Baedeker poetry?

Kris Hemensley in a recent post looking at an essay by Petra White zeroes in on her use of term 'Baedeker poetry' - specifically in the context of her question "Can we write about the effect a place has on us, avoiding Baedecker poetry?". The derogatory import here of the term 'baedeker poetry' would perhaps seek to invalidate one of the occasions for poetry; and it is tempting to see all poetry as occasional. Laurie Duggan in a diary entry from August 2003 wrote "I’d mentioned to Kris that I’ve started to see myself as a kind of ‘occasional’ poet – no less a seriousness about poetry, just an awareness of its contingency". Duggan's recent poem on Milan and those poems John Forbes wrote while in Rome seem Baedekerish, but they are good poems. To disparage poems written in response to travel seems 'occasionalist'. Although of course the occasion of travel, like the occasions of love or love-gone-wrong, might inspire a lot of third-rate work, but that's another matter. Petra White has described "a dreary parade of random otherness" and this might locate the problem - poems should simply not be dreary. But if this is the crux of the objection, why the term 'baedeker poetry'?

The term was used in a 1969 paper by Vladimir Markov which was a 'reappraisal' of Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont (1867 - 1942), poet & translator of Poe and Shelley and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Markov described Balmont's sequence Аккорды (Akkordy - Chords) as 'baedeker poetry': it contains short lyric pieces such as Пред картиной Греко В музее Прадо, в Мадриде (Before a picture of El Greco in the Prado Museum, Madrid), Английский пейзаж (English countryside), В Оксфорде (In Oxford), and Крымская картинка (Crimean picture). This is work in the same line as Wordsworth's "Memorials of a Tour in the Continent, 1820' and 'Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837'.

Taking a broader view we could even see the origins of pastoral being cityfolks' nostalgic descriptions of a distant country life: Theocritus scribbling his idylls amid the clamour and stench of Alexandria. And of course the nostalgia for a lost bucolic life is rendered also in the classical Laments for Adonis - elegy and pastoral meet. Here is Theocritus rendered by Barbara Hughes Fowler:

Bear violets now, O brambles, bear violets, thorns, and let
the lovely narcissus bloom on juniper trees. Let all
be opposite of all, and let the pine bear pears
since Daphnis is dying. Let the stag drag the hounds.
From mountain tops let owls sing to nightingales.

Which sets the tone of deploration for poetic grief for the next couple of thousand years:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death!

Anyhow, as a reader who has been known to enjoy books by Bruce Chatwin or Bill Bryson or H. V. Morton, I think there's definitely a place for the undreary baedeker poem and its parade of details.

Cioran's tatters

#6 of Kris Hemensley's The Merri Creek is out, or rather up. A poem by David Wheatley caught my eye; it's called 'Emil Cioran in Tatters' - an interesting title in that Cioran - the Romanian writer whose 1820 page Œuvres (Quarto Gallimard) & the 999 page Cahiers 1957 - 1972 (nrf Gallimard) are almost entirely composed of fragments and aphorisms, gnomes and apothegms - could be seen to have always been in tatters - pre-tattered, as it were. Tatters - torn scraps - was his considered approach. Wheatley's poem displays an appealing clarity in the language, and its dance of thought is engaging. The poem reads like a jazz improvisation over a selection of Cioran's remarks, and this brings with it something of Empson's 'puzzle-interest' or Elgar's Enigma, a game of 'spot the reference', so the twelve numbered stanzas (ordered in reverse like a NASA countdown or a microwave's metronomic progress) can seem like a quick quiz from the pages a popular magazine: 'Are YOU a real Cioran buff?'. I scored maybe 3 out of 12. Wheatley writes: 'I'd rather have been a plant, you bet,/ and spent my life guarding a piece of shit" which reminds me of Cioran's ' "One is in paradise only as a plant". A risk of the approach is that the underlying theme may strike some readers as more potent than the variation: to Wheatley's "Approach each day as a Rubicon / not to cross but to jump in and drown" I prefer Cioran's "Chaque jour est un Rubicon où j'aspire à me noyer" ("Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned"): that word 'aspire' hits and holds a high note in the sentence's melody, and packs much force into its punch. Similarly we may compare Wheatley's "Never to sleep, the insomniac's curse:" with Cioran's "Le paradis et l'enfer ne présentent d'autre différence que celle-ci: on peut dormir, au paradis, tout son soûl; en enfer, on ne dort jamais." (transl. André Vornic) ("The only difference between paradise and hell: you can sleep in paradise, never in hell.") Cioran died in 1995 at the age of 84 - in his youth he had been an active supporter of Nazi ideas - I wonder if he's sleeping.

Typo Brides

Tucked in the back of his A&R New and Selected - a copy once borrowed by the poet in haste before a reading and returned many months later inscribed as a gift, if memory serves - I recently found a letter from John Forbes. It is dated 27 October 1993 - he was in the Australia Council Rome apartment at the time. In it he seems to make a typing error - instead of 'Harbour Bridge' he writes 'Harbour Bride'. Peter Porter records a similar typo in his poem 'Brides come to the Poet's Window' whose first line explains "Birds, it should have been, but pleasure quickens." Forbes jokes about a MONUMENTAL STATUE of John Tranter "to be erected over the south pylons of the Harbour Bride like? The Harbour Bride? che cosa?" and then follows a draft of the poem which was later published as 'The Harbour Bride'. I'll leave it to the scholars to determine if this is the first draft.

Which verb for a scrutiny?

And as I scrutinised the down-turned face
With that pointed narrowness of observation
We bear upon the first-met stranger at dawn

Sound familiar? That's Eliot In the second typed draft of 'Little Gidding', perhaps unconsciously echoing Milton's "narrower scrutiny" in Paradise Regained. Eliot reworked this in the third typed draft:

And as I bent upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the first faint light

John Hayward - with whom Eliot corresponded at length during the process of revision - wrote in the margin 'scrutinised / bend a scrutiny?'. Perhaps it was an idiom with which Hayward was not familiar. I found an old page from the Palmyra Democrat (New York) of the 1890s with the phrase "He bent a scrutiny". "He would bend intent scrutiny to the dial" appears in Louis Joseph Vance's first in a series of novels about a jewel-thief turned detective - "The Lone Wolf" (1914), and Mrs Woodrow Wilson uses the figure in her 1917 book 'The Hornet's Nest' (a title which was incidentally used by former President Jimmy Carter for his novel about the Revolutionary War).

The phrase appears again in Vernon Watkins' poem 'Swedenborg's Skull'

Caught up from the waters of change by a traveller who bends
His piercing scrutiny

In the end Eliot decided on fixing a scrutiny rather than bending one.

As I fixed upon that down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk

Unpacking the Boxes

Donald Hall's latest book - Unpacking the Boxes - is a memoir covering various periods in the poet's life: school, Harvard, & Oxford are dealt with in turn; the first marriage is skipped over, so too the years with Jane Kenyon which were covered in his earlier The Best Day The Worst Day. Some of the childhood and family background material goes back over ground already explored in his earlier Life Work. The large gaps for both marriages give the book a strange feel - like what is left over from a piece of card when shapes have been cut from it. The last chapter deals largely with the blow-by-blow difficulties and indignities of health problems he suffered immediately preceding his appointment as U.S. poet laureate; the chapter opens with a wonderful paragraph: "When you are three years old and your socks are falling down, somebody says, "Pull up your socks, Donnie." Then you are twelve, solitary, reading books all day, then twenty-five and a new father, burping your son at two A.M. When you turn forty, divorced, your life is a passage among disasters. Then you marry again, you are happy, you turn sixty, your wife dies. Then you are eighty and your socks fall down again. No one tells you to pull them up."

Fire double issue

The latest issue of Jeremy Hilton's Fire has arrived: 'Nos 29/30 Special International Double Issue'. At 392 pages it weighs in with other heavy periodicals such as the annual Fulcrum. Pricing for print runs and costs of distribution no doubt push towards the annualization of magazines, but this does perhaps make the reader's life a little more difficult: 400 odd pages is a daunting bolus of work. 30 pages arriving once a month would be so much more digestible. The fattening of publications has been noted also by Alan Baker in the context of Print-On-Demand books, where minimum page count constraints are imposed. He and Laurie Duggan both comment on the increased importance of pamphlets or chapbooks serving as interim collections, on the road to the new standard fatter collections.

The new double issue of Fire contains a large and somewhat bewildering diversity of work: poems and translations by Nathaniel Tarn, translations by Christopher Middleton and Peter Robinson, a translated excerpt of Platonov, 16 Finnish poems translated by Anselm Hollo, poems in the original Chinese, Bengali and Greek with facing translations, Afghan poets, Austrian poets, Vietnamese poets, even a couple of Australians ... it doesn't make sense to try to list all the nations represented. Fire now appears annually, so I guess I've got twelve months to get through it all.

Burnt birds

The burnt bird as an emblem of 20th century destruction appears in the work of two major poets: Pablo Neruda and Zbigniew Herbert. Neruda uses the image in his 'Oda al Átomo' ('Ode to the Atom')

La aurora
se había consumido.
Todos los pájaros
cayeron calcinados.

'The dawn had been consumed. All the birds burned to ashes' (Margaret Sayers Peden's translation).

Herbert uses a fractured version of a similar image in his poem 'Dom'. The last four lines are:

dom jest sześcianem dzieciństwa
dom jest kostką wzruszenia

skrzydło spalonej siostry

liść umarłego drzewa

which in English goes ...

home is a cube of childhood
home is a small bone of emotion

the wing of a burnt sister

the leaf of a dead tree

(my translation)

Herbert's approach to the image is more complex; there's an almost cubist re-assembling of imagery that has already appeared in the poem ... 'the cheek of a sister', 'dry ashes of a nest' so the poem has a tight interwoven structure analogous in effect to a piece of Baroque keyboard music.