Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/175809

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer
BY MARY KARR
To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry—a journal founded in part on and for the godless, twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals—feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s “Real Sex Extra.” I can’t even blame it on my being a cradle Catholic, some brainwashed escapee of the pleated skirt and communion veil who—after a misspent youth and facing an Eleanor Rigby-like dotage—plodded back into the confession booth some rainy Saturday.

Not victim but volunteer, I converted in 1996 after a lifetime of undiluted agnosticism. Hearing about my baptism, a pal sent me a postcard that read, “Not you on the Pope’s team. Say it ain’t so!” Well, while probably not the late Pope’s favorite Catholic (nor he my favorite pope), I took the blessing and ate the broken bread. And just as I continue to live in America and vote despite my revulsion for many US policies, I continue to enjoy the sacraments despite my fervent aversion to certain doctrines. Call me a cafeteria Catholic if you like, but to that I’d say, Who isn’t?

Perversely enough, the request for this confession showed up last winter during one of my lowest spiritual gullies. A blizzard’s dive-bombing winds had kept all the bodegas locked for the second day running (thus depriving New Yorkers of newspapers and orange juice), and I found—in my otherwise bare mailbox—a letter asking me to write about my allegedly deep and abiding faith. That very morning, I’d confessed to my spiritual advisor that while I still believed in God, he had come to seem like Miles Davis, some nasty genius scowling out from under his hat, scornful of my mere being and on the verge of waving me off the stage for the crap job I was doing. The late William Matthews has a great line about Mingus, who “flurried” a musician from the stand by saying, “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel...” I felt doomed to be that diminuendo, an erasure mark that matched the erasure mark I saw in the grayed-out heavens.

Any attempt at prayer in this state is a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry is still healing balm, partly because it’s always helped me feel less alone, even in earliest childhood. Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar. It was a lot of other firsts too, of course: first classroom/chat room/confessional. But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, because it eased a nagging isolation: it was a line thrown to my drear-minded self from seemingly glorious Others.

From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight. Somehow—long before I’d published—that connection even extended from me outward. Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread. Maybe secreted in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just eaten of. As that conduit into a community, poetry never failed me, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself. Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

In the Texas oil town where I grew up, fierceness won fights, but I was thin-skinned—an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids. Plus, early on, I twigged to the fact that my clan differed from our neighbors. Partly because of my family’s entrenched atheism, kids weren’t allowed to enter my yard—also since my artist mother was known to paint “nekked” women and guzzle vodka straight out of the bottle. She was seductive and mercurial and given to deep doldrums and mysterious vanishings, and I sought nothing so much as her favor. Poetry was my first lure. Even as a preschooler, I could sometimes draw her out of a sulk by reciting the works of e.e. cummings and A.A. Milne.

In my godless household, poems were the only prayers that got said—the closest thing to sacred speech at all. I remember mother bringing me Eliot’s poems from the library, and she not only swooned over them, she swooned over my swooning over them, which felt as close as she came to swooning over me. Even my large-breasted and socially adroit older sister got Eliot—though Lecia warned me off telling kids at school that I read that kind of stuff. At about age twelve, I remember sitting on our flowered bedspread reading him to Lecia while she primped for a date. Read it again, the whole thing. She was a fourteen-year-old leaning into the mirror with a Maybelline wand, saying, Goddamn that’s great...Poetry was the family’s religion. Beauty bonded us.

Church language works that way among believers, I would wager—whether prayer or hymn. Uttering the same noises in unison is part of what consolidates a congregation (along with shared rituals like baptisms and weddings, which are mostly words). Like poetry, prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: “true” and “beautiful.” (Only in my deepest prayers does language evaporate, and a wide and wordless silence takes over.) But if you’re in a frame of mind dark enough to refuse prayer, nothing can ease the ache like a dark poem. Wrestling with gnarled or engrossing language may not bring peace per se, but it can occupy a brain pumping out bad news like ticker tape and thus bring you back to the alleged rationality associated with the human phylum.

So it was for me last winter—my most recent dark night of the soul—when my faith got sandblasted away for some weeks. Part of this was due to circumstances. Right after a move to New York, fortune delivered a triple whammy: my kid off to college, a live-in love ending volcanically, then medical maladies that kept me laid up for weeks alone. In a state of scalding hurt—sleepless and unable to conjure hope at some future prospects—suddenly (it felt sudden, as if a pall descended over me one day) God seemed vaporous as any perfume.

To kneel and pray in this state is almost physically painful. At best, it’s like talking into a bucket. At worst, you feel like a chump, some heartsick fool still sending valentines to a cad. With my friends away for the holidays, poetry seemed my only solace for more than a month. Maybe a few times I dipped into the Psalms or the book of Job. But more often I bent over the “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins to find shape for my desolation:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.


I was also reading that bleak scribbler Bill Knott, to find a bitter companion to sip my own gall with. He’d aptly captured my spiritual state in “Brighton Rock by Graham Greene,” where he imagines a sequel for Greene’s book: the offspring that criminal sociopath Pinky Brown conceived in the body of pitiful Rose Wilson before he died becomes a teenager in a skiffle band called Brighton Rockers. This kid’s inborn anguish resounds in the grotesque Mass his mom sits through:

Every Sunday now in church Rose slices

her ring-finger off, onto the collection-plate;
once the sextons have gathered enough
bodily parts from the congregation, enough

to add up to an entire being, the priest sub-
stitutes that entire being for the one
on the cross: they bring Him down in the name

of brown and rose and pink, sadness
and shame. His body, remade, is yelled at
and made to get a haircut, go to school,

study, to do each day like the rest
of us crawling through this igloo of hell
and laugh it up, show pain a good time,

and read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.


This winter, I felt yelled at by the world at large and God in particular. The rhythm of Knott’s final sentence says it all—“to DO each DAY like the REST/of us”—the first phrase is a stair plod, with an extra stumble step to line’s end, where it becomes a cliff you fall off (no REST here)—“CRAWling through this IGloo of HELL.”

People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror. Need and fear. In some Edenic past, our ancestors began to evolve hard-wiring that actually requires us (so I believe) to make a noise beautiful enough to lay on the altar of the Creator/Rain God/Fertility Queen. With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble. We suffer with prayer and poetry alike. Boy, do we suffer.

The faithless contenders for prayer’s relief who sometimes ask me

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet.../article/31466

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
“I Did Not Advance, I Cannot Retreat”
BY DANIELLE CHAPMAN

The Niche Narrows, by Samuel Menashe.

New York City tends to obsess the poets who live there. Whitman and Crane used the epic city as a metaphor for the epic self-as-New-Yorker; Moore conscientiously collected and arranged its oddities; O’Hara manically maneuvered through its people and experiences. Surely these poets who made it in New York could, as the saying goes, have made it anywhere, and it’s no wonder that the city’s personality bursts through their voices without upstaging them. But contemporary New York poets, rather than inhabiting the city, often seem to have been inhabited by it—even contaminated. Attitudinal, world-weary, neurotic, each is another version of the same caricature of “self-expression.” That’s why it’s such a delight to come across Samuel Menashe, a lifelong New Yorker whose poems exist at a sonorous remove from the frenzy of life downtown. His small poems—most are less than ten lines long—speak to the archetypal condition of the poet or “scribe,” as Menashe calls him, with a quietude and depth virtually unknown in contemporary poetry.

Menashe’s earnest assumption of the title “poet” has made him something of an anachronism in our professional age. While his contemporaries have garnered the fellowships, prizes, and university jobs that represent success in American poetic culture, poetry has been for him an independent, and ultimately isolating, venture. At almost eighty years old, and with only a fraction of his work in print, he is practically unrecognized, except as a sort of eccentric cult figure, the last West Village bohemian. The poetry, however, rises above this kitschy reputation. Menashe’s tiny lyrics are keenly aware of their author’s obscurity; it suspends them in a timeless sort of space, ballasting them between opposing questions of the same dilemma: is there any point in writing a poem? and is there a point in anything but writing a poem? Consider “At a Standstill”:

That statue, that cast
Of my solitude
Has found its niche
In this kitchen
Where I do not eat
Where the bathtub stands
Upon cat feet—
I did not advance
I cannot retreat


What’s most impressive here is the way in which, in so few lines, Menashe manages to encompass an entire life in poetry. In the first line, the poet’s ambition for immortality is evoked, only to be relegated to the humble surroundings of the prototypical bohemian flat—with its kitchen too small for a table, but just big enough for a bathtub. It is an image that is absurd and yet, with the last line, uncompromising and, one feels, true.

Menashe’s portrayal of his self-as-poet is vulnerable, though never sentimental or narcissistic. A poem like “Morning” speaks movingly to the intimate sorrows of the artist:

I wake and the sky
Is there, intact
The paper is white
The ink is black
My charmed life
Harms no one—
No wife, no son


This leanness is typical of the poems in The Niche Narrows. Menashe returns to the same subjects and words time and again, inhabiting particulars in order to expand their significance. A “charmed life,” here a solitary life, harms no one—the kind of slightly enigmatic statement that many poets are content to pass off as interesting in itself—but Menashe presses the point, defining “no one,” as “No wife, no son.” What’s so poignant about this last line is that, in qualifying the line before it, it both narrows and expands the meaning; at once, we are moved to sympathy for the singular speaker and brought to an understanding about the nature of the poet, the costs of such a life. Craft prevents the meditation from becoming hokey or overly self-conscious: the linked vowel sounds and slant rhymes of “wake” and “paper,” “intact” and “black,” as well as the mixed images of the sky and the writing tablet, set up a composition that is slightly askew. In the last three lines, the rhymes get closer: “charmed” and “harms,” then “one” and “son.” As the sounds come together, so does the picture of this poet, whose reason for being is the same as his reason for being lonely.

In most of Menashe’s poems, there is a deeply grounded sense of humor about the self. Often it returns us to the bodily condition with a sort of droll pathos in which the poet sums up the experience of living and dying in a few matter-of-fact phrases, as in “The Visitation”:

His body ahead
Of him on the bed
He faces his feet
Sees himself dead,
A corpse complete


This is an example of Menashe’s “niche,” the tiny poem which intends to encompass the scope of mortal existence; its narrowing is the approach of death, which brings life into stark focus. In the title poem, the mortal predicament is summed up in eleven words:

The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him


Here, “Hones” and “disclose” describe the body of the poem as well as the body of flesh. The niche is narrowed—visually and sonically—through a series of shortening lines and half-rhymes that hone the general “one” into the particular “him.” It’s a morbid little metaphor of emaciation: the end of the poem is the end of the man.

In his introduction to this volume, Dana Gioia states that “Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed.” Given the fact that Menashe has written poems with such obviously Judeo-Christian titles as “Adam Means Earth,” “Manna,” and “Promised Land”—as well as one that refers, with unchecked intimacy, to Noah’s nipples—this is a reasonable conclusion. With one or two exceptions, though, the overtly religious poems are the most problematic in The Niche Narrows. Those that use too many Biblical references compress meaning and syntax so tightly that they often must be decoded rather than read. Others assume the mannerisms of New Age mysticism, becoming simultaneously emphatic and, well, loopy, as if in creating access for his belief the poet has had to force out all nuances of pathos and wit, those rewards of his best writing.

Nevertheless, Menashe is to be commended for taking the risk of writing poems of outright praise and wonder. He is often capable of achieving an effect that is airy and subtle, as in the aptly titled “Sprite of Delight,” which “Springs, summersaults / Vaults out of sight / Rising self-spun / Weight overcome.” Here, as in other poems-about-poetry such as “Spur of the Moment” and “Walking Stick,” creative power is evoked with both joy and a grounded intelligence. When Menashe’s poems of praise succeed, we are just as rapt in wonder at the way inspiration works through the poet’s mind as he is, as in “Dreams,” where he asks, “What wires lay bare / For this short circuit / Which makes filaments flare—.”

While even Menashe’s most difficult poems have a gentle familiarity to them, they are rarely personal. One of the primary satisfactions of this volume is that no time is wasted getting to know and accept the tastes and preoccupations of the poet; he doesn’t dredge through memories or parade us through his bedroom, and, except as the archetypal mother, father, or friend, he rarely makes mention of specific people or places. His vocabulary is plain—without personality, one might contend. The common nouns are stone, tree, eyes, nose, darkness, light. Common abstractions are Paradise, Solitude, Time, Immortality. In this way, he reminds us of Dickinson, exploiting the duality of simple words and stacking syntax in order to render complex meanings. Yet in Menashe the poems don’t seem as if they are built as scaffolding around existential anguish as they often do in Dickinson. As much as he is a wordsmith and an artist, Menashe is a good son, prone to natural fondness and grief. In “Grief,” he writes:

Disbelief
To begin with—
Later, grief
Taking root
Grapples me
Wherever I am
Branches ram
Me in my bed
You are dead


While it’s not stated, the context of the surrounding poems leads us to believe that this poem is dedicated to one of the poet’s parents, those essential yet unspecific characters who appear throughout the book. We find their influence in a self that has felt itself loved both by the father and the Father, and has created, through poetry, a vigil in order to receive those presences again.

By avoiding explicit autobiographical anecdote and compressing his poems to the point where each word reveals the limits of its meaning, Menashe takes risks that are unfashionable in contemporary terms. But to call him a “difficult” poet would be a misnomer, for there are few poems in The Niche Narrows that require a dictionary or supplemental reading; in fact, the immediate reaction upon reaching the end of a Menashe poem is usually amusement. Afterwards, one basks in the understanding of how simple genuine profundity is. But the “I” in Menashe’s poems, that scribe who is following his true calling, does present a difficult dilemma to contemporary poets—of the kind that requires soul-searching rather than scholarship.

The idea that the existence of a poet is a prerequisite to a poem, and that this implies some confluence of talent, circumstance, and character, is unsettling to us. We have bought into a poetic culture that imitates popular American culture at large—with its cults of personality, its shameless self-marketing, its ethos of maximum productivity, and its surface frenzy—to such a degree that a voice untouched by these factors seems at times naïve, even absurd. That Menashe, who is on the margins of the poetry world, has written good poems about being a poet while so many insiders have become talking heads for the industry begs the question: can “successful” poets speak truthfully to their own condition? If not, po-biz success and poetic integrity may soon become mutually exclusive. Under these circumstances, the pause that Menashe gives is exactly what we need.
Originally Published: October 30, 2005

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/171122

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
No Experience Necessary
BY CHRISTINA PUGH
"In some poetry you feel there is too little lived experience—here you feel there is almost more than you can take in." Such was a blurb I found the other day on the back of a first book of poetry. Read this, and be overwhelmed by experience: on the face of it, a strange way to recommend poems. But on the other hand, I knew I'd seen that blurb before. Even in a poetic climate that supports the cerebral, ludic peregrinations of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, reviewed by Danielle Chapman in the January 2005 issue of this magazine, there is still a sizable minority of poets and readers who come to poetry looking for a measure of "experience"—and what's more, "lived experience." What, in fact, are they really looking for? Is experience quantifiable? Is it equivalent to an empirically exciting life? Does it drive a red Ferrari, or is it a rambling pedestrian with a long white beard? Is there a difference? And when so many come away from American poetry today—particularly from the work of younger poets—with a feeling of disappointment or outrage, is experience what they are really missing?

The category of experience is seldom defined or questioned; as a concept, it's more like a wink or a nudge in the ribs. But those who uphold it as a value seem to want to appeal to a shared sense of humanity—an unspoken agreement that despite our many cultural, racial, sexual, and economic differences, we all are born, live, and die. In this new, graciously multicultural universalism, the category of "experience" wants to provide a comforting sense that we're all in this together—and that we can, at least, agree on what "this" might be. And of course, "experience" wants even more to be the sine qua non for writing the type of poetry that will speak to "people" and not "just poets."

But as the messy legacy of the American poets known as the Confessionals—particularly Lowell, Plath, and Sexton—the thirst for experience reveals its own fundamental contradictions. Plath died at thirty: from the perspective of anyone but the teenaged, how experienced could she really have been? Sexton and Lowell, for their parts, lived the life of economic privilege—which placed them, in Wordsworthian terms, "at a distance from the kind." The writing of both Plath and Sexton was, to a great degree, forged by their struggle with what Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique called "the problem that has no name": the mind-numbing burden of domesticity faced by women in an America that had yet to undergo the changes brought about by Second-Wave feminism. Can this be what is touted as "lived experience"?

The category of experience seems to promise a place for everyone: like Walt Whitman, it wants to invite all of us to dinner. But it's clear that many readers simply can't identify with the life stories of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton. And though one could easily follow R.D. Laing and claim that mental illness itself is a voyage of discovery, it's not clear how such a voyage, as articulated in the work of the Confessionals, would feed into the common construction of experience as a shared and democratic value.

Fascinatingly, the contemporaneous New York School, who were chattier than the Confessionals and just seemed to have a lot more fun, played down the role of experience in writing. As O'Hara so succinctly put it, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." Or Ashbery's ruminations in an interview with Kenneth Koch: "We seem to be determined both to discuss poetry and not to discuss anything at all. This is probably what we do in our poetry. I only wish I knew why we feel it to be necessary."

An even better indictment of experience-as-value comes in Ashbery's "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name." There he inimitably asserts that for the poet, "Certainly whatever funny happens to you/ Is OK." In this mock ars poetica, "whatever" becomes both everything and nothing—and the wisdom to know the difference. Kay Ryan has seconded this motion by pressing "the importance to the poet of avoiding or ignoring Kodak moments." In an essay that celebrates the habitual or "novelty-free life," Ryan lauds the least entropic state of being: "Your memory will be deep, quiet, undifferentiated as a pool. Change will enter and twist like a drop of ink, the tiniest bit of new per old."

Perhaps it is precisely that near-invisible shimmer in the old that draws me to certain poets rather than others. I admit that I'm often thrilled by the poets of no experience: no experience at all, if experience is defined in the popular, unexamined way. For people immune to literature, Emily Dickinson "didn't have a life." After a year at Mount Holyoke, she embarked on what can only be called, experience-wise, an early retirement in her twenties. As for Wallace Stevens, how boring can it be to walk to your job at an accident and indemnity company (in Hartford, no less), year in and year out? From this perspective, both were writing books—or fascicles—on "nothing," much as Flaubert sought to do when he began to incubate the book that would become Madame Bovary. Yet we don't fault these poets for their lack of experience, for their humdrum and muted lives, for not having lived enough in the world (wherever we think that may be). For me, a certain contemporary parallel is found in the marvelous work of Charles Wright, which reads as a paean to the limited-experience life. If read collectively, his selected Negative Blue paints a portrait of someone who has done little more—experientially—than sit alone in his own backyard for decades.

Still, experience has long provided a dubious litmus test for poetry, and not just in the American tradition. When Rilke's friend Ellen Key told him that his work "smacked of the writing desk," she clearly meant that it reflected too little actual experience. The poet's aversion to sustained relationships is well-known, as is his avoidance of service during the First World War. Isn't it funny, then, that Rilke's poetry has been popularly seen—even prescribed—as the poetry of experience: the poetry of weddings, funerals, and, according to Rilke scholar Judith Ryan, German soldiers' comfort at the front during both the First and Second World Wars?

So the poetry that, for some, lacks experience can be embraced as the quintessential poetry of experience by others. And the poetry forged in what we might consider to be genuinely hefty experience—manual labor, for example—can also easily become its own template or formula: something just as repeatable as the oft-lamented "academic" poem. If Wright has repeated himself—much as Dickinson repeated herself—the same could be said of a poet like Philip Levine, who is often looked to as a quintessential contemporary poet of experience. Clearly, then, having "experience" doesn't void the risk of repetition in poems. Poetry that is "novelty-free," in Kay Ryan's terms, may be a function of self-actualization in the work, regardless of how much recognizable experience that work does or does not reflect.

The longer I look, the more the category of "experience" dissolves before my eyes. I'm happy to see that dissolution, since it's a fitting prelude to another intimately related argument: one for the viability of reading as a version of, or a substitute for, "lived experience." Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveler provides a good model for what I'm talking about. There, the allegorical Writer and Reader are two separate people: the first male, the second female. Lately I've envied this Reader her fly-by-night quality, her ability to lose herself so irresponsibly in books. But if I superimpose the one allegorical figure upon the other, I end up with a viscerally viable, albeit cartoonish, prescription for who the writer is—or should be, or could be. Might it be that what is missing in the work of some younger poets is not "experience" at all, but reading that is deep enough to effect changes in the self?

Here is where the university, the proverbial elephant in the room, comes in. Many believe universities fail poets, particularly younger poets, by depriving them of experience. This is said categorically of the MFA and other graduate degrees, as well as of academic positions that now support many poets as teachers and writers. Academia becomes, in this model, a sort of double Procrustean bed. We're told repeatedly that graduate programs in creative writing produce poets who crank out the same, experience-challenged, cookie-cutter verse. But do education and "lived experience" have to be so ineluctably incompatible? That question is almost never asked. And few, if any, seem to wonder whether universities are failing poets by not educating them enough, or widely enough—or later, by requiring them to teach only in the workshop model. What if experience were not the missing ingredient after all?

I've thought a lot about this question because, though I'm hardly leading the escapist life of Calvino's Reader, I too am a Reader of sorts: Reader for this magazine. As such, I see an enormous quantity of work by poets who are hoping for publication. Ironically, it often seems that it's an inability to get past one's own experience that causes many of these poems to founder. For the beginner, it's the rather narcissistic belief that, to switch Ashbery a bit, "whatever melodramatic happens to you/Is OK." But even in certain, yes, more experienced poets, there can be an impulse around the anecdotal—around travel, around the family, around "events"—that, if not reworked in what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called the "internal expansion" of the poem, burns as the steady flame of ordinariness.

What's missing in much of the work I see is an ability to distinguish experience from occasion: what I'll define here as the prime mover of the poem, be it based in the poet's empirical life, in imagination, in the jurr of language, in literary texts. Yes, it can even be anecdotal, as in the infamous "I placed a jar in Tennessee." It's the opening, the antechamber of the poem that invites us into the occasion that will, we hope, master us as readers. Consider these openings—how they happen, and how little you can resist them: "I heard a fly buzz—when I died"; "Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry"; "My black face fades"; "Yes, it's a joke—in the florist's dictionary"; "flower is becoming the graph." Infinite, the snares of occasion. And polyglot. One of them is even taken from the book whose well-intentioned but ultimately misguided blurb I quoted at the outset of this essay.

Though the term may seem old-fashioned to some, occasion manages to crash the party of even the least referential of poetic schools. The best way I know to get a feel for this—what others might call integrity or bloom or motor—is not necessarily to go out and have an exciting life that you can write about in your work. Instead, I think, it's the ability to read widely enough to know which poetic occasions stir you: be they empirical, imaginative, aleatory, linguistic, discursive—and how various and transhistorical are poems' means to stir. So to argue against the litmus test of experience is not necessarily to argue, as did Eliot, for the extinction of the personality. It's also not to claim that I wouldn't drive the red Ferrari, if I had a license. Instead, it's to note that poetic occasion may not always be the result of "lived experience" per se. Understanding this will open the door to the younger poet who, like Mark Yakich, "divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." At the risk of coining yet another new universalism, maybe this is precisely the sort of experience we should all want to have.
Originally Published: October 30, 2005

Though the term may seem old-fashioned to some, occasion manages to crash the party of even the least referential of poetic schools. The best way I know to get a feel for this—what others might call integrity or bloom or motor—is not necessarily to go out and have an exciting life that you can write about in your work. Instead, I think, it's the ability to read widely enough to know which poetic occasions stir you: be they empirical, imaginative, aleatory, linguistic, discursive—and how various and transhistorical are poems' means to stir. So to argue against the litmus test of experience is not necessarily to argue, as did Eliot, for the extinction of the personality. It's also not to claim that I wouldn't drive the red Ferrari, if I had a license. Instead, it's to note that poetic occasion may not always be the result of "lived experience" per se. Understanding this will open the door to the younger poet who, like Mark Yakich, "divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." At the risk of coining yet another new universalism, maybe this is precisely the sort of experience we should all want to have.

Certainly in imaginative poetry one can shine and write great poetry, which appeals to many but the greatest poetry-the most famous poetry came from poets that used their life experiences combined with heart's desires to create masterpieces.
Which is harder to accomplish- something from nothing- "imaginative poetry" or taking that which is a known quantity (LIFE EXPERIENCES) AND WEAVING SUCH INTO TRUE MASTERPIECES?
And who has the authority or enough life validation to declare which is superior. Eliot as great as he was had not ALL the answers--nobody does.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/176084

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Word’s Worth
BY ROB KENNER

“Art” notwithstanding, some poets are creeps. Upon meeting my ten-year-old sister, Lisa, at an Ezra Pound conference in Orono, Maine, Allen Ginsberg asked if she’d lost her cherry yet. I’ve often wished I’d been present to smack those words out of his mouth.

For better or worse, poetry has always been as familiar as breathing to my six siblings and me. As the offspring of a loving, lifelong literary critic, Hugh Kenner, we were used to spontaneous recitations. Stray refrigerator magnet nouns and verbs would mix up with our breakfast cereal. Headlines from the daily news became haikus or, worse, free verse. I considered it perfectly normal to telephone Louis Zukofsky to discuss “similes” for a sixth-grade homework assignment. Lisa once served Basil Bunting’s sake, keeping his goblet filled as he read during that bittersweet Pound conference. In the house where we grew up, a framed William Carlos Williams typescript, signed with his painful post-stroke scrawl, hung where you could examine it while taking a leak.

Of course we watched plenty of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons. But at bedtime, while other kids might be hearing Christopher Robin’s observations on the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, my father and I would learn poems from books that I’ve chosen to hide from my own kids for the time being. The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children were two of our favorites. These were the work of Hillaire Belloc, an early twentieth-century British poet whose verse was “designed for the admonition of children between the ages of eight and fourteen years.” By the time I was seven I could spit out the whole grisly tale of “Jim,” a boy who runs away at the zoo and gets eaten by Ponto the lion:

Now just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels
And then by gradual degrees
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees
Are slowly eaten bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!


Ponto gnawed away until only a “dainty morsel” remained, and then, “the lion, having reached his head/The miserable boy was dead!”

Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t such a leap for me to end up at VIBE magazine, where I’ve worked as an editor since 1993, the year Quincy Jones launched his journal of hip hop culture. Back when Lisa introduced me to L.L. Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, we never doubted that rap was poetry; we had always understood poems to be performances. Although lots of mindless, hurtful crap gets peddled by the corporate entertainment machine, the essence of rap is samizdat poetry. Of course that artistry is lost on many people, blinded as they are by mass-media stereotypes.

It’s an essential part of being human, this need to shape the chaos of life into language and then to fit that mosaic of words into rhythmic patterns. At the end of the day, Nas and Homer are both in the same line of work. Do we disqualify one because he rhymes over a break-beat instead of a lyre? Because one is blind while the other is merely def?

Our father taught my siblings and me that a work of art should reward prolonged attention, a test that the best hip hop passes with ease. These compositions operate on several levels at once: you can dance to the beat, let the verbal flow wash over you, or wear out your rewind button trying to penetrate the encrypted language. With the best MCs (as most serious rappers prefer to be called) there is no lack of hidden riches. Where Milton may shout out Dante and the Book of Revelation, Jay-Z alludes to The Notorious B.I.G. and Big Daddy Kane, all while taunting rival rappers, social critics, and law enforcement officials. In “Agent Orange” Pharoahe Monch pisses on the White House lawn, then lets the double entendres fly:

I threw a rock and I ran... Y’all wanna ask me who sane?
These biological gases are eating my brain
It’s a political grab bag to rape mother earth
Thirty seconds after they bagged dad for what he’s worth.


I once had the good fortune to edit Harry Allen’s “Hypertext,” an attempt to unpack all the embedded subliminal references and nuances of craftsmanship in “Niggas Bleed,” a single rap by the late Christopher Wallace, AKA The Notorious B.I.G. The final manuscript—fragments of which appeared in the March 1998 issue of VIBE—ran way past twenty thousand words. The complexity of Wallace’s rap was awe-inspiring, especially considering the fact that he wrote nothing down, recording all his rhymes “off the dome.”

Meanwhile, millions of kids around the world can recite Eminem’s latest verse by heart, although they couldn’t care less what any doctoral candidate thinks about it. “See I’m a poet to some/A regular modern-day Shakespeare,” Eminem muses on “Renegade,” a dazzling duet from Jay-Z’s landmark album The Blueprint. Because it’s not exactly cool for any MC to care about that sort of thing—let alone a white boy—he backpedals a few lines later: “I’m just a kid from the gutter/Making this butter offa these bloodsuckers.” But go through his raps and Eminem’s artistic aspirations are undeniable. Tupac Shakur, hip hop’s tragic anti-hero, struggled with a similar internal conflict. Only after his murder at age twenty-five did his legions of fans learn how much he loved acting classes and writing poetry.

Mercenary motives are reliable alibis for the preservation of icy machismo. (“Words worth a million like I’m rapping over platinum teeth,” Jay-Z once boasted.) But other MCs are willing to admit that it’s not necessarily all about the Benjamins. Check Common’s new album Be, especially “The Corner,” an ode to the urban crossroads that features the seventies proto-rap crew, The Last Poets. Some MCs actually covet critical respect. “I’m trying to show these poetry niggas that you can be poetic and into high fashion at the same time,” the Chicago-born bard Kanye West told VIBE: “These people think you need to live on a rock to be poetic. I’m actually consulting with poets as I write this album. Like the way niggas got vocal coaches, I got a poetry coach.”

Reports of the declining state of poetry have been greatly exaggerated. Much of the mail we receive at VIBE (especially the letters stamped with a prison ID) contains loose-leaf sheets of hand-written poetry. Is this what the poet Allen Grossman had in mind when he called poetry “the last recourse before despair”? Or what Lucille Clifton was getting at when she wrote:

...come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.


Maybe it was like that with my dear friend Catherine Barnett. We worked together for years at Art & Antiques magazine, and kept in touch after I went on to VIBE. I was aware that she had begun writing and teaching poetry, but never knew what or why until the publication of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever encountered. This series of poems chronicles the death of the poet’s young nieces in a plane crash, registering the family’s disbelief, grief, and—worst of all—the moving on. The cumulative power of each carefully constructed verse is still quite overwhelming for me. In each cluster of particulars, I recognize my friend’s mind struggling to shape all the brutal details into some semblance of meaning. I think that’s what my father meant when he wrote, in this magazine, that “art is a fake but when vital has death somewhere at its roots.”

Hugh Kenner was no hip hop head. His auditory sense was severely compromised for most of his life, and those powerful hearing aids of his would have made listening to one of my favorite mixtapes a painful experience. As far as I know, his only exposure to rap lyrics came while watching the first annual VIBE Awards on TV with the closed captions turned on. Mom and Lisa sat with him as Andre 3000 enjoined the crowd to “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Dad expressed his sympathy that I had to attend this event and then died four days later of heart failure. But I still believe that he’d fully endorse my defense of the ol’ boom-bap. After all, consider his epitaph: “What thou lov’st well remains. The rest is dross.”
Originally Published: November 28, 2005

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/176628#guide

Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi”
In the realm of the world-class talkers.

BY W. S. DI PIERO

It’s past midnight in Florence’s red-light district in the mid-15th century, and a man dressed as a monk has just been strong-armed by the police and questioned about his presence in such a place. Wait, he says, I can explain everything.

That’s where we find ourselves at the beginning of Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi.” What follows is a wild improvisation on assorted themes—lust, want, religion, art-making, and the nature of beauty. The good Fra Lippo—Carmelite Friar and in-house painter for Cosimo De’ Medici—does explain his presence, explains in fact pretty much his entire life and art, over the course of nearly 400 lines. He is, like other of Browning’s monologists, a world-class talker.

Browning wrote many kinds of poems, but the ones I like best and have been rereading for years are the dramatic monologues, in which the ventriloquist poet throws his voice and we hear a dummy (usually an actual historical personage) talk itself into existence. Although the speaker usually directs his gab to a particular person or persons, he may as well be talking to himself. The Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess” is in love with the sound of his own voice and its homicidal menace. A dramatic monologue also lets the poet shape and set loose a voice that reveals something that matters not just to the speaker but to Browning, too. The “unknown painter” whose voice we hear in “Pictor Ignotus” is soured by what he feels to be his contemporaries’ indifference toward his work. In every monologue we hear the speaker (or what I think of as the consciousness of the poem) working through a crisis, conducting an argument, or rationalizing inclinations, actions, and beliefs.

Some of these poems, such as “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Pictor Ignotus,” are about painting and are spoken by artists, which makes them ekphrastic poems; that is, they have to do with images—ekphrasis is Greek for description. Even those not in artists’ voices usually involve art. The dying ecclesiast in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” whose thoughts should be concentrated on last things and the afterlife, obsesses about architecture, stonemasonry, and sculpture.

Every Browning monologue discloses an idiosyncratic, preoccupied mind, and the imaginative arc that connects us to that mind is the same arc we make when reading Shakespeare: it’s a character that speaks to us, not the poet, though it’s the poet who gives spirit and voice to the character’s passions. Browning, like Shakespeare, is everywhere and nowhere in the voices he creates. In “Fra Lippo Lippi,” he has his character argue for the realistic style developed in Renaissance art because he wants to make a case for the vivid textures and psychological realism of his own poems, a prime instance of which is the very monologue we’re reading. In this and other poems, we’re suddenly made eavesdroppers to an already strung-out dramatic situation; it’s like hearing one side of a telephone conversation we’ve tuned into after it has already started.

Browning takes nasty delight in dropping us into situations that engage moral questions attached to rough, unpleasant realities, though his tone is high-spirited and racy, not morose. “Andrea del Sarto,” spoken by the 16th-century artist described by one of his contemporaries as “the faultless painter,” starts with del Sarto’s attempt to have a “relationship talk” with his wife: “But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once.” A few years earlier, Lucrezia persuaded him to return from the Court of France (where he’d been invited and won acclaim and prosperity) to Florence—that is, to her and her claims on him—which he fears may have cost him the supreme fame of a Michelangelo or Raphael. We follow the movements of his mind as it dances through various subjects: good technique, nostalgia, fame, and covetousness. We learn that he’s henpecked but loves his wife (in part because she’s a reliable model), that he’s sensitive to personal and professional slights, and that he’s not entirely convinced that being a “perfect painter” is such a good thing after all.

In “My Last Duchess,” the greatest modern poem I know about, the acidic, potentially murderous dynamics of jealousy, the duke of Ferrara is showing his art collection to the representative of a nobleman whose daughter the duke is betrothed to. The collection’s centerpiece is a portrait of his lately deceased duchess, who in life—the duke lets the go-between (and us) know—distributed her attention to the world too indiscriminately to please the egomaniacal owner “of a nine-hundred-years-old name.” Was the duchess superficial and flirty? Did she smile too much at everything alike? We have only the duke’s word for it. There’s no ambiguity about the duke’s solution, though: “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Listening to him, we’re like Othello depending on an Iago for our intelligence.

To read these poems is to experience how a unique consciousness answers to reality. Whatever the monologist says about the world of circumstance is not a shared truth, it’s a person-specific interpretation. Every detail he chooses to include reveals something essential about character. Fra Lippo’s improvised self-defense becomes an eloquent, at times hilarious resume of his orphaned, street-urchin beginnings and how those circumstances shaped his art. This painter, so gifted at rendering psychological subtleties in physiognomies, was once a starving kid who watched people’s faces “to know who will fling / The bits of half-stripped grape-bunches he desires, / And who will curse him or kick him for his pains.” Want taught him to value the pleasures of the flesh. The deprived child grew to become a man who, though a member of a religious order, chases girls. He’s one of several clerics Browning loved to tease for their randy worldliness. The dying priest in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” moans reverentially about the blue vein in the Blessed Virgin’s breast.

It’s not only the what of the monologues that wakes us into recognitions of character. The how matters just as much. Browning was vilified by critics for obscurity and abused as a language mangler. The speed of the thoughts that issue from his speakers’ mouths sometimes blurs clarity. But the stream of consciousness is a crooked stream, and in the monologues Browning intentionally allows his speakers to indulge in interruptions and gnarly obliqueness. We have to pay attention to his speakers’ patterns of reasoning, however corrupted or manipulative. (Browning’s speakers always represent their own interests, as we do when we conduct monologues in life.) He varies effects from poem to poem. “My Last Duchess,” a viper of a poem, its beautifully reasoned discourse venomous with insinuation at every turn, is quite unlike the twisty confusions of the bishop’s last thoughts on his deathbed, which snap back and forth from his envy of another cleric’s tomb to his resentment toward his sons (don’t ask) to his obsession with lapis lazuli and correct Latin.

The monologues are crafted to reveal the moral character of the speakers, and the crafting depends on the sonorities and rhythms of versification. Browning favored the blank-verse line—unrhymed iambic pentameter. In its stiffest form, with its ten syllable and alternating stressed/unstressed units, the line would sound like “I am, I am, I am, I am, I am.” Gifted versifiers such as Browning work endless variations on this rudimentary pattern. When Fra Lippo gets serious about the relation of art-making to appetite, his meters turn blunt: “This world’s no blot for us, / Nor blank; It means intensely, and means good: / To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

But when he describes how, while painting night after night all those saints and Madonnas, his attention was drawn by a sound outside his window, the meters dramatize the excitement and arrested attention he felt when he looked out and saw “Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight—three slim shapes.” The first half of the line prances toward those last three monosyllabic attention-stoppers. When he rhymed, he could do so to chilling effect. The rhyming couplets spoken by the smug, righteous duke in “My Last Duchess” growl with wounded vanity: “She liked whate’er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.”

Selfhood in Browning is a mass of disheveled fragments of experience, and the monologues give form to what it feels like to actually live them, what it feels like to work at understanding meaning, with little more to go on than memory, desire, and circumstance. He loves to rake life’s casual messiness across apparent certitude and aphoristic confidence. “Andrea del Sarto” contains Browning’s most famous maxim: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for.” A sparkling nugget, that one. But all around it one hears about the dozens of tiny rips and rents in del Sarto’s marriage, artistic practice, and worldly career. Readers like me who savor these poems go to them not for confirmation of what we already know but to experience the lurching, unstable process of making sense of things.

Selfhood in Browning is a mass of disheveled fragments of experience, and the monologues give form to what it feels like to actually live them, what it feels like to work at understanding meaning, with little more to go on than memory, desire, and circumstance. He loves to rake life’s casual messiness across apparent certitude and aphoristic confidence. “Andrea del Sarto” contains Browning’s most famous maxim: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for.” A sparkling nugget, that one. But all around it one hears about the dozens of tiny rips and rents in del Sarto’s marriage, artistic practice, and worldly career. Readers like me who savor these poems go to them not for confirmation of what we already know but to experience the lurching, unstable process of making sense of things.

^^^^^^^^^^ AND HERE YOU HAVE IT. Why many poets write and why many poets are crazy, methinks.
And I dare to include myself in that broad declaration!-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/177209

The Immense Intimacy, the Intimate Immensity
BY EDWARD HIRSCH

The profound intimacy of lyric poetry makes it perilous because it gets so far under the skin, into the skin. “For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences,” Rilke wrote in a famous passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I am convinced the kind of experience—the kind of knowledge—one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The spiritual life wants articulation—it wants embodiment in language. The physical life wants the spirit. I know this because I hear it in the words, because when I liberate the message in the bottle a physical—a spiritual—urgency pulses through the arranged text. It is as if the spirit grows in my hands. Or the words rise in the air. “Roots and wings,” the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez writes, “But let the wings take root and the roots fly.”

There are people who defend themselves against being “carried away” by poetry, thus depriving themselves of an essential aspect of the experience. But there are others who welcome the transport poetry provides. They welcome it repeatedly. They desire it so much they start to crave it daily, nightly, nearly abject in their desire, seeking it out the way hungry people seek food. It is spiritual sustenance to them. Bread and wine. A way of transformative thinking. A method of transfiguration. There are those who honor the reality of roots and wings in words, but also want the wings to take root, to grow into the earth, and the roots to take flight, to ascend. They need such falling and rising, such metaphoric thinking. They are so taken by the ecstatic experience—the overwhelming intensity—of reading poems they have to respond in kind. And these people become poets.

Emily Dickinson is one of my models of a poet who responded completely to what she read. Here is her compelling test of poetry:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there any other way.
Dickinson recognizes true poetry by the extremity—the actual physical intensity—of her response to it. It’s striking that she doesn’t say she knows poetry because of any intrinsic qualities of poetry itself. Rather, she recognizes it by contact; she knows it by what it does to her, and she trusts her own response. Of course, only the strongest poetry could effect such a response. Her aesthetic is clear: always she wants to be surprised, to be stunned, by what one of her poems calls “Bolts of Melody.”

Dickinson had a voracious appetite for reading poetry. She read it with tremendous hunger and thirst—poetry was sustenance to her. Much has been made of her reclusion, but, as her biographer Richard Sewall suggests, “She saw herself as a poet in the company of the Poets—and, functioning as she did mostly on her own, read them (among other reasons) for company.” He also points to Dickinson’s various metaphors for the poets she read. She called them “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul,” her “Kinsmen of the Shelf,” her “enthralling friends, the immortalities.” She spoke of the poet’s “venerable Hand” that warmed her own. Dickinson was a model of poetic responsiveness because she read with her whole being.

One of the books Emily Dickinson marked up, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), recommends that people read for “soul-culture.” I like that dated nineteenth-century phrase because it points to the depth that can be shared by the community of solitaries who read poetry. I, too, read for soul-culture—the culture of the soul. That’s why the intensity of engagement I have with certain poems, certain poets, is so extreme. Reading poetry is for me an act of the most immense intimacy, of intimate immensity. I am shocked by what I see in the poem but also by what the poem finds in me. It activates my secret world, commands my inner life. I cannot get access to that inner life any other way than through the power of the words themselves. The words pressure me into a response, and the rhythm of the poem carries me to another plane of time, outside of time.

Rhythm can hypnotize and alliteration can be almost hypnotic. A few lines from Tennyson’s The Princess can still send me into a kind of trance:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmurings of innumerable bees.
And I can still get lost when Hart Crane links the motion of a boat with an address to his lover in part 2 of “Voyages”:

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
The words move ahead of the thought in poetry. The imagination loves reverie, the daydreaming capacity of the mind set in motion by words, by images.

As a reader, the hold of the poem over me can be almost embarrassing because it is so childlike, because I need it so much to give me access to my own interior realms. It plunges me into the depths (and poetry is the literature of depths) and gives a tremendous sense of another world growing within. (“There is another world and it is in this one,” Paul Éluard wrote.) I need the poem to enchant me, to shock me awake, to shift my waking consciousness and open the world to me, to open me up to the world—to the word—in a new way. I am pried open. The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being. And yet the work of art is beyond existential embarrassment. It is mute and plaintive in its calling out, its need for renewal. It needs a reader to possess it, to be possessed by it. Its very life depends upon it.


Originally Published: January 23, 2006

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This is a very informative article both on Emily Dickinson and on why we poets write.
Even despite criticisms we write!
Ever notice how painters/artists putting color on paper rarely get such criticisms?--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/177613

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern
BY GEORGE SZIRTES
The following opinions are frequently put forward regarding “form” in poetry:

1 Traditional forms are marks of conservatism embodying reactionary values, whereas what is truly valuable in art is what is forward-looking, cutting-edge, challenging;

2 Rhyme, form, and all other such devices are agents of closure, and closure is the mark of repressive, authoritarian societies;

3 Versification is a form of decoration, bourgeois obfuscation, a pretty way of saying something that could be muscular, authentic, straight;

4 Versification is a form of male intellectual abstraction, and antithetical to the play of ecriture feminine;

5 There are few rhymes in English, so re-using the narrow range of the same ones is predictable. Rhyme is therefore the essence of cliché;

6 Versification, particularly metre and rhyme, hampers the free play of the imagination.

The first four objections are essentially political from a left point of view (anarchist rather, though those who support them profess to be of the left) and may be considered as a group. The fifth and sixth are more aesthetic or technical in nature and might be adopted by the right.

An easy reply to the first might be that versification was common to all societies at all times, and that the word “traditional” as used here has little meaning, except as some kind of antithesis to another blanket term: “modernist.” Modernism, as used now, comprises a wide range of practices. If employed in a stricter historical sense, one might ask why a movement that began a hundred or so years ago should be thought to be the last word on anything. Repeating tired “modernist” gestures is perhaps the easiest, most conservative option.

One might go on to argue that closure is not the easy option it is thought to be. A bad closure is not a closure but someone waving goodbye when they haven’t in fact gone anywhere. A good closure might simply mean the sense that an object has become distinct from the person regarding or holding it. The closure in this sense is not an authoritarian gesture: on the contrary it is letting the object go.

Poetry is never a pretty way of saying anything that might be said straight. It is unparaphrasable, or, insofar as it may be paraphrased, it is sold short. Is someone seriously going to contend that all the great verse of the centuries which employs meter and rhyme would be far better paraphrased and digested? I don’t think so. Verse is not decoration: it is structural. It is a forming principle and works at depth.

As to notions of versification being an arid male intellectual pursuit, I wonder what we make of Akhmatova, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Hacker? Does the female mind, if we can isolate such a thing, abhor patterns? What of all those quilts, flower schemes, and fancy dances?

Sure, rhyme can be predictable. The good poet’s job is to make it less so. On the other hand rhyme is also a mnemonic and an early pleasure. Rhyme is an extraordinary and surprising coincidence.

On the last point, I would contend that the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination.


* * *



Having set out six brief objections and six possible counter-arguments, I want to exercise my poetic right and talk a little more figuratively now. Perhaps I might begin with language itself.

My personal sense of language probably has its roots in my family’s transplantation to England and our complete, abrupt switchover to English in 1956. I cannot help feeling that what language theorists tell us must be true, that language is a very thin integument or skin stretched over a mass of inchoate impressions, desires, and anxieties. I cannot help feeling that the gap between signifier and signified is potentially enormous, and that the whole structure of grammar and syntax is a kind of illusion that hides this unpleasant fact from us.

Thin as it may be, however, language is a wonderful catcher and refractor of light, and has, in fact, all the psychological, intellectual, emotional, and sensory qualities one could wish for or imagine, for it is essentially a product of the imagination. Of imagination and memory, I should say, because of course language has a history of usage without which it would be almost useless. Imagination and memory are the central driving forces of poetry: poetry, one might say, is imagination and memory concentrated in language.

A tight skin over chaos: a skim of meaning over meaninglessness. There is an image in Edmund Blunden’s poem, “The Midnight Skaters,” of people wheeling and gliding over the thin ice of a village pond, under which lurks the figure of death who “With but a crystal parapet/Between, he has his engines set.” In response to which the poet exhorts the skaters to “... reel and pass,/And let him hate you through the glass.”

Blunden is a poet of the First World War and the years after, but the power of the ice image in his poem remains, for me, associated not only with the triumph of grace and courage over danger, but with the triumph of meaning and structure over chaos and meaninglessness, and also with the triumph of civilized values over barbarity. I think here of the barbarity that overtook my parents’ generation, that is never as far from us as we believe or hope.

I should say at this point that, instinctively, I have little faith in the benignity of nature, that great good green thing that gives us earthquakes and tsunamis as readily as it gives us daisies and nightingales. I don’t believe man is a bad blight on good nature: I believe he/she is part of nature and shares nature’s qualities. Between Versailles and the rainforest is a vast range of human interventions that move and delight me because I can identify with the instincts that created them.

What I would like to propose here is the notion of poetic form as an act of courage and grace, the wheeling of the skater on the ice, the tightrope walker juggling over Niagara, the builder of frail bridges across dark spaces who is not so very different from the spider spinning a web (a structured web, mind you) from his own body.


* * *



Those images of balance and grace over chasms of various sorts must correspond with elements of my understanding of the world: that the raw material we are given is magnificent but not necessarily well disposed to us, and that, to persist with the Levi-Strauss terms, one has somehow to cook it. This isn’t because we are epicures or restaurant critics, but because cooking is as magnificent as the material it works on.

You could argue that the desire for form or pattern springs out of fear, though I would prefer to say apprehension. Apprehension, desire, and love form a triad—the third term being the cooked version of the first two. The spider’s web is the cooked version of spider spit, the bee’s hive is the cooked version of the bee’s secretions, the sentences I am writing right now are deeply cooked versions of instincts that struggle towards thought. Nor have they been cooked by me alone out of nothing, since, as an inquirer into this area of experience, I have been joined by all other formers of instinct into language.

Not by me alone, then. One of the other attractions of form is community. If I write a sonnet, it has communion with other sonnets littering the sonnet landscape. It calls to them and they call to it. They do not necessarily huddle together or wear uniforms but they are aware of each other’s presence. They are not alone in the world. Nor have I had entirely to reconstruct or reinvent them. That which is given in them is available to me, and my task is to feed them fresh life. There is a complex range of sonnets out there, and while I may note the clear division between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean, I do not forget Donne or Keats or Wordsworth or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or John Berryman or Robert Lowell or Seamus Heaney or Tony Harrison, for that matter. And having translated a number of the Hungarian Ottó Orbán’s Lowellian sonnets, they have established themselves as important features in the same terrain.

And so it is with other historical forms, such as terza rima, with its narrative ABA BCB CDC chains and Dantesque smell of sulphur and sadness.

The community is, by its nature, a community of ghosts. One of my favourite images of the artistic act is from Emily Dickinson, who said that art was a house that tried to be haunted. Each artist—but since we are talking of poetry here, let us say each poet—builds some kind of house, the point of the house being to entice the ghost in. My own house is what I am inclined by history and instinct to build, but the ghost it is trying to attract is related to those of other writers of similar predicaments and temperaments. I think I can vaguely see my house as a series of rooms arranged in the form of a tenement block of the kind that seems almost to sing to me in Budapest. I do very much suspect that I am, in some sense, erecting the buildings my own lost selves might have inhabited.

The point then is to get that ghost in, for your house is nothing but a hollow shell without it. I know these are analogies, for they convey something of the power and gravity of poetry. Form, too, is a house that tries to be haunted, and form-with-history is the house that longs for more than just the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

But there are delights and games as well as ghosts.


* * *



The first rhymes we hear are in the cot or at our mother’s knee. They are a mixture of the lulling and the playful. The lulling approximates to the predictable heartbeat, the playful to the leap of surprise. These are the earliest physical maps of poetry: the even road, the running stream, the tumbling of pebbles through the blood. Reassurance, progress, delight.

Rhyme can be delight in much the same way as any delicious accident can. How strange that “particle” should rhyme with “article”; how outrageous that “intellectual” should rhyme with “hen pecked you all” (both examples from Byron’s “Don Juan”). The delight of finding unlikely couplings reminds us of the delight of fitting any one thing to any other in childhood, or of the simple pleasures of playing Snap. The pleasure resides in the odds being stacked against the desired coincidence. The first such against-the-odds coincidence might be the matching of a word to its referent. Make that sound, says mother, and you will get the object. So the strange sound meets the desired object much like the surrealist sewing machine meets the umbrella on the operating table.

Somewhere at the heart of language is an initial dislocation that is stitched up (I use the term advisedly) by an apparently arbitrary suture that makes for laughter and disquiet, the laughter of relief that things are not doomed to be dislocated, the laughter of surprise that the dislocation is healed in such remarkable fashion, the laughter of triumph that healing has been achieved, and the laughter of irony that such healing is a clever, disquieting, but hardly permanent device.

Rhyme and pattern as play are part of the spontaneous overflow of pleasure at the sheer existence of anything. They are aspects of the comedy of the human situation. Discovering a pattern or a coincidence can be the beginnings of religious vision or, once revealed to be artificial, simply the occasion of laughter.

The Victorians loved language games: acrostics, double sonnets, puns, nonsense verse, parody, shaped poems, echoes, puzzles. They worked so hard at it that some of their productions seem rather labored now. We prefer our laughter less dutiful. We are more aware of the spaciness, airiness, weightlessness of existence than they were, but patterns still beguile us. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin may be too sophisticated, but a decent hip-hop lyric still aims at some pretty tall rhymes. What is cool but significant lightness?


Rhyme can be unexpected salvation, the paper nurse that somehow, against all the odds, helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature. Knowing that rhyme might become part of the field of poetic expectation, we strive to make its arrival as unexpected and therefore as angelic as possible, and, in so doing, we discover more than we knew. Rhyme can be an aid to invention rather than a bar to it. It is an aid because it forces us into corners where we have to act and take the best available course out. In the process of seeking it, we bump up against possibilities we would not have chosen were we in control of the process.

Another analogy: the dance. Imagine a formal dance. Your partner is language. You are not the leading partner in this dance, in which there is no clear leader—if there were, it would be language—but you have to respond to each other’s movements with as much grace as you can muster. You may have chosen to perform a waltz, a fox-trot, a tango, or any other set dance. There are certain determined moves here, and the clumsy dancer will have all his or her time cut out just trying to follow them according to those black and white feet depicted in the diagrams. The pattern must be kept in mind but may be varied, and still leaves room to invent, out of necessity, that whole vocabulary of complementary gestures and moves that soon stop being complementary and become essence, so that the black and white foot diagrams are simply the condition that brings the essence about. That essence may well be art. That invention is the requirement of pattern.

So why do we insist on believing that our solemn faces and grand intentions are all that matter? That the arbitrary gaiety of language has nothing useful to offer us?

None of this is to decry so-called “free verse,” which is, as has been pointed out, never “free” to those who use it well. I don’t want to fight yesterday’s battles all over again. I would prefer to offer some arguments that may be attractive in today’s conditions, not in 1912. Milton thought rhyme a pain, and so, occasionally, did Blake, not to forget Whitman, Williams, Sandburg, the Beats, etc., all of which shows that one needn’t be carrying a metronome or a rhyme-testing device at all times. But rhyme and pattern work, and they work because of where we are, not somewhere else. And I have not forgotten disquiet. How indeed could I? Nor do I think the implications of these technicalities stop at poetry, if only because poetry does not stop at poetry. As the late Bill Shankly said: football isn’t a game of life and death. It’s more important than that.


* * *



“The music of what happens”: counterpoint, sonority.

The phrase is used by James Stephens and also by Seamus Heaney, (“And that moment when the bird sings very close/To the music of what happens”). It is the title of an anthology of poems from the Listener magazine, edited by Derwent May and of a book of criticism by Helen Vendler.

The phrase “the music of what happens” might refer to a hidden and mystical system of high order, as in Heaney, or to the “music” of the arbitrary, as in John Cage. Its roots are certainly Celtic. For me, the music of poetry lies in what I think of as counterpoint: the counterpoint between the line and the sentence. It was Frost in one of his letters who suggested that the basic unit of the poem was the sentence rather than the line or the word, a typically robust piece of Frostian doctrine. After all, the poem on the page is recognized as such by its arrangement into lines, and Frost himself was a pretty regular user of metrical forms and rhymes, features that follow from the line unit.

The rhythm of the line is directed by mood and movement, the length of the line by breath. It is in the line and that regular collection of lines, the stanza, that poetry is closest to song—and often is song: “Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king” (Nashe), “Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet” (Campion), “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” (Herrick), to take a few early examples; but moving on to Tennyson, Housman, Brecht, Auden, James Simmonds, whoever. The line will make its own music too, with or without instruments: “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” is deep sonorous music, as is much of Tennyson, despite what Tom Paulin says to the contrary. In fact, one must make an argument for any line of any poem to possess a certain sonority in its pace, its consonant and vowel music, in its caesurae and alliterations.

I sometimes think of a good line as a mouth dance, requiring the mouth to undertake a variety of movements that might well imitate expressions of human emotions. Certainly the mouth can sound cello, violin, flute, trumpet or indeed most string or wind instruments.

The roundness, the fullness, the statement of a sonorous end-stopped line provides a certain security and satisfaction. It also makes life easier for the popular musician and singer for whom time signatures are the stuff/staff/stave of life. The full end-stopped line is therefore well adapted to the usual concerns of song: narrative, mood, address. Song doesn’t do ideas or objects particularly well though, so its idea-content tends towards cliché—towards, at best, the strengths of cliché, which are trust, communality, and proverbialness. You might just as easily be singing the “Horst Wessel Song” as “Carrickfergus,” but that’s the chance you take. I would not willingly forego the delights of “Carrickfergus” because there’s an outside chance of it becoming a Nazi theme song, but a certain distrust tells me that the devil is likely to have some if not all the good tunes. The distrust of closure in an end-stopped line of poetry may well be linked to such suspicion.

A suspicion I share, as I have already said. Once you introduce enjambment, you complicate matters by resisting the natural fullness, or, as it may sometimes seem, the plumpness of the line. But you have to be careful since enjambments are noticeable. They draw attention to themselves and a particularly violent one is not unlike breaking a limb (or jambe) or even, at times, your neck. The best enjambments spice things up; they put, if you like, a snap in the poetic journey, keep you on your toes. Spectacular effects can be achieved in this way; separate the word “steep” at the end of the last line of a stanza from the word “fall” at the beginning of the first line of the next stanza and you really have enacted a falling, though you still have to gather that effect back into the body of the poem as a whole.

But Frost’s notion is not about effects as such. For him it is about naturalness, the assurance that no damned quack-doctor of pretty phrases is going to put one over on him. Out of the naturalness springs the music of counterpoint, which is not an arbitrary meeting of differences but the accommodation of two different expectations that act, literally, in concert.

This counterpoint produces a flexible poetics. If your mind is as liable to lurch and skip as mine is, a flexible poetics can be very useful, for it accommodates the lurches in its sentence structure while keeping a reasonably rigorous set of expectations in its linear structure. It is, to return to the very top of my argument, not a tyranny (no one accuses free verse of being a version of rampant individualist capitalism) but a society with a constitution. It is capable of surprising through its narrative sequence via the sentence, while offering reassurance through rhyme, meter, and stanza—which can, of course, supply their own surprises by way of wit.

Counterpoint, flexibility, and freedom with a constitution don’t seem dated ideals to me. Of course they are not the only available model in this line, but they are not secondhand goods. To mount a defense of them on what seem to me still-valid grounds is not to launch an attack on any other kind of verse. There may be a certain ritual quality in the manner of formal verse, but I observe the formalities in martial arts movies and note how the audience responds to them.

Personal form, of course, is a personal solution, insofar as it is a solution, for solutions sooner or later produce their own resistance. That’s the nature of the poetic enterprise.

You don’t have to dance like this, there are plenty of other dances; you don’t have to jive, you don’t have to tango, and it may take a little time of stumbling over your feet to learn, but it’s exciting once you’ve got it. It’s not going to go away.

Originally Published: February 1, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...spired-it.html

The remarkable story behind Rudyard Kipling's 'If' - and the swashbuckling renegade who inspired it
By GEOFFREY WANSELL
UPDATED: 20:11 EST, 15 February 2009


This week, Rudyard Kipling's If, that epic evocation of the British virtues of a 'stiff upper lip' and stoicism in the face of adversity, will once again be named as the nation's favourite poem.
The choice will certainly reignite the debate about whether it is, in fact, a great poem - which T. S. Eliot insisted it was not, describing it instead as 'great verse' - or a 'good bad' poem, as Orwell called it.
Indeed, when it was last acclaimed as our favourite 14 years ago, one newspaper dismissed it as 'jingoistic nonsense', while another praised it as 'unforgettable'.
What is not in doubt is that Kipling's four eight-line stanzas of advice to his son, written in 1909, have inspired the nation for a century.

Two of its most resonant lines, 'If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same', stand above the players' entrance to the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
My own father gave a copy to me when I was ten and I carried it around in my wallet for the next 15 years. He felt it was the perfect advice for a son born at the end of the last world war, who could not know what triumphs and disasters lay ahead.
But few of the thousands who have voted for If as their favourite poem (in a poll for radio station Classic FM) know the remarkable story that lies behind the lines published in Kipling's collection of short stories and poems, Rewards And Fairies, in 1910.
For the unlikely truth is that they were composed by the Indian-born Kipling to celebrate the achievements of a man betrayed and imprisoned by the British Government - the Scots-born colonial adventurer Dr Leander Starr Jameson.
Although it may not seem so to the millions who can recite its famous first line ('If you can keep your head when all about you'), If is also a bitter condemnation of the British Government led by Lord Salisbury, and the duplicity of its Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, for covertly supporting Dr Jameson's raid against the Boers in South Africa's Transvaal in 1896, only to condemn him when the raid failed.
Kipling was a friend of Jameson and was introduced to him, so scholars believe, by another colonial friend and adventurer: Cecil Rhodes, the financier and statesman who extracted a vast fortune from Britain's burgeoning African empire by taking substantial stakes in both diamond and gold mines in southern Africa.
In Kipling's autobiography, Something Of Myself, published in 1937, the year after his death at the age of 70, he acknowledges the inspiration for If in a single reference: 'Among the verses in Rewards was one set called If - they were drawn from Jameson's character, and contained counsels of perfection most easy to give.'

But to explain the nature of Kipling's admiration for Jameson, we need to return to the veldt of southern Africa in the last years of the 19th century.
What was to become South Africa was divided into two British colonies (the Cape Colony and Natal) and two Boer republics (the Orange Free State and Transvaal). Transvaal contained 30,000 white male voters, of Dutch descent, and 60,000 white male 'Uitlanders', primarily British expatriates, whom the Boers had disenfranchised from voting.
Rhodes, then Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, wanted to encourage the disgruntled Uitlanders to rebel against the Transvaal government. He believed that if he sent a force of armed men to overrun Johannesburg, an uprising would follow. By Christmas 1895, the force of 600 armed men was placed under the command of Rhodes's old friend, Dr Jameson.
Back in Britain, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, father of future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had encouraged Rhodes's plan.
But when he heard the raid was to be launched, he panicked and changed his mind, remarking: 'If this succeeds, it will ruin me. I'm going up to London to crush it.'
Chamberlain ordered the Governor General of the Cape Colony to condemn the 'Jameson Raid' and Rhodes for planning it. He also instructed every British worker in Transvaal not to support it.
That was behind the scenes. On the Transvaal border, the impetuous Jameson was growing frustrated by the politicking between London and Cape Town, and decided to go ahead regardless.
On December 29, 1895, he led his men across the Transvaal border, planning to race to Johannesburg in three days - but the raid failed, miserably.
The Boer government's troops tracked Jameson's force from the moment it crossed the border and attacked it in a series of minor skirmishes that cost the raiders vital supplies, horses and indeed the lives of a handful of men, until on the morning of January 2, Jameson was confronted by a major Boer force.
After seeing the Boers kill 30 of his men, Jameson surrendered, and he and the surviving raiders were taken to jail in Pretoria. The raiders never reached Johannesburg and there

The Boer government handed the prisoners, including Jameson, over to the London government for trial. A few days after the raid, the German Kaiser sent a telegram congratulating President Kruger's Transvaal government on its success in suppressing the uprising.
When this was disclosed in the British Press, a storm of anti-German feeling was stirred and Jameson found himself lionised by London society. Fierce anti-Boer and anti-German feelings were inflamed, which soon became known as 'jingoism'.
Jameson was sentenced to 15 months for leading the raid, and the Transvaal government was paid almost £1million in compensation by the British South Africa Company. Cecil Rhodes was forced to step down as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.
Jameson never revealed the extent of the British Government's support for the raid. This has led a string of Kipling scholars to point out that the poem's lines 'If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you' were designed specifically to pay tribute to the courage and dignity of Jameson's silence.
Typical of his spirit, Jameson was not broken by his imprisonment. He decided to return to South Africa after his release and rose to become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1904, leaving office before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.
His stoicism in the face of adversity and his determination not to be deterred from his task are reflected in the lines: 'If you can make a heap of all your winnings / And risk it at one turn of pitch and toss / And lose, and start again from your beginnings / And never breathe a word about your loss . . .'
As Kipling's biographer, Andrew Lycett, puts it: 'In a sense, the poem is a valedictory to Jameson, the politician.'
All in all, an impressive hero for Kipling's son, John. 'If you can fill the unforgiving minute/ With sixty seconds' worth of distance run/ Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it/ And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!'
But Kipling's anger at Jameson's treatment by the British establishment never abated.
Even though the poet had become the first English-speaking recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, he refused a knighthood and the Order of Merit from the British Government and the King, just as he refused the posts of Poet Laureate and Companion of Honour.
The tragedy was that Kipling's only son, Lieutenant John Kipling, was to die in World War I at the Battle of Loos in 1915, only a handful of years after his father's most famous poem first appeared. His body was never found.
It was a shock from which Kipling never fully recovered. But his son's spirit, as well as that of Leander Starr Jameson, lives on in the lines of the poem that continues to inspire millions.
As Andrew Lycett told the Daily Mail: 'In these straitened times, the old-fashioned virtues of fortitude, responsibilities and resolution, as articulated in If, become ever more important.'
Long may they remain so.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz3pIhHkTl9
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This week, Rudyard Kipling's If, that epic evocation of the British virtues of a 'stiff upper lip' and stoicism in the face of adversity, will once again be named as the nation's favourite poem.
The choice will certainly reignite the debate about whether it is, in fact, a great poem - which T. S. Eliot insisted it was not, describing it instead as 'great verse' - or a 'good bad' poem, as Orwell called it.
Indeed, when it was last acclaimed as our favourite 14 years ago, one newspaper dismissed it as 'jingoistic nonsense', while another praised it as 'unforgettable'.
What is not in doubt is that Kipling's four eight-line stanzas of advice to his son, written in 1909, have inspired the nation for a century

Eliot the poetic genius was rarely wrong in regards to poetry but in this he was! I suspect that jealousy played a big part in his comment. History has now shown Kipling poem's greatness, its lasting fame and the deepness within.
Article above reveals its inspiration.. --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/177754

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
John Masefield
1878–1967

BY CONOR O'CALLAGHAN
He was born the year British Imperial forces were squaring up to the Zulus and Tennyson’s death was still fourteen years in the offing. He once met someone who had met Napoleon. He held a door for Lenin at the British Museum. He was deemed by Ramsay McDonald to be the natural successor to Robert Bridges, a voice-of-the-voiceless laureate for Britain’s first labour prime minister. He lost his son in WWII. He died the year the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Norman Mailer was jailed after Vietnam protests in Washington. More than any poet I can think of, his life and work straddle two irreconcilable worlds.

Nowadays it is difficult to credit his fame. The Everlasting Mercy was declared “nine-tenths sheer filth” by that paragon of piety Lord Alfred Douglas. The 1923 edition of Collected Poems sold eighty thousand copies. It is equally difficult to make any serious critical defense. Even Yeats, who was among his closest literary allies, advised him to sing in music halls. He wrote far too much. He did not, as John Betjeman tactfully pointed out, “specialize in brevity.” Nowadays, whenever his name comes to us, it comes to us with a faintly ludicrous patina. He is the seaman poet who suffered chronic seasickness; whose bestseller Gallipoli hailed that squalid massacre as a glorious victory; who died of gangrene brought on by a split toe.

I have liked John Masefield’s poetry for over twenty years. My maternal grandfather, a self-taught detective sergeant from a landlocked county of South Ulster, loved to recite the swaying opening stanza of “Sea-Fever.” I learned “Tewkesbury Road” by heart at secondary school. What class of genius, I wondered, could compose “the grey light drift of the dust”? Until recently, admitting to liking Masefield’s poetry was like confessing sympathy with some far right-wing militia or saying you listen to the Carpenters. Then Manchester’s Carcanet Press brought out a Selected earlier this year. The unexpectedly enthusiastic reviews that have greeted its publication suggest a dormant following.

Masefield’s first book, Salt-Water Ballads, appeared in 1903. By 1913, with fifty-four years still on the clock, his significant poetry had been published. To this day he gets itemized as the original of the Georgian species, even though his first three books were, technically speaking, Edwardian. Those early lyrics possess nothing of the tweedy hothouse pastoral of their age. They are breezy, visceral, caught placelessly between two yearnings like “anchors hungry for English ground.” They impose the see-saw of shanties onto drier literary meters. They have stories, direct speech. They are littered with words—fo’c’s’le, goneys, skysail, spunyarn—that you suspect had not appeared in poetry up until then and have not since.

Masefield’s best poems escape the autopilot optimism of those of his contemporaries. His vision is so clear and realistic that his palette risks appearing monochrome: “the grey dawn breaking,” “the cool grey rush of the dusk.” His lines can be so accentual as to sound vaguely jazzy. Even the anthology anthems, “Sea-Fever” and “Cargoes,” hit willful bum notes. They harbor tongue twisters, at once cherished and unsayable, like “the flung spume and the blown spray and the seagulls crying” or the “Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” that Muldoon ventriloquizes via MacNeice in “7 Middagh Street.” “Cargoes,” among popular favorites in English poetry, has to be one of the most pessimistic:

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.


Muriel Spark, in her book-length study, argues that Masefield’s gift was for narrative. However untenable that claim seems now, “The Everlasting Mercy” and “Dauber” deserve at least partial survival on the grounds of importance if not sustained quality. The former’s realism broke real ground and influenced a generation. Sassoon happened upon the style of his war poetry by lampooning it. Graves described how its “fresh wind ... exhilarated us youngsters.” While its narrative is off-puttingly moral, the early fight sequence remains vivid and gritty. The latter, a semi-autobiographical tale of the eponymous painter-cum-cabin boy, contains some of the truest, most beautiful images of the sea and seafaring:

the swift ship
Tore on out of the tropics, straining her sheets,
Whitening her trackway into a milky strip,
Dim with green bubbles and twisted water-meets,
Her clacking tackle tugged at pins and cleats,
Her great sails bellied stiff, her great masts leaned:
They watched how the sea struck and burst and greened.


Masefield matured into mediocrity. He became an authority on Chaucerian meter, and his own work drifted slowly into the canon’s Bermuda Triangle. Not a solitary line appears in Paul Keegan’s otherwise magisterial New Penguin Book of English Verse. “I am like the dodo,” the man mused, “no longer known as a bird at all.” Only a twit would argue the case of Masefield’s greatness. Better, I suggest, to see him occupying a position within British poetry similar to that of Edward Arlington Robinson here: a minor poet whose career became an important stepping stone between the Victorian and the modern (both Auden and Larkin acknowledged a debt), and who wrote a few gems of his own that remain unworthy of neglect.
Originally Published: March 2, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178263

INTERVIEW
Mind Over Matter
BY THE EDITORS
A conversation between Stanley Kunitz and his assistant, Genine Lentine.

GL: Stanley?

SK: Yes.

GL: Do you believe in mind over matter?

[laughter]

SK: You should ask it the other way, "Do you believe in matter over mind?" and then you’d have to say no.

[ laughter. ]

GL: I can hardly even think about that! I ask because of the way you just scrambled up those stairs, as if you just said, “Well, it doesn’t matter that I don’t have my walking stick.” So much of what you do seems to be the result of just deciding you can do it.

SK: That’s right.

GL: We stop short of our potential so often.

SK: True enough. True enough.

GL: What is it in you that enables you to short circuit that sense of “I can’t do it.”

SK: I don’t know but that’s been a principle all my life to do what I can and more. And it’s amazing that if you believe in that there’s almost nothing that stands in your way except your own restrictiveness.

GL: It’s so much about what we think we can do, and that’s always much less than what we can really do. One of the ways I think of my job is that everyday we have some heretofore impossible task in front of us, and then we do it. Every day I wonder, “What impossible thing are we going to do today?”

SK: That’s a good question.

GL: It’s only a construct, only poverty of mind that defines a task as impossible anyway. It’s just maybe that it hasn’t been done yet.

SK: Well, you know there are situations when you can’t do it, that’s all there is to it, and you have to be realistic up to a certain point.

GL: Yes. It’s foolhardy not to be.

SK: But it goes the other way too. You can do more than you think you can. You can stretch your strength to a point where you . . . you can walk up this path without a cane. If I had a cane I would use it, but without it I feel perfectly able.

GL: Do you think that’s how evolution proceeds? One creature decides, Hey! I’m going to try to eat that shiny blue thing over there, or one member of the herd is able to reach the more plentiful leaves in the upper branches, then gradually, the species starts to have a longer neck.

Do you think the poet is in some way an advance scout for spiritual evolution?

SK: In a way, yes. I cannot think of any other vocation that demands as much of you as the poem does in terms of confronting life and death and everything else.

There’s a bug there.

GL: I know. It’s just sleeping. That’s a nice looking beetle.

SK: Oh, beautiful. [laughs]

GL: It’s got such a great sheen. I like how sticky their legs are too. They’re very effective.

What does the poem demand of you? What were you going to say?

SK: What does the stickiness of the legs do for the beetle?

GL: It allows it to hold onto the leaf.

SK: Prey.

GL: Oh, prey, I was just thinking it allows it to travel where it needs to travel, but probably holding onto its prey is another feature.

Could we talk more about what the poem demands of you?

SK: Everything you can give. In a way, the concept of the poem is boundless. It wants everything you have to give, and then more. That’s its nature.

GL: How does it tell you what it wants?

SK: Well, you have to become the spokesperson for the poem. For poetry itself. You have to demand of yourself a kind of power, understanding, perfection that is beyond your daily self.

GL: What if you were to bring that into your daily life?

SK: You would become impossible.

[pause]

GL: I wonder about that distinction you’re making. The poem both expands—it can receive whatever you give it—but it also pushes back and what I love is that feeling where there’s infinite room, but it’s also resisting me. And it’s at that place of resistance where that effort at articulation, where the heat, where the friction takes place, that impulse to try to resolve that feeling. It’s like when you compared it to a cat scratching its nails on a tree, it’s that feeling. Trying to get language to strike a likeness to your inner state. Language provides both the resistance and the opportunity.

SK: Very true.

GL: and it’s always falling short, but it’s also providing you with these incredible gifts too, these coincidences of form, unimagined concentrations or suspensions of meaning.

I was trying to see what bird that was that was under the yew hedge, but it flew away.

SK: Not a mocking bird?

GL: No.

SK: A catbird.

GL: Yes. I bet it was a catbird. Do they feed on the ground?

SK: That’s the primary occupant of the garden.

GL: I love the call of the catbird.

SK: And you feel it never gets discouraged. It keeps calling.

GL: You talk a lot about testing yourself. Do you think the poem is the ultimate testing ground?

SK: For a poet, yes. [laughs]

GL: I mean for you.

SK: mm hmm.

[pause] It’s so much a testing ground that often, I think, among the poets I know, it is capable affecting one’s capacity to deal with the dailiness of life, because it’s the dailiness that is the enemy of the poem.


GL: That’s so paradoxical though because the day provides the . . .

SK: it gives you material, it gives you a circumstance, but if the poem emerges as daily let’s say as a menu, then it’s a negative impact.

GL: I remember reading in Galway’s book, Walking Down the Stairs, that Rilke wouldn’t go to his daughter’s wedding because he thought he’d be better off staying home . . .

SK: . . . and writing a poem, mm hmm. I don’t think poems should be treated as though they were a substitute for life.

GL: It doesn’t seem like any self-respecting poem would want to be treated that way, because the poem advocates for life.

Have you been feeling like your daily life recently has been inimical to poems?

SK: Well I think any daily life tends to become routine. One doesn’t expect revelation out of daily life.

GL: Isn’t that when revelation comes though?

SK: Surprisingly enough it’s the feeding ground. It’s where the materials of the poem are found, but revelation is not really consistent with dailiness. It has a miraculous aspect to it, and it is not to be encountered in every experience of the day, and especially the routine experiences

GL: Intuitively that feels to me just the kind of place where revelation happens; you’re doing the dishes and your mind reaches a state of equanimity in the task

SK: and then you drop the dish and it shatters

GL: and it was a worthy sacrifice.

Photos Marnie Crawford Samuelson
Originally Published: April 10, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178165

POEM SAMPLER
Poems of Sorrow and Grieving
Classic and contemporary poems about ultimate losses

BY THE EDITORS

Remembering a Parent
Making a Fist -- by Naomi Shihab Nye
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

oh antic God -- by Lucille Clifton
oh antic God
return to me

Love Lost
Ae Fond Kiss -- by Robert Burns
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, and then forever!

And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair-- by Lord Byron
And thou art dead, as young and fair
As aught of mortal birth;

Ebb -- by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:

Epigrams: Epitaph on Elizabeth, L.H. -- by Ben Jonson
Wouldst thou hear what man can say
In a little? Reader, stay.

Death of a Child
An Arbor -- by Linda Gregerson
The world’s a world of trouble, your mother must
have told you
that. Poison leaks into the basements

The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad --by Robert Herrick
Dull to myself, and almost dead to these
My many fresh and fragrant mistresses

The Dying Child by -- John Clare
He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well

Grieving the Death of a Friend
Buried at Springs --by James Schuyler
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go

Elegy with a Chimneysweep Falling Inside It by -- Larry Levis
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark

Facing It -- by Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.

Regret & Depression
A Daughter of Eve-- by Christina Rossetti
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly

The Debt -- by Paul Laurence Dunbar
This is the debt I pay
Just for one riotous day,

Fragment 3: Come, come thou bleak December wind -- by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!

Originally Published: May 12, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/251266#guide

Anne Sexton: “The Truth the Dead Know”
The impersonal power of a confessional classic

BY AUSTIN ALLEN

Anne Gray Harvey took the married name Sexton in 1948, thereby joining Swift, Wordsworth, and Frost as one of English literature’s most perfectly named poets. The word sexton, meaning a church officer who serves as bell ringer and gravedigger, is rich in both symbolism and literary history. The figure of the sexton appears in such mainstays of the canon as Hamlet (with its two gravedigger-clowns), Emily Dickinson’s thwarted-love poem “I cannot live with You,” and Hart Crane’s haunting ode “The Broken Tower.” In her brief career, Sexton lived up to virtually all the associations—tragedy and comedy, music and melancholy, death and the embedded word sex—that her name prepared for her.

A member of the mercurial, mid-20th-century group called the confessional poets, Sexton worked in an impressive range of forms and modes, from witty ballads to raw free verse. She broke poetic taboos with flair, writing frankly about menstruation, female masturbation, bipolar disorder, and other topics considered all but untouchable at the time. “A Sexton audience might hiss its displeasure or deliver a standing ovation,” Maxine Kumin recalls in the introduction to Sexton’s Complete Poems. “It did not doze off during a reading.” Like her friend and rival Sylvia Plath, Sexton committed suicide, suffocating herself in her garage at age 45.

Sexton’s titles alone often sound like dispatches from the graveyard. The Pulitzer Prize–winning 1966 collection Live or Die prepared the way for The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (posthumous, 1975). Her poems include “The Hangman,” “Imitations of Drowning,” “Suicide Note,” “Godfather Death,” “For Mr. Death Who Stands With His Door Open,” and “Wanting to Die.” Then there’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” the opening poem of All My Pretty Ones (1962) and one of the 20th century’s outstanding poems of loss.

As revealed in its dedication, “The Truth the Dead Know” is an elegy with a double subject:

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

These are the actual birth and death dates of Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey; their daughter’s poem emerged three years after they died in quick succession. Such autobiographical details, now common in poetry, were then a cutting-edge gesture. In the 1962–1963 Hudson Review, Cecil Hemley reacted with mixed feelings:

There is no doubt that the poet wants us to associate herself with the “I” of the poem. … This identification with the writer has the advantage of intensifying our feelings, but the disadvantage of embarrassing us slightly. There were good reasons why past eras were reticent on such matters. However, the poem rises above the confession and achieves great beauty.

This far removed from confessionalism, Hemley’s embarrassment seems both quaint and beside the point. Distracted by the minor novelty of the framework, he downplays the extent to which the poem is deeply, deliberately traditional. Its imagery could belong to just about any century: church, grave, hearse, shoes, stones, boats, sea, gate, sun that “gutters” like a candle flame.

What was and is fresh about the poem is its bluntness:

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

From that stark “Gone” onward, the diction is so austerely Anglo-Saxon that the few Latinate words seem like extravagances. Amid stanzas rife with monosyllables, procession sounds highly formal, and cultivate, dangling at the end of a line, sounds almost luxuriant. But cultivate, too, is somehow stiff or hollow in light of the poem’s theme. Both words imply progress, a concept that death mocks. Both offer momentary changes of pace from the prevailing style, which is as plain as loss.

A change of pace is exactly what this speaker craves. Having lost both parents in the space of four months, she escapes to the beach with her unnamed “darling.” There the two lovers feel a sense of overwhelming connection, even communion:

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

Despite the bond the couple forges, “this” is no paradise. The “whitehearted water” could be an agitated cousin of Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” It swings “like an iron gate,” recalling the “iron gates of Life” through which Marvell, in “To His Coy Mistress,” insists that we must “tear our pleasures” if we’re to enjoy them at all. The lovers seem besieged, threatened: “the wind falls in like stones,” as in punishment by stoning, and the speaker reflects that “Men kill for this.” Both human and natural forces exact a price for such intense love.

Soon romance fades altogether as Sexton’s dirge marches to its close:

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

This final stanza contains just three polysyllabic words: without, refuse, knucklebone. All three reinforce the image of death as a kind of asceticism. The corpses lie shoeless and motionless. Their refusal echoes the speaker’s refusal of the funeral: just as she abandoned the dead en route to the grave, so the dead now dispense with the blessings of the living. That last exposed knucklebone seems pugnacious and, at the same time, naked.

Meanwhile Sexton’s stone sea recalls at least two of Emily Dickinson’s most chilling images: the corpse as stopped clock and the “Valves” of the soul closing “like Stone.” “Stone boats” (i.e., coffins) evokes the long mythological tradition of death-voyages, from Charon rowing souls across the Styx to the Lady of Shalott drifting glassy-eyed into Camelot. The water that pelted the lovers with spray now seems to have engulfed and petrified Sexton’s imagination. Sea, boats, and bodies become stone, stone, stone. Death is universal and irreversible.

But poems themselves soon die if they freeze into straightforward statements. To survive, they must preserve restless undercurrents of ambiguity. What, if anything, is still moving at the end of Sexton’s poem?

One answer lies in that double-edged word refuse. Paradoxically, Sexton grants the dead an action—an emphatic, line-ending verb that combines cold negation and warm defiance. Moreover, their refusal mirrors the speaker’s, so that living and dead, parents and child, each partake of the activity (and, figuratively, the condition) of the other. “In another country people die,” the speaker declares, echoing Hamlet’s image of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” Yet like the ghost-haunted Hamlet, Sexton finds that the separation isn’t so absolute. The two countries are joined by a murky psychological sea (Hamlet’s “sea of troubles,” Sexton’s stony waters) and by the indissoluble link between generations.

Sexton’s parents can’t visit her as literal ghosts, but the thought of them in their “stone boats” returns just as she’s trying to get away from it all. Perhaps, as Hemley imagines, they’re “sailing away from her in time,” or perhaps they’re emissaries, harbingers of her own death, floating toward her. Regardless, their “Truth” is what she has to learn and what she has to teach us.

•

“The Truth the Dead Know” employs a timeless diction, and its theme is as old as parents and children. With a slight change to the headnote, it could be a fictional construct about an anonymous speaker. Yet Sexton takes care to present it as a slice of her own life. As Hemley observes, this may have “the advantage of intensifying our feelings”; it also tempts us to read other biographical factors into the poem.

In 1959, the year Sexton’s parents died, Robert Lowell published Life Studies, widely acknowledged as the foundational text of confessional poetry. In that same year, Sexton took one of Lowell’s workshops at Boston University alongside an ambitious young poet named Sylvia Plath. The competitive friendship between the two women has become legendary. Over happy-hour martinis at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, they talked poetry, planned illustrious futures, and traded stories of suicide attempts. Through their mutual admiration ran a vein of envy: Plath brooded in her diary when Sexton landed her first book deal, and Sexton coveted “a scholarship to McLean,” the psychiatric hospital where Plath and Lowell had both been patients. (She taught a poetry seminar there in 1968–69 before finally being admitted herself in 1973.) Sexton even reacted with jealous resentment to Plath’s suicide, as she confessed in “Sylvia’s Death” (1964):

… and I know at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

Inescapably, they influenced each other. One revealing way to read “The Truth the Dead Know” is in comparison with “The Colossus,” the title poem of Plath’s first (1960) collection and another distinguished elegy by a grieving daughter.

In “The Colossus,” Plath’s speaker crawls over the massive wreck of a statue she calls “father,” fruitlessly trying to reassemble him. The landscape is eerie, primal, a mix of “the Oresteia” and Dalí. The diction is wildly varied (pig-grunt, acanthine, Lysol), the tone both melodramatic and comic, the speaker’s situation both noble and futile. Plath adopts, in critic Margaret Dickie’s words, “the ancient role of the female who mourns the dying god, or the heroine who tends the idol,” but she’s lost all hope of fulfilling her task. She’s doomed to endless filial duty, the same duty she would later renounce in the explosive “Daddy.”

“The Colossus” was Plath’s first masterpiece, and it can’t be a coincidence that Sexton’s poem, published two years later, tackles the same theme from a virtually opposite angle. No mythic conceit. No verbal razzle-dazzle. The speaker anything but noble. Sexton is not the loyal but the disloyal daughter, not a tragic heroine persisting in rites of mourning but a flawed human resisting grief. The dead father in Plath’s poem remains passive and mysterious; the dead parents in Sexton’s, as if punishing their daughter, flatly “refuse / to be blessed.”

“The Truth the Dead Know” is not superior to “The Colossus,” but it is more raw—and that rawness was the product of enormous effort. Kumin reports that the poem “went through innumerable revisions before arriving at its final form, an a b a b rhyme scheme that allows little room for pyrotechnics.” One unpublished version, available via recording, contains phrases such as “loose brows” and “a blushing hermit in the sun”; it ends on a conventional carpe diem note:“live now, live now.” This redemptive ending feels as alien to the final work as the stylized diction. In both respects, Sexton pared the poem down to the bone.

Plath’s “Daddy” may have been, in part, another entry in this contest of one-upmanship. (If Sexton could abandon her father at his funeral, Plath could call hers “you bastard.”) Similarly, the baroque morbidity of Sexton’s late poems may have been a bid to out-Plath Plath. Both poets took confessionalism to startling extremes, but “The Truth the Dead Know” achieves a starkness neither of them found (or perhaps sought) again. It’s both vulnerable and stoic, colloquial and classically restrained. Along with Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz” and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” it’s one of the least comforting death poems in the language. Its power hinges not on the revelation of private details but on the recognition of an impersonal truth—one that we all learn sooner or later.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178034

INTERVIEW
Former Freight Hopper Makes Good
Richard Wilbur on meeting Frost, writing in foxholes, and falling in and out of fashion.

BY D. H. TRACY

Former army cryptographer, freight hopper, and Broadway lyricist Richard Wilbur (1921—) published his first book of poems in 1947. He quickly developed a reputation, cemented by subsequent collections, for felicitous, elaborate, even-tempered verse, and his recent Collected Poems 1943-2004 is a remarkable record of sustained optimism and commitment to craft. No poet of his generation has been more committed to careful, organized expression or has more thoroughly mastered the forms and devices of traditional poetry; this conservative aesthetic and his deep love for “country things” link Wilbur to the Roman poet Horace and to his fellow American Robert Frost. Wilbur had an academic career at Wesleyan University, and remains an active translator, particularly of classic French drama. [Read D.H. Tracy’s extended Wilbur biography.]

Wilbur lives in Cummington, Massachusetts. This conversation took place on April 7, 2006.

D.H. Tracy: You’ve had a very long career—your first book came out 60 years ago next year. Some of the questions I’d like to ask have to do with your perceptions of things over time.

I’m surprised by the strenuousness of the criticism your poetry has sometimes generated, and by the contrast between this strenuousness and the timbre of the poems themselves. When you were starting out, did you have an idea of how controversial it would be to write optimistic formal verse?

Richard Wilbur: Actually, in my background, at that time, most of the poets I admired—and many of them were alive—were capable of writing metrically. Many of them chose to rhyme. My favorite poet, then and always, was Robert Frost, and I didn’t hesitate to follow in his footsteps. There were people at the time I was commencing to write who didn’t regard Frost as a Modernist, but now I believe he’s considered to be one form that Modernism could take.

So I never felt I was electing to be “old hat” from the start. It seemed a kind of poetry that anybody at the moment might like to write, and indeed many people were doing so. It wasn’t really until the ’60s that there was a general turning away from so-called formal verse.

DHT: You knew Frost personally, isn’t that so?

RW: Yes, I did. I had the luck to meet him almost immediately after World War II, when my wife and I and my daughter went up to Cambridge to be at the Harvard graduate school. He was spending his winters in Cambridge.

I had a certain advantage with him right away because my wife’s grandfather, William Hayes Ward, had been the editor of The Independent, in which Frost’s first publication occurred. It was his poem “My Butterfly.” My wife’s great-aunt, Susan Hayes Ward, was an expert on hymnody and a great lover of poetry, and the person whom Frost described all his life as “the first friend of my poetry.” That meant that Frost smiled on us from the beginning.

DHT: Some of the poems from your first book were composed while you were still in the army. And you’ve talked about how you first deeply read Poe out of a paperback in a foxhole at Monte Cassino. Do you remember the circumstances behind the composition of any of the poems?

RW: I’m not sure that I can call up the moment. Even if you’re in a divisional signal company—which means that you are very busy, and imperiled some of the time—you find that, as Evelyn Waugh once said, war is mostly waiting around. You sit in a hole in the ground somewhere, or in a truck somewhere, or behind a couple sandbags, and you pass the time by forgetting, if possible, where you are for the moment.

And I forgot myself in all sorts of places during World War II. I had a young man’s ability to sit down in the corridor of a troop ship going overseas, with people’s feet all around me, and read books and even scribble on a poem. I did that sort of thing at every opportunity.

DHT: Can you give us a basic sketch of a day in the life of an army cryptographer? Were you usually outdoors? In a field office? By a radio? What did your duties consist of?

RW: Most of what I did was, as you say, cryptographic work: I was breaking enciphered messages and sending out messages in cipher. Our greatest weapons, on the cryptographic side, were big machines. Those had to be toted around in large trucks. We worked in a truck, very often. Under unpleasant circumstances, like the Anzio beachhead, we would dig the truck into a bank and make it as secure as possible. At other times, we would just sit there in the damn truck and work. We also established ourselves in buildings, here and there—wherever we could find a little bit of shelter so that we could do complex work with full attention. We sought that shelter.

DHT: You were initially thrown out of cryptanalysis school because of suspected disloyalty and leftist sympathies, after they discovered a copy of Marx in your possession.

RW: Quite ridiculous, really. When I reported to my basic training camp, I took along a large Modern Library volume of Marx’s Capital, which I had never read. I thought that (as I’ve just said) war was going to involve a lot of waiting around, and I might as well read that big fat book. I’ve still never read it.

But the fact is that, during inspection, when we had to have our footlockers open for the eye of the inspecting officer, it looked pretty bad. So the counterintelligence corps people decided they better look into me.

I really wasn’t very radical. You might say I was a strong New Dealer—an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and an adherent of the union movement. I had no really dangerous leftist convictions. I do think that during World War II—and it’s probably indeed the same right now in Washington—what is preferred is that people who handle secret material should not have strenuous political attitudes of any kind. I can recall that when I was going through basic training, we were shown, as a matter of what they called indoctrination, a couple of rather good films by Frank Capra, one of which essentially traced the development of Fascism in Europe, and the clear moral of which was that we should have stopped them in Spain. You were supposed to sit in front of that movie and absorb it, yet if you went out in the company street thereafter and started talking about how we should have stopped them in Spain, people who were security-minded would feel a certain alarm. They did not want the passionately political in secret work.

DHT: How common an occurrence were these demotions? Did anything similar happen to any of your friends?

RW: Yes. One of my friends, who had I think been in the Communist Party (I’m not sure), was thrown out of some secret work, and comically enough he ended up rather in charge of teletype communications for the southern ETO [European Theater of Operations].

If you had a specialist number of some kind, identifying you as having some sort of ability, you were likely, regardless of people’s doubts about your security, to end up practicing that talent and that training. So I, even though my service record—which was forwarded along with me wherever I went—contained some sort of an indication that I was suspected of disloyalty, I found myself, through a series of accidents, doing exactly the secret work for which I had been trained, because the 36th Infantry Division needed a cryptographer.

DHT: Did this treatment rattle you, or did it seem entirely in keeping with what you knew about the army and the way it operated?

RW: I find it hard to report on my frame of mind about that; I was not dashed by it. It seems to me that I had a considerable feeling of knockabout enjoyment of things in those days, a feeling of adventure. So I just waited to see what would happen to me, and to absorb the shocks that might come.

DHT: Speaking of Edgar Allan Poe in the foxhole, it’s striking that the early American figures you seem to be in conversation with are Poe and Longfellow, and the monumental European figure who most interests you seems to be Milton. More commonly poets seem to fall in with Whitman and Dickinson, and then Dante. Have these figures and affiliations taken you in unusual directions relative to your peers?

RW: I don’t suppose that when I started writing poetry I was trying to place myself in the likely pattern of American poetry as a whole. I really responded to Walt Whitman rather favorably when I was young, and got to like him much more when I was older and teaching a course in American poetry. In spite of the fact that Whitman is thought of as the great American bard, like many people I read very little of him in my youth. He is a great unread poet for most people.

At present, to hear people talk in the academies, you would think that the things that happened in American poetry were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. But when I was starting to read and know American poetry, I read many other people, and enjoyed, for example, Emerson. I liked the best of Longfellow very much. But my great attachments were to the Modernists. Really I responded to the whole lot of them. The list, if I gave it to you, would simply be the contents of a Modernist poetry anthology.

DHT: In the early ’60s you traveled to the Soviet Union and had contact with a number of writers there, translating, among others, Andrei Voznesensky, whose books were selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Some of the remarks you’ve made about Soviet poets during this period, who were writing “high demotic” poetry for an eager, newly literate public, have been fascinating—you’ve compared their situation with Longfellow’s in the mid-19th century.

RW: That’s right. It was a very comparable situation that I found when I went to the Soviet Union. In the first place, the Soviet reader was someone in many cases proud of a new literacy and seriously aspiring to higher things, and the Soviet poets, even those who had a certain freedom of mind and attitude, felt that they were the servants of those people, and that it was their business to energize and enlighten them. Therefore, people like Andrei Voznesensky sold out very large editions whenever they published. It did seem very enviable to me.

DHT: Have you kept up with any of those writers, either personally or with their work?

RW: For quite a while I did keep up with Voznesensky, but I haven’t really seen him for about ten years now or had any correspondence with him. I suppose that some of our cordiality did have to do with the need to bridge the gap between our countries, and now that doesn’t seem to be the chief aspect of the international situation.

I think actually that Yevgeny Yevtushenko is living and teaching here in the United States, somewhere in the Southwest [editor’s note: at the University of Tulsa]. He’s almost migrated to us.

DHT: What do you think about high demotic poetry in the United States right now? Is there any? If so, is there is a use for it? If not, is there a need for it?

RW: When I think of the 19th-century fireside, it’s rather easy to imagine a volume of Longfellow on the table by the easy chair. There are a lot of other distractions in our contemporary American life—with some of them I’m quite unacquainted. I don’t have a computer, for example. I know nothing of the Internet. But I know that the Internet is a large part of life for people now. And of course there’s television and videos and all the rest. I think that some of the entertainment aspect of poetry is less important to the majority of people now. They find their entertainment more readily in other media.

But just two days ago I was reading poems over at Tufts College in Medford, and a young woman in the audience asked me pretty much the question you’ve asked. I thought, well, instead of talking about how Modernism estranged the common reader and so on, let’s see if I can’t think of what’s positive about the present situation. One thing I thought of was simply the way poetry books sell at present. My first volume came out in an edition of 750 copies. I think that no New York publisher would come out with so small a first printing nowadays. I can’t estimate the likely sales of a good book of poetry now, but they’re much higher than they used to be.

Then there’s the matter of the poetry reading—I don’t mean the slam, but the reading. When I was a kid, the only people who went around on the lecture circuit very notably were pros like Robert Frost and Edna Millay and Carl Sandburg and, a little earlier, Vachel Lindsay. It was a limited number of people who had great power not only as poets but as entertainers. Starting I should say just after World War II, the poetry reading began to be a form of concert that was very frequent and well attended, and didn’t require that the reader be a pro as an entertainer. A kind of savvy audience developed—an audience of people who know that there’s a difference between a poetry concert and a concert of music. I walk out of any concert of music feeling that I’ve heard all the music. Of course I didn’t, but I tell myself that I have, and feel that I have. At poetry readings, you have to be willing to let a few things go by you, to be puzzled and frustrated from time to time, and to tolerate that as part of the poetry-reading experience.

Well, I seem to be running on, but I think there are positive aspects. Of course I could mention also radio broadcasters who read poems of some real quality, apparently to large audiences. That, too, is a good sign.

DHT: Speaking of writing for wide audiences, I wonder if you could speak a bit about your experiences writing Broadway lyrics. What habits did you have to get rid of or rein in to write for musical accompaniment, and to collaborate with others?

RW: You do have to change your way of working, in order to write Broadway lyrics. I know that, except for the occasional happy birthday poem, which is directed to somebody, I don’t write for people “out there”—I write to see if I can’t understand what it is I want to say. I assume myself to be an average human being, and I figure if I make things clear and interesting to myself, others might find them so.

But Broadway lyrics are an entirely different matter. There you have to think as knowledgably as you can about what is going to please a particular kind of New York theatergoer. When I was working on Candide, [Leonard] Bernstein and [Lillian] Hellman and I referred to him as “the man from Scarsdale.” He’s out there in the third or fourth row, he’s been dragged to the show by his wife, and you hope to say things that will keep him awake, will amuse him, and will be fully understandable to him. I remember when I was, as it were, “trying out” for the job of lyricist on Candide, I wrote for Hellman and Bernstein a sample lyric based on a passage in Voltaire’s Candide. It was one in which some shipwrecked kings in the middle of the Atlantic were resolving to lead improved lives if rescued. One of them was saying, “I’ll find myself a humble cot and cultivate the chicken.” The man from Scarsdale would not know that “cot” could mean a cottage or little farmstead of some kind—he would associate it with the army-and-navy store, and with the bunks at summer camp. So you can’t get away with too many clever rhymes of that kind. You really do need to think all the time about the people for whom you’re writing. I always preferred to write for an imaginary, quite bright and amusable person. When you start writing for people, you’d better not be condescending or you’ll lose.

DHT: You’ve talked about the difficulty of writing verse drama, and you spent a year in New Mexico trying to write your own plays. How would you put your finger on the difficulty?

RW: I turned out to be perfectly horrible at the conception and animation of characters. I could think of all sorts of amusing lines, but I could not get any kind of human action going on the stage. I, like many poets, do not have a narrative imagination. I tend to be able to pursue an argument for a certain distance, but I’m not really a storyteller.

I was once given a test by Harry Murray at Harvard. It was called a thematic apperception test. He was asking a number of writers to take it. He put a picture in front of me and said, “Tell me what you see there.” Well, the picture I remember was several frogs sitting around a pond; behind them, a hill; over the hill, a view of a house and a chimney with some smoke coming out of it. What I said was that it interested me the way the clouds in the sky repeated the forms of the frogs. And Mr. Murray said, “Yes, but who lives in that house?” And I said, “I’m damned if I know.” The last thing I was going to do was to tell a story about that picture. But any novelist would instantly have done so.

DHT: Are there poets you admire who do demonstrate this kind of dramatic gift? Yeats, perhaps, or Eliot?

RW: It seems to me that Eliot proved in the best of his poetic plays that he had a capacity for narrative. I think Brad Leithauser does too. I can think of a number of people who have written sustained story poems which I’ve found it pleasant to read. But the most I can do in that line is to write a poem such as my “Mind-Reader,” which is a Browningesque monologue in which the speaker does go from one point to another within his life, but is much more conveying his consciousness than his story.

DHT: A major project of yours has been the translation of the verse plays of Molière and Racine. Did you conceive of the project as “corrective” or “nutritious,” either to yourself or to poetry generally?

RW: I thought it was going to do all sorts of good to translate Molière’s The Misanthrope. It’s such a wonderful play that I wanted to do it properly and make it available to our stage. Happily, it turned out that I did have a talent for that. I don’t think I was trying to improve myself in any way, but actually translating that wonderful play did have an effect on my imagination when it came to my own poems. If you work through a Molière play trying to write lines which an actor will wish to speak with conviction, and the right flavor, it’s going to make it a little more possible to write within your own range. I began to have more of a dramatic voice, and to have more of what amount to characters in my poems.

DHT: You’ve written some children’s poetry of pretty sophisticated riddling and verbal play, requiring some attention to the formation and spelling of words (to find the “pig” in “spigot,” and so on). Were these poems tested on your own children? Or did they come about only after having seen your kids go through their language acquisition?

RW: When I was a kid, I was very amused by amusable poetry. I was fond, for example, of Edward Lear from the beginning, and of all sorts of nonsense verse, and of Lewis Carroll. I loved the Alice books, and read them annually at Christmastime. So I was prepared, I guess, to write some kids’ stuff as I got older. But of course the great catalyst was my children. My children loved to have me tell them stories, and they loved to hear and recite funny poems intended for children—things like the cautionary verses of Hilaire Belloc amused them all a great deal.

Another thing I did with all my children was to play dinner-table games, and that too fed into my initial project as a children’s author. But actually, the first thing I ever did was a book called Loudmouse, which I wrote at the invitation of Louis Untermeyer for a series of books he was editing called Modern Masters Books for Children. Louis had looked around for a lot of writers who had never written for children but might be expected to do it well. My first book, a narrative about a loud-voiced mouse, was written for that series, and it included some little jingles. I got to serious writing of poetry for children with my series of poems called “Opposites.”

I said just now that when I was writing Broadway lyrics, I tried to write for an imagined person of some taste and intelligence. I found myself doing the same thing with children’s verse. I did not write down to an imagined creepy little child; I wrote up to my own children at their best, and to intelligent, lively children generally. This meant when my first Opposites book was published and reviewed in the Times, a reader wrote in and said, “I’m an adult, and I enjoyed that book. Is that all right?” I was always delighted to find there were as many adult readers as there were child readers. A woman I respected very much always kept a copy of Opposites on her bathroom cabinet—I was proud of that.

DHT: It seems there is a pastoral element in your work that has true seductive value, but on the other hand you’re scrupulous about holding the city in equal esteem. Is this a balancing act for you, or does it come naturally?

RW: I think it does come naturally. I have spent more of my life in the country than in the city. But I was born in New York City and have lived there, in Greenwich Village or elsewhere, from time to time. I’ve lived in Cambridge, a delightful town. I don’t see any reason to feel superior to city life when it comes to writing poems. I was always very happy to discover that a nature poet like William Cullen Bryant could also write quite well about the town.

I’m happiest in the country. I was brought up on a farm in New Jersey about 20 miles out of the big city, and I was about a hundred feet from a barn full of cows, and experienced every aspect of farming as I grew up. I’ve also always been a tramper in the woods. Living as I do now in one of the hill towns of northwestern Massachusetts, I find there’s lots of good material all around.

DHT: Does the farm where you grew up still exist?

RW: No. As a matter of fact, the town of North Caldwell is not in any way recognizable now. It’s been absolutely engulfed by the spreading metropolis. So I haven’t seen it for about ten years. One friend of mine still lives there. I ought to go and see him. But none of the trees I climbed are there anymore.

DHT: As a poet who works in received forms, how do you think about originality? Do you feel a responsibility to use form in original ways? Or do you think of originality as overvalued? Is it even a virtue? What does originality consist of, for you?

RW: I don’t have any interest in the repetition of the past. I regard what you just called “received forms” as so much equipment, really—that’s all that they are. I find that the use of meters, rhymes, and stanzas is a way of saying what I want to say with greater power and pleasure. I would be very troubled if people thought my book of poems had too fearfully traditional an air. I try to make every poem different from the last, and I simply use the meters and the other received, inherited formal elements to enforce what it is that I’m saying.

DHT: As fashions have come and gone, have the terms your work has been received in changed much? Do you think the criticism has gotten coarser or finer, closer to the point or farther away?

RW: Anybody who uses forms as I do is going to go in or out of fashion. When I started writing, there was a very warm reception to my poems generally, and they were cheerfully accepted on the formal side. Come the 1960s, I was suddenly very much out of fashion. So I spent a decade or more simply being defiant, and going on doing things the only way I knew how.

Now I should say there’s a revival of tolerance for so-called formal poetry, and also, many people who have gotten a bit sick of the prosaic creative-writing poem of the past few years have learned to read formal poetry with relish and understanding.

DHT: Do you feel any sense of vindication about this? Do you think it’s a temporary development?

RW: I don’t regard form as a cause, so I’m not really militant about it. One of my favorite poets of all time, who never gets tiring for me, is William Carlos Williams. I can’t imagine lining myself up against him, or against any school of writers presumably descended from him. Free verse is awfully hard to write, but I much admire it when somebody can do it well, as most people cannot.

DHT: Elsewhere, talking about William Carlos Williams, you’ve indicated the affinity both of you have for things and objects, and how both of you avoid approaching the spiritual through the immaterial or the abstract. How do you approach airier poets who do approach the spiritual in this fashion? Do they hold any interest for you?

RW: I daresay I could think a bit and come up with a list of poets who seem to me not very much in touch with the concrete world but [who] nevertheless have power. Yeats is rather that way, really. If you look around in Yeats hoping for a good description of something, you’ll look all day. It’s mostly something else—a form of poetry rather close to the incantatory and oratorical, which I find quite wonderful sometimes.

I shall make Yeats my champion of the abstract.

DHT: In 1974 someone asked you where you thought poetry would be in the year 2000, and you replied that you saw “no one powerful style prevailing or developing,” and you spoke somewhat ruefully of the development of a marketplace where work is accorded space according to how easy or difficult it is to classify. Would you say time has borne out this prediction?

RW: I do think that development is tiresome. No really good poet is describable in terms of his school affiliations. I do think that when people begin to put together anthologies in that spirit, they include a lot of inferior work by association, and neglect much that is more original.

I’m not aware, really, of our present poetic scene consisting of a lot of schools. Do you see it that way?

DHT: It seems more fragmented than it was several decades ago, but maybe I’m mistaken.

Are there developments over the past 30, 40, 50 years that have surprised you, ones you would not have been able to predict?

RW: That’s a tough one. I guess that when surprises happen, it’s the emergence of some unpredictably good talent that excites me. I can’t think very well in terms of what people call “the condition of poetry in America.” There are doubtless distinguishable trends, but I don’t see them. I tend to see the individual book as it comes, and rejoice or not.

DHT: Another phenomenon you’ve been able to observe for a long period of time is the entry of poets into the universities. As a social experiment, would you call it a success? Where do you think this experiment stands now, relative to where it did when you were starting your career?

RW: Certainly when I was starting, it was relatively rare for there to be poets working in the English departments of this country. Ridgeley Torrence had done it, Robert Frost had done it, David Morton was doing it at Amherst when I was an undergraduate. But of course there’s been a runaway development of this, together with the establishment of creative writing courses, MFAs, and so on. Anything of this kind is going to be both good and bad. Don Justice spent a very good part of his life running creative writing classes, and if so marvelous a poet as that found it a lively thing to do—I know that he conveyed his liveliness to a certain number of his students—it must have been good.

I have my negative thoughts about the phenomenon too. It seems to me that it has made for a lax, undemanding kind of poem: prosaic, personal, unambitious, and formless. That has been the period style for a bit too long, though that seems to be changing. There are other negative things one could say about poetry camping in the university, but if what poets need is an encounter with life in general, I think it’s still to be had.

DHT: Your most recent teaching appointment was when?

RW: I retired from Smith College in 1986, I think. Because I enjoyed teaching subject-matter courses as well as doing the creative writing sort of thing, I find that I’m sometimes frustrated by the unavailability of persons to whom I can tell the truth about Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example. Every now and then I want to corner people and give them the cold dope on the authors whom I most enjoy teaching.

But on the whole, I find that I’m quite busy enough. At the moment I’m translating Corneille’s extraordinary play L’Illusion Comique. I’m on line 902 of it and forging forward every day. I do that when a poem doesn’t come and insist on being written. And all of that pretty well fills my days.

DHT: Discussions of poets’ work tend to fall into ruts, where the same three or four poems are discussed again and again. Is there a poem of yours that you would like to draw attention to, a poem that you feel has not received adequate notice?

RW: There’s a poem of mine called “Lying” that has had some good attention, but I like it better all the time, and so I hope that people who are at all interested in me will have a look at that one. When I read that poem to an audience, I always tell them that when I showed it first to my wife, she said, “Well, you’ve done it. At last you’ve done it. You’ve written a poem that’s unintelligible from beginning to end.” And it is a tough one in the sense that it’s full of riffing similes and metaphors, and indeed that’s what the poem is about: it’s about resemblances between things, and the idea that all things are ultimately of one nature.

But when I persuaded my wife to reread that poem, she said, “Well, yes. It’s clear now. Busy, but clear.” And I think a number of people have found it so.

DHT: One last question I’ve been dying to ask. In your poem “Walking to Sleep,” there is the passage “What you must manage is to bring to mind / A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak / Champaign at dead November’s end.” I just moved to Champaign, Illinois, last year—is this the Champaign you’re talking about?

RW: [laughs] It’s the same word, but it has a different flavor in the poem—I take a positive view of Champaign, Illinois.

This particular Champaign, in “Walking to Sleep,” is intended to be a part, I suppose, of a strategy of emotional avoidance. The poem begins by trying to bore oneself to sleep, and then, halfway through, it takes a more contagious and courageous view of things. But I’m getting incoherent.

DHT: What was the genesis of that poem? Was there insomnia involved?

RW: Ever since my childhood I’ve been interested in my dreams, and sometimes kept a book in which I wrote them down. So finally, out of many, many years of dreaming, and some years of having insomnia, I decided to make dreaming the whole subject of the poem.

Of course, one of the theses of the poem is that the way you dream will be an indication of the way you take the world as a whole, the way you take this world and the next. And so it is, rather at some length, an account of two strategies for going to sleep. It ends by proposing [that] you go to sleep courageous.


Originally Published: April 18, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

ESSAY
How Words Fail
Does language reflect the world? Or is it a distorting mirror that never gets reality straight?

BY CATHY PARK HONG
I always felt an anxiety about language, an anxiety that grew more pronounced when I began writing poetry. I rationalized this anxiety by rolling out the immigrant truisms. Growing up, I had to negotiate the yawning gap between speaking Korean at home and battling it out in the schoolyard with my faltering English (for a while, my flimsy arsenal was “You shut up!” for every imaginative invective hurled at me). I thought the English language was a tricky, trap-filled activity I had to somehow master like squash or table tennis. Nabokov once called English “an artificial, stiffish thing” and wrote, “If Russian was his music, English was his murder”; yet he wrote some of the most exquisite prose in the English language. I am no persecuted exile, however, but a pampered second-generation American whose childhood difficulties with English nonetheless left their indelible mark.

When professors first introduced the craft of poetry to me, I felt like Leonard Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon-man, who appropriated the behavior of whomever was around him. “Write about your family experience! Write about what is true to you,” one dramatic poetry professor told me in his office, and then gave me poems by Asian American poets who sounded exactly like Sharon Olds. I tried to compose clear, confessional gems but thought of them as interesting exercises in imitation. When the professor looked at them, he told me I was beginning to find a voice. “Whose voice?” I asked. “Yours!” he announced, and the meeting was over.

“Finding your voice” is a familiar workshop trope, one that assumes poetry is an expression of an authentic self. I was asked to write in natural, plainspoken speech (none of which felt natural or plain to me), and this teacher mistook the result as me. He embraced the principle that a poem represents a person who is a unified whole, and that the syntax of the poem is a window to the person’s, or writer’s, mind. The professor’s assumptions proved only that I was a damn good mimic.

My teacher’s concept of “the voice” is shared by many poets, including Adrian Blevins, who wrote an essay about the music of sentences for PoetryFoundation.org. She opines that the sentence structure of a poem gives us a clear diagnosis of the poet’s mind. In her reading of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” she writes, “The ungrammatical . . . excerpt produces the emotional effects of an anxious or scattered psyche.” She sees a direct correlation between Berryman’s progressively unraveling mind and his unraveling syntax, concluding, “It’s interesting to note that Berryman began playing with syntax as a young man, when he was still, as far as anyone can determine, happy enough. As his life becomes more and more pressured . . . he becomes more and more serious and seems to lose, as a result, the sense of daring syntactical play. . . . It is therefore possible to speculate that Berryman’s suicide was at least partly the result of a loss of his syntactical distinctiveness.”

Blevins believes in a causal relationship between the author’s psychological state and the author’s syntactical choices, asserting that Berryman’s “loss of syntactical distinctiveness” helped lead to his own suicide. If we are to follow this logic, how to explain Hart Crane, who offed himself yet wrote poetry that is syntactically distinct? Or Sylvia Plath, who was at the top of her syntactic game when she shoved her head in the oven? Or that many poets today are happy on antidepressants yet write syntactically dull poetry? Blevins also observes that the sentences of Gertrude Stein and certain “post-post-post-postmodernists” are “stark raving mad,” implying that the poets must obviously be bonkers.

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.
The repetition in “Psalm” creates a propulsive cadence. The poem begins with a negation of Genesis. The recurrence of “No one,” a reference to God (or his absence), creates a tonally hammering antiprayer as it denies Creation. “Blessed art thou” is negated by the thudding absence of “No one.” “No one” becomes “Nothing” and then returns as “No-One’s Rose.” The song, driven by absence, ends somewhat redemptively, as the flowering song or the word sings “over” the imagery of suffering, Christ’s thorn. Yet the singing is also fractured—the invocatory “O” in the line “Over, O over” is a hesitant break in cadence. Driven by spiritual necessity, the music of Celan’s poetry is both brutal and brutalized.

Like Celan, the poet John Taggart entwines the music of his linguistic experiments with a deep spiritual sensibility. Son of a Methodist clergyman, Taggart was born in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1942 and spent most of his childhood within the church culture. He equates “poem as gospel service,” positing that poetry should have a spiritual power that can be wrought from its own music. But Taggart is no traditional lyricist. His “voice” is not a stand-in for the self. His ultimate goal is to turn the poem into what he calls a “sound object,” where words cease to be metaphor and become part and parcel a compositional score.

Deeply influenced by the experimental music composer and writer John Cage and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, Taggart incants through the “silence of the gaps” that surround the unadorned word. His words are mortarless, often unbound by clauses or punctuation. Rather than isolated poems, Taggart composes poetic variations that are circular, repetitive, and serial. In fact, his largest collection of poems, Loop,is aptly titled since his poetry obsessively returns to a set of nouns in different arrangements, as if each poem is a remix of the previous one. “Nativity,” for instance, scrolls down as if it were enacting a feverish sermon:

If you kneel
sender will teach
will teach you
here’s a sender
no bright harness
still a sender
if you kneel
will teach you
teach the shout.
But Taggart does not completely abandon content. Like Celan’s work, Taggart’s poetry can be read within a cultural-political context. Here is an excerpt from “Twenty-one Times,” Taggart’s most explicit poem about Vietnam and his own version of Wallace Stevens’s“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

4
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
The word breaks through partitions and outer-walls
Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.

5
Napalm: the heart rubbed and smeared with soap
The young heart is soiled with fire
Soap cannot cleanse the soiling of the fire.

6
Napalm: why the child caught on fire
The itching as of creatures for possession of words
Glitter for self and nation.
The repeated incantation “napalm” is an attempt at exorcism, as if to cleanse the horrors associated with napalm. But despite the attempt to “wash” it out, the word grows cancerously: “Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.” As in many of Taggart’s other poems, the nouns in “Twenty-one Times” are reshuffled, and each time a noun is reintroduced, its associations become progressively menacing: “the young heart is soiled with fire” leads to “why the child caught on fire.” As the poem’s inexorable momentum builds to a frightening pitch, “napalm” as a word metastasizes inside the mouth, until poem’s end: “Napalm: speak and the word glows and plays / speak and suffer torment for love / because of you no one will have to write the word down.”

Celan and Taggart have created a distinctly haunting and astonishing music through solecisms and hesitations, through the broken sentence. For them, the disassociation of voice from language is not just a philosophical choice. It is also political. The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression. It can prove to be a difficult transaction, a construction of fragments, as much conflicted demurral as actual communication, as much about what is unspeakable as about what is speakable.

Originally Published: July 31, 2006
Visit Harriet—the Poetry Foundation blog.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178440

ESSAY
A Biblical Blast of Rage
At a reading for New School students, Frank Bidart is greeted like a god.

BY JAMES MARCUS
For his June reading at Manhattan’s The New School, Frank Bidart was dressed from head to toe in black. This puritanical garb, combined with Bidart’s high forehead, pointy nose, and shock of gray hair, suggested a chic version of Ichabod Crane. Yet Bidart, who was participating in the school’s Summer Writers Colony program, warmed to his audience at once. As well he might: the 30 or so people in the room had already spent three classroom sessions studying his latest collection, Star Dust: Poems, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award. Now, after an ecstatic introduction by Dan Chiasson (who called Star Dust one of the “half dozen greatest books of poetry published in my lifetime”), the poet was here in the flesh. He began by taking requests from the crowd.

“Do the third passage from ‘The Third Hour of the Night’!” insisted one admirer. Bidart promised to get around to it. To break the ice, however, he read some shorter lyrics from the first half of Star Dust, including “For the Twentieth Century,” “Young Marx,” “For Bill Nestrick,” and “Advice to the Players,” which he characterized as “a manifesto written by somebody who doesn’t believe in manifestos.” The poet had an urgent platform manner: he shook his fist or made sculpting motions at the audience, many of whom were following along in their own, black-jacketed editions of the book. Except for the girl in front of me, nervously wiggling her heart-shaped ring on and off her finger, the crowd was motionless and rapt. They applauded warmly when Bidart broke off for some Q-and-A. Then a student asked him to continue reading with “The Curse,” which represents something of a departure for the metaphysically inclined poet.

Noting the influence of Robert Lowell—who, Bidart said, wrote about current events without turning them into “disposable poetry”—he read the poem, a biblical blast of rage directed at the 9/11 hijackers: “May what you have made descend upon you.” Next he discussed a signal irony. When this rare venture into public verse appeared in the Threepenny Review in April 2002, it got him into hot water with pundit-for-all-seasons Andrew Sullivan, who interpreted it as condemnation of the victims. There was a certain amount of online skirmishing as the poet’s fans rode to his defense. And did Bidart himself fire back at Sullivan? “I wasn’t online at the time,” he explained—a perplexing notion for his twentysomething audience. “But I did eventually send him a respectful note.”

As promised, Bidart read some passages from “The Third Hour of the Night.” This is the latest installment of a massive enterprise he began in 1990, borrowing structural elements from the inscriptions on the sarcophagus of Seti I. Earlier episodes of this insomniac’s delight dealt with phenomenology and eros. This time around, the poet has explored the creative impulse, along with its paradoxical links to power and violence. (The sequence concludes with a rape scene that would make Quentin Tarantino blanch.)

The generational divide surfaced once again as the discussion turned to the title poem of Bidart’s latest collection, with its uncharacteristic opulence of language. Bidart confessed his distaste for such verbal filigree: “There’s a false luxuriousness in some poems that is a kind of alcohol.” In “Star Dust,” surely one of his finest creations, Bidart serves up some intoxicants of his own. But the problem, it soon became clear, was one of cultural allusion: few students were familiar with the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust,” whose mood of nostalgic reverie the poem inverts like a photographic negative. (Bidart called “Stardust” a “summit” of American popular music and indicated his preference for Nat King Cole’s ethereal version.) Nor did they pick up the nod to Sam Cooke’s “Touch the Hem of His Garment.”

“There’s a false luxuriousness in some poems that is a kind of alcohol.”

^^^^^^ Which is distasteful to me and I have done my damn-best to never include in my poems, to any degree beyond what is necessary for the poem's message to be true and on score.
A pinch of slat tis ok methinks ,but adding in cupfuls detract from the message,the heart and the soul of a poem!-Tyr