Wit on the Scaffold

(The first part of this yadda-yadda is here; what follows below is the second part.)

Against the vastness of the world and time, the woman's coyness, in Marvell's "To a Coy Mistress" seems… little; she is belittled by the poem. In Freud's view, Marvell's wit affords him the means “of surmounting restrictions and of opening up otherwise inaccessible pleasure sources.” As Hyman points out (anybody read him anymore?!), “beneath the bantering mockery of the woman's coyness is the desire to overcome space and time;” the witty juxtaposition and sharp contrast of the “eternal” and “ideal” with the “temporal, sensuous, and ordinary” make for extraordinary poetry. When Marvell attaches fanciful images to the facade of a story, the deeper thought is that time is short for us, though we dare not admit it; and in clothing this thought in images that oppose it, a compromise is effected. On the one hand, nothing is greater than pleasure, and “it is fairly immaterial in what manner one procures it;” one might be able to postpone gratification, “but how do I know whether I shall still be alive tomorrow?” On the other hand, by containing one's one-sided demands, one perhaps can “knit” one's life more closely to others', “to form such an intimate identification with others, that the shortening of one's life becomes surmountable;” the decision in this conflict “is possible only through the roundabout way of a new understanding.” The understanding achieved in the poem allows for the fact that there is no definite solution of the conflict of a life in time, despite the pretense to the reverse. “Life remains a blessing / Although you cannot bless.”

In “The Definition of Love,” Marvell does not directly address the object of his yearning. “My love,” in the first line, is not a well-bred person, but the speaker's emotion; as Wilcher notes, “the origin of this strange passion is traced to the impossibility of its desires ever being fulfilled.” Stanzas 3 and 4 “express the forced separation of the lovers” in physical images: fate, with its iron wedges, takes on a force not granted love in the poem, and is able to prevent the lovers' union. A perfect union would transgress the laws that govern the state of things as they are and so result in the “ruin” of Fate, the embodiment and guardian of those laws.

In Auden's famous poem on the subject of Law, it is (depending on whom you ask) the sun, wisdom, stuck-out tongues, priestly words to unpriestly people, judges' explanations and the writing of law-abiding scholars, crimes, clothes, “Good-morning and Good-night,” Fate, the state, the crowd, or something that has gone away. Nevertheless, “All agree / Gladly or miserably / That the Law is.” Auden identifies a “universal wish to guess / Or slip out or our own position / Into an unconcerned condition;” this is naturally impossible—

Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,

that law is like love. Auden says law is like love, but actually, this is a timid way of saying, too, that law determines love: we don't know where or why there is love, we can't compel it, we often weep over it, and we seldom keep it. The poem says one thing, means another, too: Auden wittily embraces a conflict embodied in the poem. While no solution is proposed to the problem of love's determined fleetingness, the articulation of it is faithful to reality.

If in the Auden poem love is something we seldom keep, Marvell supplies an astronomical form for this idea. His lovers, in fact, are (Wilcher again) “as far apart as the human imagination can reach—to the poles of the universe.” In stanza 7, Marvell refines and exploit the notion Auden has that “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun.” For Auden, the sun comes and goes, “To-morrow, yesterday, to-day;” time goes on forever, though individual lives and loves do not. Even those hyphens never meet. In the Marvell poem, unlike some of Donne's, physical difference really does separate lovers: the lines of latitude that represent the full-bodied world are infinitely parallel, while the lines of longitude meet in angles at the poles. The poem ends in a paradox, “the only available linguistic device for formulating the quality of a love that draws together and drives apart with equal force.” “Conjunction” and “opposition” continue the astronomical conceit. The poem, like Auden's, persists in a hopelessness that also strongly evokes the possibility of love's lasting, even if not infinite, value.

The call to love in Marvell is characteristically an opportunity to weigh against each other the bonds and separations in a life lived in time. “Young Love” is addressed to a girl too young indeed to hear or answer. “Come, little infant, love me now.” As well, Auden's “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” is addressed to one who cannot reply, being asleep. “Now then,” Marvell says mixing up time, “love me: time may take / Thee before thy time away.” And for Auden, “Time and fevers burn away / Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children, and the grave / Proves the child ephemeral.”

That these poems address people who cannot hear them, and are intended to be read by lots of third parties, has a dramatic effect: they're like asides in a play. The speaker in them, at a temporary remove from the scenes he plays, identifies the ways that love can be inadequate. For Marvell, “doubtful fate” portends “ill” that can only be counteracted by nipping fate in the bud: “Of this need we'll virtue make, / And learn love before we may.” Marvell combines the problem of time with the unyieldingness of women. Unable to gratify himself, he takes the reader as his confederate, the way some schmucks might make a smutty joke about a woman they consider to be intransigent. Marvell's wit makes gratification possible despite a hindrance. Freud calls this an obscenity that has become wit, one that “is tolerated only if it is witty.” The poem doesn't come off very well because - among other things - there are places where the weakness of his argument leads to a failure of wit, such as in the peculiar fourth stanza. Auden's poem works better because he asks his unconscious lover only to “find the mortal world enough.” For Auden, the question of “fidelity” is at issue. His is a flawed and faithless love, but a “human” love, after all. In his poem, wit serves to take the edge off the facts of a less-than-ideal relationship, which doesn't mean his point isn't ultimately made.

Marvell, at any rate, again collapses time and sexuality in “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers.” His seduction dialogue begins in the pastoral mode, nymph included, along with green grass and flowers, but as in “Young Love,” he creepily addresses someone who can’t really respond. Little T.C. plays in the grass (which we know from Isaiah withers) and “names” flowers (which fade)—at once a kind of Adam in the plant-world and a creator, who tells them what colors and scents to effect. She “begins” these days (the word introduces the idea of their transience) and they are “golden” (new, yet redolent of impending decay, like golden leaves). If the girl is potentially a woman, her innocence is only for now a foregone conclusion. By stanza 2 Marvell is already predicting her command of Cupid; by then her virtue will lie in her contest with adult men. Yet in stanza 3 he interjects himself, as Wilcher notes, to make a “first person appearance to negotiate a truce before battle is joined.” Her might consists not of virtue, but sexual power. She will wound and conquer with her eyes, which crush her lovers like chariot wheels. As for Marvell, he retreats to the “shade,” ostensibly to stay safe from her sexuality—but also to step back and write the poem. Again he has used separation to express sentiments about time and love. “Meantime” he is back from the future, describing a trampled Eden. “Procure,” with its connotations of taking measures, bring about by care or pains, and of obtaining women for the gratification of lust, chimes in a central rhyme with “endure.” As T.C. ruins the flowers to make them perfect, if less flowery, so Marvell would prospectively “cure” the girl of her flowering sexuality rather than endure the ruination of his own virgin hopes. As flowers and girls come one after the other, for Auden childhood beauty is lunar, untouched. It

Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

In childhood, Auden says,

Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

While on the face of it saying the opposite of Marvell, Auden, too, wrestles with the beauty of childhood, which will be ruined by puberty and effaced by age. The poem is, as Edward Mendelson says, an effort to “refuse the tasks of time... either by dying out of time or by finding some arcadian locus not yet affected by it.” This poem, and also “Schoolchildren,” says straight faced what the Marvell poem slyly and disturbingly disguises: that in children “the sex is there.”

By the end of Marvell's poem, as in “Young Love,” a sense of foreboding is extended from the speaker and the girl to the third-party readers: he tells T.C. to spare the buds lest lethal Flora

Do quickly make the example yours;
And, ere we see,
Nip in the blossom all our hopes and thee.

The real prospect, therefore, is not the “simple” picture Marvell purports to give us. Spoken from withdrawal, his real concerns are the “imperfections and transitoriness of created nature” whose witty articulation is all there is to carry him “across the gulf that separates him—and us—from the mind of a child not yet a prey to the longing, dissatisfactions, and fears that knowledge and experience bring.”

In his love poems Marvell articulates the conflict between an ideal love and the corruptions of time; in his political poetry an ideal of political order comes into conflict with the actual nature of history. “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland” opens with the “forward” youth who must give up his books, “Nor in the shadows sing.” In “Spain,” Auden puts it succinctly: “Yesterday is all the past.” The time of “shadow-reckoning” is over. Auden describes “the inglorious arts of peace” in some detail; and as Marvell packs away the books, so Auden says, “Yesterday the classic lecture / On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.” Like “three-forked lighting” Cromwell breaks and burns through the new moment, a stormy “disturbance in the fixed, natural order of things.” In Auden's words, “the menacing shapes of our fever / Are precise and alive.” Political thoughts are seen as independent bodies; similarly, Marvell is able to see Cromwell as the instrument of “angry heaven's flame.” Called up from his private gardens, Cromwell embodies the feverish thoughts of the nation. He cannot be confined to his own “plot,” planting the bergamot, the “pear of kings.” Instead he must uproot the monarchy, and shifting from the horticultural image to that of iron forging, Marvell shows how Cromwell could “cast” the kingdom into another “mould.” This transformation not only changes the picture of Cromwell, distancing his later role from his earlier private one, it also contains the tension between peaceful and warlike pursuits. The time of war forcefully “shapes the individual's belly and orders / The private nocturnal terror;” in Auden's poem, moments of peace “blossom” into the forced iron power of the firing squad, the bomb, and the ambulance.

Auden's citizens say, “O show us / History the operator, the / Organiser, Time the refreshing river,” but nothing quenches the thirst for change in the Marvell poem, where Cromwell must “ruin the great work of time.” The nation must be refashioned, and in Auden's poem, the nation says, “I accept, for / I am your choice, your decision.” Marvell says that Nature invites and makes room for the “penetration” of violence. And so Charles must go to the scaffold, “While round the armèd bands / Did clap their bloody hands.” As Auden explains, “To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.” The bleeding head found beneath the Capitol's foundation contrasts with the gentle gesture of the King's bowing his “comely head / Down, as upon a bed.” The Republic is based on forced power.

“To-day the makeshift consolations” are acceptable. So Marvell claims that the Irish, “though overcome, confessed” how good, just, and fit Cromwell's command is. An ambiguous wit is at work here: the lines maybe be read as ironical or not, and themselves have a forced power. As the architects “forsaw” the State's “happy fate” earlier in the poem, now Cromwell “forbears” his fame, “to make it theirs.” The action of the poem, though occasioned by Cromwell's return from Ireland, projects itself into the future. As we have seen, this is how Marvell gathers his wits when the present appears to be inadequate or dangerous.

Marvell's image of the falcon, Wilcher says, “enhances by contrast the magnanimity of Cromwell, whose submission to Parliament and people is an act of moral choice, whereas the obedience of bird to falconer is merely a conditioned response to training.” Still, the “What may not...” the “If's” and “But's” and the wordplay on “parti-coloured” infuse Marvell's dream of the future with careful skepticism. As the poem ends, Cromwell, like time, marches indefatigably on; his “active star” lights up the “shady night.” As Auden says at the end of “Spain,” “We are left alone with our day, and the time is short...” In the Auden poem, the struggle “to-day” (the hyphen lending force to the possibility of action, and to the day) divides “yesterday” from “to-morrow.” In a sense, each day of struggle repeats this, and must “maintain” that transitive power. Tomorrow resembles yesterday, and is, in fact, a “rediscovery.” The “forward” fighter must, alas, actually maintain the new status quo, against all pressures of time and history. Thanks to this, a certain servile wit is at work in both poems. Auden later repudiated his “flat ephemeral pamphlet.” That the work is ephemeral explains the “expending of powers” in such topical matters. Freud complained that witticisms containing allusions to actual persons and events are endowed with a tension that is lost over time, diminishing their pleasurable effect. Auden felt that his poem claimed to have “joined the realm of the private will to that of the public good, when in fact the union had been made through the force of rhetoric alone.” Mendelson characterizes the poem as “nostalgia for the future,” a Utopian work.“ As for Marvell, he evidently never published his Ode.

In the last couplet of the poem, Marvell maintains that the same ”arts“ that gained a power must keep it alive. These arts, presumably, do not include the art of poetry, Auden's ”poets exploding like bombs,“ despite the fact that the Ode is, after all, a poem—Marvell's ”measured“ endorsement of Cromwell. That touch is characteristic. In his poems Marvell's wit involves, as Eliot concludes, ”a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible;“ Marvell's taste for wit ”finds for him the proper degree of seriousness“ for the subjects he treats, an ”equipose, a balance and proportion of tones.“ At the same time, Marvell's wit shows how language ”is unreliable and is itself in need of examination for its authority.“ This is an irritation as well as an incitement and a pleasure; perhaps a reader may calm his or her own agitation ”by resolving that he himself should take the place of the narrator,“ and maintain the gains of poetry by - you guessed it! - writing more of it.

Pictured: The infamous "Tyburn tree!"

Time's wingèd chariot, springing a leak

Wit is nothing but a free play of ideas. - Jean Paul

In his survey of the techniques of wit, Freud begins by quoting a characterization of it that he finds “most satisfactory:” “Wit is a playful judgment.” For his part, T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Marvell, figures that the great imaginative power of that poet's wit lies in an “alliance of levity and seriousness,”—adding parenthetically—“(by which the seriousness is intensified.)” In making the narrow distinction between “imagination” and “fancy,” Eliot observes that poetic playfulness is not without its risks: “Obviously, an image which is immediately and unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy.” Johnson saw the fanciful as characteristic of metaphysical poetry and damaging to it when he complained about those most heterogeneous ideas “yoked by violence together.” Still, a once well-known philosopher named Lipps felt that the contrast of ideas in wit -

"is not formed in a manner to show the ideas connected with the words, rather it shows the contrast or contradiction in the meaning and lack of meaning of the words... A contrast arises first through the fact that we cannot adjudge a meaning to its words which after all, we cannot ascribe to them."

Wit can be used when language itself is nearly insufficient; there are situations when a simple statement won't do, and one says one thing and means another, too. Freud described wit as the containment of an idea and its opposite: it transforms “the expression of one of the ideas into an unusual form until it furnishes an associative connection with the second thought.” The contradictions of wit work to allow the use of a single, dominating voice while at the same time disclosing the “limitations of its vision... through the very conceits and rhetorical devices that constitute its medium of expression.”

You can see how this works in Marvell's “Mourning.” It opens by acknowledging the difficulty of interpreting the act of weeping, and addresses astrologers, inviting them to “decipher” Clora's tears. As astrologers read out the “fate” of human offspring from the skies, a man must read a woman's tears—and the reader must interpret Marvell's poem. The poem is filled with nearly-confusing false clues: “Of human offsprings from the skies” seems for a moment to refer to extraterrestrials; yet it sets up a serious parallel between human beings, who do seem to come out of nowhere, and the tears that “Spring from the stars of Clora's eyes.” “Late / Spring” might be glimpsed as a time of year. In stanza 2, her eyes themselves are confused, and in a pun are “doubled over.” The tears are “suspended,” which means both that they fall and do not fall. Indeed, they “Seem bending upwards,” in a gesture that suggests humility and acceptance, but also reproach, sending all that woe right back where it came from.

By stanza 3, one has cause to wonder how “precious” Clora's tears really are, and this is because Marvell regulates his rhetorical devices as carefully as Clora does her tears. Those tears may have real value (as in Donne's “A Valediction: Of Weeping”); Marvell's “pretending art” strengthens his fine assessment of the conflict contained in the poem. He pretends to dismiss the gossip: in stanzas 4 and 5 the tears fall to “soften” a place near Clora's heart for another wound, and in stanza 7, the tears are discarded in a kind of housekeeping; but Marvell claims the gossipers dream. Clora's tears are said to be as unfathomable as the seas. At the same time, while he says that divers “Would find her tears yet deeper waves / And not of one the bottom sound,” there is a deep impression that not one of Clora's tears is, at bottom, sound. Marvell claims in stanza 9 to keep his “silent judgement;” as “oft as women weep, / It is to be supposed they grieve.” Looked at one way, one sees that when women weep there may be genuine grief; seen another way, it is a matter of tact to act as if false grief is not counterfeit. The poem addresses what Robert Wilcher calls “the artifice of women,” yet it exemplifies the artifice of poetic wit: "Hiding behind the skill of an art that avoids all temptation to simplify the enigma of experience—even so trivial an enigma as that of Clora's tears—Marvell keeps his 'silent judgement.'” This “pretending art” through which alternative points of view are kept “hovering” behind the argument expresses the sad truth that grief is not as simple as it appears. Marvell's wit is a mode of expression that, like Clora's tears, softens a place near his heart to fix another poem.

Addressing further the problem of a mistress's coyness, when Marvell says “Had we but world enough, and time...” he indicates the opposite: that neither is available enough to allow room for coyness. The idea is that if time did not make the seduction ritual foolish, Marvell would “gladly play the conventional game of protracted courtship.” The poem advances this half-hearted argument by unfairly matching fancy against reality. By suggesting that one could have world enough and time, possibility is made to seem “equivalent to actuality,” to paraphrase Freud. This is executed through the use of playful images: the woman would find rubies by the Ganges, while by the tide (a word which once also meant “time”) of the Humber, he would complain; the juxtaposition of these two presumably Heraclitean rivers hints at the separations contained in time and the world. He would love her ten years before the Flood, and she refuse till the conversion of the Jews; his is an astonishing “vegetable” love. It's all just talk! Auden works the same neighborhood in “As I walked out one evening”—the crowds he sees are “fields of harvest wheat.” Auden's lover sings,

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street...

and so on, with the ocean hung up to dry and stars squawking like geese in the sky. At this point in each poem comes a telling “But...” In the Auden, clocks begin to whirr and chime; unconquerable, deceitful Time has his leisurely fancy. In Auden's nervous condition, life leaks away in headaches and in worry, and suicide is contemplated (ridiculously, since Time eventually will do the job, anyway). Meanwhile, glaciers knock in the cupboard, and even the crack in the tea cup (tea being one way to kill time) “opens / A lane to the land of the dead.” By the end of the poem, the lovers are gone; in this vacuum, the clocks cease their chiming, their work done.

Marvell doesn’t hear the clock ticking, but rather the whirring sound of time’s wingèd chariot. The image itself is almost ridiculous: imagine that fancy heavy thing hovering behind your ear—who rides it, and who drives? But before the reader has enough time to crack a smile, rhetoric about a courtship projected through time is superseded by the prospect of what lies “before” us: “Deserts” of vast, sterile eternity:

Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song...

Even should his verse survive and resound, it will not be heard in the tomb, or at least, from within the tomb; whether his song sounds or not will be unknowable to him. This doesn't prevent him from finishing the poem, as it happens. In another shifting of time, the poem returns to the “Now,” and Marvell has not got time for more frilly talk of love. Instead, he talks of “sport,” “amorous birds of prey,” tearing pleasure, and “rough strife.” As for the woman, she is waiting with pores, as it were, instantly inflamed. It's as if there is barely time for a last desperate quickie, as if a rushed bit of intercourse can compensate for all that gnawing eternity (which is replete with phallic, yet also detumescent, worms!). This imagination of sex—here neither love- nor baby-making—shows Marvell to be creepily undaunted in the face of the whirring clock. “Rather at once our time devour,” he says, while in the Auden poem the reverse happens: his lovers have run off, though in Marvell’s poem they stay put — and make time run on.

[Essay continued here....]

"He was always on the side of justice"

The BBC is reporting that the Spanish government will formally recognise one of the country's best-known poets as a victim of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

Here's some of the info, via reporter Sarah Rainsford in Madrid:

"The decision to rehabilitate him comes as Spain marks the centenary of the poet's birth with a series of events. 'We have always lived with this sadness, and finally we have cleansed his memory,' the poet's daughter-in-law, Lucia Izquierdo, told the BBC. 'We wanted his image restored as a poet of the people, and a great man.'

'Lullaby of the Onion'

The family applied for the rehabilitation under Spain's Historical Memory Law, passed in 2007 to recognise the victims on both sides of the Civil War, and during Franco's rule... Ranked alongside Federico Garcia Lorca and others as one of Spain's finest poets, Miguel Hernandez was from a poor, peasant family. A staunch Republican, many of his poems depict the horror of the Civil War. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1940, when he refused on principle to sign a confession and apology in return for permission to go into exile.

'He was never a traitor, he was always on the side of justice,' Ms Izquierdo said. 'It is frightening to think what they did to him. He never took up arms, but they were against him because he defended Spain with his pen. His legacy is some of the most beautiful poetry we have. His unjust death deprived us of more...'

Many of the poet's most moving works were written in prison, including the famous 'Onion Lullaby.' He addressed that poem to his wife when he learned she and their child were surviving on nothing but onions."

-- The full story from BBC NEWS can be read here.

I don't often put in a plug for myself, but... You can read my translations (which were awarded the TLS Translation Prize, among other honors) of this astonishing poet here; for a few sample poems, click here.

Poetry and the trades

The New York Times: "American fiction and poetry could use more former blacksmiths and concrete mixers among its ranks. Albeit without the forced labor."

(FWIW, I am descended from a blacksmith who was anything but poetical. Though he may have liked "The Village Blacksmith" for all I know.)

Link via Michael Marcinkowski who remarks:

"The forced labor part seems key. What self-respecting person trying to make a career as a writer would waste time on such things if they are not forced to? (Note ironic rhetorical tone.)

Additionally problematic: the form that such labor would take in America wouldn't be anything as exciting as blacksmithing or concrete mixing (professions that still involve craft), but would be something much more dull, like retail."

Pictured: A guy who was neither a poet nor my grandfather, about to smash a copy of Poetry magazine, a la Charles Bernstein.

Al Que Quiere!

"Literary style is the expression of the innate person, not something you buy into with options for future makeovers."

. . .

"[My work] runs counter to a lot of what is deemed avant-garde work. I noticed I couldn't really write the thinky or conceptual poems that mark their territory through a refusal of sense data, or spatio-temporal conventions. I've written a lot on Susan Stewart's work, which takes as a starting point Marx's notion that even the five senses are the product of historical forces - they have a history, and for Stewart poetry is a record of that history.

And I have a history, and it is legible in my work both as content and in the development of styles and methods. I wouldn't have it any other way."

-- Ange Mlinko, in conversation with Jordan Davis

*

From the dustjacket of the 1917 edition of William Carlos Williams’ book Al Que Quiere!:

“To Whom It May Concern! This book is a collection of poems by William Carlos Williams. You, gentle reader, will probably not like it, because it is brutally powerful and scornfully crude. Fortunately, neither the author nor the publisher care much whether you like it or not. The author has done his work, and if you do read the book you will agree that he doesn’t give a damn for your opinion. . . . And we, the publishers, don’t much care whether you buy the book or not. It only costs a dollar, so that we can’t make much profit out of it. But we have the satisfaction of offering that which will outweigh, in spite of its eighty small pages, a dozen volumes of pretty lyrics. We have the profound satisfaction of publishing a book in which, we venture to predict, the poets of the future will dig for material as the poets of today dig in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.”

-- via cs perez, who adds:

... the epigraph of Al Que Quiere! is a passage from the story "El hombre que parecia un caballo," by Guatemalan writer Rafael Arévalo Martínez (whom Williams translated with his father):

“I had been an adventurous shrub which prolongs its filaments until it finds the necessary humus in new earth. And how I fed! I fed with the joy of tremulous leaves of chlorafile that spread themselves to the sun; with the joy with which a root encounters a decomposing corpse; with the joy with which convalescents take their vacillating steps in the light-flooded mornings of spring.”

[all this info can be found in the notes to the collected WCW]

Jllegible phrases [sic]

What poet wrote (or did not write) these lines?*

When spoken to unsympathetically attack ally as by a hostile lawyers

go to wrack and mine

dig your rave in if your dead

hide [linigue] for harriners

The mining of them that nod and not

Columbus brooch alone awhile

History that coming

In colleness or in the quest of fruit

all he is parinian

use of lipstitch and howdy

brought up dull

if I become your Bently

***

Serving two or three bats

Fan pitcher

The picktie exhibition

***

Colundres! Christophes! No less!

What no one left alive but you

He boards again


Till someone comes up over [side]

The meekly [vaunt] single file

Columbus brooch alone awhile


*Hint: Not a Flarfist or conceptual writer. Answer: CLICK HERE

Now They Bury Her Again

Chagrin

"Imagine my chagrin every snowstorm when I feel violently that every poet in NY is writing some terribilita on snow and none as well as Pasternak: the blizzard was alone with the world."

-- David Shapiro

The quantum of wantum does not vary

... So it irritates me when people make out that now there are constraints of cultural/political/social situations, as if there used not to be. I don’t know a society in which there aren’t pressures to conform. And anyway I don’t think conforming is a bad thing. So I’m not one of those people who use the word ‘subversive’ as if it’s automatically a good thing: ‘The great thing about literature is that it’s so subversive’. There are lots of things which should not be subverted. The idea that you have shown that someone is a good writer because you have shown that he or she has challenged the orthodox opinion… Orthodox opinion is often immensely to be valued...

*

It suits people always to make out things were very bad in the old days so that there is need for new days. I’ve heard Empson and Eliot referred to as horse- and-buggy criticism. A lot of anger (mine and other people’s) in those matters had to do with mis-descriptions of the past. ‘We no longer believe in the myth of the solitary genius’. Now who did believe in the myth of the solitary genius? It’s the phrasing: ‘We no longer…’. ‘We are no longer naive empiricists’. Alright, now was Eliot a naive empiricist? It doesn’t look like it to me.

*

One big enemy of literary studies is recency, an inordinate claim, proportionately, for contemporary or recent literature. So I’m against the invention by literary theorists of the term ‘post-contemporary.’ It means being ahead of the minute. Being up to the minute is alright, but being ahead of the minute is even better.

-- Christopher Ricks, in an interview at The Literateur Magazine [!], via Daniel Pritchard

***

Is truth beauty and/or vice versa? Search me, but check out Adam Fitzgerald's swell new blog TheThe for some stabs at an answer, in a post called "The Ill-Wrought Urn?"


Illustration, above, by John Keats

Two poems with about one hundred years between them

Winter Fields

O for a pleasant book to cheat the sway
Of winter -- where rich mirth with hearty laugh
Listens and rubs his legs on corner seat
Foe fields are mire and sludge -- and badly off
Are those who on their pudgy paths delay
There striding shepherd seeking driest way
Fearing nights wetshod feet and hacking cough
That keeps him waken till the peep of day
Goes shouldering onward and with ready hook
Progs oft to ford the sloughs that nearly meet
Across the lands -- croodling and thin to view
His loath dog follows -- stops and quakes and looks
For better roads -- till whistled to pursue
Then on with frequent jump he hirkles through


Blizzard in Cambridge

Risen from the blindness of teaching to bright snow,
and everything mechanical stopped dead:
taxis thumbs-down on fares, tires burning the ice;
wet eye, iced eyelash, spring-wear; subways held,
too jammed and late to wait for passengers;
to snow-trekking the mile from subway end to airport,
to all-flights-cancelled, to the queues congealed
to telephones out of order, to the groping buses,
to rich, stranded New Yorkers staring with the wild, mild eyes
of steers at the foreign subway -- then the train home,
rolling with stately scorn: an hour in Providence,
another in New Haven -- in darkness seeing
white arsenic numbers on the tail of a downed plane,
the smokestacks of abandoned fieldguns burning skyward.

Poetry and embarassment

For John Keats, love poems caused "a burning forehead" and "a parched tongue."

For Andrew Marvell they created "instant fires" in every pore.

But what really happens we we read poems?

Click here to find out how effective "love" poems really are!

The Three Blind Mice at Acapulco

The 1st Blind Mouse: I smell skin-divers and playful sharks.
The 2nd Blind Mouse: Expensive garbage and after-shave lotion.
The 3rd Blind Mouse: Gringos and the sweat of bulbous dancers.
1st Blind Mouse: O nacreous moon!
2nd Blind Mouse: O transilient yacht!
3rd Blind Mouse: O rum-riddled surf!
1st Blind Mouse: O patulous belly-bumpers!
2nd Blind Mouse: O cliff-hanging bay of bays!
3rd Blind Mouse: O crapulent mangrove swamp!
All Together: Touch us where it hurts us most,
See us, O, see us.

-- RIP Poetry contributor Philip Murray

Love begins a picture: an anthology of Google Voice (tm) poems

... Mao said a revolutionary must swim among the people like a fish. The Maoists thought they were ushering in a new future. But don't we all just "try to be tomorrow" when we "get the chance"? I attribute much of this piece to the Voice, although "whatever this is" is resonant with Christina's sense of irony.

-- from an editor's note to a work included in a groundbreaking new anthology of work that combines elements of Flarf with actual human voices!

No like? How 'bout Ezra Pound listening quietly to Pasolini, then?

Merfolk

You can read Francisco Aragon's response to my post about bilingualism on his blog, Letras Latinas. I am grateful for it. He mentions the disheartening recent news story about Spanish-speaking workers at a bookstore, of all places, being asked not to use their own language on the job, as well as Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, an influential book for both of us, it turns out. I hope you'll read what Francisco has to say, for which I am grateful and by which I am moved.

I should add, about Ni Dhomhnaill, that though Irish herself, she had to embrace the language on her own in a culture that increasingly embraced English as a dominant language; and that, married to a Turkish man, she also lived in Turkey and learned to read and speak Turkish. The experience of living away from her own country and culture did not make her nostalgic for either, but rather showed her how deeply important it was for her to write and function in her own inherited language. But it also reinforced her sense of a kind of vertigo and dislocation:

"... the whole act of [literary] translation seems to me vitally important. What we gain is still so much greater than what we lose. It is another precarious purchase on reality in the often uncomfortable, even at times downright pathological, life of continuous dualism. Many are wont to praise the stereophonic and stereoscopic worldview gained by knowing a major world language and a less-spoken local one which has a long and august literary reality. I am more inclined to be aware of the vertiginous swoon and sense of headlong rush into incomprehensibility which often accompanies this dual view."

I quote this to amplify and clarify my earlier post: it's not the case that what she describes is exactly pertinent to Spanish. Ni Dhomhnaill specifically contrasts English, a "major world language" with "a less-spoken local one," and Spanish is both a major world language and a much-spoken local one. The larger point remains: that we owe much to translation, and to poetry itself, however you come by it:

The high spring tides leave their mark
on the sea-walls of their minds, the edge of every breaking wave
ragged with flotsam and jetsam and other wreckage,
words carried ashore like the shells of sea-urchin
and left at the high-water mark where they get the head-staggers
at the time of the Saturday moon, words that are still imbued
with the old order of things, phrases like
"wide thighs, narrow-waist, hare-brain."

(translation by Paul Muldoon of an unpublished poem)

My thanks yet again to Francisco, and I expect we'll each have more to say!

Speaking English is Like

Recently, in a controversial Harriet thread by Craig Santos Perez called 'Spic Up!' & why 'US Hispanics Don't Count', Vivek Narayanan remarked: "Every single American child should be forced to learn and be fluent in both Spanish and English. Harsh treatment? It wouldn’t kill anyone."

I replied that having been so educated (and being descended myself from bilingual persons - as well as being a translator of Spanish poetry), I don't feel at all superior to a monolingual person. How ignorant are we of other people's languages, and of our own?

Many of us are monolingual because we have lost the languages of our parents or grandparents. Our families wanted us to learn English, to fit in, to belong to ourselves and not the past. Often, there is tragedy written into these transformations. The inferiority complex of the immigrant gives way to the superiority complex of the English language. What would it be like for it to be otherwise: to live in two languages, to have two different mind-sets? Interestingly, the Irish poet (and when I say "Irish poet," I mean one who writes in Irish) Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, has some fascinating reservations about being bilingual. In her recent book of selected essays (not published, alas, in the U.S.), she asks -

"...is it always, or necessarily, a good thing? Does a bilingual existence really, as many claim, lead to a genuinely stereoscopic and enriched view of life, or is it the cause of mental astigmatism and blurred vision, a sense of displacement, a deep anxiety? I have found at times that the inner contradictions bilingualism entails cause psychic pain: sometimes it is as if a civil war were going on inside me, and the sheer effort of maintaining a standoff of the warring parties is deeply exhausting. All my energies get sucked down into the subconscious, with a depression characterised by overwhelming lethargy as its most obvious physical manifestation. Even in better times there is a constant restlessness. Is this feeling of being unsettled, vaguely in exile from somewhere I know not where or something I know not what, connected with the sheer complexity of Irish history - or is it just an ineradicable part of the modern condition? There is no Ithaca to return to. The cancerous spread of global 'pop' monoculture has seen to that."

I wonder how that would sit with American poets who are bilingual. As it happens, Craig (whose own work you can sample here) and I were recently thinking about some books to review, and he was interested in Kristin Naca's Bird Eating Bird, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the National Poetry Series. Naca is an interesting poet to think about in this context - she teaches Asian American and Latino poetry at Macalester College, and her book weaves together, weaves in and out of, Spanish and English lines. Some of the poems are present in both English and Spanish versions, and each version has, to my eye and ear, very distinct - but surely complimentary - pleasures. I hope you'll browse the book here.

The number of poets who write in Irish today is very small; I do not know the number of Latino/a poets in the US, but it is surely growing. But the juxtaposition of Ni Dhomhnaill and Naca has really given me lots to think about. The former writes movingly about how the suffering and day-to-day lives of millions of people was experienced in a language, Irish, that is condescended to, is lopped out of history. One also thinks of Yiddish; another juxtaposition is with the recent passing of Abraham Sutzkever. No language is dead as long as its poems still live.

Here's one of Sutzkever's poems, translated by Jacqueline Osherow for Poetry; it's from a longer work called "Epitaphs" -


Written on a slat of a railway car:

If some time someone should find pearls
threaded on a blood-red string of silk
which, near the throat, runs all the thinner
like life’s own path until it’s gone
somewhere in a fog and can’t be seen—

If someone should find these pearls
let him know how—cool, aloof—they lit up
the eighteen-year-old, impatient heart
of the Paris dancing girl, Marie.

Now, dragged through unknown Poland—
I’m throwing my pearls through the grate.

If they’re found by a young man—
let these pearls adorn his girlfriend.
If they’re found by a girl—
let her wear them; they belong to her.
And if they’re found by an old man—
let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.


Here's Ni Dhomhnaill's "As For the Quince," translated by Paul Muldoon; the poem in its original Irish can be found here.


As for the Quince
There came this bright young thing
with a Black & Decker
and cut down my quince-tree.
I stood with my mouth hanging open
while one by one
she trimmed off the branches.

When my husband got home that evening
and saw what had happened
he lost the rag,
as you might imagine.
“Why didn’t you stop her?
What would she think
if I took the Black & Decker
round to her place
and cut down a quince-tree
belonging to her?
What would she make of that?”

Her ladyship came back next morning
while I was at breakfast.
She enquired about his reaction.
I told her straight
that he was wondering how she’d feel
if he took a Black & Decker
round to her house
and cut down a quince tree of hers,
et cetera et cetera.

“O,” says she, “that’s very interesting.”
There was a stress on the ‘very’.
She lingered over the ‘ing’.
She was remarkably calm and collected.

These are the times that are in it, so,
all a bit topsy-turvy.
The bottom falling out of my belly
as if I had got a kick up the arse
or a punch in the kidneys.
A fainting-fit coming over me
that took the legs from under me
and left me so zonked
I could barely lift a finger
till Wednesday.

As for the quince, it was safe and sound
and still somehow holding its ground.


Here's Kristin Naca's "Speaking English is Like" -


Brown and beige and blonde tiles set in panels of tile across the bathroom floor.
Wakes curled into the pavement by traffic, the asphalt a slow, gray tide.
A loose floorboard hiding the gouges chunked out of the floor.
Tawny red curtains hamstrung in the quick, morning light.
Her body oils like sage in a shirt, in the bed sheets.
Pigeons on a line and in the gutters.
The staple that misfires and jams the hammer.
The tender, black wick at the top of a candle's waxy lip.
The lonely woman secretly dying her curtains red at the Laundry Factory.
The purple and purple-blue berry sacks tethered to a blackberry rind.
Branches lolled by the weight of voluminous, tender sacks.
The path along the lake lit up with the pitch of purple stars.
Mouthfuls of lavender at the height of August.
Her lips, red gathering in the creases when she puckers.
Endings that are dirty tricks and also feathers.
Red water out the pipes, teeming from the rusty gutters.
The curtain flicker in the leafy, August breeze.
The ghostly cu-cu echoing through the purple night, under stars.


Ghostly echoing... love and sensuality... regret... prayer. I'm lucky to be able to read these poems in English, luckier, perhaps, than the man who returned to Ithaca.

Are we ignorant if we only know one language? Is the language to know that which belonged to our ancestors, or having forsaken that one, English? Ni Dhomhnaill writes of a relative who was ignorant - but in the way that the (bilingual) poet Michael Hartnett spoke of his own grandmother:

ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat.

We ought not to be monotonous in our diet of poems, whatever the language they're written in; we need the spices and flavors of our native food, but that of other cuisines as well. But we do need to know ourselves, even if there will always be flatlanders who dispense with our "subjectivity."

Ni Dhomhnaill tells the story that when she was five, having been removed from coal-mining Lancashire in England to the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht of the Dingle peninsula, nobody in her new village could understand her Scouse English, any more than she could quite understand their Kerry accents. One day she met an old man coming down the road who asked her, "Ce leis tu?" In English: "Who do you belong to?" - the usual way of asking children their name.

"Taking the phrase at its most literal meaning, I drew myself bristling to my great height of all three-foot nothing and stoutly replied, 'Ni le heinne me. Is liom fein me fein' ('I don't belong to anyone. I belong only to myself.') Chuckling mightily, Jacsai continued down the road..."

We don't belong to ourselves. As Ni Dhomhnaill puts it, "there are many, many people to whom I belong, and who belong to me." I'll wind things up now with her poem, "The Language Issue," translated again by Paul Muldoon:


I place my hope in the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither
not knowing where it may end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.

(Please also read a follow-up post here.)
This post is dedicated to Craig Santos Perez and Francisco Aragon

The Atlantic Rift

Reading unfamiliar poetries means de facto accepting a tricky plural: one that denotes the contingency of poetic form, and implies the possibility of thinking about poetry as much as through it. Maybe one reason British readers are often resistant to international writing is that this notion of “thinking about” disturbs a customary empiricism. Our contemporary poetry mores translate a deep-seated empirical tradition into twin concerns: with craft, and with presenting concrete example rather than abstract argument. “Muscularity,” that Leavisite term of endearment, pictures the poem as material: the poem is the concrete particularity of these words, in this order. As Auden said, it “makes nothing happen”; its business is simply to be its own perfect incarnation. No coincidence that Don Paterson, arguably the most brilliantly-influential poet working in Britain today, turns William Carlos Williams’s vision of the poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words”—that is, a producer of affect, of something beyond itself—inwards, into “a little machine for remembering itself.”

It’s easy to see how abstraction can be a high road to cliche and un-clarity. Great ideas like love, truth, and justice are emptied of content as they circulate in political and commercial discourse. On the other hand, as the Australian poet-activist John Kinsella suggests in his clearly instrumental poetics, reading poetic complexity might equip us to decode, and challenge, those very discourses. (Nothing new here: Shelley makes a similarly instrumental case, in A Defence of Poetry, for the usefulness of practicing imaginative sympathy.) In a distinction too easily forgotten, abstraction—that gesture of finality with which the concrete realm is lifted away from, or refused—differs from abstract thought, which breathes movement into and within the conceptual realm. Practice (“craft”) does produce the poem. But it’s difficult to work out how we can be sure what’s produced is fit for purpose unless we accept that the poem has a purpose. This struggle to fix the locus of poetic purpose, or meaning—whether it’s internal to the text, or what it would mean to say it could be extra-textual—is central to contemporary British poetry. Encountering the unfamiliar also demonstrates the extent to which reading a poem means thinking in its terms. Sometimes—when the poem feels unappealing in one way or another—this collusion seems more like discipline than consent; but it locates the reader within a poem’s semantic frame, as an element which therefore shifts what a poem can be. The Atlantic Rift does make a difference to what “American poems” can be for a British reader.

-- Fiona Sampson

Questions poets get asked

Why do you write when no one can tell me what the point is? Why do you have to do something so dubious? Why are you so difficult that hardly anyone can understand you? Why do you stand there so calmly presiding over all your neuroses? -- Durs Grünbein, on the questions poets are always asked, February 2010 issue of Poetry