The man who tilts

Thierry Metz

I am starting once more to read — slowly — Thierry Metz’s L’homme qui penche (The Man Who Tilts), which comprises 90 numbered short sections: prose fragments written ab extremis, from the ward of a psychiatric hospital where he made two brief stays before his final suicide. 

Here is the first section:

1.

Centre hospitalier de Cadillac en Gironde, pavillon Charcot. October 1996

C’est l’alcool. Je suis là pour me sevrer, redevenir un homme d’eau et de thé. J’envisage les jours qui viennent avec tranquillité, de loin, mais attentif. Je dois tuer quelqu’un en moi, même si je ne sais pas trop comment m’y prendre. Toute la question ici est de ne pas perdre le fil. De le lier à ce que l’on est, à ce que je suis, écrivant. 

Cadillac Psychiatric Hospital, Gironde, France. Charcot Pavilion. October 1996.

It’s the alcohol. I am here to wean myself off it, to become once more a man of water and tea. I contemplate the coming days with a distant but attentive tranquillity. I must kill someone inside of me, even though I do not really know how to do it. The whole point here is not to lose the thread: to tie it to what one is, to what I am, writing.

Coming so soon after the word “tuer” — to kill — which itself protudes so suddenly, after the balanced calm of “tranquillité, de loin, mais attentif,” I cannot help hearing behind the choice of words “perdre le fil” the alternative “perdre le fils.”  The overriding destructive event in Metz’s life was the terrible accident, eight years earlier, in which his eight-year-old son was killed on the main road in front of their house. The whole point being not to lose the thread, has standing behind it the shadow of the whole point being not to lose the son. It’s the alcohol: it’s not just the alcohol.

The double alignment of small fragments of prose together with the setting of a psychiatric ward brings Robert Walser’s Microscripts to mind. After essentially failing to establish his place as a writer in the world, Walser — having begun to suffer from hallucinations — retreated to an asylum for the final two and a half decades of his life. Mounting difficulties in writing led him to invent an approach whereby using a pencil (impermanent, tentative, effaceable, the writing instrument of small children) instead of a pen (permanent, definite, calligraphic), and writing in the most minute and unobtrusive manner possible, writing only on small scraps of paper (e.g. the back of a business card), he was able to navigate a way through the sort of block or cramp that was besetting him. This too was writing in extremis. 

Thierry Metz (1956 - 1997)

The poet Thierry Metz was born in Paris on 10 June 1956. He was self-taught, getting what books he could from a charity for the homeless. At the age of 21, he moved to Saint-Romaine-le-Noble in 1977. He worked in a range of manual labour jobs, in abbatoirs, factories, and largely on construction sites.  He was a father of three. During periods of unemployment he wrote. In 1988 tragedy struck: his second son Vincent was, at the age of eight, mowed down by a car on the main road in front of their house, and on the same day Metz was awarded the Prix Voronca for his collection Sur la Table inventée.

In 1996 he moved to Bordeaux and in October and November of that year he admitted himself voluntarily to a psychiatric ward to help in his struggles with alcohol and depression. And a month later in January 1997 he returned to the same hospital for a second stay, but took his own life on 16 April 1997.

Facing the facts

Donald Hall, in an interview in 1963, remarked: “Poetry is becoming impoverished by facts.” But what did he mean? That a poem should not be considered journalistic reportage? That the facts might get in the way? 

Ian Sansom in his recent (2019) book ‘on’ Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’ (‘on’ is no doubt not really the right word here, as the book self-admittedly meanders through a landscape of thoughts the author had had over the course of 25 years spent trying to write about book about Auden) relates the story of how Tennyson stuck with 600 in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ because it was metrically better than the more accurate 700, and remarks “Poets are not historians, or statisticians.”

And of course we would not want Tennyson to have maimed his poem with an awkward scansion. Peter Porter did ‘correct’ the last line of his relatively early poem ‘Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum’ which orginally read:

It is Australian innocence to love
The naturally excessive and be proud
Of a thoroughbred bay gelding who ran fast.

Which I greatly prefer to the later corrected version:

It is Australian innocence to love
The naturally excessive and be proud
Of a big-boned chestnut gelding who ran fast.

So what are we to think? I do prefer the original line, it is predominantly a phonetic and rhythmic preference I think: the balance of word-lengths, the assonance of ‘bred’ and ‘geld’ as well as the doubling of the ‘b’ sound work very well to give both a memorable line and a sense of closure. The factually more accurate line ‘big-boned chestnut’ is to me more awkward: the juxtaposition of the ‘g’ and ‘b’ sounds in ‘big-boned’ slows the line right down — the sort of encumbering effect you find Shakespeare using to slow down the end of a declamatory line, as in “And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!” from The Merchant of Venice, or Dylan Thomas uses perhaps somewhat excessively in the line “one big bird gulp” in Under Milkwood, and of course is especially useful when the phonetic effect is used to somehow enact the meaning presented in the words, such as happens with a pairing such as ‘lag behind’ or in Shakespeare’s line ‘Drag back our expedition’ — Porter’s ‘big-boned’ gives a clumsy feeling to the phrasing which ‘chestnut’ only amplifies. The echoing of ‘chest’ and ‘geld’ is not as effective as the ‘bred’/‘geld’ pairing, in part because that ’s’ sound gets in the way, and partly in the lumpy rhythm with ‘chest’ carrying a full stress, whereas the subsidiary and subtle stress on ‘bred’ in ‘thoroughbred’ leading into the almost-spondee of ‘bay gelding’ is far superior. Perhaps this is all personal and subjective, having myself come-of-age as it were partly under the spell of Pound’s rhythms and having a fondness for spondees, near-spondees, the hints of triple rhythm — never let to run away like an Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold — all the technical apparatus deployed to “break the pentameter” (which of course ended up with effects not all that different from what emerges from pentameters written along the lines of Bridges’ sensitive reading of Milton’s prosody). This is however a topic for an entirely different post.

I have digressed, but suffice to say that I prefer the two near-spondees of ‘bay gelding’ and ‘ran fast’ to the trochaic clutter of ‘big-boned chestnut gelding,’ and would agree with Hall that facts have effected some impoverishment.

But I also suspect that both Hall and Sansom are in danger of being somewhat partial in relation to various genres of poetry. I have quoted elsewhere A.D.Hope’s remark from 1965: “One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy.” There has seemingly been a reduction in the variety of commonly used genres, but is this just a false impression caused by the vast preponderance of a certain few types just swamping and hiding from view a greater diversity?  

Holub: Five minutes after the air raid

A poem by the Czech poet Miroslav Holub, who was born in Plzeň (Pilsen) and was 15 years old when the city became a border city when the boundary of the Third Reich was moved right up to its outskirts following the annexation of the Sudetenland.

Pět minut po náletu

V Plzni,
v Nádražní třídě 26
vystoupila do třetího poschodí
po schodech, které jediné zbyly
z celého domu,
otevřela dveře
vedoucí do nebe,
strnula nad propastí.

Neboť tady
končil svět.

Pak
dobře zamkla,
aby snad někdo nevzal
Siria
nebo Aldebarana
z jejich kuchyně,
sestoupila se schodů
a usedla dole
čekat,
až znovu
naroste dům
a z popela vrátí se muž
a z nožiček slepí se děti.

Ráno ji našli
zkamenělou.
A vrabci jí zobali z dlaní

Miroslav Holub

My translation  ...

Five minutes after the air raid

In Plzeň
at Station Avenue 26
she went upstairs to the third floor
only the stairs were left
of the whole house,
she opened the door
direct to the sky,
froze paralysed above the precipice.

Because here
the world ended.

Then
she locked up well,
lest someone steal
Sirius
or Aldebaran
from their kitchen,
descended the stairs
and sat down,
waited
for again
the house to grow
and her husband to return from the ashes
and the children's little legs to be glued back.

They found her in the morning
fossilized.
And the sparrows pecking her hands.

Foreign contexts

Back in P. N. Review 175 James Sutherland-Smith in his Letter from Belgrade described well the attraction of living immersed a foreign language:  “… the advantage to a poet of not understanding. For poets whose gift is to write poems where their language is distilled to the highest proof, a babble around them, or at best only a surface understanding of the others languages spoken around them, creates no interference with the language within them. It permits an enormous concentration. For poets, whose gift is to clarify meaning, attention to the babble around them is useful training for the poetic processes of making meaning precise and lucid.”

I am not sure which of these varieties of poet Sutherland-Smith considers himself ... back in an even earlier Letter from Belgrade (PNR 169) he wrote: “When I write a poem I have the desire to make something potentially useful for the English language. ‘Potentially’ is the whole of it, either to indicate a direction the language can take or to conserve a way of saying something that is in danger of being confined to the notes in the OED. ... There is also a measure of self-assertion when I write a poem. I am establishing and making public my own idiolect.”

Of course not everyone takes that approach — I cannot imagine Berryman’s idiolect, no matter how much he drank, ever getting close to the syntax of his poems.

But Sutherland-Smith is right about the effects of being in foreign parts. When you have to express yourself in a language you have only a weak grasp of, or say something unambiguously to someone who has rudimentary English, it focuses the mind on how meaning is conveyed and on how it can be undermined, for instance by the use of idiomatic turns of phrase.

As one ventures into reading poetry in another language and attempting to translate it, one quickly appreciates the impossibilities, and how the deep contextual associations at the level of each single word are utilized to establish meaning, tone, effect.

Former skills

 “Are we to believe that a mutation has occurred in the required or essential nature of verse? That — for instance — flat, linear, untextured arrangement has properly taken over, that former skills and manipulation, rhythmical, measured, musical, sensuous, visual, have by necessity been superseded? Is all previous poetry now useless? Not unless man has mutated into a new species.” 

—Geoffrey Grigson, The Private Art (1982), p.17

“For centuries, poets have had an implicit contract with the reader that poems mean something or some things, that they aren’t exercises in endless deferral of meaning.” 

—Craig Raine, My Grandmother’s Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry (2016), p.6

To some extent meaning per se might be seen as an inhibiting limitation: we have to lean Raine's thought up against Robert Frost's often misquoted statement. 

“I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.”

— Robert Frost, Conversations on the Craft of Poetry (1959)

Donald Hall — the early Donald Hall in an early interview — talks of how the “real energy” of a poem will come from its images and should not need the support of the “crutches” of the “old methods of construction.” To which the interviewers (one of whom was Ian Hamilton, whose voice I fancy I hear here) responded “This new poetry will open the floodgates to a lot of crap, surely?” adding “it’s very difficult to work out ways in which you begin to discriminate between kinds of nonsense.”

Are we to think of the “old methods of construction” as Hall puts it, or the “former skills” as Grigson says, as “crutches” that should be cast aside, or as vital supports without which we are breaking Raine's “implicit contract”? 

In another very early interview Hall himself might have the answer: “Freedom is the expression of the will and art is not free because the will is a servant of the Muse.”

Devoted to the Impossible

Henry Moore

In the book Life Work Donald Hall recounts the last conversation he had with the sculptor Henry Moore. Hall asks “Now that you’re eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?”

With anyone else the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh, but Henry Moore answered me straight: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

T. S. Eliot – who was ten years older than Moore – captures something of the mechanism which makes the sort of creative life that Moore describes a good life. 

“That excitement, that joyful loss of self in the workmanship of art, that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief reward of creative work.” T. S. Eliot in ‘Matthew Arnold’ from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p.108.

But of course the mathematician and the scientist are equally creative and can be absorbed in their task every bit as joyfully as the painter or the writer. In his 1956 book Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski writes:

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations – more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

p.29 

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

p.30

The steady shape of the mind

A few quotations from the foreword of Jacob Bronowski's wonderful book The Poet's Defence, which I have referred to before, a book in which he “tried to write criticism as reasoned as geometry.” [p. 8]. 

“One belief is that poetry is worthy in itself. Another is that this worth must be judged, not measured. That is, this worth cannot be abstracted from the poem like the wavelength of a light from its colour, and given a measure. It must be judged, as it must be made, by the whole soul of a man. That is why great criticism, like great poems, has not been written by little men.” [pp. 8‒9]

He observes there has been a historical development of ideas against this belief, a denial of the belief “by Coleridge and now by his pupil I.A. Richards” who hold the contrary “unspoken belief that only that can be judged which can be measured. It is the belief that science is the only way to knowledge. This belief has grown as science has grown wider. From the hopes of the Augustans it has grown to the boundless pride of to-day. I do not think that it is chance that poets have grown so much worse in the same time.” [p.9]

Bronowski, a passionate advocate for the role of science in the world, and famous for his TV Series The Ascent of Man, stands for the distinct form of truth which poetry strives for, distinct from the kinds of truth accessible by science. 

“In science, that is true which can be checked by others. Science therefore finds its knowledge of the world by mass measurement, that is by social means. It finds it through the senses, and what it finds is never true but more and more nearly true. This holds of physics, of history, and also of psychology.” [p.10]

The kind of truth that poetry can access is of a different order: “I believe that the mind of man has a steady shape which is the truth. We know the truth about the mind by looking from this a priori truth outward.” [p.10]

“Great poets have thought that poetry is its own end. Had they thought otherwise they would have turned to something which is an end. Only small poets like Shelley have held to poetry although they have not thought it an end.” [p.16]

Onomatopoeia

It has been observed (but where? I don’t recall) that to some extent all words are onomatopoeic: ‘dog’ after all is a very doggy word for native speakers. But this is a reductive notion, and as little use as limiting the meaning of onomatopoeia to the trivially obvious: boom, bang, crash, clang, murmur and the Classical Greek root of ‘barbarian’ οι βάρβαροι: the people who made a sound like ‘bar bar bar.’

Context can heighten the sense of onomatopoeia in words. A good example is in the opening lines of Kubla Khan, where Coleridge uses a restricted range of vowel sounds at the lighter end of the spectrum so that when the word ‘down’ comes at the start of line 5 it comes as a change to a lower aural register and thus enacts its meaning with its sound:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea.

The Great Forms Disappear

A. D. Hope in 1963 

In his 1965 book of essays, The Cave and the Spring, A. D. Hope compares the landscape of poetry with its diverse forms to a natural ecosystem, and laments the loss of so much. “One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy and display increasing eccentricity and lack of control. A general erosion of the mind proceeds with more and more acceleration. A desert ecology replaces the ecology of the rain forest. The forms are few, small, hardy, and reflect the impoverished soil in which they grow.”

Mary Kinzie, in her essay ‘The Rhapsodic Fallacy’ echoed and cited Hope’s essay, down to similarly laying blame at the feet of Edgar Allen Poe, and his The Poetic Principle, for the malaise of modern verse. 

Hope quotes Poe's statement “That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.” He then goes on to entertainingly remark: “Poe's opinion hardly deserves a serious answer. He might just as well have maintained that love consists only of brief passages of intense excitement in secual intercourse, and that, because a man cannot prolong these moments indefinitely, he is never in love except when he is in bed.”

Best poetry fertilizer

Zbyszek Herbert

Leopold Tyrmand’s diary describes his friend Zbigniew Herbert’s office work in the peat industry, one of a long series of underpaid low level jobs he held.

“Wieczorem Herbert i czytał nowe wiersze. Wydaje się, że praca w torfie wpływa nań użyźniająco. Do roboty nie ma tam nic, czytać gazet w godzinach urzędowych nie wypada, wobec tego Zbyszek siedzi przy biurku i pisze wiersze i bajki. Każdy myśli, jaki on przykładny i gorliwy, podczas gdy Zbyszek boryka się z obsesją zmarnowanego życia, co - jak wiadomo - stanowi najlepszy nawóz sztuczny poezji. W wierszach daje wyraz obawom i przygnębieniu, że nie zostawi śladu istnieniem. Przeraża go grząskość ludzkiego losu. Powiedziałem mu, że jest to uczucie naturalne wśród torfowisk. Musi zmienić pracę i poszukać czegoś w cemencie czy betonie .” (Dziennik 1954, s.168)

“February 5: Herbert in the evening ... read new poems. It seems that work in peat has a fertilizing effect. There is nothing to do there, you shouldn't read newspapers during office hours, so Zbyszek sits at his desk and writes poems and fables. Everybody thinks he’s an exemplary and zealous worker, while Zbyszek struggles with his obsession — that of a wasted life, which, as we know, is the best fertilizer for poetry. In his poems, he expresses his fear and depression that he will not leave a trace of existence. The mire of human fate scares him. I told him it was a natural feeling among the peat bogs. He has to change jobs and look for something in cement or concrete.”

Hoping for lightning

John Berryman

Here’s the last paragraph of Adam Kirsch’s article on John Berryman ‘That thing on the front of your head’ from the Times Literary Supplement, Feb 6, 2015:

Randall Jarrell wrote that a poet was someone who stands outside in storms hoping to get struck by lightning. Berryman, who spent so many years waiting for genius to find him, eventually lured it by making the waiting around, with all its attendant boredom, guilt and vice, the very subject of his poetry. In 77 Dream Songs, he used every technique of artificiality — in diction, syntax, allusion, rhythm — to create a voice of shocking honesty and directness; and by achieving this paradox, he liberated himself from the impersonality (itself, perhaps, no more than ostensible) of high Modernism. If we have no poets like John Berryman today, it is not because we are less ingenious than he is, but because our poetry seems to have so much less at stake.

Randall Jarrell

Kirsch is referring to Jarrell's remarks at the very end of his essay 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens' from Poetry and the Age:

How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great. 

The mathematician referred to is the Cambridge mathematican G. H. Hardy who wrote in his 1940 book A Mathematician's Apology:

I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. If a man of mature age loses interest in and abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious either for mathematics or for himself. 

The image of the poet standing in a thunderstorm also puts me in mind of another figure from Cambridge: Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose explanation to his sister of his choice to be a primary school teacher after not only beginning to gain a reputation as one of the world's foremost philosophers, having already published his Tracatus, but also having given away one of Europe's largest personal fortunes which he had inherited from his father. As Norman Malcolm explains in a London Review of Books article from 19 November 1981, “Hermine Wittgenstein tells of the bewilderment of the family over Ludwig’s determination, immediately upon his return home at the end of World War One, to rid himself unconditionally of his whole fortune; and of her own dismay at his decision to become a country schoolteacher. She protested to him that his teaching in an elementary school would be like ‘using a precision instrument to open crates’. She was silenced when he replied ...

You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet. 

The very young Ludwig Wittgenstein

On several occasions Hermine observed Ludwig’s teaching in the boys’ school. He encouraged his pupils to invent a steam-engine and to create other constructions, steering them to correct solutions by means of questions. Tremendous interest was aroused: the boys ‘literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations’. But he was impatient with untalented or lazy pupils, and his inability or refusal to soothe unsympathetic parents eventually led to his resignation.”

Sad similitude

In the early poems of Lawrence Durrell we find lines with a rhythmic and syntactic similarity which almost amounts to a tic:

In all the sad seduction of your ways

and

When all the slow destruction of the mind

A short Teutonic word followed by a long Latinate word is a well-used tactic:  “sad seduction,” “slow destruction.”

There is nothing particularly good about these lines; in fact, they both suffer the minor flaw of having the word ‘of’ bear an albeit secondary iambic stress. This is a bit of awkward panel-beating in the line, denting the language a bit out of shape.

But behind these lines lurks the ghost of a line of a far greater craftsman: Alexander Pope.

In sad similitude of griefs to mine.

Here not only is ‘of’ not asked to bear an unnatural stress, but the fine balance of syllabic quantities across the line is expertly done. If we mark the caesura:

In sad similitude | of griefs to mine

We can see that in the first half of the line there are five short quantities and only one long: the -ude of ‘similitude.’ In the second half of the line there are three long quantities and only one short. If you crudely count a long quantity as twice a short, then each half line carries the exact same weight.

Who has the time?

Eliot at his desk at Faber & Faber

T.S. Eliot, from the age of 29 until he was 37, worked at Lloyd’s bank. This was from 1917 until 1925. His hours would have been 9:15 am to 5:30 pm Monday to Friday, plus one Saturday a month. There were two weeks of vacation a year. During this period, which starts around the publication of his first book Prufrock and Other Observations, he published the collection Poems 1920, influential essays such as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and in the year 1922 he published The Wasteland as well as founding the quarterly The Criterion which he edited for the next 17 years.

Recall Cyril Connolly’s observation that “we cannot think if we have no time to read.” Eliot in a letter of 29 April 1927 (in Vol 3 1926-1927) to editor of The Evening Standard writes how contributors to The Criterion are “supporting themselves and their families in the Civil Service, or in museums, or in universities, or in banks and commercial houses, and are thus able to think, and read, and write independently of a livelihood.” As Stephen Collini observes in his recent book Common Writing, “Several kinds of social and economic change thereafter combined to bring about a much sharper contrast between a university post and these other occupations; in the early twenty-first century we hardly think of a job in a bank or a commercial house, or even perhaps in the civil service, as allowing much leisure to ‘think, and read, and write’ about literary and intellectual matters.” Perhaps the absence of television or the internet might also partly explain how normal employment could leave time for literary pursuits, that and — amongst the middle classes — the universal use of servants, live in domestic staff and ‘dailies’ to tend to the business of running a household. The lighting of fires, the cleaning of the house, the laundry, the shopping, the preparation of meals: all this was done by domestic staff.

In her book The Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service, Alison Light states that “without all the domestic care and hard work which servants provided there would have been no art, no writing, no ‘Bloomsbury.’” Rosemary Hill, in her LRB Review of that book starkly describes Virginia Woolf’s last months:  “With the winter her state of mind deteriorated and as her final illness began she found comfort in cleaning, telling her doctor that she had ‘taken to scrubbing floors when she couldn’t write’. Leonard hoped the mechanical tasks might be therapeutic and encouraged her to help Louie Everest, their daily, who was somewhat surprised: ‘I had never known her want to do any housework with me before.’ Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put the duster down and went to drown herself.”

Garden Time

W.S.Merwin's Garden Time reads as perhaps a notebook of sketches for poems, which makes me think of Adorno's notions of 'late style', or perhaps as a single large poem, much in the way that several of Geoffrey Hill's recent books read: a large number of small lyrics that amass into a unified grandeur.

There is a strong Proustian current running through the meditative reflections.

Sometimes in the dark I find myself
in a place that I seem to have known
in another time ... 

These lines strongly echo the opening of À la recherche du temps perdu, but in Merwin's poem the nostalgia for the things he remembers is transfigured by the thought not only of whether they are still in the same place, but also the question

would they know me and have they been
waiting for me all this time

The book is full of single clear observations:

The rain stopped
you never hear it stop

and thoughts of stopping, ending, visiting a place for the last time permeate the texture of the poems.

as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

which brings it's heartbreaking echoes of Dido's lament from Purcell:

When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

Memories surface and shift through the poems with the slight incoherence of dream. A poem which captures the memory of seeing dragonflies is infused with a childlike clarity of perception, but also brings this into a more adult observation of how the world we inhabit is changing irrevocably, using the dragonfly as an emblem:

now there are grown-ups hurrying
who never saw one
and do not know what they
are not seeing

What host of things are we not seeing?

The catch-cries of the clown

The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

W. B. Yeats (aged 54)

Testudo

There is a memorable poem by Martin Kratz in most recent but one issue of The Rialto called 'Curriculum'. I say it is memorable because I remembered it, after skimming through the issue when it arrived, before mislaying it. Interestingly I had misremembered the title as being 'Testudo' which is a key word in the culminating final stanza of the poem.

The poem describes schoolchildren's growing enthusiasm for all things Roman, an early sign of which occurs when "a girl brings in cardboard scutum".  I like the inclusion of these talismanic Latin words, which are both accurate flecks of colour in the verbal texture, and centrally material to the narrative of the piece. This isn't early modernism's arch macaronics (a word which seems to come from the word for a type of pasta, macaroni, which is possible from the Byzantine Greek word μακαρία which refers to barley-broth).

We go to fetch them in, someone shouts: Testudo!
We can't fault them. Each plate overlaps the next
perfectly. Spears bristle out of darkness.
In silence, they wait for instruction. 

 I cannot put my finger on what is so resonant and right in these lines. It relieson what has been built up in preceding lines, and it captures something about the nature of childhood, about power in the setting of the schoolyard ... I had also misremembered that the word "cower" was in here somewhere .. it isn't.  The verb 'bristle' carries much in these lines.  Yes, the spears protruding from the tortoise of shields will look like a hedgehog or some spiny animal, but the verb bristle brings with it the idea of "showing fight" (see meaning 2b in the OED) or being an animal's sign of "anger or excitement" (meaning 2a).  But what the OED does not mention directly is the strong connotation of the threat that causes an animal to bristle.  So here in the image of small children enacting an ancient Roman military drill, some emblem of the threat of adult teachers and the cowering of the pupils.

Maybe this taps in to my reservations about some aspects of 'schooling'. Nietzsche describes the child as "ein aus sich rollendes Rad", a self-propelling wheel ... 'Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen.'  ... 'The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes."' But so much of the schooling process seems to eat away so early at this innate self-busying Will-To-Do of the child. I guess this is leading to what Paulo Freire in Pedagogía del oprimido characterised as "la educación como práctica de la dominación" ..  "education as a practice of domination."

Coffee stains

“A manuscript is not a manuscript without a coffee stain” – Joseph Brodsky.  

Surface Faults

One of the neglected books published in that momentous year 1922 is Robert Graves' On English Poetry (William Heinemann). From the vantage point of 2014 its 61 short and chatty sections read very like blog posts.  Sadly much of this book and much of Graves' Poetic Unreason and other studies (1925, Cecil Palmer) are omitted — following Graves' own later abridgements — from the Collected Writings on Poetry in Carcanet's otherwise wonderful Robert Graves Programme of editions.

Geoffrey Hill in his Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture 'A Deep Dynastic Wound' (30 April 2013) mentions these two early books: "Two of Graves's early prose books ...[he gives the titles and dates] ... I would certainly recommend as required reading for auto-didactic self-apprenticed deeply eccentric young poets." (at 45 min 15 sec)

Hill names three pieces from these books dealing with the task of revision: "Putty" and "Surface Faults, An Illustration" and "Secondary Elaboration." Only the last of these has survived into the Carcanet edition, although somewhat self-referentially this piece both in its original 1925 form and its later much reduced form presented in the Carcanet edition does itself contain a revised and slightly expanded version of "Surface Faults".   In "Surface Faults" Graves presents a sequence of pre-publication drafts of a few lines from one of his poems. Here is the whole text as originally presented in the 1922 edition:

"The later drafts of some lines I wrote recently called CYNICS AND ROMANTICS, and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenuous ideas of Love, give a fairly good idea of the conscious process of getting a poem in order. I make no claim for achievement, the process is all that is intended to appear, and three or four lines are enough for illustration:

1st Draft:

In club or messroom let them sit,
Let them indulge salacious wit
On love's romance, but not with hearts
Accustomed to those healthier parts
Of grim self-mockery ...

2nd Draft: (Consideration:— It is too soon in the poem for the angry jerkiness of "Let them indulge." Also "Indulge salacious" is hard to say; at present, this is a case for being as smooth as possible.)

In club or messroom let them sit,
Indulging controversial wit
On love's romance, but not with hearts
Accustomed ...

3rd Draft.  (Consideration:— No, we have the first two lines beginning with "In." It worries the eye. And "sit, indulging" puts two short "i's" close together. "Controversial" is not the word. It sounds as if they were angry, but they are too blasé for that. And "love's romance" is cheap for the poet's own ideal.)

In club or messroom let them sit,
At skirmish of salacious wit
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed ...

4th Draft. (Consideration:— Bother the thing! "Skirmish" is good because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S's — "sit," "skirmish," "salacious." It makes them sound too much in earnest. The "salacious" idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have two "at's" bumping into each other; one of them must go. "Yet" sounds better than "but" somehow.)

In club or messroom let them sit,
With skirmish of destructive wit
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed ...

5th Draft. (Consideration:—And now we have two "with's" which don't quite correspond. And we have the two short "i's" next to each other again. Well, put the first "at" back and change "laughing at" to "deriding." The long "i" is a pleasant variant; "laughing" and "hearts" have vowel-sounds too much alike.)

In club or messroom let them sit,
At skirmish of destructive wit
Deriding love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed ...

6th Draft. (Consideration:—Yes, that's a bit better. But now we have "destructive" and "deriding" too close together. "Ingenious" is more the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests that it was a really witty performance. The two "in's" are far enough separated. "Accorded" is better than "accustomed"; more accurate and sounds better. Now then:—)

In club or messroom let them sit,
At skirmish of ingenious wit
Deriding love, yet not with hearts
Accorded etc.

(Consideration:—It may be rotten, but I've done my best.)"

The play of satisfied expectation

Randall Jarrell, when characterising Pound's The Cantos as "less a 'poem containing history' than a heap containing poetry, history, recollection, free associations, obsessions," quotes Kenneth Burke's statement that "Form … is a satisfied expectation," and elsewhere, in writing an introduction to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, he quotes Burke again and goes on to say that Stead's book also "has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form."

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in her wonderful little book Poetic Closure (1968) describes in detail how the continual play of expectation through a poem is what gives it form: "The perception of poetic structure is a dynamic process: structural principles produce a state of expectation continuously modified by successive events." The main focus of her book is how poems end ... "Closure allows the reader to be satisfied by the failure of continuation or, put another way, it creates in the reader the expectation of nothing."