Get thee to a winery

The title of this post is a line from Peter Rose: it is from the poem 'More Mutant Proverbs (after Peter Porter)' in Crimson Crop. The poem is a list of one-liners that might have otherwise blushed unseen in notebooks. Auden is in thw wings murmuring "weakness for bad puns". Rose is well-stocked … "When in Rome, pay the Romans", "Blessed are the chic", "Après toi, le subterfuge" …

Another talker nonpareil

The latest issue of ABR sports a bit of wordplay reminiscent of a tabloid headline - "Littoral Truth" - but it is wonderfully apt, and one feels sure the subject of the main article, the recently deceased Peter Porter, would have appreciated it. After all, a predecessor whose presence loomed large through Porter's thought and writing was W. H. Auden, who had said "Good poets have a weakness for bad puns."

Peter Steele's article on Porter is packed with choice quotes from Porter and others. He includes Porter's statements that "No poet can be great who is not memorable, unmistakeable and a virtuoso," and that "All the poetry I love is potential energy come to rest."

Another key figure for Porter was Robert Browning: "In his copious and generous output, Browning satisfies the unquenchable haranguer which is in each of us. We are born, we talk and we die. But chiefly we talk, and when we meet a good talker we listen. Browning is the talker non pareil."

There is much else worth quoting in the piece, so much that I'd surely infringe copyright if I put all the good bits in this blog. Fortunately ABR has made the article available online here.

Collectible words

In the poem 'Francis Bacon's Studio' appearing on Justin Lowe's BluePepper blog, Mark O'Flynn kicks off with the words "From the perspex doorway" ... setting aside the problem of how a doorway (as opposed to a door) can be perspex, the use of the word 'perspex' acts to pin down the poem's temporal setting. O'Flynn also uses the word 'bloodshot' - which also has something of a contemporary feel to it, although it was used by Keats and Matthew Arnold and Hart Crane, & always coupled with the word 'eye', O'Flynn also uses it to describe an eye, whereas Peter Porter has used the word more imaginatively in the phrase "the bloodshot hills". There are moments when O'Flynn seem to tap into what the language is using us for ... the phrase 'holy, primal mess' is interesting: "holy mess" plays with the colloquial "unholy mess" but also carries with it echoes of "holy messengers", so the words acquire a resonance beyond their literal meaning.

The word 'perspex' appears in poems by both Peter Porter and Roy Fuller. Porter uses it as a prop to give a sense of the contemporary or futuristic - "watch the the cuckoo in your perspex panel"; whereas Fuller uses it to find a fresh image, a fresh comparison "the rain had stopped and through the perspex air", which is the sort of thing Auden was up to when he likened the chimneys of a power house to recently fired rifles. This drive to capture the details of the physical world, all its detritus, reminds me of the title poem of Donald Platt's 'Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, Guns'

Mozart once said that he wrote music
    by finding the notes
that love one another and putting them

    together. But remembering how
the dissonant opening bars of his string quartet
    in C major grate

against each other and yet somehow cohere,
    I like to think
he found a different kind of order,

    the same principle
of musical composition that inspired the roadside sign
    I saw on Rt. 29:

Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns.
    It makes me do a U
-turn pull over, and park among the rusted-out

    pick-ups. ...

Browning had a magpie's approach to grabbing the shiny new bits of language and putting them to use ... he used the word 'cocktail' and referred to the striking of a match only about a decade after matches were first introduced to Britain. But whether it's Platt on Route 29, or Auden with his goal post, wind-gauge, pylon & bobbing buoy, or Adam Kirsch with his humvee - the collective project of using poems as Cornell boxes of contemporary nouns is clear. A recent debut collection by Kathryn Simmonds, Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren 2008, winner of the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection) displays the same tendency. In one short poem, appropriately entitled 'News', she mentions the tube, the night bus, Woolworths, flatmates & fake Chanel. In another poem (which was featured at Todd Swift's Eyewear in August) Simmonds' category of human types - hillwalkers, Hare Krishna followers, war photographers, ambassadors, sous chefs, surveillance officers, apprentice pharmacists - takes us right back to Horace's Ode I,i, which Donald Hall reimagined in The Museum of Clear Ideas.

... I know that some people
require fame as athletes; still others demand
election to office or every gadget
for sale on 42nd Street; Tanaquil
enjoys dozing in the British Museum
and its pub; she prefers them to Disney World,
while her Chair, who won an all-expenses-paid
weekend in Rome, Italy, would have favored
Las Vegas. Marvin enjoys drinking himself
quadriplegic, Joan backpacks through Toledo,
Kim helicopters into Iranian
deserts, and Flaccus shoots tame wild antelope
in a hired game preserve. ...

Of course it's not just the nouns ... those verbs 'to backpack' 'to helicopter' do a lot of the work. Hall concludes his rendition of Horace I,i

I know that some people exist to look thin,
others stare at television sets all day
until they die, and others expend their lives
to redeem the dying. As for Horsecollar,
Decius, he'll take this desk, this blank paper,
this Bic, and the fragile possibility
that, with your support, the Muse may favor him.

Kirsch's Metaphysical Invasions

Adam Kirsch's second collection of poems, Invasions (Ivan R Dee, Chicago, 2008) compriss a sequence of 16-line rhymed lyrics, reflections in the main, with a brief interlude of versions from Boethius. Kirsch thinks about things, and his references range widely - there is plenty of metaphysical 'yoking' going on: a strip of flowers along the Broadway median is a homeopathic remedy is litmus paper is a St Patrick's day ribbon (page 22), and much topicality - 'the embedded editor who rolled / His Humvee to the bottom of a dune' (page 48).

Robert Frost in his short piece 'The Figure a Poem Makes' (1939) wrote: "The object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context - meaning - subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety ... The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless." And it is this variety that Kirsch strives for. The poems wear their form lightly, which is perhaps à la mode in this uncertain age, with the smoke of New Formalism's polemic still drifting over the academies. Modernism put form on the back foot, so that one find's statements such as Donald Davie's recommendation that one could write in form but get away with it, by writing blank iambic trimeters with a liberal use of substitution; form relegated to the writer's crutch. Auden's remark that "formal verse frees one from the fetters of one’s ego" is in neighbouring territory.

Kirsch's 16-liners at once raise the precursors of Meredith's Modern Love and Tony Harrison's The School of Eloquence. Meredith is of course working squarely inside the tradition, so form plays a prominent part in the structuring of the pieces, and works satisfyingly with the reader's expectations of pattern. Harrison plays with form brilliantly - there's something of what Bunting referred to as 'a boast' & 'a see-here' in Harrison's display. Kirsch lets the form recede into the background, not a bad thing, but one wonders about possibly unhappy choices such as ending rhymed pentameters on the relative pronoun 'whose' (pages 13 & 29), or the 'like' or 'as' of a simile (pages 28 & 58).

In the introduction to his collection of essays The Modern Element (Norton, 2008), Kirsch sets up his terms of reference for the contemporary poet: "In contemporary poetry, it is striking how often the tools of the modernists are used to summon a factitious authority and prestige, to obscure premises that would not bear plain examination. Still worse is the use of the ludic, fracturing techniques of postmodernism, which emphasize the poem's difficult texture in order to conceal its absence of genuine insight, accuracy, and challenge." (page 12). He discusses the virtues and vices of contemporary poetry: "The virtues are daring honesty, subtle self-kowledge, an intimate (if not always explicit) concern with history, and a determination to make language serve as the most accurate possible instrument of communication, even at the risk of estrangement. The vices, which correspond to the virtues and call them into question, are sentimental egotism, an obsession with staying up-to-date, and a belief that distortion of language is interesting and praiseworthy in ts own right." (pages 11 - 12); with so many Scyllas and Charybdises it might seem the poet-critic must steer a slalom course through the recognized faults of others. Kirsch is still on his skis.

Rain and Ruin: something recalcitrant

Jane Holland has posted her compressed version of the Exeter Book's The Wife's Lament. It is interesting how much 'resonance' with the language itself is achieved here. In an earlier post I talked of how the language seems to keep saying certain things over and over, and it's this that gives us the building blocks for the musical composition of poems; it gives us the notes to play on the instrument (the instrument that Ed Dorn speaks of when he says re Gunslinger "It's really just an attempt to meditate what there is left of the available instrument. It's not an epic, but it's going to work that kind of trip.") And it's the repetitions and refrains of the language that lend good poems that sort of 'alienated majesty' that Geoffrey Hill mentions (lifting the phrase from Emerson).

In Holland's 'The Wife's Lament' the rain/ruin conjunction appears in her rendering of the line "under stanhliþe / storme behrimed" (under stone slopes / by storms berimed"). Holland's line runs "in ruins under the rain" ... this brings 19th-century associations: Longfellow's "Upon the ground I saw a fallen nest / Ruined and full of rain", or Swinburne's "For winter's rains and ruins are over" or Wilde's "Time hath not spared his ruin,---wind and rain / Have broken down his stronghold", or Stevenson's lines ..

Bursting across the tangled math
A ruin that I called a path,
A Golgotha that, later on,
When rains had watered, and suns shone,

Going back in time, Pope has

So from each side increased the stony rain,
And the white ruin rises o'er the plain

That 'white ruin' also evokes Auden's lines:

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing amid the ruined languages.

And Pope's 'stony rain' brings into view the stone/storm conjunction present in the Exeter Book, and in Pound's Seafarer: "Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten". Coming forward in time, Rexroth, in his Letter to Auden, juxtaposes "The steel rain // Voices in the old ruin".

Geoffrey Hill, in his 'A Postscript on Modernist Poetics', writes "In the act of creation we alienate ourselves from that which we have created, or conversely, the genius of language alienates us from itself. We are no longer masters of a well-considered curriculum vitae in free verse, or blank-verse sonnets, or whatever; the anecdote is no longer the agency of our self-promotion; something recalcitrant has come between us and our expectant and expected satisfaction."