I, too, dislike it.
But.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Gamechangers
Prepping for class today, I reread Helen Vendler’s account of meeting Seamus Heaney and first hearing the poems of North. Vendler calls that book one of those rare volumes (like Prufrock, Harmonium, and North of Boston) that profoundly influenced the course of poetry in the 20th century. It’s not that I disagree, either about North – there are reasons why I teach Heaney’s poems pretty regularly – or about the Eliot, Stevens, and Frost books to which she compares it – I teach those guys all the time too – but it struck me that Vendler’s list, aside from North, stops around 1923. So I started wondering what books I’d add. In the spirit of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which slim volumes (not already named) might make up the Top Five Poetic Gamechangers of the Century?
We’re looking, if Vendler’s list is a guide, for books whose poems not only strike us with particular power but also bring some alteration of form or rhetoric to bear on the specific character of their historical moment, for books whose poems not only strike us individually but also add up to a coherent and forceful whole. A couple of Yeats volumes come quickly to mind, though two (Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921]) are even earlier than the other modernist books above. And very recent stuff has not yet had a chance to exert any influence or demonstrate its staying power. So, for now, I’ll focus on the half-century between 1924 and 1975. Even here there’s an embarrassment of poetic riches, even if we set aside Pound’s 1925 Draft of XVI Cantos (great opening, vitally important middle, and strong ending, but some less crucial stuff scattered throughout) and, for fun, allow no repeat Eliot, Frost, Heaney, or Stevens. Which Bishop volume does one choose? Which Larkin? Do you go with an early, small-press Prynne or one of the more recent, Bloodaxe volumes? I’ll spread my list over a couple of posts, and I’ll take the cowardly judge’s dodge and name some Honorable Mentions to swell the list and accommodate more of my choices.
Sylvi
a Plath, Ariel (1965)OK, some of this book’s influence might seem to be malign (see any of the hordes of poets who’ve taken from Plath an ambition to load every rift with emotional ore but who’ve left behind the formal mastery with which Plath actually at once achieves and transcends her strong emotional effects), and we’ll probably, at some point, have to have the conversation about which Ariel we’re talking about, given the alterations and emendations scholars have pointed out in the decades since the volume’s publication. Still, though, from the updated dramatic monologues of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” to the contained energy of the bee poems, Plath crafts from her enviable formal control crucibles in which to mold the molten resentments recognizable to women not only in the 1960s when she wrote the poems but also to generations since take profound and powerful shape.
Honorable Mention: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
It’s no insult to Plath to say that Ariel is unimaginable without the example of Lowell’s book, which precedes it by a couple of years and which also makes the poet’s self an emotionally fraught exemplum not only for feeling individuals but also for the pressures those “tranquilized Fifties” exerted on them.
Michael Harper, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970)
A tough call here over which makes the list and which is honorably mentioned, but the visceral power channeled through jazz rhythms and idioms just packs more punch to the contemporary ear than Hughes’s blues poems (great as they are). Or is it that the personal pain in Harper’s elegies for his newborn son, especially when articulated to the racial division and violence of the 1960s, lift the book to a higher level of power and potential influence? I think I’d maybe listened once to twice to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme before I read this book, but I went out and bought it and put it on constant repeat after I read it (which meant, really, listening to one half over and over because, um, this was back in the days of LPs; I can still hear the arm lifting the needle from the end of the record and swinging it back, then the hiss of the groove before the first sounds of the first movement sang out again). If you can get hold of the recording Harper did with Essex Hemphill on cello, do it. But even if you can’t, just read a poem like “Deathwatch” or “We Assume” out loud. Does America need a killing? I’d like to think not, but at the end of the poem, when Harper intones that refrain, it’s hard not to agree. And it’s cold compensation that “Survivors will be human,” but a compensation that’s earned by the poem’s clear-eyed confrontation with both personal grief and political grimness.
Honorable Mention: Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues(1926) According to Hughes, when he was reading poems from this book in a Harlem church, the pastor passed him a note telling him to stop reading the blues from his pulpit. It’s hard to recover the sense of violence against decorous norms that Hughes perpetrated in his early blues poems, and hard to remember until you reread them both the power and the political charge the poems bear. If it’s been a while, or if you’ve only read the Hughes poems typically anthologized, this one’s worth checking out.)
Next time: Ashbery? And Howe!
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Reviewing the Reviews: Toibin on Gunn in NYRB
If you didn’t catch it, check out Colm Toibin’s review of the new Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler. I’ve got my problems with the Kleinzahler’s selection (too little of the early work, which often – though not, I have to say, by Kleinzahler in his introduction – gets written off as the tight-assed verse of a young poet from austere, post-imperial Britain, and too much of early seventies stuff, which seems for some readers to stand for the loose, acid-fueled authenticity of a wild man who’s come to accept his penchant for Harleys and black leather), and so would cavil a little over Toibin’s approval of same, but the review’s great. Toibin’s clear and perceptive. More than that, he really gets Gunn. This can be most clearly seen when he turns to exemplary lines and stanzas; he notes, for example, the “mixture of sexual desire and lovely, ambiguous menace” in Gunn’s wonderful “Tamer and Hawk.” But his broader characterization of Gunn’s work, both in individual moments (the Movement-ish verse of the first three books, the experimental work of the Moly period, the elegiac Man with Night Sweats) and in the arc of the career as a whole (as when he illustrates the continuities across the career through five poems chosen for attention by critics in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, another book under review in the essay) are also persuasive.
It might be, though, that the comments I most appreciate in Toibin’s review are those that get not at the variety of Gunn’s work but at the catholicity of the poet’s taste. Toibin sets up as the poles between which Gunn moved over the course of h
is career the antithetical Bay Area figures of critic Yvor Winters and poet Robert Duncan, and he concludes with a comment about how Gunn, especially in a notebook comment about how poetry could “be one’s life at the fullest,” would have met with the approval of both.
He quotes with approval Gunn’s response to an interview question about the impressive span of his poetic affinities: “I’m not surprised . . . that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I’m surprised that everybody doesn’t.” This attitude is of a piece, I think, with that other uncommon facet of Gunn’s poetics: his resistance to the notion of poetic uniqueness, to the idea that poets should cultivate idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable individual voices. If, like Gunn, more poets made the work about language and its ways of mediating, shaping, warping, breaking and otherwise verbing experience, intellection, and feeling (rather than about their own experience, thoughts, and emotions), the art might recover the widespread strength Gunn himself saw in the work of the Elizabethans. That might be a good thing.
If you didn’t catch it, check out Colm Toibin’s review of the new Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler. I’ve got my problems with the Kleinzahler’s selection (too little of the early work, which often – though not, I have to say, by Kleinzahler in his introduction – gets written off as the tight-assed verse of a young poet from austere, post-imperial Britain, and too much of early seventies stuff, which seems for some readers to stand for the loose, acid-fueled authenticity of a wild man who’s come to accept his penchant for Harleys and black leather), and so would cavil a little over Toibin’s approval of same, but the review’s great. Toibin’s clear and perceptive. More than that, he really gets Gunn. This can be most clearly seen when he turns to exemplary lines and stanzas; he notes, for example, the “mixture of sexual desire and lovely, ambiguous menace” in Gunn’s wonderful “Tamer and Hawk.” But his broader characterization of Gunn’s work, both in individual moments (the Movement-ish verse of the first three books, the experimental work of the Moly period, the elegiac Man with Night Sweats) and in the arc of the career as a whole (as when he illustrates the continuities across the career through five poems chosen for attention by critics in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, another book under review in the essay) are also persuasive.
It might be, though, that the comments I most appreciate in Toibin’s review are those that get not at the variety of Gunn’s work but at the catholicity of the poet’s taste. Toibin sets up as the poles between which Gunn moved over the course of h
is career the antithetical Bay Area figures of critic Yvor Winters and poet Robert Duncan, and he concludes with a comment about how Gunn, especially in a notebook comment about how poetry could “be one’s life at the fullest,” would have met with the approval of both.He quotes with approval Gunn’s response to an interview question about the impressive span of his poetic affinities: “I’m not surprised . . . that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I’m surprised that everybody doesn’t.” This attitude is of a piece, I think, with that other uncommon facet of Gunn’s poetics: his resistance to the notion of poetic uniqueness, to the idea that poets should cultivate idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable individual voices. If, like Gunn, more poets made the work about language and its ways of mediating, shaping, warping, breaking and otherwise verbing experience, intellection, and feeling (rather than about their own experience, thoughts, and emotions), the art might recover the widespread strength Gunn himself saw in the work of the Elizabethans. That might be a good thing.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Review: Carl Phillips's Latest
A few years ago, I wrote that Carl Phillips is the best writer of unrhymed tercets in the contemporary American poetry scene. I also said that wasn’t faint praise. I’ll stand by both of those assertions now, on the basis of “The River in Motion and Stillness,” in Phillips’s latest volume (FSG 2009). Also on display here is Phillips’s penchant for long sentences broken over lines and caesurae:
As if with the satisfaction of a near-impossible task
brought finally, and with no little struggling, to absolute
accomplishment, he lifts his ruined face up from beside
the other’s face, just as ruined, despite the sun being at that
angle that makes what ordinarily gets taken for flaw
very briefly what it also is: a loveliness, and something
strange, original . . .
The ellipses are in the poem, and, like the self-interrupting course of the sentence, they suggest the unending character of the experiences and perceptions Phillips recounts. Part of what makes Phillips so rewarding to read is precisely this tension between interruption and continuity, a tension held not only by the suspensions of sense over those syntactic and stanzaic breaks but also by the interplay of sounds. Listen to the simultaneous variety and insistence of “a” sounds in that sentence, the short “a” of “As,” “satisfaction,” “task,” “and,” “absolute,” continuing through the second stanza even as Phillips shifs to the long vowel of “face” (twice) and “taken,” “angle” and “strange.” There’s a similar alternation or interweaving of sibilants and fricatives, the hissing whisper of the lines providing a sinuous soundtrack over the modifying and qualifying phrases. The lines and their music perform what the poem’s title promises, motion and stillness.
Most of the poems in Speak Low are not in unrhymed tercets, but there are plenty of other elements that link the book to the poet’s previous nine (nine!) collections. Phillips was trained as a classicist, and this volume, like his other books, refers often to classical myths, histories, and texts (“Late Empire,” “The Plains of Troy,” “The Centaur,” “Fair Is Whatever the Gods Call Fair,” “Reciprocity”). These references suggest analogies between the violent emotions and actions of the old world a
nd life and love today, but it’s hard to tell which is the tenor and which the vehicle, which of these we’re being led to understand in light of the other. “Happiness” meditates on the tears not of Achilles but of his horses at the death of Patroclus and imagines the beasts “hovering around their disbelief . . . as a bee will hover, // fooled at first, over freshly spilled semen,” the shift from past to present tense (and the context of the volume’s other poems on lovers and their discontents) locating the simile in today. The comparison’s ostensible aim is to illuminate those horses, but it’s contemporary weepers we really learn something about, just as in “Naming the Stars” Helen in the Iliad says something applicable not only (and not, for the poem’s purposes, chiefly) to the role of defilement in Homer’s world but also to the part it plays in ours.
Defilement; there’s another continuity with Phillips’s earlier work. This poet, more than a
ny other living poet I can think of (and in company with such immortals as Catullus, Shakespeare, and Thom Gunn), forcibly holds our faces to the violence inherent in what we call (to make ourselves feel better? more human(e)?) love.
There is pain in these poems, there is torture, and these are inextricable from, are, maybe, constitutive of, desire. The speaker of “Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices” characterizes himself with references to sentences he’s “spouted” (“To know is to live flayed and Ambition / means turning the flesh repeatedly back – toward the whip”), as if to distance himself from these statements, but “Late Empire” and “Early Dreamer” and half a dozen other poems here seem still to proffer without apology similar sentiments.
So that it’s a relief, not because I doubt or disagree with Phillips’s intrication of love and torture (quite the contrary), and not because there is no pleasure in the pain he so tautly strings across the poems’ staves (there’s plenty of that), but because even after an enthralling storm, a compelling thriller, or a strenuously orgasmic bout of sexual combat the mind and heart and body seek rest and quiet, a return to equilibrium, to come to the book’s penultimate poem, “Husk,” which turns the volume down and reels the lines back in (“a wordlessness prevailing the way / a wind prevails”) and resigns itself, allowing us to resign ourselves in turn, with its concluding line: “So what, that we’re falling?” Falling, and fallenness too, have rarely fared as well as they do in Phillips’s classical handling, his careful hands.
As if with the satisfaction of a near-impossible task
brought finally, and with no little struggling, to absolute
accomplishment, he lifts his ruined face up from beside
the other’s face, just as ruined, despite the sun being at that
angle that makes what ordinarily gets taken for flaw
very briefly what it also is: a loveliness, and something
strange, original . . .
The ellipses are in the poem, and, like the self-interrupting course of the sentence, they suggest the unending character of the experiences and perceptions Phillips recounts. Part of what makes Phillips so rewarding to read is precisely this tension between interruption and continuity, a tension held not only by the suspensions of sense over those syntactic and stanzaic breaks but also by the interplay of sounds. Listen to the simultaneous variety and insistence of “a” sounds in that sentence, the short “a” of “As,” “satisfaction,” “task,” “and,” “absolute,” continuing through the second stanza even as Phillips shifs to the long vowel of “face” (twice) and “taken,” “angle” and “strange.” There’s a similar alternation or interweaving of sibilants and fricatives, the hissing whisper of the lines providing a sinuous soundtrack over the modifying and qualifying phrases. The lines and their music perform what the poem’s title promises, motion and stillness.
Most of the poems in Speak Low are not in unrhymed tercets, but there are plenty of other elements that link the book to the poet’s previous nine (nine!) collections. Phillips was trained as a classicist, and this volume, like his other books, refers often to classical myths, histories, and texts (“Late Empire,” “The Plains of Troy,” “The Centaur,” “Fair Is Whatever the Gods Call Fair,” “Reciprocity”). These references suggest analogies between the violent emotions and actions of the old world a
nd life and love today, but it’s hard to tell which is the tenor and which the vehicle, which of these we’re being led to understand in light of the other. “Happiness” meditates on the tears not of Achilles but of his horses at the death of Patroclus and imagines the beasts “hovering around their disbelief . . . as a bee will hover, // fooled at first, over freshly spilled semen,” the shift from past to present tense (and the context of the volume’s other poems on lovers and their discontents) locating the simile in today. The comparison’s ostensible aim is to illuminate those horses, but it’s contemporary weepers we really learn something about, just as in “Naming the Stars” Helen in the Iliad says something applicable not only (and not, for the poem’s purposes, chiefly) to the role of defilement in Homer’s world but also to the part it plays in ours.Defilement; there’s another continuity with Phillips’s earlier work. This poet, more than a
ny other living poet I can think of (and in company with such immortals as Catullus, Shakespeare, and Thom Gunn), forcibly holds our faces to the violence inherent in what we call (to make ourselves feel better? more human(e)?) love.There is pain in these poems, there is torture, and these are inextricable from, are, maybe, constitutive of, desire. The speaker of “Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices” characterizes himself with references to sentences he’s “spouted” (“To know is to live flayed and Ambition / means turning the flesh repeatedly back – toward the whip”), as if to distance himself from these statements, but “Late Empire” and “Early Dreamer” and half a dozen other poems here seem still to proffer without apology similar sentiments.
So that it’s a relief, not because I doubt or disagree with Phillips’s intrication of love and torture (quite the contrary), and not because there is no pleasure in the pain he so tautly strings across the poems’ staves (there’s plenty of that), but because even after an enthralling storm, a compelling thriller, or a strenuously orgasmic bout of sexual combat the mind and heart and body seek rest and quiet, a return to equilibrium, to come to the book’s penultimate poem, “Husk,” which turns the volume down and reels the lines back in (“a wordlessness prevailing the way / a wind prevails”) and resigns itself, allowing us to resign ourselves in turn, with its concluding line: “So what, that we’re falling?” Falling, and fallenness too, have rarely fared as well as they do in Phillips’s classical handling, his careful hands.
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