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.

Phrase-making

In one of his recorded talks with Peter Porter, Clive James places the ability to make memorable phrases centre-stage: "On any given contemporary scene, but especially the one we have now, there are many, many, many poets who canít make phrases. They write poetry with a capital P but they don't do the essential thing that poets do - or I think it ís the essential thing that poets do but maybe I'm old fashioned."

Given the recent uproar in the letters section of Poetry (March 2008) issue there are plenty of Pound defenders who would agree with that label "old fashioned". But the lines that lodge in our brains are surely integral to the manner in which reading poetry transforms and enriches day to day experience - the lines pop into your head, and there's this whole expansive dimension at hand. Kris Hemensley writes - in a comment on an earlier post "For me it's as often lines or parts of poems as it is the complete poem or a poem or two as much as the poet's complete works that sustains me or maintains that particular poet in my mind."

I've been enjoying Don Share's collection Squandermania, not least because of his talent at making phrases. Often enough the good phrases are shows of wit, lifting the poem with humour ...

Patience comes
to those who wait -

or (echoing a Joni Mitchell lyric)

Paradise can't exist
till it's gone.

There are many observations, appealing in the same sort of way as Billy Collins can be, but the texture and language of the verse is quite different

Joke shops are always
in bad neighborhoods.

But Share's phrase-making can be turned to serious effect. In a poem which sets out with a reference to "ground zero" the final line starts with a phrase which has all the weight, balance and import of a line from the classics:

disaster marries us