Clive James, Glass Globes, and a Sea-eagle of English feather

In a recent TLS (May 16, 2014) Clive James holds up a passage from Chapman's Homer as an example of alliteration done right (which he opposes to Swinburne's alliteration overdone wrong) …

Then took he up his weighty shield, that round about him cast
Defensive shadows; ten bright zones of gold-affecting brass
Were driven about it, and of tin, as full of gloss as glass,
Swelled twenty bosses out of it …

The double use of "gl" must indeed be a temptation for poets wanting to overdo alliterative effects … Burns has "glens gloomy and savage" and "glaikit, gleesome, dainty damies".  Byron has a commonplace book argument which "glibly glides from every tongue". W. E. Henley has "gladdening glass", while Coventry Patmore offers up "glowing gloom" as well as "trackless glories glimpsed in upper sky".  Spenser had his "gloomy glade" and "gold / Whose glistering glosse darkened with filthy dust", and "glistering glory" and a "glassie globe", and "gladsome glee".  John Tranter follows suit with "glassy gloom", and has "a cul-de-sac choked with  / expensive shops towards whose glow and glitter / her soul inclines". Hart Crane's "Pullman breakfasters glide glistening steel".

The "glassie globe" in Spenser (which Merlin made), reappears in Crabbe's The Parish as a fishbowl - "A glassy globe, in frame of ivory press'd; / Where swam two finny creatures", and Oscar Wilde as the earth itself "a brittle globe of glass", and then it surfaces again in a poem by Lynda Hull as a snow-globe in the palm of your hand:

 … Should I say the Mississippi knows
the story of the room left behind, the bad deals?
Like a scene playing out in a glass globe
I might hold in my palm, I can watch them:
oh look at those fools, the cold carving
them up to some version of bewildered miracle.

Pope shows off with three in a row: "Glittering through the gloomy glades", and Shakespeare piles on the effects in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Sweet Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams;
I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright;
For, by thy gracious, golden, glittering gleams,
I trust to take of truest Thisby sight.

The "gl"s are piled up thickly by Clive's friend Peter Porter in his lines: "the little glowworms/of our wounded childhood glitter, glitter / a square piano pounded by an ugly woman".  I very much like here that the alliteration isn't limited to the beginning of words: the hidden alliteration coming mid-word in "ugly" strongly contributes to the effect but in a subtle way: it gets under your skin, or beneath your analytic defences; it sneaks into the brain directly like perfume, or music with too many things going on at once.  Another line of his with a hidden "gl" alliteration is "a single stick of gladiolus". But back to explicit in-your-face alliteration: in his first collection Porter managed a Pope-like trifecta: "Glancing kingdoms enter, the glasses glow".

And even Clive himself gives us "Great in his glory, glorious in his greatness," and "Out in the sea / No waves, and there below not even ripples turning light / To glitter: just a glow spread evenly / On flawless water."

But Swinburne?  Yes, I am afraid so … "as a gleam that before them glided", and there's stuff like "Deep flowers, with lustre and darkness fraught, / From glass that gleams as the chill still seas" and of course the moon is "Bright with glad mad rapture, fierce with glee."  But returning to the idea of hidden or mid-word alliteration, Swinburne has the line "Sea-eagle of English feather" … that's a much better tuned effect to my mind.

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.

Kleinzahler's new New and Selected

August Kleinzahler's latest - Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (2008) - is subtitled 'Poems, New and Selected', and is described on the front flap as the "first broad retrospective" - the Australian retrospective edition Like Cities, Like Storms (1992) now too old to qualify. The new book is a hefty enough tome - 234 pages - and very many of the early poems haven't made it through the cull. So many didn't make the grade: 'Indian Summer Night: The Haight', 'Love Poem', '16' , '1978, Montreal', ...

Kleinzahler had over time assembled a sequence of poems called 'Four Worthies' ... one poem, on Thomas Urquhart, appeared in A Calendar of Airs (1978). The sequence has been dismantled again and now of the worthies only Australian poet John Tranter remains in the poem 'Tranter in America'.

The new book is organized in five sections which seem to represent selections from earlier books as follows 1. New poems 2. Early poems (Storm Over Hackensack (1985), Earthquake Weather (1989)), 3. Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (1995) 4. Green Sees Things In Waves (1998) and 5. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2003). However it is worth noting that the poem 'Vancouver' which appears in the first section is a much longer version of an old poem with the same title. Is this an earlier draft reworked, or have other poems or fragments been invisibly mended into the fabric?

In the previous collection - The Strange Hours Travelers Keep - a number of old poems - 'Hot Night on East 4th', 'The Gardenia', '86', and a significantly reworked second-half of 'Evening, in A minor' - were stitched together to make the poem 'Montreal'.

Kleinzahler keeps tinkering with his poems. 'The Last Big Snow' in Earthquake Weather, was divided into two numbered sections when re-collected in Live From the Hong Kong Nile Club (2000). 'The Lunatic of Lindley Meadow' appears in the new book, its major transformation having occurred twenty years ago between A Calendar of Airs, where it was called 'The Lunatic of Mt.Royal' and was built from four-line stanzas, and Earthquake Weather where the stanzas have three lines. '1978, Montreal' was called 'Radio' once ... after the lines 'Down the same shaft old TV westerns / in French', Kleinzahler inserted ''Allons, Monsieur Hopalong". Anyone one day working on a bibliography or critical edition will have their work cut out.