Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[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]

ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.
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(1.) Excerpt below taken from full body of previous text in my previous post..-Tyr

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

I do not knock Pablo Neruda being a fine poet.. as truly he is--so are many others for that matter.
However, this legendary status the elitist morons try to bestow upon him is damn sickening to me!
I could point out other so-called minor poets that put Pablo to shame but do not get the fame given Pablo by modern fools simply because his name being Pablo and his leftist political leanings.
Whereas, in my view, in my world -- politics in poetry is a damn invasive cancer that should be cut out every place it invades.
So much of his fame rests upon the desire to advance a political ideology! ffing morons...-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/177309#guide

John Donne: “The Sun Rising”
The poet tries to start a revolution from his bed.

BY STEPHEN BURT
John Donne (1572-1631) wrote a prose work called Paradoxes and Problems, and his life presents plenty of both: he was born a Catholic, gained notoriety for sacrilegious verse, and later in life became an Anglican priest. Though some of his poems defended libertinism and casual sex, he destroyed his first career by falling in love, and stayed with the woman he married until her death. His poems picked up a reputation for head-scratchingly bizarre intellectualism—one reason they're now called metaphysical—but some of them are the most deeply felt poems of romantic love in the language. One such poem is "The Sun Rising."

A former law student whose London relatives were persecuted for remaining Catholic after England had turned Protestant, Donne ruined what could have been a fine career at court when in 1601 he secretly married his employer's niece, Anne More. The next year, Donne's employer found out and fired him. Donne later found his calling as an Anglican cleric, giving dramatic sermons at London's most famous church. Until after his death, most of Donne's poems circulated only in manuscript: his friends copied them by hand, then showed them to their friends, who copied them into their commonplace books. (If you think of a book of poems as like a compact disc, then a commonplace book is like a mix tape, or an iPod; Donne's poems were like popular, unreleased MP3s.)

Donne liked to make long, odd comparisons, called conceits: he compared two lovers to the parts of a compass, for example, and likened a teardrop to a navigator's globe. Later poets such as Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) built whole careers by imitating those conceits. By the time Cowley died, though, conceits had gone out of fashion. When the influential critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) coined the term metaphysical poets, he meant it as an insult: "Metaphysical poets" such as Cowley and Donne, he wrote, used their conceits to present "heterogenous ideas ... yoked by violence together"; "they were not successful in representing or moving the affections." (In other words, they had too much head, not enough heart.) The term metaphysical stuck, though the judgment did not: when modernist critics and poets such as T.S. Eliot wanted to rehabilitate Donne, they defended something called metaphysical poetry, and praised the metaphysical conceit.

Readers like to believe that Donne's libertine poems—which insult women in general, or recommend sex with many partners—date from his law-student days, while the passionate, sincere-sounding love poems reflect his romance and marriage with Anne. As with Shakespeare's sonnets, nobody really knows. It's no wonder, though, that so many readers (myself included) imagine "The Sun Rising" as written to Anne. In it, Donne and his beloved wake up together, and Donne fears that someone will walk in on them: the unwelcome intruder is (not her father, nor his boss, nor a London stranger, but) the sun, which (here's the conceit) Donne treats as a person:


Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

"Prentices" are apprentices, who (like today's sullen teens) oversleep; "motions" are regular changes, such as sunset or sunrise, spring or fall. Donne and Anne (we might as well call her Anne) believe it's more important to be in love than to be on time: they won't let the hour, or the month, or even their relative ages, tell them what to do.

Nor do they want to get up out of their shared bed. From medieval French to modern English, there's a tradition of poems called aubades, about lovers who awaken at dawn: often they are adulterous or illicit lovers, who don't want to separate but don't want to get caught. Donne wrote such a poem himself, called "Break of Day." In "The Sun Rising," though, Donne and Anne feel right at home: there's no chance either of them will go anywhere, because their love has placed them where they belong, and everything else must reorient itself around them.

It follows that Donne is the master of the house; the sun, as a guest, should respect and obey him. Donne therefore reverses the conceit: having likened the sun to a person, he now gives a person—himself—the powers of the sun:


Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

Donne could occlude or outshine the sun (because he, too, is a celestial body), but he won't (because then his beloved would not see him, and he would not see her). Since everything important to Donne (i.e., Anne) stays indoors, not outside, Donne feels as if everything commonly believed important—spices from the Indian Ocean, precious metals from West Indies mines—remains securely indoors too.

In fact (here we see the extravagance of the conceit), everything and everyone of any importance is already in Donne's bed:


She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

The sun, having been shown the door, now gets asked to remain. The pronouns "I" and "she" disappear, leaving only "us" and "we"; thus combined, the lovers become the whole Earth, and since the sun's job is to warm the Earth, it ought to stay where the lovers are, and orbit them. Not only will Donne and Anne escape detection and censure, since the sun will never shine anywhere else, but the lovers won't even have to get out of bed.

Fancy metaphysical conceits differ from plain-Jane metaphors not just because conceits run all the way through a poem, but also because they often bring in the latest in Renaissance science and technology. Remember that the sun is like a person, but Donne is like a celestial body: he and Anne, together, replace the Earth. "Sphere" comes from the old, Ptolemaic cosmology (the one Galileo and Copernicus disproved), in which the sun supposedly went round the Earth (as did all other planets, each in its own "sphere"). In Donne's time, astronomers (and astrologers) still argued about what went around what. His interest in scientific controversy, in ongoing disputes about natural and supernatural truths, gave him metaphors for his poems. The same interest helps give this poem its emotional force: nobody knows if the sun goes around the Earth, or vice versa, that last line implies, but I'm quite certain that my life revolves around yours.

Donne's conceit describes the sun as a human being who walks in on the lovers, and then—with help from what was, to Donne, modern science—makes himself and his beloved into their own cosmic entity, their own world. You might see how readers who (like Johnson) thought poets should stay away from complex images found such flights of figuration distasteful. In "The Sun Rising," though—and in other Donne poems akin to it ("The Canonization," for example, and "The Relic")—the figure of speech is extreme for a very good reason: Donne's devotion is extreme, too, and only "heterogenous ideas yoked by violence together," only the language of the metaphysical conceit, can express the depths of his love.