we are probably, at the very earliest, somewhere in the years after 1945, when the American formalists were already operating and Britain’s phalanx of Movement poets were on their way up. The line “The drained-off retrogressive sea” might have been turned by Philip Larkin, who was fond of coupling his adjectives into a train. The fresh fish on the market stalls might have come from “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” the long poem in which Galway Kinnell took out the patent on fish imagery. Except that Elizabeth Bishop took out a rival patent when she, too, got into the seafood business. Could it be her? With my supervisor looking at his watch and pressing for an answer, I would have to say that the watery departure towards the moon sounds like Richard Wilbur writing just after the end of WWII, or perhaps James Merrill a bit later, or perhaps Stephen Edgar writing last year, or perhaps . . . But the flock of names, mere shorthand for a flock of tones, would only mean that I had found a single voice unidentifiable. And indeed the poet’s name is probably still unidentifiable when I reveal it: Dunstan Thompson.

I would have liked to say that Thompson (1918–1975) is the missing man from the post-WWII poetic story, but the sad truth is that he has gone missing for a reason. Born and raised in America, he had an enviably cosmopolitan education that culminated at Harvard, from which he went into the army. During the war, his poetic career started off brilliantly with his collection Poems (Simon and Schuster, 1943) and continued after the war with Lament for the Sleepwalker (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1947). These were big-time publishing houses and he won big-time recognition, his name often included in the magic list of voices built to last. Stephen Spender gave Thompson a papal imprimatur, thereby, perhaps, signaling that there might be a fertile context waiting for Thompson across the Atlantic. When Thompson’s second book came out he had already resettled in England, and there he began the long business—difficult, for one so prominently placed in several of the “war poets” anthologies—of ensuring that he would be forgotten. There was quite a lot to forget, and how exactly he managed to translate prominence into oblivion raises some unsettling questions. He wrote one poem, “Largo,” whose qualities should have been remembered, even though it runs to some length and not all of it is in tight focus. Here is a sample stanza:

All friends are false but you are true: the paradox
Is perfect tense in present time, whose parallel
Extends to meeting point; where, more than friends, we fell
Together on the other side of love, where clocks
And mirrors were reversed to show
Ourselves as only we could know;
Where all the doors had secret locks
With double keys; and where the sliding panel, well
Concealed, gave us our exit through the palace wall.
There we have come and gone: twin kings, who roam at will
Behind the court, behind the backs
Of consort queens, behind the racks
On which their favorites lie who told them what to do.
For every cupid with a garland round the throne still lacks
The look I give to you.

This majestic form, one of his own devising, is continued through all ten stanzas of the poem, with a scarcely faltering interplay between the hexameters, tetrameters, and trimeters—everything except pentameters, in fact. Anywhere in the poem’s wide panorama, the half rhymes are handled with an infallibly musical tact: the modular balancing of “well,” “wall,” and “will” in the quoted stanza is only a single instance of a multiple enchantment. You would say that a man who could build such an exquisite machine could do anything, technically. But even though bringing all this mastery to bear, he couldn’t do anything definite with the subject matter. From what thin biographical evidence exists, it is possible to conclude that Thompson was one of those gay male poets trapped between the urge to speak and the love that dare not speak its name. Auden escaped the trap by scarcely dropping a hint until the safety whistle blew decades later. But Thompson wanted to spill the beans, not just about Damon and Pythias and Richard II and A.E. Housman—whether named or merely alluded to, they all crop up during the poem—but about himself and his lover, evidently a fellow serviceman. Unfortunately he could spill only a few beans at once. There were limits to what he could say, and the result is a flurry of tangential suggestions, a cloud of innuendo.

“Largo” was a clear case—the only clear thing about it—of a poem written before its time, and by the time its time had come, the poem was gone. Oscar Williams, the best anthologist of the post-war years on either side of the Atlantic, published it in his invaluable A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, but I have never seen it anywhere else. I would like to call the poem magnificent. But it gives only flashes of the total effect it might have had, and there lay the problem that dogged Thompson’s poetry for the rest of his career, and eventually buried him.

In England after the war, Thompson went on writing poems, most of which were collected posthumously in Poems 1950–1974. The book has an impressive physical appearance, rather along the lines of a Faber collection of the shorter poems of Auden or MacNeice. But the publishing house was an off-trail outfit called Paradigm Press, who can’t have printed many copies. During decades of haunting second-hand bookshops all over the world, I only ever saw a single copy, and that was in Cambridge in 2006. I picked it up, wondering who he was, read the lines about the seashore quoted above, and took it home to read it through.

Fragments of high quality were everywhere, but a completely integrated poem was hard to find. “Seascape with Edwardian Figures” came nearest, but even that one tailed off: when the tide departed towards the moon, the poem went with it. There was a long poem, “Valley of the Kings,” about Egyptian tombs. Freighted with his curious learning, it could have rivaled the stately march of “Largo,” but its points of intensity were scattered, like the momentarily illuminated wall paintings in the tombs themselves, and nothing held them together except the darkness between them. Flaring moments slid away into shadow:

This painted food will feed
Only imperishable people. Stars which glow
Like real stars lose
Their seeming lustre when you need
Them to disclose the way. From what? I do not know.

I talk about “Valley of the Kings” in the past tense because it is no longer alive, and the same applies, alas, to the whole of his later achievement. There is just too little of Samuel Daniel’s “It is mine owne,” and too much of Dunstan Thompson’s “I do not know.” Throughout the book, Thompson’s talent—in the complex sense that involves perception, precision, and musicality—is everywhere, but that’s just the trouble. It’s everywhere without being anywhere. The lesson, I think, is that a talent might be the necessary minimum, but it will not be sufficient if it can’t produce a poem, or at least a stanza, assured enough to come down through time and make us ask, “Who wrote that?”

James Merrill(1926–1995), another gay American poet who came to prominence a little later, wrote a poem about his upbringing, “The Broken Home,” that would have ensured his survival even if his every other manuscript had gone up in smoke. The poem doesn’t bring his sexuality into focus—other poems did—but it does illuminate his early life. This single stanza about his father would have been enough to prove that a masterful voice had arrived:

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

I quote the stanza because it was the first thing I read of Merrill’s that made me realize I would have to read everything else. When I began to, I soon realized that the assurance of his early formal patterns provided the warrant for following him when his patterns became more complicated and finally ceased to be patterns at all. In the twentieth century, this was a not uncommon progression among revolutionary spirits in all the arts. Picasso had conspicuously mastered every aspect of draughtsmanship and painting that had ever been applied to the recognizable before he moved on into the less recognizable, and the best reason for trying to follow what he was up to was that he had proved he could actually do what he was no longer doing. Stravinsky composed melodies you could hum and whistle—I can still do my version of the major themes from Petroushka unless somebody stops me—before he moved on to composing what could only be listened to, and the best reason for listening hard was your memory of the authority he had displayed when the listening was easy. In poetry, Eliot went on proving that he was a master of tight forms even as he became famous for works that apparently had no form at all, and that was the best reason for supposing that those works still depended on a highly-schooled formal sense. So there was nothing new about Merrill’s progression from poems with apprehensible boundaries to poems whose lack of boundaries was part of their subject. It was in the tradition of Modernism. But it depended on an assurance that made paying attention compulsory.

This compulsory quality was what Dunstan Thompson lacked even in his brightest moments. Thompson didn’t have Merrill’s vast financial resources—which enabled Merrill to do pretty much what he liked all his life, including, commendably, helping other poets when they were short of cash—but Thompson did have nearly all of Merrill’s technical resources. Exploiting those, he might have built an impregnable position for himself, but you can’t help feeling that he didn’t really want to. His relocation from America to England need not necessarily have been fatal. Earlier in the century it had worked triumphantly for Pound and Eliot, and the only reason that Lowell made a hash of it later on was that his intermittent psychic disturbance had become almost continuous, and had weakened his strategic judgment to the point where he failed to recognize that he wasn’t getting beyond the discipline of his wonderfully self-contained early poems, but was neutralizing that discipline in the name of an illusory scope. And it wasn’t as if Lowell lacked a welcome in London. (If anything, he was too welcome: the locals would print anything he gave them.) The possibilities of working on both sides of the pond were rich, as was proved in the next generation by Michael Donaghy, who was born in New York in 1954 and died in London at the age of only fifty.

At the time of writing, Donaghy’s complete works are being published in Britain by Picador in two neatly matched volumes: Collected Poems, which contains all four of the collections published in his lifetime plus a sheaf of previously unpublished poems uniformly excellent, and The Shape of the Dance, which amounts to his collected prose. I was asked to write the introduction for the prose volume and was glad to do so, because I think Donaghy was an important critic, even a necessary one. But the reasons to think so would be crucially fewer if he had not been so authoritative as a poet. Within the first few lines of any poem he writes, he has made paying attention compulsory. There are simply dozens, even scores, of poems by which this fact could be easily demonstrated, but let’s make it harder for ourselves, by choosing a poem where the reader has to dig a bit to figure out what is going on. That we feel compelled to dig is, I think, a further illustration of the quality of command that we are talking about. The poem, “Shibboleth,” was the title poem of the first collection he published in 1988. Here is the poem entire:

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.
Another couldn’t strip the cellophane
From a GI’s pack of cigarettes.
By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We’d become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,
Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

For anyone of my generation it is obvious that this poem is about the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when a special SS unit formed by Otto Skorzeny penetrated the American lines with a view to creating havoc. The SS men—most of them Volksdeutsche who had been brought up in America—wore American uniforms, carried captured American weapons, spoke perfect English, and could be identified only by what they didn’t know, because they had spent the last few years in Germany. One could make an objection based on just that point: none of the suspects would have shown an “ignorance of baseball” in general. They just would have been ignorant about the latest scores. (And one of the Andrews Sisters has her name misspelled: “Maxine” was really “Maxene.”) But Donaghy has a far wider audience in mind than just my contemporaries. For his own contemporaries, the whole episode might not be in their frame of reference; and he has done very little to clue them in. They have to figure it out. The reference to “GI’s,” to the Andrews Sisters, or perhaps to Tarzan’s friend Cheetah, would probably be a starting point to help them identify which war it was. Finally they will get it right, and thus find out that the shaving narrator can’t be Donaghy, who, at the time, was ten years short of being born. He has put his narrator into a war that could be any American war in which infiltrators have to be detected according to their knowledge of American culture. It’s a Battlestar Galactica scenario, with the Germans as the Cylons. The new generation, who are just coming to poetry now, might have that as their first thought. Donaghy future-proofed the poem by cutting back on its context. He often did that; or, rather, does that—let’s put him in the present, where he belongs.

The typical Donaghy poem isn’t typical. Each poem has its own form and, remarkably, its own voice. Underlying this protean range of creative expression there is a critical attitude, which is probably best summed up in a single essay contained in The Shape of the Dance. The essay is called “American Revolutions” and it sums up his lifelong—lifelong in so short a life—determination to make sense out of the twentieth-century conflict between formal and free verse. As a musician by avocation, Donaghy had no trust in the idea of perfectly unfettered, untrained expression. He agreed with Stravinsky that limitations were the departure point for inspiration. Donaghy believed that a living poem could emerge only from an idea in “negotiation” (the key word in his critical vocabulary) with an imposed formal requirement, even if it was self-imposed, and might be rendered invisible in the course of the negotiation. The split between ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70095

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Playing by Ear, Praying for Rain: The Poetry of James Baldwin
By Nikky Finney

Baldwin was never afraid to say it. He made me less afraid to say it too.

The air of the Republic was already rich with him when I got here. James Arthur Baldwin, the most salient, sublime, and consequential American writer of the twentieth century, was in the midst of publishing his resolute and prophetic essays and novels: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), The Amen Corner (1954), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni’s Room (1956). I arrived on planet earth in the middle of his personal and relentless assault on white supremacy and his brilliant, succinct understanding of world and American history. In every direction I turned, my ears filled a little more with what he always had to say. His words, his spirit, mattered to me. Black, gay, bejeweled, eyes like orbs searching, dancing, calling a spade a spade, in magazines and on the black-and-white tv of my youth. Baldwin, deep in thought and pulling drags from his companion cigarettes, looking his and our danger in the face and never backing down. My world view was set in motion by this big, bold heart who understood that he had to leave his America in order to be. Baldwin was dangerous to everybody who had anything to hide. Baldwin was also the priceless inheritance to anybody looking for manumission from who they didn’t want or have to be. Gracious and tender, a man who had no idea or concept of his place, who nurtured conversation with Black Panthers and the white literati all in the same afternoon. So powerful and controversial was his name that one minute it was there on the speaker’s list for the great August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and then, poof, it was off. The country might have been ready to march for things they believed all God’s children should have in this life, but there were people, richly miseducated by the Republic, who were not ready for James Baldwin to bring truth in those searing ways he always brought truth to the multitudes.

The eldest of nine, a beloved son of Harlem, his irreverent pride and trust in his own mind, his soul (privately and sometimes publicly warring), all of who he was and believed himself to be, was exposed in his first person, unlimited voice, not for sale, but vulnerable to the Republic. Baldwin’s proud sexuality and his unwillingness to censor his understanding that sex was a foundational part of this life even in the puritanical Republic and therefore should be written, unclothed, not whispered about, not roped off in some back room, informed all of his work, but especially his poetry. Uninviting Baldwin was often the excuse for the whitewashing of his urgent and necessary 
brilliance from both the conservative black community and from whites who had never heard such a dark genius display such rich and sensory antagonism for them. Into the microphone of the world Baldwin leaned — never afraid to say it.

Only once did I see James Baldwin live and in warm, brilliant person; it was 1984, a packed house at the University of California at Berkeley. I was twenty-seven, he was sixty, and we would never meet. None of us there that night, standing shoulder to shoulder, pushed to the edge of our seats, knew that this was our last embrace with him, that we would only have him walking among us for three more years. I remember the timbre of his voice. Steadfast. Smoky. Serene. His words fell on us like a good rain. A replenishing we badly needed. All of us standing, sitting, spread out before this wise, sharp-witted, all-seeing man.

I had met James Baldwin by way of his “Sweet Lorraine,” a seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word loving manifesto to his friend and comrade, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry died from cancer at the age of thirty-four, soon after her great work, A Raisin in the Sun, yanked the apron and head rag off the institution of the American theater, Broadway, 1959. Baldwin’s intimate remembrance became the introduction to Hansberry’s posthumous collection, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a book that, as a girl of fourteen, I was highly uncomfortable ever letting out of my sight. I was the black girl dreaming of a writing life and Hansberry, the black woman carving one out. Hansberry had given me two atomic oars to zephyr me further upstream: I am a writer. I am going to write. After her untimely death, I had a palpable need to still see and feel her in the world. Baldwin’s lush remembrance brought her to me in powerful living dimension. His way of seeing her, of remembering what was important about her, helped her stay with me.

I had needed Hansberry to set my determination forward for my journey. And I needed Baldwin to teach me about the power of rain.



•



Baldwin wrote poetry throughout his life. He wrote with an engaged, layered, facile hand. The idea being explored first cinched, then stretched out, with just enough tension to bring the light in. His language: informal, inviting; his ideas from the four corners of the earth, beginning, always, with love:

No man can have a harlot
for a lover
nor stay in bed forever
with a lie.
He must rise up
and face the morning sky
and himself, in the mirror
of his lover’s eye.
 — From A Lover’s Question

Baldwin’s images carry their weight and we, the reader, carry their consequence. In one turn of phrase and line, something lies easy in repose; in the next, he is telling the Lord what to do; the words jump, fall in line, with great and marching verve:

Lord,
when you send the rain,
think about it, please,
a little?
Do
not get carried away
by the sound of falling water,
the marvelous light
on the falling water.
I
am beneath that water.
It falls with great force
and the light
Blinds
me to the light.
  — Untitled

Baldwin wrote as the words instructed, never allowing the critics of the Republic to tell him how or how not. They could listen in or they could ignore him, but he was never their boy, writing something they wanted to hear. He fastidiously handed that empty caricature of a black writer back to them, tipping his hat, turning back to his sweet Harlem alley for more juice.

James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there, making his outlines, his annotations, doing his jotting down, writing from the mettle and marginalia of his life, giving commentary, scribbling, then dispatching out to the world what he knew and felt about that world. James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem. James Baldwin, as poet, never forgot what he had taught me in that seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word essay — to remember where one came from. So many of the poems are dedicated back to someone who perhaps had gone the distance, perhaps had taught him about the rain: for David, for Jefe, for Lena Horne, for Rico, for Berdis, for Y.S.

When the writer Cecil Brown went to see James Baldwin in Paris in the summer of 1982, he found him “busy writing poems,” quite possibly these poems. Brown reports that Baldwin would work on a poem for a while and then stop from time to time to read one aloud to him. “Staggerlee wonders” was one of those poems, and “Staggerlee wonders” opens Jimmy’s Blues, the collection he published in 1983. The poem begins with indefatigable might, setting the tone and temperature for everything else in this volume, as well as the sound and sense found throughout Baldwin’s oeuvre. “Baldwin read to me from the poem with great humor and laughter,” Brown wrote in his book Stagolee Shot Billy.

Baldwin felt that black men in America, as the most obvious targets of white oppression, had to love each other, to warn each other, and to communicate with each other if they were to escape being defined only in reaction to that oppression. They had to seek and find in their own tradition the human qualities that white men, through their unrelenting brutality, had lost.

I do not believe James Baldwin can be wholly read without first 
understanding white men and their penchant for tyranny and “unrelenting brutality.” If you read Baldwin without this truth, you will mistake Baldwin’s use of the word nigger as how he saw himself, instead of that long-suffering character, imagined, invented, and marched to the conveyor belt as if it was the hanging tree, by the founding fathers of the Republic, in order that they might hold on for as long as possible to “the very last white country the world will ever see” (Baldwin, “Notes on the House of Bondage”).

I always wonder
what they think the niggers are doing
while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,
are containing
Russia
and defining and re-defining and re-aligning
China,
nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,
from blowing up that earth.
— From Staggerlee wonders

With prophetic understanding, harmony, and swing, creating his own style and using his own gauges to navigate the journey, Baldwin often wrote counter-metrically, reflecting his African, Southern, Harlem, and Paris roots. “What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?” he was once asked in a Paris Review interview. His answer: “Her use of language . . .    Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny.”

James Baldwin made laughter of a certain style even as he reported the lies of  the Republic. He was so aware of that other face so necessary in this life, that face that was present in all the best human dramatic monologues, the high historic black art of laughing to keep from crying. He knew that without the blues there would be no jazz. Just as Baldwin dropped you into the fire, there he was extinguishing it with laughter.

Neither (incidentally)
has anyone discussed the Bomb with the niggers:
the incoherent feeling is, the less
the nigger knows about the Bomb, the better:
the lady of the house
smiles nervously in your direction
as though she had just been overheard
discussing family, or sexual secrets,
and changes the subject to Education,
or Full Employment, or the Welfare rolls,
the smile saying, Don’t be dismayed.
We know how you feel. You can trust us.
 — From Staggerlee wonders

Baldwin wrote poetry because he felt close to this particular form and this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his imagination. From the beginning of his life to the very end, I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: The way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work. The way he understood what his friend and mentor, the great American painter Beauford Delaney, had taught him — to look close, not just at the water but at the oil sitting there on top of the water. This reliable witnessing eye was the true value of seeing the world for what it really was and not for what someone reported, from afar, that it was.

When Baldwin took off for Switzerland in 1951, he carried recordings by Bessie Smith, and he would often fall asleep listening to them, taking her in like the sweet black poetry she sang. It must have been her Baby don’t worry, I got you voice and their shared blues that pushed him through to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain in three months, after struggling with the story for ten years. Whenever Baldwin abandoned the music of who he was and how that sound was made, he momentarily lost his way. When he lost his way, I believe it was poetry that often brought him back. I believe he wrote poetry throughout his life because poetry brought him back to the music, back to the rain. The looking close. The understanding and presence of the oil on top of the water. Compression. Precision. The metaphor. The riff and shout. The figurative. The high notes. The blues. The reds. The whites. This soaking up. That treble clef. Bass. Baldwin could access it all — and did — with poetry.

He was standing at the bath-room mirror,
shaving,
had just stepped out of the shower,
naked,
balls retracted, prick limped out of the
small,
morning hard-on,
thinking of nothing but foam and steam,
when the bell
rang.
  — From Gypsy

Baldwin integrated the power of sex and the critical dynamics of the family with ease. He spoke often and passionately about the preciousness of children, the beloved ones. He never hid from any language that engaged the human conundrum, refusing to allow the narrow world to deny him, black, bejeweled, Harlem insurgent, demanding to add his poetic voice to all others of his day. Sometimes employing a simple rhyme scheme and rhythm, as in “The giver,” a poem dedicated to his mother, Berdis, and then, again, giving rise to poetic ear-play in “Imagination.”

Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.

It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.

In several of his last interviews you hear James Baldwin repeat something you know is on his mind as he grew older: “You learn how little you know.” This black man of the black diaspora, born in 1924, the same year that J. Edgar Hoover was appointed the new director of the fbi, forever taking stock of his life as it unfolded:

My progress report
concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
is discouraging.
I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Furthermore, it appears
that I packed the wrong things.
  — From Inventory / On Being 52

Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems is being published in what would have been Baldwin’s — our loving, long-cussed, steadfast witness in this world’s — ninetieth year. These poems represent the notations, permutations, the Benjamin Banneker–like wonderings of a curious heart devoted to exposing tyranny, love, and the perpetual historical lies of the Republic.

In a 1961 interview, Studs Terkel asks Jimmy Baldwin after Baldwin’s first twenty years as a writer, “who are you, now?” Baldwin answers,

Who, indeed. Well, I may be able to tell you who I am, but I am also discovering who I am not. I want to be an honest man. And I want to be a good writer. I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. You just have to play it by ear and . . .    pray for rain.

He never rested on any fame, award, or success. He didn’t linger in the noisy standing ovation we gave him that night in California. He didn’t need the poison of whatever it meant “to be famous” pounding at his door. Refusing to stand in any shadow, Baldwin understood that any light on his life might open some doors, but in the end it was his pounding heart, caring and remaining focused on the community, that had always defined him, that mattered. In his work he remained devoted to exposing more and more the ravages of poverty and invisibility on black and poor people. He loved it when people came to talk and listen to his stories, his rolling laughter, and consented to be transformed by his various arenas of language and his many forms of expression. These were friends and strangers, artists, who only wanted to feel him say what he had to say. People hungry to hear James Baldwin unabridged, before the night got too late and his devotion would make him rise and return him to the aloneness of his work, in that space he called his “torture chamber,” his st

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/reso...s/detail/69568

Essay on Poetic Theory
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems (2006)
By Brenda Hillman
Introduction

In 2006, poet Brenda Hillman delivered the lecture “Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems” at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture Series. Hillman—whose own poetry often brings together narrative fragments, language-led lyricism, ideas steeped in social activism and Gnosticism, and a deeply personal voice—here examines the role of complexity in contemporary poetry and the benefits that engaging such complexity can offer readers.

As an advocate of poems that some readers might regard as difficult and therefore intimidating or off-putting, Hillman offers close readings of several such works by tracking their syntactic, tonal, and imagistic shifts. Contemporary poetry, Hillman notes, “favors process over destination,” and her readings model a way to enter, rather than paraphrase, these poems.

While her students have often praised what they call “flow,” Hillman examines inventive or disruptive grammar as a means of indicating where “the yes of a brush stroke meets the maybe of a thought.” She notes that contemporary poetry should be read in its historical context, in the wake of Modernism, which challenged and redefined our relationship to the world as well as made room for disjunction and fragmentation in the arts.

Hillman organizes her lecture according to the four main ways in which she believes poetry can serve contemporary readers. First, she argues, poetry helps us see ourselves in the context of a range of environments, and thus to find our place in the world. Secondly, poetry displays the breadth of language’s power and potential. Thirdly, truly engaging with the matter of a poem can offer a reader a means by which to process emotion. Finally, poetry can help a reader tap into the precise beauty and strangeness of our days.

Hillman’s lecture draws on her experience as a teacher of poetry as well as her own poetry’s engagement with difficulty and complexity.

I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate to be among such illustrious company.

When I began to work on this lecture some time ago, I had just received an email saying that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, having retired from the Cabinet, was seriously hoping to be selected as Poet Laureate of the United States. Ashcroft’s best-known poem, “Let the Eagle Soar,” was used at President Bush’s swearing-in ceremony:

Let the eagle soar,
Like she’s never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
“Only God, no other kings.”
This country’s far too young to die.
We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.

I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing this poem. It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes. The problem here isn’t straightforwardness, or rhyming, or birds; Dickinson, Hopkins, and Frost all employ those things. The problem is that Mr. Ashcroft has not used his imagination in his poem. He needs to sign up for my introductory creative writing class at Saint Mary’s, where we could help him begin his poetry studies in just two weeks. The fact that Ashcroft wants to represent American poetry officially and to be its servant is frightening. His poem reminds me of the 21-year old pipe-bomber planting his bombs all over the Kansas countryside in the shape of a gigantic smiley face. The world quite literally suffers from a lack of imagination.

Here is a poem with imagination, written by Lisa Fishman, It’s called “Note”:

Was wintered in
unmade of stone and what-
not

This compact poem, like the inverse of a dreamed place, invites a sense of uncertainty and of safety. Its three-line form suggests haiku, but it is not haiku. The lines hold an unbalanced number of stresses: 2-3-1. The poem has neither noun nor pronoun for its subject; who is speaking? It begins mid-thought: someone or something has been entrapped by winter. The second line, after an implied comma, seems an extension of the first thought; the someone or something being “unmade of stone” is either being released from a previous condition of being “made” of stone, or the “unmade” means “not yet made.” The third thought-perception is the colloquial, but not current, “what-/not,” broken in half by a hyphen and a new line: “what-not” points to the tentative quality of the initial perceptions. To live without expectation seems a particular terror and amazement in this brief structure.

Could the same thought have been expressed in any way other than in these nine words? A poem cannot be paraphrased. But it can be described, its effects analyzed to heighten appreciation for how such a delicate mechanism plays itself out. In poems, the meanings coincide with the rhythms of someone thinking them; they are the subjects of their own making.

My argument for this talk stems from the idea that it is all right for poetry to have made it into the twentieth century and beyond, and that it is a healthy thing for us that poetry engages with complexity, that this complexity is practical and aesthetically pleasing in ways that offer beginning and advanced readers more reality. Complexity and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. The paradoxical inevitability and openness of poetic expression make it both satisfying and mysteriously difficult to teach. To engage the mysterious or the difficult is not such a bad thing. It is mysterious and difficult to be alive and to express why. For lovers of poetry, there is disequilibrium between ourselves and the world that nothing restores to balance but poetry. The Stronach Lectures are meant to address issues of teaching poetry for audiences that have both scholarly and non-scholarly interests in the subject. I want to approach the topic in a fairly intuitive and jargon-free manner, and to present four survival tools for contemporary culture that poetry is especially good at providing: (1) the sense of who we are in our historical, cultural and—for want of a better term—natural (but I really mean “not man-made”) environments; (2) a sense of the power of language, of each word and phrase; (3) the ability to think through emotion on many levels—literal, abstract, concrete, metaphysical, figurative; and (4) an awareness of how particular and odd everything is, especially in moments of compressed thought captured in time. Taking delight in this four-fold toolkit provides my primary pedagogical energy. I think about these things when composing my own poetry and when teaching at all levels. Poetry is the most powerful method I’ve found for expressing the particular and extreme states life has to offer.

The idea for this talk came from hearing hundreds of questions over several decades—not only in the classroom, but also in conversations with friends and strangers—about the challenges of current poetry. “I can’t say I read much poetry; it really kinda loses me,” someone will say. “Why can’t they just say it normally?” or “Am I supposed to feel stupid when I read it?” as a friend recently asked.

The challenges of reading contemporary poetry also came up in a stimulating lunchtime conversation I had with Judith Stronach in the late nineties. We discussed stylistic difficulties of poetry in relation to states of mental suffering. Judith was troubled by a struggle she was having understanding a particular poem, and asked me whether poetry might not have a special obligation to present directly what might seem inexpressible. I said I thought poetry has the obligation to try to express what cannot be expressed, but that it could not always be done in direct ways. We talked about how the confusion of daily life, the impossibilities, the unredeemed moments of spiritual darkness, as well as massive social and political injustices, could all find shapes in poetry. I know Judith wrestled with these things, and I thought of this lecture as a way of continuing that conversation with her. Thinking about stylistic difficulty and the ineffable in poetry resonates in other types of hermeneutical reading I’ve done for decades—including literary theory, gnostic and occult writings of the second century, spam sent by pharmaceutical companies, and instructions for various pieces of technology. I would say all of these require considerably more interpretation than poetry!

A while back, my husband showed me a thrilling article in the magazine Representations by David Keightley, a Berkeley scholar, about the origins of writing in ancient China. I will try to summarize a few of the main points. Keightley discusses divination by fire (pyromancy), and the development of writing in neolithic Chinese culture. In the Shang dynasty (that’s 1200–1050 B.C.E.—around the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt and of the Trojan Wars), the bones of ancestors and animals were used for this sort of pyromancy, often exhumed from burial grounds, and then reburied and exhumed again, and then burned for the purposes of divination. After the diviners interpreted the messages from the stress-cracks resulting from fire, they uttered sounds as they “read” the cracks, and the sounds of their spoken prophecies were carved deeply into the bones and emphasized with ink. It is in part from these painted carvings that the written Chinese language evolved. Keightley notes that these rituals of divination and writing were open only to a few, and that their interpretation remained a specialized field. He demonstrates that this form of Chinese writing kept the power of knowledge specific to the scholar classes over the centuries. It seems these individual logographic signs were different from the alphabetic or syllabilary scripts in other cultures (Microsoft did not recognize “syllabilary” and tried to suggest “salability” in my laptop)—for instance, those in Mesopotamia—that combined syllables or signs to make meaning. Nor were they pictographic. Each sign came with a single sound and a prediction, with its own meaning. When Bob and I were in Paris last summer we visited the Asian Museum and saw some of these amazing bones and turtle shells and my breath was taken away by the beauty of the markings—like the tracks of small animals surrounding their own absence.

The ability to produce and to interpret the cracks, to utter the sounds from the dead, and to carve the encoded signs became the most valued form of literacy. The signs produced in this manner were more stylized and abstract than those of ordinary writing. Because they came directly from the ancestors whose power was considered to be of an abstract and collective nature (unlike the Egyptian and Greek idea of the particularized soul existing after death), these writings had a powerfully generalized aesthetic function in the culture. I am intrigued by this idea of purely abstract, sound-based script—the signals from the ancestors. The value of these markings lay in their very mystery and abstraction, and in the fact that the accompanying sacred sounds had a social function. This oracle bone script exists between words and music.

A few weeks ago, a poet-friend, Lauren Levato, gave me an article about the development of nüshu, an encoded secret script developed more recently by women in the mountains of southern China for the purpose of sending secret messages men couldn’t read. It is thought that this script derived from the oracle bone tradition. The figures are graceful and stylized—even more so than the bone scratches—bird prints, chevrons, spiked angles. Both these scripts seem like modernist practices in the twentieth century. As Robert Kaufman reminds us that Theodor Adorno reminds us, the vast expressiveness of the abstract and the lyric—as in Kandinsky paintings—help aesthetic culture reconceive its social function. The oracle bone signs and nüshu script both remind me of Mandelstam’s poems criticizing Stalin in secret metaphors, and of reports that servicemen in Iraq are doing highly encoded rap and hip-hop in order to express criticism of the military hierarchy and of the presence of multinational corporations benefiting from their labors.

One of the big jobs of a teacher is to convince students that any effort whatsoever is worth it. In the remarks that follow I’m thinking mostly of introductory poetry classes, but the students might be of any age. Some of my students, especially those new to reading poetry, become afraid when they think they are supposed to understand contemporary poems and can’t. Slant or oblique styles of poetry make them feel stupid, even if the very same techniques are used in music videos. Panicked that they will produce the wrong response, students may grow impatient in an increasingly impatient culture, believing that if poetry does not have an immediate appeal, it is undemocratic and ungenerous. Even some grown-up, famous poets put forth these opinions—arguing that poetry should be easy, should give a quick story, should never make them feel as if a highbrow or academic trick is being played on them. My goal as a teacher is to bring students closer to the initiating impulses of the poem, so that what might have evoked a hostile response can move them to a sense of accomplishment, to the deep pleasures of finding multiple interpretations for what may have seemed obscure.

The fearful student and the equally fearful famous poet might need a small review of the basics of twentieth-century modernism, which redefined the nature of art in several important ways: (1) in light of—or in the dark of—the First World War, modernism broke from the past—but also brought a new consciousness of cultural history—think art deco with its Egyptian motifs; (2) modernism brought an interest—through Freud, but not only Freud—in the mind’s psychological processes, which inspired artists to incorporate images reflecting mental process; (3) modernism defined creativity in new ways (by redefining god and nature); and finally, (4) modernism recognized that the modern city—people living together as alienated beings—was as important to the subject matter of aesthetic expression as rural scenes had been to pastoral traditions. (Readers might want to take a look at Charles Altieri’s The Art of 20th Century American Poetry.)

To most of you this will seem basic, but I wanted to remind the reader that a little background goes a long way. These redefinitions—what we are, what art is, what nature/god is, what we are in cities in relation to our mental lives—and the fact that dramatically new forms of art can include the threadlike, the fragmentary, the unfinished, that objects can point to their own synthetic qualities—all these are concepts worth reminding students of—even if “make it new” is by now one hundred years old. Much contemporary poetry that readers find mysterious makes use of modernist modes, tones, types, levels, styles that we take for granted in other aspects of our lives. It doesn’t take more than half a day to present this summary to students, though it might take them many years to absorb the art itself. Not having arrived at the twentieth century is, incidentally, one of the many problems in Mr. Ashcroft’s poem.

The fact that art comes from other art as well as from non-art, that it should be current, that the dilemmas of our present poetry come from unresolved arguments about representation and expression in the nineteenth century should not dismay us—it is a good thing. As romantic emotion, symbolist moody alienation, surrealist wild irrationality or Russian formalist philosophy make their way into contemporary poetry, we can remind students that originality in art, as in the human genome, resides in the way things are reconfigured, not in some god-given attribute (though I personally talk to rocks, plants, birds and the piece of paper when composing my own poetry, and thus do not want to put down people who think an actual muse still exists). Oracle bones of ancient China speak metaphorically through their ancestors’ recirculating messages. An overwhelmed, busy, depressed, confused or mystified contemporary reader can depend on the poet to make expressive signs, to give meaning to—or even to undermine meaning in—the sounds of her time.

I want to go through the four-fold toolkit I mentioned earlier: the sense of who we are in our environments; the understanding that every word and phrase matters and can be of interest; the idea that meaning circulates on many levels; and the conviction that the strange mystery of our existence can be represented. To proceed inductively, I thought about some poems I have taught in the last few years, and recalled some of the pedagogical challenges they present.

I. The sense of who we are in our environments

Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on.

Often the persona in poetry is assumed to be that of the poet recounting an experience, or series of thoughts, about an experience in narrative or meditative form. That this became the main mode in the twentieth century is probably because personal accounts have, and well continue to have, a particular appeal. When students first come to poetry, they are excited that it can address their own states of feeling, their questions: Who am I? What is my problem? The lyric poem is still going steady with the turbulent heart that loves its own turbulence. The basic desire for emotional identification, and the lack of it, brings most people to poetry in the first place. No poet forgets the power of emotion. My introductory students have often been drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poetry despite—or perhaps because of—the perilous nature of her metaphors. Here is one of her poems:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your foot-soles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Many students can enter this poem rel .....................................

"Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on. "

And some poets go their own path and mix methods and pay homage to the greats by doing so..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/feat...s/detail/89623

Interview
Filling a Vacuum
Kwame Dawes on directing the African Poetry Book Fund.
By Alex Dueben
Image Courtesy of University of Nebraska-Lincoln / Craig Chandler

Kwame Dawes is celebrated as a gifted poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and journalist. His numerous accomplishments as an editor, however, are less known. He is the Glenna Luschei editor in chief of the journal Prairie Schooner, and, for the past four years, he has served as the founding director of the African Poetry Book Fund, an impressive venture that publishes books by both young and established African poets, from the debut collection by Ethiopian American writer Mahtem Shiferraw to the collected poems of Gabriel Okara, an elder statesman of Nigerian literature.

Dawes recently spoke with the Poetry Foundation about his many editorial projects, how the African Poetry Book Fund came into being, and finding time for his own writing. The following interview was edited and condensed.


What exactly is the African Poetry Book Fund?

The African Poetry Book Fund was established about four years ago in response to an absence. There was no publisher exclusively devoted to publishing African poets. This seemed ridiculous to me, even as it explained why so often people complained to me that they did not know where to find the work of African poets in print. A few of us felt that something needed to be done, so we formed this entity and brought together a group of gifted and successful writers who all have a remarkable track record of supporting the work of other writers. Chris Abani, Bernardine Evaristo, John Keene, Matthew Shenoda, and Gabeba Baderoon constitute the remarkable editorial team for the Fund, and we work in the engine room for this enterprise.

Our goal is to see more books of poetry published and to create an environment that encourages the advancement of African poetry. We are now adding to this work a translation effort to bring work published in traditional African languages as well as in other colonial languages to readers.

What was your thinking about what the project would encompass? You’re publishing such a range: established poets, younger poets, poets from Africa, poets from the diaspora, chapbooks.

We are filling a vacuum. So while we are publishing work by first-time writers, we are also publishing the work of established poets and, of course, by the folks we regard as the senior poets from Africa. Given the poor publishing opportunities for even highly regarded poets from Africa, we feel it is imperative that people have access to the work of the best poets in Africa at all stages of their careers. Our goal is not to monopolize this publishing but to start to build interest in and awareness of the work. Eventually, we believe, other publishers will start to pay attention and acquire the work of African poets. In fact, this has already started to happen, and we expect this to only get better. In the meantime, we are committed creating a publishing home for poets so they can grow. In three years, we have published some 30 African poets. This is just the start.

The African Poetry Book Fund awards the Sillerman Prize annually to an African poet who has not yet published a collection of poetry. The University of Nebraska Press then publishes the book for which you write an introduction. You do a great job of analyzing the poets’ work, and you also provide an excellent frame and context to consider their work.

Each book is different. Each poet is different. That is the point. It is not my job to start to speak of a school of African poetry or even trends in African poetry. I am more interested in ensuring that the work of African poets is published so that scholars, critics, reviewers, and other poets can do that work. This strikes me as important. So when I come to the winners of the Sillerman Prize, I simply try to engage their work as I encounter it. What I can say is that our winners are truly writing some of the best poetry being published today, anywhere. I read and edit poetry for a living. I teach writing for a living. I pay attention to poetry from all over the world. I am not exaggerating here. [Sillerman winners] Clifton Gachagua, Ladan Osman, Mahtem Shiferraw and Safia Elhillo are startlingly gifted poets. Their books vary in style and content but share the qualities of urgency, vulnerability, and sheer poetic skill.

When you’re looking for established poets to publish, such as Gabriel Okara or Kofi Awoonor, what are your criteria? Did you just start with a long list of great poets?

We do have a list. The list is of the poets who have helped shape African poetry and whose work has not been treated to the kind of attention and presentation that we give to major writers in other traditions. Our list is long, but we have to find a team to work on each project. Collected volumes and new and selected volumes can be challenging because we have to secure permissions for reprints, and we have to work closely with the authors to ensure that we have a book that does justice to their body of work. We have several such works in the pipeline. We believe that it is pointless to pretend that African poetry is somehow new. There is a long tradition, and we believe that it should be made available to readers.

You’ve also been involved with the building—and stocking—of poetry libraries. I wondered if you could talk a little about these projects.

We have not built libraries. We have worked with various partners in five African countries to establish poetry libraries. These are reading libraries for writers and lovers of poetry. The partners in Ghana, Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, and Botswana have found venues for these libraries and have been running these libraries with volunteer staff for the past two years. The APBF procures the books through donations from publishers, journals, arts organizations, and individuals and ships them to these countries. We also developed a cataloging system for each library, and we help organize these libraries. The libraries have become hubs for poetry readings, workshops, and much else. This has been the plan.

So far we have made three shipments of about 400 to 500 books and journals to each library. Contemporary works of poetry make up the bulk of these books. The plan is to work with the libraries to develop their own network of sources for books to add to their stacks.

The logic is simple. Serious poets read poetry, all kinds of poetry. Poets who don’t have access to contemporary poetry are writing outside of community. Poets learn from one another, and we believe that poets can grow only by reading other poets. Africa is not a country, it is a continent, and in many ways, these libraries can be instrumental in getting poets from one nation to read the work of poets from another African nation. It is a simple project, modest but effective.

It feels as though you are really trying to build a community of writers and readers.

The community has long existed, but a community struggles to benefit from its existence if it is not communicating. There are many literary festivals all over Africa, and African writers have been in contact with one other for a long time. We are not inventing a community. What we are doing, though, is adding to the community’s ability to communicate. Books will help do that. And the publishing of books is supported by the willful creation of a network of mentors that can strengthen the work being produced. The process of finding poets involves multiple conversations with poets from all over Africa and the diaspora, and it is beautiful to have writers recommending the work of other poets. I suppose this is what community is about.

You’ve edited another book coming out later this year, A Bloom of Stones, which is a trilingual anthology of work about the Haitian earthquake. What was the impetus for the project, and how did you go about assembling it?

I was in Haiti a few months after the catastrophic earthquake in 2010, and I visited that country about five times over an eight-month period to report on the impact that the earthquake was having on people living with HIV/AIDS. As you know, I am also a journalist, and much of my work has involved reporting on HIV/AIDS. Well, as is my wont when I visit a new country, I try to find out what poets are doing. I was very interested in finding out how Haitian poets were responding to the earthquake. I had some good contacts in Haiti who helped me set up a soiree with Haitian poets while I was there. It was a powerful gathering. I vowed then to edit a volume of poems by Haitian poets responding to the earthquake. It has taken a few years to get this completed as it has involved a great deal of translation work. It is a beautiful volume.

I suppose some people will read about all the work that you’re doing as an editor—and of course there’s more we haven’t even talked about—and wonder how you find time for your own writing.

There is more time than we imagine. I have never found myself feeling conflicted about my time. Here is the truth: if you get the impression that I am always working and running everything, I am afraid you might be misinformed. The truth is that I work with some really good people.

My own writing is something I look forward to doing. I make time. It never really has to compete for attention. But who knows—maybe I should have published 40 books of poems by now instead of 20! No, the world does not need that.

Originally Published: June 8th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...-near-knowing/

Poetry News
Poetry of Self-Trust: Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
By Harriet Staff

Blanchfield_Proxies

At Flavorwire, a great piece about Brian Blanchfield’s new collection of essays, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat, 2016). Jonathan Sturgeon casts the work against similar poets-gone-prose writers Maggie Nelson and Ben Lerner, noting that “although it often looks like poststructuralism is the strongest influence, it’s more likely poetry — poetry is the common.” More:

If Sontag saw interpretation as the “revenge of the intellect upon art,” maybe now we’re experiencing the revenge of poetry upon the intellect. In any case, the poetic refusal of the metaphysics of genre is becoming a genre. Proxies, with its rejection of conventional knowingness, is an act of fidelity to it.

So it’s not surprising that, like Lerner’s 10:04, Blanchfield’s Proxies considers the idea of proprioception (“the sense of the body’s orientation and balance and the weighted proportion of its parts”). Or that, like Nelson’s The Argonauts (and other works of queer autotheoretical writing), it reconsiders family structures. On this subject, Proxies is especially good. In “On House Sitting,” the essay I liked best, Blanchfield recounts his experiences as a house-sitter (another kind of proxy), an occupation that comes with its own politics and “commensalist” gestures; following the convention of a previous house-sitter (his friend Eileen Myles), Blanchfield learns to leave a poem-gift for the “permanent resident” of the house. In this act Blanchfield locates the first-person plural of his own poetry; house sitting becomes a metaphor for “a queer kind of family”:

A family attuned alike, who find each other eventually and dovetail their several courses far from families of origin: the we I mean in my poems, connected preternaturally, manifested similarly, recognizable to one another, is active in our trade of relations and interdependences, a guild, or troupe or battalion of us thrown together by like circumstances, managing perforce a solidarity. The young help the old, and the old help the young, likewise the vagrant and the situated, passing keys, leaving notes. “Here we are all by day. By night we’re hurl’d / by dreams each one…” Robert Herrick gave us bed as a place to be distinct; Whitman cited that same nightly tendency to separate as what we most share.

Read it all at Flavorwire!

Tags: Brian Blanchfield, Flavorwire, Jonathan Sturgeon
Posted in Poetry News on Monday, April 18th, 2016 by Harriet Staff.

"" A family attuned alike, who find each other eventually and dovetail their several courses far from families of origin: the we I mean in my poems, connected preternaturally, manifested similarly, recognizable to one another, is active in our trade of relations and interdependences, a guild, or troupe or battalion of us thrown together by like circumstances, managing perforce a solidarity. The young help the old, and the old help the young, likewise the vagrant and the situated, passing keys, leaving notes. “Here we are all by day. By night we’re hurl’d / by dreams each one…” Robert Herrick gave us bed as a place to be distinct; Whitman cited that same nightly tendency to separate as what we most share. ""

^^^^^ I agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY. . Concluding paragraph is solid gold IMHO..-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Part one of two- bio of John Clare.-Tyr

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/th...ohn_clare-1381

The life of John Clare
Written by: EDMUND BLUNDEN

The life of John Clare, offering as it does so much opportunity for sensational contrast and unbridled distortion, became at one time (like the tragedy of Chatterton) a favourite with the quillmen. Even his serious biographers have made excessive use of light and darkness, poetry and poverty, genius and stupidity: that there should be some uncertainty about dates and incidents is no great matter, but that misrepresentations of character or of habit should be made is the fault of shallow research or worse. We have been informed, for instance, that drink was a main factor in Clare's mental collapse; that Clare "pottered in the fields feebly"; that on his income of "L45 a year … Clare thought he could live without working"; and all biographers have tallied in the melodramatic legend; "Neither wife nor children ever came to see him, except the youngest son, who came once," during his Asylum days. To these attractive exaggerations there are the best of grounds for giving the lie.

John Clare was born on the 13th of July, 1793, in a small cottage degraded in popular tradition to a mud hut of the parish of Helpston, between Peterborough and Stamford. This cottage is standing to-day, almost as it was when Clare lived there; so that those who care to do so may examine Martin's description of "a narrow wretched hut, more like a prison than a human dwelling," in face of the facts. Clare's father, a labourer named Parker Clare, was a man with his wits about him, whether educated or not; and Ann his wife is recorded to have been a woman of much natural ability and precise habits, who thought the world of her son John. Of the other children, little is known but that there were two who died young and one girl who was alive in 1824. Clare himself wrote a sonnet in the London Magazine for June, 1821, "To a Twin Sister, Who Died in Infancy."

Parker Clare, a man with some reputation as a wrestler and chosen for thrashing corn on account of his strength, sometimes shared the fate of almost all farm labourers of his day and was compelled to accept parish relief: at no time can he have been many shillings to the good: but it was his determination to have John educated to the best of his power. John Clare therefore attended a dame-school until he was seven; thence, he is believed to have gone to a day-school, where he made progress enough to receive on leaving the warm praise of the schoolmaster, and the advice to continue at a nightschool—which he did. His aim, he notes later on, was to write copperplate: but there are evidences that he learned much more than penmanship. Out of school he appears to have been a happy, imaginative child: as alert for mild mischief as the rest of the village boys, but with something solitary and romantic in his disposition. One day indeed at a very early age he went off to find the horizon; and a little later while he tended sheep and cows in his holiday-time on Helpston Common, he made friends with a curious old lady called Granny Bains, who taught him old songs and ballads. Such poems as "Childhood" and "Remembrances" prove that Clare's early life was not mere drudgery and despair. "I never had much relish for the pastimes of youth. Instead of going out on the green at the town end on winter Sundays to play football I stuck to my corner stool poring over a book; in fact, I grew so fond of being alone at last that my mother was fain to force me into company, for the neighbours had assured her mind … that I was no better than crazy…. I used to be very fond of fishing, and of a Sunday morning I have been out before the sun delving for worms in some old weed-blanketed dunghill and steering off across the wet grain … till I came to the flood-washed meadow stream…. And then the year used to be crowned with its holidays as thick as the boughs on a harvest home." It is probable that the heavy work which he is said to have done as a child was during the long holiday at harvesttime. When he was twelve or thirteen he certainly became team-leader, and in this employment he saw a farm labourer fall from the top of his loaded wagon and break his neck. For a time his reason seemed affected by the sight.

At evening-school, Clare struck up a friendship with an excise-man's son, to the benefit of both. In 1835, one of many sonnets was addressed to this excellent soul:

Turnill, we toiled together all the day,
And lived like hermits from the boys at play;
We read and walked together round the fields,
Not for the beauty that the journey yields—
But muddied fish, and bragged oer what we caught,
And talked about the few old books we bought.
Though low in price you knew their value well,
And I thought nothing could their worth excel;
And then we talked of what we wished to buy,
And knowledge always kept our pockets dry.
We went the nearest ways, and hummed a song,
And snatched the pea pods as we went along,
And often stooped for hunger on the way
To eat the sour grass in the meadow hay.

One of these "few old books" was Thomson's "Seasons", which gave a direction to the poetic instincts of Clare, already manifesting themselves in scribbled verses in his exercise-books.

Read, mark, learn as Clare might, no opportunity came for him to enter a profession. "After I had done with going to school it was proposed that I should be bound apprentice to a shoemaker, but I rather disliked this bondage. I whimpered and turned a sullen eye on every persuasion, till they gave me my will. A neighbour then offered to learn me his trade—to be a stone mason,—but I disliked this too…. I was then sent for to drive the plough at Woodcroft Castle of Oliver Cromwell memory; though Mrs. Bellairs the mistress was a kind-hearted woman, and though the place was a very good one for living, my mind was set against it from the first;… one of the disagreeable things was getting up so early in the morning … and another was getting wetshod … every morning and night—for in wet weather the moat used to overflow the cause-way that led to the porch, and as there was but one way to the house we were obliged to wade up to the knees to get in and out…. I staid here one month, and then on coming home to my parents they could not persuade me to return. They now gave up all hopes of doing any good with me and fancied that I should make nothing but a soldier; but luckily in this dilemma a next-door neighbour at the Blue Bell, Francis Gregory, wanted me to drive plough, and as I suited him, he made proposals to hire me for a year—which as it had my consent my parents readily agreed to." There he spent a year in light work with plenty of leisure for his books and his long reveries in lonely favourite places. His imagination grew intensely, and in his weekly errand to a flour-mill at Maxey ghosts rose out of a swamp and harried him till he dropped. This stage was hardly ended when one day on his road he saw a young girl named Mary Joyce, with whom he instantly fell in love. This crisis occurred when Clare was almost sixteen: the fate of John Clare hung in the balance for six months. Then Mary's father, disturbed principally by the chance that his daughter might be seen talking to this erratic youngster, put an end to their meetings. From this time, with intervals of tranquillity, Clare was to suffer the slow torture of remorse, until at length deliberately yielding himself up to his amazing imagination he held conversation with Mary, John Clare's Mary, his first wife Mary—as though she had not lived unwed, and had not been in her grave for years.

But this was not yet; and we must return to the boy Clare, now terminating his year's hiring at the Blue Bell. It was time for him to take up some trade in good earnest; accordingly, in an evil hour disguised as a fortunate one, he was apprenticed to the head gardener at Burghley Park. The head gardener was in practice a sot and a slave-driver. After much drunken wild bravado, not remarkable in the lad Clare considering his companions and traditions, there came the impulse to escape; with the result that Clare and a companion were shortly afterwards working in a nursery garden at Newark-upon-Trent. Both the nursery garden and "the silver Trent" are met again in the poems composed in his asylum days; but for the time being they meant little to him, and he suddenly departed through the snow. Arrived home at Helpston, he lost some time in finding farm work and in writing verses: sharing a loft at night with a fellow-labourer, he would rise at all hours to note down new ideas. It was not unnatural in the fellow-labourer to request him to "go and do his poeting elsewhere." Clare was already producing work of value, none the less. Nothing could be kept from his neighbours, who looked askance on his ways of thinking, and writing: while a candid friend to whom he showed his manuscripts directed his notice to the study of grammar. Troubled by these ill omens, he comforted himself in the often intoxicated friendship of the bad men of the village, who under the mellowing influences of old ale roared applause as he recited his ballads. This life was soon interrupted.

"When the country was chin-deep," Clare tells us, "in the fears of invasion, and every mouth was filled with the terror which Buonaparte had spread in other countries, a national scheme was set on foot to raise a raw army of volunteers: and to make the matter plausible a letter was circulated said to be written by the Prince Regent. I forget how many were demanded from our parish, but remember the panic which it created was very great. No great name rises in the world without creating a crowd of little mimics that glitter in borrowed rays; and no great lie was ever yet put in circulation without a herd of little lies multiplying by instinct, as it were and crowding under its wings. The papers that were circulated assured the people of England that the French were on the eve of invading it and that it was deemed necessary by the Regent that an army from eighteen to forty-five should be raised immediately. This was the great lie, and then the little lies were soon at its heels; which assured the people of Helpston that the French had invaded and got to London. And some of these little lies had the impudence to swear that the French had even reached Northampton. The people were at their doors in the evening to talk over the rebellion of '45 when the rebels reached Derby, and even listened at intervals to fancy they heard the French rebels at Northampton, knocking it down with their cannon. I never gave much credit to popular stories of any sort, so I felt no concern at these stories; though I could not say much for my valour if the tale had proved true. We had a crossgrained sort of choice left us, which was to be found, to be drawn, and go for nothing—or take on as volunteers for the bounty of two guineas. I accepted the latter and went with a neighbour's son, W. Clarke, to Peterborough to be sworn on and prepared to join the regiment at Oundle. The morning we left home our mothers parted with us as if we were going to Botany Bay, and people got at their doors to bid us farewell and greet us with a Job's comfort 'that they doubted we should see Helpston no more.' I confess I wished myself out of the matter. When we got to Oundle, the place of quartering, we were drawn out into the field, and a more motley multitude of lawless fellows was never seen in Oundle before—and hardly out of it. There were 1,300 of us. We were drawn up into a line and sorted out into companies. I was one of the shortest and therefore my station is evident. I was in that mixed multitude called the battalion, which they nicknamed 'bum-tools' for what reason I cannot tell; the light company was called 'light-bobs,' and the grenadiers 'bacon-bolters' … who felt as great an enmity against each other as ever they all felt against the French."

In 1813 he read among other things the "Eikon Basilike," and turned his hand to odd jobs as they presented themselves. His life appears to have been comfortable and a little dull for a year or two; flirtation, verse-making, ambitions and his violin took their turns amiably enough! At length he went to work in a lime-kiln several miles from Helpston, and wrote only less poems than he read: one day in the autumn of 1817, he was dreaming yet new verses when he first saw "Patty," his wife-to-be. She was then eighteen years old, and modestly beautiful; for a moment Clare forgot Mary Joyce, and though "the courtship ultimately took a more prosaic turn," there is no denying the fact that he was in love with "Patty" Turner, the daughter of the small farmer who held Walkherd Lodge. In the case of Clare, poetry was more than ever as time went on autobiography; and it is noteworthy that among the many love lyrics addressed to Mary Joyce there are not wanting affectionate tributes to his faithful wife Patty.

Maid of Walkherd, meet again,
By the wilding in the glen….

And I would go to Patty's cot
And Patty came to me;
Each knew the other's very thought
Under the hawthorn tree….
And I'll be true for Patty's sake
And she'll be true for mine;
And I this little ballad make,
To be her valentine.

Not long after seeing Patty, Clare was informed by the owner of the lime-kiln that his wages would now be seven shillings a week, instead of nine. He therefore left this master and found similar work in the village of Pickworth, where being presented with a shoemaker's bill for L3, he entered into negotiations with a Market Deeping bookseller regarding "Proposals for publishing by subscription a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Subjects, Religious and Moral, in verse, by John Clare, of Helpstone." Three hundred proposals were printed, with a specimen sonnet well chosen to intrigue the religious and moral; and yet the tale of intending subscribers stood adamantly at seven. On the face of it, then, Clare had lost one pound; had worn himself out with distributing his prospectuses; and further had been discharged from the lime-kiln for doing so in working hours. His ambitions, indeed, set all employers and acquaintances against him; and he found himself at the age of twenty-five compelled to ask for parish relief. In this extremity, even the idea of enlisting once more crossed his brain; then, that of travelling to Yorkshire for employment: and at last, the prospectus which had done him so much damage turned benefactor. With a few friends Clare was drinking success to his goose-chase when there appeared two "real gentlemen" from Stamford. One of these, a bookseller named Drury, had chanced on the prospectus, and wished to see more of Clare's poetry. Soon afterwards, he promised to publish a selection, with corrections; and communicated with his relative, John Taylor, who with his partner Hessey managed the well-known publishing business in Fleet Street. While this new prospect was opening upon Clare, he succeeded in obtaining work once more, near the home of Patty; their love-making proceeded, despite the usual thunderstorms, and the dangerous rivalry of a certain dark lady named Betty Sell. The bookseller Drury, though his appearance was in such critical days timely for Clare, was not a paragon of virtue. Without Clare's knowing it, he acquired the legal copyright of the poems, probably by the expedient of dispensing money at convenient times—a specious philanthropy, as will be shown. At the same time he allowed Clare to open a book account, which proved at length to be no special advantage. And further, with striking astuteness, he found constant difficulty in returning originals. In a note written some ten years later, Clare regrets that "Ned Drury has got my early vol. of MSS. I lent it him at first, but like all my other MSS. elsewhere I could never get it again…. He has copies of all my MSS. except those written for the 'Shepherd's Calendar.'" Nevertheless, through Drury, Clare was enabled to meet his publisher Taylor and his influential friend of the Quarterly, Octavius Gilchrist, before the end of 1819.

By 1818, there is no doubt, Clare had read very deeply, and even had some idea of the classical authors through translations. It is certain that he knew the great English writers, probable that he possessed their works. What appears to be a list of books which he was anxious to sell in his hardest times includes some curious titles, with some familiar ones. There are Cobb's Poems, Fawke's Poems, Broom's, Mrs. Hoole's, and so on; there are also Cowley's Works—Folio, Warton's "Milton," Waller, and a Life of Chatterton; nor can he have been devoid of miscellaneous learning after the perusal of Watson's "Electricity," Aristotle's Works, Gasse's "Voyages," "Nature Display'd," and the European Magazine ("fine heads and plates"). His handwriting at this time was bold and hasty; his opinions, to judge from his uncompromising notes to Drury respecting the text of the poems, almost cynical and decidedly his own. Tact was essential if you would patronize Clare: you might broaden his opinions, but you dared not assail them. Thus the friendly Gilchrist, a high churchman, hardly set eyes on Clare before condemning Clare's esteem for a dissenting minister, a Mr. Holland, who understood the poet and the poetry: it was some time before Gilchrist set eyes on Clare again.

The year 1820 found Clare unemployed once more, but the said Mr. Holland arrived before long with great news. "In the beginning of January," Clare briefly puts it, "my poems were published after a long anxiety of nearly two years and all the Reviews, except Phillips' waste paper magazine, spoke in my favour." Most assuredly they did. The literary world, gaping for drouth, had seen an announcement, then an account of "John Clare, an agricultural labourer and poet," during the previous autumn; the little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, in a little while seemed to usurp the whole sky—or in other terms, three editions of "Poems Descriptiveof Rural Life and Scenery" were sold between January 16 and the last of March. While this fever was raging among the London coteries, critical, fashionable, intellectual, even the country folk round Helpston came to the conclusion that Clare was something of a phenomenon. "In the course of the publication," says Clare, "I had ventured to write to Lord Milton to request leave that the volume might be dedicated to him; but his Lordship was starting into Italy and forgot to answer it. So it was dedicated to nobody, which perhaps might be as well. As soon as it was out, my mother took one to Milton; when his Lordship sent a note to tell me to bring ten more copies. On the following Sunday I went, and after sitting awhile in the servants' hall (where I could eat or drink nothing for thought), his Lordship sent for me, and instantly explained the reasons why he did not answer my letter, in a quiet unaffected manner which set me at rest. He told me he had heard of my poems by Parson Mossop (of Helpston), who I have since heard took hold of every opportunity to speak against my success or poetical abilities before the book was published, and then, when it came out and others praised it, instantly turned round to my side. Lady Milton also asked me several questions, and wished me to name any book that was a favourite; expressing at the same time a desire to give me one. But I was confounded and could think of nothing. So I lost the present. In fact, I did not like to pick out a book for fear of seeming over-reaching on her kindness, or else Shakespeare was at my tongue's end. Lord Fitzwilliam, and Lady Fitzwilliam too, talked to me and noticed me kindly, and his Lordship gave me some advice which I had done well perhaps to have noticed better than I have. He bade me beware of booksellers and warned me not to be fed with promises. On my departure they gave me a handful of money—the most that I had ever possessed in my life together. I almost felt I should be poor no more—there was L17." Such is Clare's description of an incident which has been rendered in terms of insult. Other invitations followed, the chief practical result being an annuity of fifteen pounds promised by the Marquis of Exeter. Men of rank and talent wrote letters to Clare, or sent him books: some found their way to Helpston, and others sent tracts to show him the way to heaven. And now at last Clare was well enough off to marry Patty, before the birth of their first child, Anna Maria.

Before his marriage, probably, Clare was desired to spend a few days with his publisher Taylor in London. In smock and gaiters he felt most uncertain of himself and borrowed a large overcoat from Taylor to disguise his dress: over and above this question of externals, he instinctively revolted against being exhibited. Meeting Lord Radstock, sometime admiral in the Royal Navy, at dinner in Taylor's house, Clare gained a generous if somewhat religiose friend, with the instant result that he found himself "trotting from one drawing-room to the other." He endured this with patience, thinking possibly of the cat killed by kindness; and incidentally Radstock introduced him to the strangely superficial-genuine lady Mrs. Emmerson, who was to be a faithful, thoughtful friend to his family for many years to come. In another direction, soon after Clare's return to Helpston, the retired admiral did him a great service, opening a private subscription list for his benefit: it was found possible to purchase "L250 Navy 5 Per Cents" on the 28th April and a further "L125 Navy 5 Per Cents" a month or so later. This stock, held by trustees, yielded Clare a dividend of L18 15s. at first, but in 1823 this income dwindled to L15 15s.; and by 1832 appears to have fallen to L13 10s. To the varying amount thus derived, and to the L15 given yearly by the Marquis of Exeter, a Stamford doctor named Bell—one of Clare's most energetic admirers—succeeded in adding another annuity of L10 settled upon the poet by Lord Spencer. But in the consideration of these bounties, it is just to examine the actual financial effect of Clare's first book. The publishers' own account, furnished only through Clare's repeated demands in 1829 or thereabouts, has a sobering tale to tell: but so far no biographer has condescended to examine it.

On the first edition Clare got nothing. Against him is entered the item "Cash paid Mr. Clare for copyright p. Mr. Drury … L20"; but this money if actually paid had been paid in 1819. Against him also is charged a curious "Commission 5 p. Cent… L8 12s.," while Drury and Taylor acknowledge sharing profits of L26 odd.

On the second and third editions Clare got nothing; but to his account
is charged the L100 which Taylor and Hessey "subscribed" to his fund.
"Commission," "Advertising," "Sundries," and "Deductions allowed to
Agents," account for a further L51 of the receipts: and Drury and
Taylor ostensibly take over L30 apiece.

The fourth edition not being exhausted, the account is not closed: but "Advertising" has already swollen to L30, and there is no sign that Clare benefits a penny piece. Small wonder that at the foot of these figures he has written, "How can this be? I never sold the poems for any price—what money I had of Drury was given me on account of profits to be received—but here it seems I have got nothing and am brought in minus twenty pounds of which I never received a sixpence—or it seems that by the sale of these four thousand copies I have lost that much—and Drury told me that 5,000 copies had been printed tho' 4,000 only are accounted for." Had Clare noticed further an arithmetical discrepancy which apparently shortened his credit balance by some L27, he might have been still more sceptical.

Not being overweighted, therefore, with instant wealth, Clare returned to Helpston determined to continue his work in the fields. But fame opposed him: all sorts and conditions of Lydia Whites, Leo Hunters, Stigginses, and Jingles crowded to the cottage, demanding to see the Northamptonshire Peasant, and often wasting hours of his time. One day, for example, "the inmates of a whole boarding-school, located at Stamford, visited the unhappy poet"; and even more congenial visitors who cheerfully hurried him off to the tavern parlour were the ruin of his work. Yet he persevered, writing his poems only in his leisure, until the harvest of 1820 was done; then in order to keep his word with Taylor, who had agreed to produce a new volume in the spring of 1821, he spent six months in the most energetic literary labour. Writing several poems a day as he roamed the field or sat in Lea Close Oak, he would sit till late in the night sifting, recasting and transcribing. His library, by his own enterprise and by presents from many friends, was greatly enlarged, and he already knew not only the literature of the past, but also that of the present. In his letters to Taylor are mentioned his appreciations of Keats, "Poor Keats, you know how I reverence him," Shelley, Hunt, Lamb—and almost every other contemporary classic. Nor was he afraid to criticize Scott with freedom in a letter to Scott's friend Sherwell: remarking also that Wordworth's Sonnet on Westminster Bridge had no equal in the language, but disagreeing with "his affected godliness."

Taylor and Hessey for their part did not seem over-anxious to produce the new volume of poems, perhaps because Clare would not allow any change except in the jots and tittles of his work, perhaps thinking that the public had had a surfeit of sensation. At length in the autumn of 1821 the "Village Minstrel" made its appearance, in two volumes costing twelve shillings; with the bait of steel engravings,—the first, an unusually fine likeness of Clare from the painting by Hilton; the second, an imaginative study of Clare's cottage, not without representation of the Blue Bell, the village cross and the church. The book was reviewed less noisily, and a sale of a mere 800 copies in two months was regarded as "a very modified success." Meanwhile, Clare was writing for theLondon Magazine, and Cherry tells us that "as he contributed almost regularly for some time, a substantial addition was made to his income." Clare tells us, in a note on a cash account dated 1827, "In this cash account there is nothing allowed me for my three years' writing for the London Magazine. I was to have L12 a year."

To insist in the financial affairs of Clare may seem blatant, or otiose: actually, the treatment which he underwent was a leading influence in his career. He was grateful enough to Radstock for raising a subscription fund; he may have been grateful to Taylor and Hessey for subscribing L100 of his own money; but what hurt and embittered him was to see this sum and the others invested for him under trustees. Indeed, what man would not, if possessed of any independence of mind, strongly oppose such namby-pamby methods? It is possible to take a more sinister view of Taylor and Hessey and their reluctance ever to provide Clare with a statement of account; but in the matter of Clare's funded property folly alone need be considered.

In October 1821, notably, Clare saw an excellent opportunity for the future of his family. A small freehold of six or seven acres with a pleasant cottage named Bachelor's Hall, where Clare had spent many an evening in comfort and even in revelry, was mortgaged to a Jew for two hundred pounds; the tenants offered Clare the whole property on condition that he paid off the mortgage. Small holdings were rare in that district of great landowners, and this to Clare was the chance of a lifetime. He applied therefore to Lord Radstock for two hundred pounds from his funded property; Radstock replied that "the funded property was vested in trustees who were restricted to paying the interest to him." It would have been, thought Clare, no difficult matter for Radstock to have advanced me that small amount; and he rightly concluded that his own strength of character and common sense were distrusted by his patrons. Not overwhelmed by this, he now applied to his publisher Taylor, offering to sell his whole literary output for five years at the price of two hundred pounds. Taylor was not enthusiastic. These writings, he urged, might be worth more, or might be worth less; in the first case Clare, in the second himself would lose on the affair; besides, there were money-lenders and legal niceties to beware of; let not Clare "be ambitious but remain in the state in which God had placed him." Thus the miserable officiousness went on, and if Clare for a time found some comfort in the glass who can blame him? In his own words, "for enemies he cared nothing, from his friends he had much to fear." He was "thrown back among all the cold apathy of killing kindness that had numbed him … for years."

In May, 1822, Clare spent a brief holiday in London, meeting there the strong men of the London Magazine, Lamb, Hood, and therest. From his clothes, the London group called him The Green Man; Lamb took a singular interest in him, and was wont to address him as "Clarissimus" and "Princely Clare." Another most enthusiastic acquaintance was a painter named Rippingille, who had begun life as the son of a farmer at King's Lynn, and who was now thoroughly capable of taking Clare into the most Bohemian corners of London. Suddenly, however, news came from Helpston recalling the poet from these perambulations, and he returned in haste, to find his second daughter born, Eliza Louisa, god-child of Mrs. Emmerson and Lord Radstock.

At this time, Clare appears to have been writing ballads of a truly rustic sort, perhaps in the light of his universal title, The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. He would now, moreover, collect such old ballads and songs as his father and mother or those who worked with him might chance to sing; but was often disappointed to find that "those who knew fragments seemed ashamed to acknowledge it … and those who were proud of their knowledge in such things knew nothing but the senseless balderdash that is brawled over and sung at country feasts, statutes, and fairs, where the most senseless jargon passes for the greatest excellence, and rudest indecency for the finest wit." None the less he recovered sufficient material to train himself into the manner of these "old and beautiful recollections." But whatever he might write or edit, he was unlikely to find publishers willing to bring out. The "Village Minstrel" had barely passed the first thousand, and the "second edition" was not melting away. Literature after all was not money, and to increase Clare's anxiety and dilemma came illness. In the early months of 1823, he made a journey to Stamford to ask the help of his old friend Gilchrist.

Gilchrist was already in the throes of his last sickness, and Clare took his leave without a word of his own difficulties. Arriving home, he fell into a worse illness than before; but as the spring came on he rallied, and occasionally walked to Stamford to call on his friend, who likewise seemed beginning to mend. On the 30th of June, Clare was received with the news "Mr. Gilchrist is dead." Clare relapsed into a curious condition which appeared likely to overthrow his life or his reason when Taylor most fortunately came to see him, and procured him the best doctor in Peterborough. This doctor not only baffled Clare's disease, but, rousing attention wherever he could in the neighbourhood, was able to provide him with good food and even some old port from the cellar of the Bishop of Peterborough.

At last on the advice of the good doctor and the renewed invitation of Taylor, Clare made a third pilgrimage to London, and this time stayed from the beginning of May till the middle of July, 1824. Passing the first three weeks in peaceful contemplation of London crowds, he was well enough then to attend a London Magazine dinner, where De Quincey swam into his ken, and the next week a similar gathering where Coleridge talked for three hours. Clare sat next to Charles Elton and gained a staunch friend, who shortly afterwards sent him a letter in verse with a request that he should sit to Rippingille for his portrait:

His touch will, hue by hue, combine
Thy thoughtful eyes, that steady shine,
The temples of Shakesperian line,
The quiet smile.

To J. H. Reynolds he seemed "a very quiet and worthy yet enthusiastic man." George Darley, too, was impressed by Clare the man, and for some time was to be one of the few serious critics of Clare the poet. Allan Cunningham showed a like sympathy and a still more active interest. A less familiar character, the journalist Henry Van Dyk, perhaps did Clare more practical good than either.

With these good effects of Clare's third visit to town, another may be noted. A certain Dr. Darling attended him throughout, and persuaded him to give up drink; this he did. The real trouble at Helpston was to discover employment, for already Clare was supporting his wife, his father and mother, and three young children. Farmers were unwilling to employ Clare, indeed insulted him if he applied to them: and his reticence perhaps lost him situations in the gardens of the Marquis of Exeter, and then of the Earl Fitzwilliam.

In spite of disappointments, he wrote almost without pause, sometimes making poems in the manner of elder poets (with the intention of mild literary forgery), sometimes writing in his normal vein for the lately announced "New Shepherd's Calendar"; and almost daily preparing two series of articles, on natural history and on British birds. A curious proof of the facility with which he wrote verse is afforded by the great number of rhymed descriptions of birds, their nests and eggs which this period produced: as though he sat down resolved to write prose notes and found his facts running into metre even against his will. As if not yet embroiled in schemes enough, Clare planned and began a burlesque novel, an autobiography, and other prose papers: while he kept a diary which should have been published. Clare had been forced into a literary career, and no one ever worked more conscientiously or more bravely. Those who had at first urged him to write can scarcely be acquitted of desertion now: but the more and the better Clare wrote, the less grew the actual prospect of production, success and independence.

On the 9th of March, 1825, Clare wrote in his diary: "I had a very odd dream last night, and take it as an ill omen … I thought I had one of the proofs of the new poems from London, and after looking at it awhile it shrank through my hands like sand, and crumbled into dust." Three days afterwards, the proof of the "Shepherd's Calendar" arrived at Helpston. The ill omen was to be proved true, but not yet. Clare continued to write and to botanize, and being already half-forgotten by his earlier friends was contented with the company of two notable local men, Edward Artis the archaeologist who discovered ancient Durobrivae, and Henderson who assisted Clare in his nature-work. These two pleasant companions were in the service of Earl Fitzwilliam. It was perhaps through their interest that Clare weathered the hardships of 1825 so well; and equally, although the "Shepherd's Calendar" seemed suspended, did Clare's old patron Radstock endeavour to keep his spirits up, writing repeatedly to the publisher in regard to Clare's account. The hope of a business agreement was destroyed by the sudden death of Radstock, "the best friend," says Clare, "I have met with."

Not long after this misfortune, Clare returned to field work for the period of harvest, then through the winter concentrated his energy on his poetry. Nor was poetry his only production, for through his friend Van Dyk he was enabled to contribute prose pieces to the London press. In June, 1826, his fourth child was born, and Clare entreated Taylor to bring out the "Shepherd's Calendar," feeling that he might at least receive money enough for the comfort of his wife and his baby; but Taylor felt otherwise, recommending Clare to write for the annuals which now began to flourish. This Clare at last persuaded himself to do. Payment was tardy, and in some cases imaginary; and for the time being the annuals were not the solution of his perplexities. He therefore went back to the land; and borrowing the small means required rented at length a few acres, with but poor results.

The publication of Clare's first book had been managed with excellent strategy; Taylor had left nothing to chance, and the public responded as he had planned. The independence of Clare may have displeased the publisher; at any rate, his enthusiasm dwindled, and further to jeopardize Clare's chances it occurred that in 1825 Taylor and Hessey came to an end, the partners separating. Omens were indeed bad for the "Shepherd's Calendar" which, two years after its announcement, in June, 1827, made its unobtrusive appearance. There were very few reviews, and the book sold hardly at all. Yet this was conspicuously finer work than Clare had done before. Even "that beautiful frontispiece of De Wint's," as Taylor wrote, did not attract attention. The forgotten poet, slaving at his small-holding, found that his dream had come true. Meanwhile Allan Cunningham had been inquiring into this non-success, and early in 1828 wrote to Clare urging him to come to London and interview the publisher. An invitation from Mrs. Emmerson made thevisit possible. Once more then did Clare present himself at 20, Stratford Place, and find his "sky chamber" ready to receive him. Nor did he allow long time to elapse before finding out Allan Cunningham, who heartily approved of his plan to call on Taylor, telling him to request a full statement of account. The next day, when Clare was on the point of making the demand, Taylor led across the trail with an unexpected offer; recommending Clare to buy the remaining copies of his "Shepherd's Calendar" from him at half-a-crown each, that he might sell them in his own district. Clare asked time to reflect. A week later, against the wish of Allan Cunningham, he accepted the scheme.

Clare had had another object in coming to town. Dr. Darling had done him so much good on a previous occasion that he wished to consult him anew. On the 25th of February, 1828, Clare wrote to his wife: "Mr. Emmerson's doctor, a Mr. Ward, told me last night that there was little or nothing the matter with me—and yet I got no sleep the whole of last night." Already, it appears, had coldness and dilemma unsettled him. That they had not subdued him, and that his home life was in the main happy and affectionate, and of as great an importance to him as any of his aspirations, is to be judged from his poems and his letters of 1828 and thereabouts. They show him as the very opposite of the feeble neurotic who has so often been beworded under his name:

20, STRATFORD PLACE, March 21st, 1828.

MY DEAR PATTY,

I have been so long silent that I feel ashamed of it, but I have been so much engaged that I really have not had time to write; and the occasion of my writing now is only to tell you that I shall be at home next week for certain.—I am anxious to see you and the children and I sincerely hope you are all well. I have bought the dear little creatures four books, and Henry Behnes has promised to send Frederick a wagon and horses as a box of music is not to be had. The books I have bought them are "Puss-in-Boots," "Cinderella," "Little Rhymes," and "The Old Woman and Pig"; tell them that the pictures are all coloured, and they must make up their minds to chuse which they like best ere I come home.—Mrs. Emmerson desires to be kindly remembered to you, and intends sending the children some toys. I hope next Wednesday night at furthest will see me in my old corner once again amongst you. I have made up my mind to buy Baxter "The History of Greece," which I hope will suit him. I have been poorly, having caught cold, and have been to Dr. Darling. I would have sent you some money which I know you want, but as I am coming home so soon I thought it much safer to bring it home myself than send it; and as this is only to let you know that I am coming home, I shall not write further than hoping you are all well—kiss the dear children for me all round—give my remembrances to all—and believe me, my dear Patty,

Yours most affectionately,

JOHN CLARE.

During this stay in London, Clare had had proofs that his poems were not completely overlooked. Strangers, recognizing him from the portrait in the "Village Minstrel," often addressed him in the street. In this way he first met Alaric A. Watts, and Henry Behnes, the sculptor, who induced Clare to sit to him. The result was a strong, intensely faithful bust (preserved now in the Northampton Free Library). Hilton, who had painted Clare in water-colours and in oils, celebrated with Behnes and Clare the modelling of this bust, all three avoiding a dinner of lions arranged by Mrs. Emmerson. On another occasion, Clare found a congenial spirit in William Hone.

But now Clare is home at Helpston, ready with a sack of poetry to tramp from house to house and try his luck. Sometimes he dragged himself thirty miles a day, meeting rectors who "held it unbecoming to see poems hawked about": one day, having walked seven milesinto Peterborough, and having sold no books anywhere, he trudged home to find Patty in the pains of labour; and now had to go back to Peterborough as fast as he might for a doctor. Now there were nine living beings dependent on Clare. At length he altered his plan of campaign, and advertised that his poems could be had at his cottage, with some success. About this time Clare was invited to write for "The Spirit of the Age," and still he supplied brief pieces to the hated but unavoidable annuals. Letters too from several towns in East Anglia, summoning John Clare with his bag of books, at least promised him some slight revenue; actually he only went to one of these places, namely Boston, where the mayor gave a banquet in his honour, and enabled him to sell several volumes—autographed. Among the younger men, a similar feast was proposed; but Clare declined, afterwards reproaching himself bitterly on discovering that they had hidden ten pounds in his wallet. On his return home not only himself but the rest of the family in turn fell ill with fever, so that the spring of 1829 found Clare out of work and faced with heavy doctor's-bills.

Intellectually, John Clare was in 1828 and 1829 probably at his zenith. He had ceased long since to play the poetic ploughman; he had gained in his verses something more ardent and stirring than he had shown in the "Shepherd's Calendar"; and the long fight (for it was nothing less) against leading-strings and obstruction now began to manifest itself in poems of regret and of soliloquy. Having long written for others' pleasure, he now wrote for his own nature.

I would not wish the burning blaze
Of fame around a restless world,
The thunder and the storm of praise
In crowded tumults heard and hurled.

There had been few periods of mental repose since 1820. His brain and his poetic genius, by this long discipline and fashioning, were now triumphant together. The declension from this high estate might have been more abrupt but for the change in his fortunes. He had again with gentleness demanded his accounts from his publisher, and when in August, 1829, these accounts actually arrived, disputed several points and gained certain concessions: payment was made from the editors of annuals; and with these reliefs came the chance for him to rent a small farm and to work on the land of Earl Fitzwilliam. His working hours were long, and his mind was forced to be idle. This salutary state of affairs lasted through 1830, until happiness seemed the only possibility before him. What poems he wrote occurred suddenly and simply to him. His children—now six in number—were growing up in more comfort and in more prospect than he had ever enjoyed. But he reckoned not with illness.

In short, illness reduced Clare almost to skin-and-bone. Farming not only added nothing but made encroachment on his small stipend. In despair he flung himself into field labour again, and was carried home nearly dead with fever. Friends there were not wanting to send food and medicine; Parson Mossop, having long ago been converted to Clare, did much for him. Even so the landlord distrained for rent, and Clare applied to his old friend Henderson the botanist at Milton Park. Lord Milton came by and Clare was encouraged to tell him his trouble; his intense phrases and bearing were such that the nobleman at once promised him a new cottage and a plot of ground. At the same time, he expressed his hope that there would soon be another volume of poems by John Clare. This hope was the spark which fired a dangerous train, perhaps; for Clare once again fell into his exhausting habit of poetry all the day and every day. He decided to publish a new volume by subscription.

The new cottage was in the well-orcharded village of Northborough, three miles from Helpston. It was indeed luxurious in comparison with the old stooping house where Clare had spent nearly forty years, but there was more in that old house than mere stone and timber. Clare began to look on the coming change with terror; delayed the move day after day, to the distress of poor Patty; and when at last news came from Milton Park that the Earl was not content with such strange hesitation, and when Patty had her household on the line of march, he "followed in the rear, walking mechanically, with eyes half shut, as if in a dream." There was no delay in his self-expression.

I've left mine own old home of homes,
Green fields and every pleasant place;
The summer like a stranger comes;
I pause and hardly know her face.
I miss the hazel's happy green,
The bluebell's quiet hanging blooms,
Where envy's sneer was never seen,
Where staring malice never comes.

This and many other verses, not the least pathetic in our language, were written by John Clare on June 20th, 1832, on the occasion of his moving out of a small and crowded cottage in a village street to a roomy, romantic farmhouse standing in its own grounds. Was this ingratitude? ask rather, is the dyer's hand subdued to what it works in?

Clare rapidly proceeded with his new collection of poems, destined never to appear in his lifetime. In a thick oblong blank-book, divided into four sections to receive Tales in Verse, Poems, Ballads and Songs, and Sonnets, he copied his best work in a hand small but clear, and with a rare freedom from slips of the pen. His proposals, reprinted with a warm-hearted comment in theAthenaeum of 1832, were in these terms:

The proposals for publishing these fugitives being addressed to friends no further apology is necessary than the plain statement of facts. Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, but there is very little need of invention for truth; and the truth is, that difficulty has grown up like a tree of the forest, and being no longer able to conceal it, I meet it in the best way possible by attempting to publish them for my own benefit and that of a numerous and increasing family. It were false delicacy to make an idle parade of independence in my situation, and it would be unmanly to make a troublesome appeal to favours, public or private, like a public petitioner. Friends neither expect this from me, or wish me to do it to others, though it is partly owing to such advice that I was induced to come forward with these proposals, and if they are successful they will render me a benefit, and if not they will not cancel any obligations that I may have received from friends, public and private, to whom my best wishes are due, and having said this much in furtherance of my intentions, I will conclude by explaining them.

Proposals for publishing in 1 volume, F.c. 8vo, The Midsummer Cushion, or Cottage Poems, by John Clare.

1st. The Book will be printed on fine paper, and published as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers are procured to defray the expense of publishing.

2nd. It will consist of a number of fugitive trifles, some of which have appeared in different periodicals, and of others that have never been published.

3rd. No money is requested until the volume shall be delivered, free of expense, to every subscriber.

4th. The price will not exceed seven shillings and sixpence, and it may not be so much, as the number of pages and the expense of the book will be regulated by the Publisher.

In his new home .....

Part two to follow****

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70186

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem
Hearing art's heartbeat.
By Mike Chasar
I

Partway through Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders, Ponyboy Curtis (played by C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) are hiding out in an abandoned church in the country because Johnny knifed and accidentally killed a guy in a late-night fight. In the church, separated from the pain and gang violence of their low-income lives, the teens can be most fully themselves, and they spend their time reading Gone with the Wind to each other as they wait for Dallas (Matt Dillon) to show up and say the coast is clear.

One morning, the blond-haired and poetically-inclined Ponyboy gets up early and watches the sunrise through the mist. He is joined by Johnny, who remarks, “Too bad it can’t stay like that all the time.” Ponyboy responds, “Nothing gold can stay,” and proceeds to recite in full Robert Frost’s well-known poem of the same title:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

When Johnny asks, “Where’d you learn that?” Ponyboy replies, “Robert Frost wrote it. I always remembered it because I never quite knew what he meant by it.”

This is a memorable and moving scene (it is also in Hinton’s novel), and Ponyboy’s interesting answer — a non-answer, really — raises 
a number of questions. Why does Ponyboy not answer Johnny’s question (“Where’d you learn that”)? Why do the film and novel cite Frost in particular? What do we make of Ponyboy’s reason for remembering the poem (“because I never quite knew what he meant by it”)? And — the apparent question to which Johnny wants an answer — where and how did Ponyboy come to memorize “Nothing Gold Can Stay”?




II

Although it can’t answer all of these questions, Catherine Robson’s absorbing, amazingly-detailed, and at times startling new book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem is certainly a good place to start. Indeed, in tracing the rise and decline of poetry memorization and recitation as a common assignment in British and American schools from the 1870s through much of the twentieth century, Heart Beats reveals not just how central the pedagogical practice was to an era of mass education in both nations, but also its unanticipated effects on poems, on cultural practices we wouldn’t be inclined to link to poetry, and in the lives of people like Ponyboy.

It so happens that Ponyboy and Johnny are among the final generation of students who would have experienced mandatory poetry memorization and recitation as a common element of their American education. (In fact, so was Hinton, who was fifteen years old when she began writing The Outsiders and eighteen when it was published.) As Robson reveals in part one, which traces the practice’s history from pedagogical and institutional standpoints, poetry memorization was freighted with unusual importance up through the forties in Britain and the sixties of Johnny and Ponyboy’s America. For many reasons (it was justified as a type of brain calisthenics that also introduced students to literature, enlisted them in stories central to national identity, rid them of their working-class or regional accents, etc.), poetry memorization and recitation served not only as a benchmark of individual student achievement, but of teacher and school achievement as well. Students, teachers, and schools were all rewarded or punished, sometimes in No Child Left Behind-like ways, for how well they executed this component of what was essentially, if not always formally, a common core of the curriculum. In the parlance of today’s educators, poetry recitation was oftentimes a “high stakes” assessment tool, and many parties — not just individual, clammy-handed grade-schoolers standing in front of the classroom — had an investment in how well students performed.

The longstanding importance of poetry memorization and 
recitation couldn’t fail, Heart Beats thus argues, to have had far-reaching effects, three of which Robson explores in part two’s case studies centered, respectively, on “Casabianca,” by Felicia Hemans, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray, and “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” by Charles Wolfe. Arguing that today’s audiences “will never feel the beat [of these poems] with quite the same urgency” as students once did, Robson puns on the prosodic term “beat” and begins her “Casabianca” case study by tracing the common threat of corporal punishment — the threat of a literal beating — that could result from unsuccessful memorization. Therein (and via a lesser-known Elizabeth Bishop poem also titled “Casabianca”) she finds a figure for the individual child’s experience of standing anxious and alone in front of the classroom seeking the teacher’s approval: the main character of “Casabianca” itself. The poem is perhaps the most commonly memorized of the era and is about the grisly death of a school-age boy waiting faithfully for his father’s permission to leave his post at the burning deck of a ship in battle:

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck
Shone round him o’er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though child-like form.

In fear of the rod, cane, switch, ruler, paddle, or hand, generations of students standing “beautiful and bright” in front of the classroom relied on — indeed clung to — the poem’s meter as a mnemonic handhold, and the cumulative force of their desperation had a much more far-reaching secondary effect on the poem’s critical fortunes. Students so over-exaggerated the poem’s sing-songy rhythm, Robson contends, that the shapers of the literary canon in the twentieth century — onetime students who were perhaps assigned the poem to memorize and recite themselves — were unable to hear anything but the “jog-trot meter” of the poem as it was performed in school and thus dismissed the piece and its actual metrical variety as 
unsophisticated and unworthy of study by adults. The critical 
reception of a memorization standard like “Casabianca,” Robson thus argues, may have had as much or more to do with “the particular circumstances of its assimilation into a culture” (i.e., recitation in school) than with the features of the text itself.

While the “Casabianca” case study focuses on the relationship between the student’s body, poetic meter, and the subsequent impact of memorization on the poem’s critical legacy, the following chapter on Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” centers on the relationship between the poem and the student’s inner life — specifically on the intellectual and emotional contradictions experienced by the upwardly-mobile British “scholarship boy” who would have been charged, near the end of his education, with memorizing Gray’s long and difficult poem that justifies why the poor and uneducated (like the scholarship boy himself) benefit from being kept poor and 
uneducated. Robson writes:

Although the successfully memorized poem undoubtedly played a role as acquired cultural capital, a pleasing and often permanently possessed symbol of that expertise that might enable an individual to rise first within the educational, and then the social, system, it also carried the potential to act as a persistent reminder of the school’s ability to alienate an individual from his or her earliest associations.

Furthermore, a poem like Gray’s could also serve as a depressing reminder that despite the scholarship boy’s individual achievement, the education system and the texts it assigns don’t necessarily have as their goal the empowerment of the lower classes in general.

Something of this dynamic informs the melancholy nature of the scene I’ve cited from The Outsiders. As Robson explains was often the case with rote memorization, Ponyboy appears to have learned “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” but he hasn’t been taught how to understand it; as plenty of examples in Heart Beats also attest, it is only later in life — as figured by the literal daybreak in the movie — that the memorized poem’s possible meanings dawn on him. (“I never quite knew [until now] what he meant by it.”) So, even as school has given him a “permanently possessed” symbol of his learning, it has nevertheless also given him a metaphor painfully naturalizing his own entrance into what Gray’s “Elegy” calls “the short and simple annals of the poor.” In this context, then, it is thus possible to hear Johnny’s question as referring not to the poem itself (“Where’d you learn that [poem]?”) or to the site of its learning (after all, Johnny would have had experiences memorizing poems in school himself). Instead, the “that” of Johnny’s question refers to Ponyboy’s depressing realization about the inevitably frustrated dreams of the lower and working classes that his teachers would have rewarded him for learning by — and taking to — heart.

The “Casabianca” and “Elegy” studies are ambitious, almost impossibly researched, and at times entertaining; Robson can spin a helluva yarn telling the reception histories and social lives of the poems she considers. For this reader, though, the third case study (the shortest in Heart Beats) makes the most astonishing and perhaps most audacious claims in the book. Here, Robson argues for the impact of “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna” — Charles Wolfe’s “one-hit wonder” that became a standard recitation piece — on the development and formalization of modern memorial practices for common soldiers who, at earlier points in history, would have been buried in unmarked graves. The mass memorization of this thirty-two-line poem in schools — and especially the phrase “no useless coffin,” which became a sort of meme quoted by individuals, in 
newspaper obituaries, and elsewhere, especially during the U.S. Civil War — offered readers a sort of “cultural shorthand” that helped to express and spread the belief that rank-and-file soldiers deserved the type of commemoration that the hero of Wolfe’s poem himself deserved but did not get. Far from “[making] nothing happen” (as W.H. Auden wrote of poetry in his own memorial poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”), the “functional presence of Wolfe’s poem in the minds of ordinary individuals,” Robson argues, was instrumental in “the raising of a million stones” marking the graves of soldiers in national cemeteries on both sides of the Atlantic. Amazing? You bet.




III

In his now classic study Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong traces the differences in communication forms and dynamics between oral and literate cultures, distinguishing between the fixity and abstracted knowledge of print (which “sets up conditions for ‘objectivity,’ in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing”) and the “situational, operational frames of reference” of orality and its real-time, personal exchanges. “Written words,” he argues:

are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.

For Ong, the values of oral and print economies exist in relation to one another in the modern, Western world of widespread literacy, where most oral communication is in some way underwritten, made possible by, or in a sort of dialogue with, the technology and authority of print. No matter how oral in nature Ponyboy’s recitation of “Nothing Gold Can Stay” appears to be, for example (it’s in the context of a single moment and spoken to and for Johnny in a real setting that includes their friendship, their shared experiences, the rising sun, their class affiliation, and so on), it is nevertheless a rendition of a printed source text, and insofar as we admire (or check for) his word-for-word fidelity to Frost’s original, it is measured by, or subject to, the values of print.

I bring up Ong and the relationship between oral and print economies because, for all of its historical reach, and only partly justifiable 
by virtue of its focus on the classroom, Heart Beats doesn’t say much, if anything, about the function or status of the memorized poem in today’s world. If we view Robson’s history from a slightly different perspective, however — not from the perspective of educational history, but from the perspective of media studies or media history — then the material in Heart Beats proves to be revealing about how and why we now value (or don’t value) various types of poetries in the ways that we do.

Among its other functions, the memorized poem in the schoolroom becomes a crucial intersection of oral and print economies, as the spoken display of one’s mastery enlists values associated with orality (bodily carriage, gesture, intonation, and elocution) even as word-for-word fidelity to the original, printed text remains the 
primary measure of achievement; as Heart Beats shows, students could get away with exaggerating the meter of “Casabianca” because it was most important for them to remember the printed poem’s exact wording. Such an interplay between aspects of oral and print economies worked to transition students — especially students like scholarship boys (or like Johnny and Ponyboy) raised in environments where the values of orality were oftentimes rewarded more than they would have been in educated, bourgeois society — away from a comparatively “primitive” mode of communication and toward a more sophisticated, “advanced” one; one might say that, in the process, students became more and more “book smart.” The process of memorizing and reciting (after all, proof of memorization could have been achieved by writing the poem down) thus helped to segue children from the lived, relational values associated with orality and into the abstract and impersonal knowledge systems facilitated by print.

The emphasis on print-based values (duplication, fidelity to the text) structuring the memorization and recitation of poetry during the period which Robson studies — and which Heart Beats gives us a chance to see more clearly than we’ve ever seen, perhaps — did not lose influence with the decline of poetry memorization as a widespread pedagogical activity. Having gained momentum and come to seem even more natural thanks to the privileged place of rote memorization, those values still inform, albeit in somewhat refracted ways, how we relate to certain sorts of poetry (and poetry delivery systems) 
differently than to others today. Publication in the little magazine or the slim volume, for example, is a far more “credible” sign of a poet’s accomplishment — far more likely to elicit respect, scholarly consideration, and even promotion or tenure — than poetry in performance or other non-print contexts, historical or contemporary. The same poem is likely to acquire a credibility when presented in Poetry that it loses if “interpreted” on air by Garrison Keillor. This is one reason why poets with print-based, rather than performance-based, résumés “read” at presidential inaugurations. And it’s a reason 
why many people are predisposed to judge slam poetry, in which memorization is de rigueur, as the aesthetically uninteresting work of amateurs. (Harold Bloom, for instance, dismissed slam poetry in distinctly acoustic and infantilizing terms as “rant and nonsense.”)

I could go on — citing the historical lack of respect afforded to oral forms of poetry such as spoken-word poetry, HBO’s Def Poetry, or popular music lyrics including hip-hop and rap — but my point is that, more likely than not, poetries distributed 
in, incorporating, or appealing to oral/aural formats are tainted by affiliation with the values of the worlds of oral communication out of which people are meant to be educated. Memorized or oral 
poetries now associate in our minds with childhood, emotion, occasional verse, amateurism, popular or mass culture, lack of aesthetic sophistication, and knowing “by heart” rather than objectively by mind and print; published by Disney’s Hyperion Books and featuring lots of enjoyable watercolor illustrations by Jon J. Muth, Caroline Kennedy’s 2013 anthology Poems to Learn by Heart feeds right into this mix. Alternately, poetries inclined toward print tend to associate with notions of professional authorship, literariness, complexity, and impersonal judgment on the part of their editors and readers.

Such distinctions owe much to the history Heart Beats brings into view, and I’ll venture to say that digital media — especially in tandem with other non-print media like movies and television shows that digital formats make increasingly available — are currently putting those distinctions under paradigm-changing pressure. Indeed, the rise in poetry memorization and/or recitation over the past decade, ranging from Poetry Out Loud competitions to Def Poetry, all sorts of YouTube videos, and Disney’s celebrity-studded “A Poem Is    ...    ” video series that premiered during National Poetry Month 2011 and serves as a sort of companion to Poems to Learn by Heart, may be read in one way or another as responses to a weakening print hegemony put under pressure by the emergence of digital media. How digital media will ultimately affect poetry as it relates to print and oral communication economies, not to mention new or revised educational theories and practices, has yet to become clear. But when it does, I’d wager that what Robson claims in her “Casabianca” study — that a poem may be more likely than we think to acquire or shed value in relation to “the particular circumstances of its assimilation into a culture” — will still hold true.




IV

The management of the relationship between oral and print value economies comes into view most clearly (at least in the context of what Charles Bernstein has called “official verse culture”) in the phenomenon of the professional poetry “reading,” which uses 
a print-based term to describe what is otherwise a recitation for the purposes of saving the endeavor from its affiliation with the oral. The last thing a professional poet wants is to risk being linked to the history of recitation and its accumulated values, and so he or she goes through a set of gestures meant to anchor his or her performance in print. She reads in a more or less standardized, even impersonal, style with little intonation and few if any theatrical gestures. She disengages from the work itself by not memorizing it. She makes a show of displaying, paging through, or talking ab .......................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...samuel-johnson

Samuel Johnson
Poet Details
1709–1784

Samuel Johnson, the premier English literary figure of the mid- and late eighteenth century, was a writer of exceptional range: a poet, a lexicographer, a translator, a journalist and essayist, a travel writer, a biographer, an editor, and a critic. His literary fame has traditionally—and properly—rested more on his prose than on his poetry. As a result, aside from his two verse satires (1738, 1749), which were from the beginning recognized as distinguished achievements, and a few lesser pieces, the rest of his poems have not in general been well known. Yet his biographer James Boswell noted correctly that Johnson's "mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet." Moreover, Johnson wrote poetry throughout his life, from the time he was a schoolboy until eight days before his death, composing in Latin and Greek as well as English. His works include a verse drama, some longer serious poems, several prologues, many translations, and much light occasional poetry, impromptu compositions or jeux d'esprit. Johnson is a poet of limited range, but within that range he is a poet of substantial talent and ability.

Johnson, the son of Sarah and Michael Johnson, grew up in Lichfield. His father was a provincial bookseller prominent enough to have served as sheriff of the town in 1709, the year of Samuel's birth, but whose circumstances were increasingly straitened as his son grew up. Samuel was a frail baby, plagued by disease. He contracted scrofula (a tubercular infection of the lymph glands) from his wet nurse, which left him almost blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, deaf in one ear, and scarred on his face and neck from the disease itself and from an operation for it. He also was infected with smallpox. These early and traumatic illnesses presaged the continuing physical discomfort and ill health that would mark his entire life.

The Johnson household was not a particularly happy one, for financial difficulties only exacerbated his parents' incompatibilities. The serious psychological problems Johnson experienced throughout his life were undoubtedly connected in part with the troubled domestic situation of his childhood. Johnson's major advantage from the beginning was his mind, for the intellectual powers that were to astonish his associates throughout his life appeared early. He excelled at the Lichfield Grammar School, which he attended until he was fifteen.

According to his boyhood friend Edmund Hector, Johnson's first poem, "On a Daffodill, the first Flower the Author had seen that Year," was composed between his fifteenth and sixteenth years (in 1724). Written in heroic quatrains, the poem is largely an accumulation of traditional lyric conventions typical of poets from Robert Herrick to Matthew Prior. At moments, however, its weighted seriousness, and particularly the melancholy sense of process and the moral that ends it, suggests some of the points where the poetic strengths of the mature Johnson would focus. The poem poses no serious challenge to William Wordsworth but is not an entirely inauspicious beginning. Hector later told Boswell that Johnson "never much lik'd" the poem because he did not feel "it was ... characteristic of the Flower." Significantly, even so young, Johnson recognized the need for the concreteness and specificity that in his later poems would infuse the more abstract intellectual conceptions that dominated his first effort.

Johnson spent the next year at Stourbridge. Initially he made a protracted visit to his older cousin Cornelius Ford, enjoying the company of this genial, witty, and worldly relative and access to a social world significantly wider than life at Lichfield had offered. Later Johnson worked at the Stourbridge Grammar School with the headmaster, John Wentworth. About a dozen of Johnson's poems from this period survive, mainly translations. Most of them were school exercises, such as his translations of Virgil's first and fifth eclogues and the dialogue between Hector and Andromache in the sixth book of the Iliad. Johnson later told Boswell that Horace's odes were "the compositions in which he took most delight," and he had already translated the Integer vitae ode (I:xxii) before studying with Wentworth. At Stourbridge he translated three other odes (II: ix, xiv, and xx) and two epodes of Horace's (II and XI). All are capable and fairly accurate performances, although the epodes show more energy. The most interesting of his early translations is that of Joseph Addison's Latin poem "The Battle of the Pygmies and the Cranes" (1698), for it anticipates the vigor, the sympathetic involvement and resulting moral poignance, and the ability to revivify known truths that are characteristic of Johnson's greatest poems.

Two more school exercises, "Festina Lente" (Make Haste Slowly) and "Upon the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude," are original poems. The latter, written in the stanzaic form that Christopher Smart would employ over three decades later in the Song to David (1763), is singular among Johnsonian poems for what it terms "extatick fury," and it shows his youthful willingness to experiment with verse forms and varieties of poetic expression. Despite its interest, it is in many ways the "rude unpolish'd song" that it claims to be, and it suggests that Johnson's decision to confine himself to couplets and quatrains was not unwise. Wentworth's preservation of Johnson's early pieces reflects his high opinion of his pupil's talent and skill, and the early poems show an increasing command of diction and rhythm. W. Jackson Bate has pointed out that although merely school exercises, they are "as good as the verse written by any major poet at the same age."

Johnson returned to Lichfield in the fall of 1726 and spent two more years there, working and also reading in his father's bookshop. Once again he found a mentor, this time Gilbert Walmesley, a scholarly, sophisticated, hospitable lawyer who was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court at Lichfield. In 1728, when Johnson was nineteen, his parents managed to scrape together enough money to send him to Pembroke College, Oxford. In his first interview he impressed his tutor by quoting Macrobius, and with the wide knowledge he had accumulated over his years of reading, he continued to impress members of the college with his intellectual prowess. Although a desultory and often irresponsible student, he loved college life. His reading of William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) during this period led him to think seriously about religion, and he gradually developed the deep, though troubled, acceptance of the Christian faith and its principles that marked his life.

As a youth in Lichfield, Johnson had first attempted Latin verse in a now-lost poem on the glowworm, but several of his Latin poems composed as college exercises survive. Of these the most important is a translation of Alexander Pope's Messiah (1712), made as a 1728 Christmas exercise at the suggestion of his tutor. Working through Isaiah, Virgil, and Pope, Johnson produced his own Latin poem of 119 lines at remarkable speed, writing half of it in an afternoon and completing the rest the next morning. This kind of facility in poetic composition was characteristic of Johnson, whether he was writing original poetry or translating, just as he later wrote prose with incredible speed. He could effectively organize and even edit in his mind; he later explained to Boswell that in composing verses, "I have generally had them in my mind, perhaps fifty at a time, walking up and down in my room; and then I have written them down, and often, from laziness, have written only half lines." The manuscript of The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) reflects this practice, for the first half of many lines is written in different ink than the last half.

The translation of The Messiah was received enthusiastically at Pembroke. Although the extant evidence is conflicting, one close friend said that Johnson's father had it printed without his son's knowledge and even dispatched a copy to Pope. Johnson, who had always experienced difficulties in getting along with his father, was furious at the interference, for he had his own plans for having the poem presented properly to the English author. Whatever actually happened in this connection, the translation was Johnson's first published poem, for in 1731 it was included in A Miscellany of Poems, edited by John Husbands, a Pembroke tutor. But by the time it appeared, lack of money had forced Johnson to leave Oxford and return once more to Lichfield.

Johnson's early translations and his Latin verse reflect two poetic modes that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Other poems extant from his earlier years show his abilities in the kind of occasional or impromptu verses that appear in large numbers in his later writings. In addition to the more serious and substantial "Ode on Friendship," there are the complimentary verses "To a Young Lady on Her Birthday" and "To Miss Hickman Playing on the Spinet," along with "On a Lady leaving her place of Abode" and "On a Lady's Presenting a Sprig of Myrtle to a Gentleman," the latter composed hastily to help a friend. A Latin quatrain, "To Laura," resulted when a friend proposed a line and challenged Johnson in company to finish it; he complied instantly. Finally, an epilogue written for a play acted by some young women at Lichfield presages his later theatrical pieces, while "The Young Author" prepares for the future treatment of a similar theme in one of his great verse satires. Almost the entire range of Johnson's mature poetic interests is represented in his early pieces.

Barred from returning to Oxford because of his family's increasingly desperate financial situation, Johnson lacked an occupation, had no prospects of one, and faced a bleak future on his return to Lichfield. Worst of all was his psychological state. For him the early years of the 1730s were a period of despair, ultimate breakdown, and only gradual recovery. Indolence had always been a problem for him; indeed, it would plague him throughout his life. But during this period, despite his best efforts to pull himself together and focus his life, he could not break the terrible lassitude afflicting him. Deeply depressed, paralyzed with gilts and fears, he suffered a massive emotional collapse that lasted for about two years and left him unsteady for three more. He later dated his constant health problems from this period, writing in a letter in his early seventies that "My health has been from my twentieth year such as seldom afforded me a single day of ease" (Letters of Samuel Johnson, II: 474). In addition, during this time he developed the convulsive gestures, tics, and obsessional mannerisms that contributed to making his demeanor so odd. Johnson was a large, powerful man, but his awkwardness, his scrofula and smallpox scars, and his compulsive mannerisms, combined with his disheveled and slovenly dress, created a grotesque initial impression.

After failing in attempts to secure several positions, Johnson was briefly employed in 1732 as an undermaster at Market Bosworth Grammar School in Leicestershire. He hated the job and particularly the chief trustee who controlled the school, and he quit during the summer. In the autumn he visited his old friend Hector in Birmingham and lived there for over a year, still trying to settle his mind and his life. By 1734 he managed to complete a translation of Father Jeronymo Lobo's account of Abyssinia, Johnson's first published book (1735). He had not forgotten poetry. Returning to Lichfield, he published proposals for a subscription edition of the Latin poems of the fifteenth-century writer Politian, with a history of Latin poetry from the age of Petrarch to Politian. Like most of his endeavors during this bleak period, the project failed.

In July 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Jervis Porter, whom he referred to as "Tetty," a widow twenty years his senior. To this unusual marriage, which he always described as a love match, she brought a substantial amount of money, and with it Johnson began a small school at Edial. It opened in the fall with only three students, among them David Garrick, who was to become the greatest actor of the century. As the school rapidly declined, Johnson decided to try to earn money—and perhaps to make a name for himself—by writing a blank-verse tragedy, a historical drama in the vein that Addison's Cato (1713) had popularized. Usually a rapid writer, this time he was unable to proceed with any celerity on his ill-fated play Irene (not published until 1749). He had completed only half of it when the school failed. With Tetty's resources now steadily diminishing, he decided to go to London, where he hoped to find work writing for journals and translating and to complete and sell Irene. Tetty stayed behind. On 2 March 1737 Johnson and young Garrick set out for London, sharing a single horse between them. In London and then in Greenwich, Johnson continued to work on Irene, but in the summer he returned to Lichfield, and after three months there he finally finished the drama. No evidence exists to indicate that any other work cost Johnson as much effort as Irene. The manuscript of his first draft is extant, and it shows his extensive research, his careful organization, and his detailed descriptions of scenes and characters.

Johnson and Tetty moved back to London in October, and Johnson sought unsuccessfully to get Irene produced. Meanwhile he began to do some work for Edward Cave on the Gentleman's Magazine. In March 1738 his first contribution to it appeared, an elegant and dignified Latin poem, "To Sylvanus Urban" (Cave's editorial pseudonym), which defended Cave against current attacks by rival booksellers. Other poems that year included light complimentary verses to Elizabeth Carter and Lady Firebrace, and Latin and Greek epigrams to Carter, Richard Savage, and Thomas Birch.

As he worked for Cave, Johnson also sought something to write on his own that might sell. A natural choice was the "imitation," a popular contemporary poetic form. Dryden in his Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) had described the imitation as a kind of translation, "where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases." Johnson himself would later define it in the Life of Pope (volume 7 of Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, 1779-1781) as "a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable and the parallels lucky." Pope, whose Imitations of Horace had been appearing during the 1730s, was the acknowledged master of the mode, which had been developed extensively during the Restoration by such poets as Abraham Cowley, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and John Oldham and had also been employed by Swift. Johnson turned to the Latin poet Juvenal and imitated his Satura III on urban life inLondon. Late in March 1738 he sent a copy of the poem to Cave, with a letter in which he claimed to be negotiating for a needy friend who had actually composed the poem. He even offered to alter any parts of it that Cave disliked. Cave printed London and arranged for Robert Dodsley, who was well known for his abilities to promote poetry, to publish it. From Dodsley, Johnson received ten guineas for the copyright, because, as he explained to Boswell years later, the minor poet Paul Whitehead had recently gotten ten guineas for one of his pieces, and he would not settle for less than Whitehead had earned. London was published on 13 May 1738.

In Juvenal's third satire his friend Umbricius pauses at the archway of the Porta Capena to deliver a diatribe against city life as he leaves Rome forever for deserted Cumae. Johnson's Thales in London similarly rails as he waits on the banks of the Thames at Greenwich to depart for Wales. (Much ink has been spilled over whether or not Thales is modeled on Johnson's friend Savage, but the best evidence suggests that Johnson had not met Savage at the time he wrote the poem.) Following the example of Pope and others, Johnson insisted that the relevant passages from Juvenal's satire be published with his own poem at the bottom of the pages, because he believed that part of any beauty that London possessed consisted in adapting Juvenal's sentiments to contemporary topics. Thus Juvenal's work provides a natural point of departure for evaluating Johnson's achievement.

Between an introduction and conclusion, Juvenal's original satire is broken into two major sections. The first focuses primarily on the difficulties faced by an honest man trying to make a living in the city, while the second part considers the innumerable dangers of urban life (falling buildings, fires, crowds, traffic, accidents, and crimes). Johnson in general follows Juvenal's structure, but as he reworks the subject, the sections he retains and those he alters reveal his own particular concerns.

Johnson when he wishes can capture Juvenal's meanings exactly. "SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPREST" is a classic example, as he powerfully restates Juvenal's "haud facile emergunt quorum virtatibus obstat / Res angusta domi" (it is scarcely easy to rise in the world for those whose straitened domestic circumstances obstruct their abilities). Johnson can also use balance and antithesis in the couplet to juxtapose for satirical effect in a manner reminiscent of Pope; a fawning Frenchman, for example, will "Exalt each Trifle, ev'ry Vice adore, / Your Taste in Snuff, your Judgment in a Whore." But Johnson does not usually concentrate either on details or on close rendition of Juvenal, and because of his different satiric emphases, London becomes in important ways his own poem.

First of all, Johnson's treatment of country life includes significant additions to Juvenal. Early in London, with no Juvenalian basis whatsoever, he adds two lines describing what Thales expects to find in the country: "Some pleasing Bank where verdant Osiers play, / Some peaceful Vale with Nature's Paintings gay." This couplet sets the tone for Johnson's subsequent rural depictions. In Satura III Juvenal lauds the country not for its beauty or the ease of life there, but as the only possible alternative to the city. Johnson, however, takes Juvenal's simple descriptions of country life and produces a combination of eighteenth-century garden (with pruned walks, supported flowers, directed rivulets, and twined bowers) and Miltonic Paradise (including nature's music, healthy breezes, security, and morning work and evening strolls). Such idealization of the country is totally incongruous with Johnson's views; he loved the bustling life of London and, like George Crabbe, always emphasized that human unhappiness emanates from the same causes in both the city and the country. His treatment of the country in London reflects prevailing poetic convention rather than conviction; his predominantly conventional additions to Juvenal in this area highlight the extent to which London is very much the work of a young poet eager to please, who played to contemporary tastes accordingly.

If Johnson's additions to Juvenal in the rural depictions are significant, his omissions in portraying the wretched life of the urban poor are even more telling. "SLOW RISES WORTH," justly the best-known line in the poem, has had impact enough to obscure the fact that Johnson's general treatment of poverty in London is cursory, particularly when compared to Juvenal's. He leaves out fully half of Juvenal's section on the general helplessness of the poor in making a living in the city. In surveying urban vexations, he omits Juvenal's sections on crowds, traffic, accidents, and thefts, leaves out the falling buildings (although collapsing older houses were a frequent hazard in eighteenth-century London), and condenses the fight scene. In the process he loses some of Juvenal's most telling episodes, for urban life is, of course, made intolerable not so much by huge disasters as by incessant small annoyances. The noise, the loss of sleep, and the difficulties in getting from one place to another disappear in Johnson's version because he is not interested in the small personal perils of city life.

No one, however, could accuse Johnson of not caring deeply about the conditions of the urban poor. He told Boswell that the true test of civilization was a decent provision for the poor, and he personally offered such provision to unfortunates whenever he could. Although his passages on the poor in London are usually competent and occasionally eloquent, he drastically condensed Juvenal's treatment because he wanted to focus his own poem on political rather than personal conditions."

The accuracy of Boswell's description of London as "impregnated with the fire of opposition" is clear from the many political references that Johnson adds to Juvenal. He expands Juvenal's introductory section to include nostalgic references to the political and commercial glories of the Elizabethan age and several times in the poem opposes Spanish power. In elaborating Juvenal's passage on crimes and the jail, he manages to attack Walpole's misuses of special juries and secret-service funds, the House of Commons, and the king himself. Johnson never forgets politics in London, even when he is at his most conventional. For example, the lines on the country include references to the seat of a "hireling Senator" and the confections of a "venal Lord."

Johnson's emphasis on politics in London was undoubtedly due to factors in the contemporary political scene as well as his personal life at the time. The year 1738 was one of widespread popular unrest, and the nation, already in ferment over the court and Walpole's ministry, was outraged over alleged Spanish suppression of British commerce. In the midst of the uproar Johnson, a newcomer to London, unsure of himself and his ability to achieve success anywhere, associated with various acquaintances who opposed the government as he eked out the barest of livings in the great capital. Young and frustrated, he was understandably eager enough to view the current political situation as the direct cause of adverse personal as well as national conditions. During his first few years in the city he produced the most violent political writings of his life. The year after London, he published Marmor Norfolciense (1739), a feigned prophetical inscription in rhymed Latin verse with a translation and long commentary attacking Walpole. This satire was so virulent that, according to Johnson's early biographer James Harrison, even a government inured to invective issued a warrant for his arrest.

London in many places shows Johnson's technical proficiency in employing the heroic couplet. It is an exuberant poem, full of life and high spirits. London does not finally bring out all of Johnson's powers, because the satire is weakened in places by the false stances into which he is forced by convention and political themes. But it is an impressive performance, and certain passages, such as the description of the dangers of friendship with great men, reflect Johnson's full poetic abilities. The final lines of this passage show Johnson rising above the specific poetic situation to present the overview of the moralist. The movement of satire into reflection here, buttressed by the enlargement and extension of the particular into the general, is characteristic of Johnson at his best. Indeed, these movements from satire to meditation and from the particular to the general combine a decade later with a more mature view, sometimes savage about life itself but always sympathetic to the struggles of suffering individuals, to produce The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Johnson's second Juvenalian imitation.

Pope's One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, another of his Horatian imitations, was published—also by Dodsley—a few days after London, and the two poems were favorably compared. Boswell reports that Pope himself responded generously to his putative rival; he asked Jonathan Richardson to try to discover who the new author was, and when told that he was an obscure man named Johnson, Pope commented that he would not be obscure for long. The popular success of the poem seemed to support Pope's prediction. Within a week a second edition was required, a third came out later that year, and a fourth in the next year. It was reprinted at least twenty-three times in Johnson's lifetime. However, the political topicality and the poetic conventionality that contributed so much to the contemporary success of London considerably lessened its later appeal. Its status as a major Johnsonian poem has always been secure and its substantial poetic power recognized. But it has also suffered from inevitable comparisons with The Vanity of Human Wishes. Modern readers have uniformly preferred the second poem for its moral elevation, its more condensed expression, and its treatment of more characteristic Johnsonian themes and ideas. Many of these elements are present in London, but to a lesser degree.

During this early period in London it was increasingly clear that Johnson's marriage was in trouble. Bruised by this second marriage to which she had brought so much and which had so reduced her circumstances, Tetty was retreating steadily from Johnson and also from life in general. The two gradually began to live apart much of the time, as Tetty steadily deteriorated, ultimately taking refuge in alcohol and opium and in her final years seldom leaving her bed. Johnson did all that he could to support her, writing furiously and stinting himself to provide for his wife. He sometimes walked the streets all night because he lacked money for even the cheapest lodging. For the next fifteen or twenty years he was a journalist and a hack writer of incredible productivity and variety. He became a trusted assistant to Cave on the Gentleman's Magazine from 1738 until the mid 1740s, writing many reviews, translations, and articles, including a long series of parliamentary debates from 1741 until 1744. He helped to catalog the massive Harleian Library and worked on the eight volumes of The Harleian Miscellany (1744-1746). In addition to a series of short biographies for Cave, he contributed biographical entries to A Medicinal Dictionary (1743-1745) by his friend Dr. Robert James, for whom he had composed the Proposals for the work (1741). His own Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, a short masterpiece of biography, appeared in 1744. In 1745 he published a proposal for a new edition of Shakespeare, composing Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth to illustrate his critical approach. This project did not materialize, but a greater one did. The next year he signed a contract with a group of publishers to produce an English dictionary, on which he labored for the next seven years in the garret of the house he rented at 17 Gough Square. Even as he worked on it, however, he always continued with many other miscellaneous writing projects.

During these years Johnson wrote substantially more prose than poetry, but he did publish various minor poems in the Gentleman's Magazine. An epitaph on the musician Claudy Phillips, composed almost extemporaneously and years later set to music, appeared there in September 1740. He revised several of his early poems (the Integer Vitae ode, "The Young Author," the "Ode to Friendship," and "To Laura") and published them in the Magazine in July 1743, along with a Latin translation, described as "the casual amusement of half an hour," of Pope's verses on his grotto. When Cave needed a revision of Geoffrey Walmesley's Latin translation of John Byrom's "Colin and Phebe" in February 1745, Johnson and Stephen Barrett alternated distiches, rapidly passing a sheet of paper between them "like a shuttlecock" across the table. In 1747, when the editor of the poetry section of the magazine was away and the copy available for the May issue was insufficient, Johnson contributed some half-dozen poems. Most were light occasional pieces written years before, including "The Winter's Walk," "An Ode" on the Spring, and several complimentary poems to ladies, but a more substantial English poem loosely based on the Latin epigraph of Sir Thomas Hanmer also appeared.

In the same year Johnson also supplied a prologue for the celebration of the reopening of the Drury Lane Theatre under his friend Garrick's management. He had already helped Garrick out by writing a preface for his first play, Lethe, for a benefit performance for Henry Gifford in 1740. The Prologue Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane was a much more considerable piece. Johnson later said that the whole poem was composed before he put a line on paper and that he subsequently changed only one word in it, making that alteration solely because of Garrick's remonstrances. The Drury Lane prologue offers an overview of the history of English drama, tracing it from "immortal" Shakespeare's "pow'rful Strokes" through Ben Jonson's "studious Patience" and "laborious Art" and the "Intrigue" and "Obscenity" of Restoration wits to the playwrights of his own age. After censuring contemporary tragedy and the taste for pantomimes and farces, he speculates pessimistically on the future of the stage, closing by reminding the audience that "The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice" and urging them to "bid the Reign commence / Of rescu'd Nature, and reviving Sense". The prologue is a fine poem that reflects premises Johnson would later employ in his dramatic criticism, particularly in his edition of Shakespeare. When published a few weeks after the opening, it did not bear Johnson's name, and the public was left to assume that Garrick was the author.

In each of the next three decades Johnson wrote one prologue, and they can be considered as a group, despite their chronological dispersion. In 1750 Johnson learned that John Milton's only surviving granddaughter, Elizabeth Foster, was living in poverty, and he convinced Garrick to put on a benefit performance of Comus (1637) to aid her. The new prologue Johnson composed lauds "mighty" Milton's achievement and the fame he has garnered, but characteristically Johnson also praises "his Offspring" Mrs. Foster for "the mild Merits of domestic Life" and "humble Virtue's native Charms." Late in 1767 he wrote a prologue that he had promised long before to Oliver Goldsmith for his comedy, The Good Natur'd Man (1768). With a parliamentary election approaching, Johnson, in a rather gloomy piece that, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, compared the pressures on the playwright and the politician to please the rabble. Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, solicited Johnson's last prologue in 1777 for a performance of Hugh Kelly's A Word to the Wise (1770) to benefit the author's widow and children. When first produced in 1770 the play had been disrupted by Kelly's political enemies, and Johnson's conciliatory and well-received prologue asked the audience to "Let no resentful petulance invade / Th' oblivious grave's inviolable shade." All Johnson's prologues resulted from the generosity to friends and to those in need so characteristic of him throughout his life. All of them are competent examples of the genre, while the poem for the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre, and to a lesser extent the prologue for Comus, rise to real excellence. The Drury Lane prologue has long remained one of Johnson's best-known poems.

In the fall of 1748 Johnson had returned to Juvenal, and in The Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of Juvenal's tenth satire, he wrote his greatest poem. He later said that he wrote the first seventy lines of it in one morning, while visiting Tetty at Hampstead. Like the Drury Lane prologue, the entire section was composed in his head before he put a line of it on paper. He also mentioned to Boswell in ano ................

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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...s/detail/70219

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Scholium
Poetry as pageantry
By Donald Revell

Allegory is a pageant of metaphor and simile. Trailing clouds of glory all its own, figurative language comes upon the scenes of our imagining there. No poet writing in English writes pageantry so in-close as does Robert Herrick. Here, in its entirety, is “The Coming of Good Luck”:

So Good-luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow; or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are, by the sunbeams, tickled by degrees.

Given substance, shape, and agency, Good-luck enters upon the advent of itself. Notice how it remains itself — not embodied by snow, not portrayed by snow, but given over to a like behavior, a noiselessness. In pageant, then, there are two: Good-luck and snow. Then there are three. “The dew of night” adds to noiseless Space (the snowy rooftop) the quiet Time of night. Given space and time, then, Good-luck is wholly born.

Once born, Good-luck possesses not only similitude, but absolute Being. The enjambment between lines three and four is climacteric. “As the trees” leads us to expect another simile; but suddenly, capitalized and alone, stands the one word “Are.” Snow and night and trees all blend into plural singularity, into the apotheosis of Good-luck. 
Apt to apotheosis, there is radiance; Herrick provides “sunbeams.” Here, “Are” is the instance of Amor, after which the upturn bends, “tickled by degrees” toward home. After the radiance, we are returned to homely simile: “as the trees are tickled by degrees.” But with this difference: an apotheosis added, embedded. Herrick’s figures of speech alone could not have anticipated such a birth.

Out of Allegory they emerge, the words and phrases, into pageants 
great and small. They return home afterward, completing a world in which allegory and fact, allegory and actual experience, are one flesh.

Ek gret effect men write in place lite;
Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space.
— From Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The storm of flung flowers rises and falls, and in that cloud of beauty ‘donna m’ apparve — a lady appeared to me’ ... it is even permissible to let ‘the flash of a smile’ pass at that phrase, so often noted.... She wore some kind of dress ‘di fiamma viva — of living flame,’ and over it a green mantle; white-veiled, olive-crowned, she paused there, and Dante — 
The great pageant has been so, and more than so. We may not be able to stay its pace, but Dante could. He has heaped up references and allusions; he has involved doctrine and history and myth, and the central dogma of the twy-natured Christ itself. He has concentrated meanings, and now the living figure for whom all the structure was meant is here.
— From The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams

Reverie is at an end. Purgatory might well have been a pilgrim fantasy, and Inferno a gothic nightmare. Dream visions sort very well with vengeance and remorse; they are the pretty conscience of child’s play. But Paradise, upon whose brink the breathing heralds of Allegory welcome Beatrice, is real. Beatrice speaks a name: “Dante.” And Dante writes it down. Allegory is splendid entertainment, but it entertains neither mask nor alias. Dante crosses over. Heir of allusion and son of reference, he crosses over into pageant and Paradise under his given name. He’s wide awake — voi vigilate ne l’eterno die. The story is true. William Blake has painted so many eyes into the picture. There are witnesses.

It’s no accident that upon the verge of Heaven itself, Dante hesitates for eight full cantos. He is all eyes. He is the pageant while the pageant lasts. In Purgatorio, earthly paradise is Eden still, regained through material witness. In states of perfection, all things are exculpatory evidence of themselves. I want to cross over under my own names, all of them, alongside pageantry. Yet it’s not by accident that I hesitate. I like my allegories allegorical. “Better ... to stay cowering / 
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning / Is a delusion,” as John Ashbery writes (“Soonest Mended”) so early and so well. Allegory is safekeeping. It is shield and buckler in the mock-siege of spring 1970, Fort Tryon Park, New York. Boys hurl themselves toward the battlements. Girls, laughing in midair in false miniver, 
urge them on. Simply to remember them, as one amongst them, is to know that Happiness exists: Allegory the shield; Allegory the buckler; Allegory the actual Name, walking away into The Romance of the Rose. Together in eternity now, the authors appear, historically, in ideal sequence. First, Guillaume de Lorris, poet of the opening four thousand lines. His story is true. Happiness is the image of itself. How do I find it?

By keeping steadily before you both the literal and allegorical sense and not treating the one as a mere means to the other but as its imaginative interpretation; by testing for yourself how far the concept really informs the image and how far the image really lends poetic life to the concept.
— From The Allegory of Love, by C.S. Lewis

Fort Tryon Park was Eden still. I was a boy. I was there, part and parcel of the tatty materials, and I bear witness to it still. It’s there to be learned forever in the first four thousand lines or so.

Few poets have struck better than Guillaume de Lorris that note which is the peculiar charm of medieval love poetry — that boy-like blending (or so it seems) of innocence and sensuousness which could make us believe for a moment that paradise had never been lost.
— From The Allegory of Love

Moments have a way of yielding to the next moment — “some climbing / before the take-off,” as Pound said, speaking also of battlements and Paradise and of voluptuaries turning upward out of pageant, continuing the pageantry. Guillaume de Lorris, poet of courtly love, yields to Jean de Meun, poet, scholar, sceptic, and tireless exegete. Adding eighteen thousand lines of his own, completing The Romance, de Meun takes the Rose by storm, by sheer force of numbers.

It was the misfortune of Jean de Meun to have read and remembered everything: and nothing that he remembered could be kept out of his poem.
— From The Allegory of Love

I think that we all, one way or another, become the Jean de Meuns of ourselves. We annotate the finest days again and again. We exhaust our happiness, meaning only to complete the dream. We lay broad waking. The only cure for love, Guillaume, is to love more. As for de Meun, as for ourselves in the long afterglow of the great poems, we must read more. We must travel the allegory the right way round.

Committed to the safekeeping of every name, commodius vicus brings a traveler the right way round. Back from the brink leads back to the brink and also to questions of conduct. What is a fallen man to do in Eden when Eden never fell? Love more. Read more. William Blake painted many eyes into the picture. A man could use them. As a through passenger — 

My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.
— From Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

As a tourist — 

You would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw — You would make fewer traveller’s mistakes.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, June 12, 1851

As prodigal son — 

Life is not long enough for one success.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, July 19, 1851

Return excels itself by virtue of a simple turn. Sing the Shaker hymn. Sing it with Henry.

Here or nowhere is our heaven.
— From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by
 Henry David Thoreau

Is Grasmere just across the verge of Paradise? Does a man, on the far side of pageant, forgive the fathering child he was? Is Paumanok Eden? Is the absconded she-bird forgiven, either by her fathering mate or by the out-setting bard? Loving more, reading more, the painted eyes begin to number the heavens. Is England a green and pleasant one? Is America?

Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
Be still the same as when you walked the beach
Near Paumanok —
— From Cape Hatteras, by Hart Crane

Brink and verge and selvage: crossing over, up, and into the pageant, close-reading is close-loving. “My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman —/ 
so — .” My head is hands and feet: all eyes.

So very close is first a cloud of emblems, images, words. So very close — loving reading, reading loving — the qualities of joy are indistinguishable from objects each possesses. My cloud was on the cover of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, in color. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car by William Blake shows an awakening cloud, envisioned as colors blazoned forth with eyes in plumage, eyes in flowers, 
pageant-wise.

Così dentro una nuvola di fiori
che dalle mani angeliche saliva
e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fuori,
Sovra candido vel cinta d’oliva
donna m’apparve. 
— From Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri

All the loves at once, donna m’apparve, a lady appeared to me — says Dante, says I, says anyone whose name is spoken aloud on the skirt of Heaven. It’s written down. In the spring of 1972, in Professor G’s “Introduction to Literary Analysis,” and on a narrow bridge through flowers and farther, into the mounted policemen surrounding the Pentagon, all the loves at once appeared, una nuvola di fiori, already written down. I fell in love a dozen times. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car was a cloud I carried everywhere it carried me. Numbering heavens, 1972 was such a number, each numeral possessed by joy.

How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys
Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love.
— From Visions of the Daughters of Albion, by William Blake

The daughters of 1972 appeared to me as gaze in plumage, gaze in flowers, asymptotes of actually beautiful human being touching the curve of my eye. Said curve continues pageant now, for joy. And Blake was right of course. One joy cannot absorb another. Eyes do not absorb the light. They rise to it, pageant-wise. I’m saying nothing about symbols. This is allegory. My college, Harpur College, was then, as now, incorporate with Binghamton University. The school itself, however, was not in the city of Binghamton. More heavily wooded then than now, campus lay to the west, in the town of Vestal. I lived very near, on Vestal Avenue, number 123, upstairs. It was a four-room apartment, to begin with. Sometime in March, one of the rooms came away and fell into the street. The monthly rent remained the same. My weekly writing assignments for Professor G likewise remained the same: five hundred words on “Among School Children.” Yeats’s pages in my Norton were the heavily annotated skirt of the cloud I carried everywhere, and a long schoolroom, too. I am sixty this year, smiling. As I was smiling in 1972 when Professor G invited me to dinner and I saw, for the one and only time, her remarkable daughter. I’ve forgotten her name. She wore a cream-colored dress with intricate bodice. Her only jewelry was a crucifix, silver, set with five red stones. All the air and all the light of that evening belonged to her. She spoke very little. She smiled often. I have never forgotten. There was pretty plumage once. This is the chase! (From among the heaped-up references and allusions, it is proper to choose from The Winter’s Tale; in the fall of ’72 I would take Professor G’s Shakespeare class, and there would come a morning when, staring out a window into the small, first snow, listening to her sing to us a song of Autolycus’s, I was born. There was a mischievous breath between small snow and William Shakespeare I had never breathed before. My life ever since depends upon it.) The daughter’s smile and unaffected elegance, the color of her cheek and hair, made her a daughter of the swan to my close-reading eye. In “Among School Children,” Yeats names no woman’s name, but she goes without saying. “Ledaean” suffices. In pursuit of atonement, not of possession, close-reading is chaste.

In the spring of 1972, I loved them all and was lover to none. Atonement is magical chastity: “a living child”; “yolk and white of the one shell.” Sylvia, an Arcadian by name, was the friend of some friends of mine. One afternoon I saw her fall and tear the seat of her dungarees. The gesture, the nonchalance (to use Whitman’s word) with which she folded the rough tear together and went on speaking to her friends, was unspeakably lovely. I’m saying nothing about symbols. This is allegory. I fell in love, and never spoke to her until an accident of the anti-war movement made a change. In Vietnam, the Easter Offensive — which dragged on well into the autumn — was horrifically underway. Protests and escalations kept steady pace with atrocity on all sides, in all dialects and distortions. Not a single branch or trellis flowered that April and May, in Vestal, in echt Binghamton, in Syracuse (where a strange girl kissed me the softest kiss of my life as a policeman took away my whistle and my flag), in Washington, DC (where I saw Sesame Street for the very first time with two small girls who called me “Mr. Demonstrator” because I was a guest in their parents’ home), and across the river in Northern Virginia (where many ran a gauntlet of bowing branches and rearing horses, 
I with those same two children under my arms, to escape the tear gas), but that branch or that trellis seemed outraged or afraid. It’s hard to smile when all that smile are terrified, even the flowers and small girls. No one is comfortable, and no one lives to grow old beneath a gauntlet.

I had my Norton with me everywhere. I continued writing my weekly assignments “Among School Children” literally, young and old, at play in peril. In the midst of all, “bent / Above a sinking fire” one late night on vigil on a courthouse lawn, I spoke with Sylvia and got to know her, if only a little. Our purpose was solemn presence, round the clock, every day, in quiet protest of the arraignments and convictions of schoolmates subsequent to their arrest at other, more clamorous demonstrations around town. The midnight was damp and chilly; we were a drab contingent huddled around the fire I’d built in a trash barrel. (The police didn’t mind. This was Binghamton, New York, a gentle place. In the morning, they’d bring us buns and coffee.) Drab, except for Sylvia. After forty hours of vigil, we’d looked to be the sullen, bewildered children we mostly were. For once, the heckler’s daylight shout of “dirty hippies” would ring true. But not of Sylvia. Hers was a Ledaean body sure enough, and a face always tilted slightly across the shadow-line where, if you looked closely, a smile began. When she stepped into the circle of firelight, I stood up straight and tried my best to look like a Moses in fatigues, prophetic behind my skimpy beard. She was so nice, so easy in her zeal. She hated the War. She hated the draft. Everyone did, and so we might as well stay close to the fire and talk about music and school and summer plans. There was a long night still ahead. And so we talked, leaning into the warmth together, sometimes laughing. One by one, our companions drifted off to doze on benches, strum guitars, read beneath streetlamps. For a while, Sylvia and I were alone. Then, out of the shadows came a voice, and a man, not much older than ourselves, dressed in a business suit, sto ...............