 As Reviewed By: James Rother |
Between Poetry and Prose: A Critical Ballet in Three Scenes Scene
One: The Prose of Poetry
|
As Reviewed By: James Rother |
Between Poetry and Prose: A Critical Ballet in Three Scenes Scene
One: The Prose of Poetry
|
I The
failure of the not infrequently blabby Ezra Pound to sharpen a remark made
in one of the many admonishing letters sent to Poetry’s then editor,
Harriet Monroe—“Poetry must be as well written as prose”—has
surely proved a fateful one. Not specifying that it was only good prose he was talking
about turned no more than a mildly controversial aside into a flashpoint
somewhere between an adventitious casus belli and a call for the
desanctification of Veronica’s napkin. At any rate, since its first
dissemination in print this mantra has become one of the dominant rallying
cries of American vers-librists eager to defend W C. Williams’s
free-basing of Imagist eye candy against the controlled and Symboliste-backed
dérèglements of an emigré from even deeper recesses of the American literary hinterland, T. S.
Eliot. One
can speculate endlessly as to why so hooded a misunderstanding could have
triggered such a resounding frisson within the modernist
unconscious-about-to-become-conscious, but the how gives far greater
pause. Mounting Georgian impatience with the slow removal of Victorian
shackles and hesitancies might’ve had something to do with it, but then,
so might’ve the concussion administered to English pastoralism by the
later novels and verse of Thomas Hardy, the inside-out dandyism of George
Moore, and the musique concrète infused into
Irish Volkslieder by the newly im-Pounded Yeats. Sent winging as a
directive which literary London had far greater reason to heed than
subliterary Chicago (Pound being less stoppered a conduit for control-freakery
exercised between Imagism’s dusk and Vorticism’s barely-struck noon
than the volatile founder of BLAST, Wyndham Lewis), the half-life of
“Poetry must be as well written as prose” would eventually prove as
surprising to its source as it had once seemed obvious (and overdue) to
its disseminating mouth. Even now, a century after its utterance, it
remains to third- and fourth-generation Ezroids an article of faith (and
one hardly to be questioned) that not only are the interests of poetry
best served by the manners of exactitude first declared basic etiquette in
the lapidary works of Flaubert and de Maupassant but—and here the
screed’s warp is crosscut by a rather more draconian woof—poets are to
view as self-evident none but such truths as are thrown boldly into relief
by observances of that kind. But to properly declare themselves aligned
with these prerequisites, vers-librists also had to hew to the ABC’s
laid down by the arch-modernist Hammurabi who had given them the force of
law, as well as follow, in no less devoted—or variably footed—a
manner, the lead of his cohort from U. of Penn. days, William Carlos
Williams. Countless
“informalist” poems strung together between 1915 and 1935 stemmed from
misreadings of these ABC’s, with the result that a run of doggerel was
unleashed the expired poetic license of which sprees of transgressive
lineality à la E. E. Cummings
and uncharged roaming à
la just
about anybody at all
seemed hardly the lowest case. Which is not to say that all, or even most
of the verse written by the torch-bearers of Objectivism and displayed
like lawn flamingoes filched from front yards cultivated by that same W.
C. Williams and his colleague, George Oppen, was second-rate. Or that the
much later poetry, written by another Williams—C. K.—hung
unceremoniously out to dry on clotheslines awash with limply prosaic
hand-me-downs, amounts to a case of not just less parading as more, but of
more denying it is more of the same. No less perceptive a discerner of
other poets’ dirty laundry than W. H. Auden was able to see past the
proletarian scuff marks (and his own formalist astigmatism) to the kernel
of genuine Americanism in poems of an aboriginally Objectivist stamp, and
he did not have to bite his tongue in acknowledging as one of the most
treasurable love poems in the English language the sunset elegy of
Williams’s declining years, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” the most
amazing among several heart-stopping triumphs brought together in the
collection Journey to Love (1955). Auden left it to later
generations to squabble over whether Imagism had indeed wrought the havoc
wreaked upon American verse in the modernist half-century which the dour
and dyspeptic Yvor Winters had insisted upon in Anatomy of Nonsense.
Furthermore, he even allowed, in the Introduction to his anthology The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse (1956), that poets maturing in the United States during the age of
Eisenhower could do worse than defy the Moses and Joshua of modernism in
no longer dismissing Walt Whitman as an indifferent drummer who managed to
be unconscionably tuneless as well. For a poet-critic who revered the
relatively strait-laced Thomas Hardy this side of idolatry, it was not the
fungibility of free verse (on which the jury was still out) that was in
question but the insistence, brassily vocalized after World War II by
legions of variable-foot doctors (interning with podiatrist-in-chief W. C.
Williams), that only poets adhering strictly to the guidelines laid down
by Olson, Creeley, and countless fellow Black Mountaineers were fit to
display the seal of approval, “American,” on their verse, irrespective
of how many New Critics, backed by this or that praetorian guard of prissy
poets and spoiled-rotten publishing house editors, might scream bloody
murder at such a meld of slumming and noblesse oblige. Actually,
the “prose content” of modern poetry has inspired almost as much
debate as the fat content of certain popular diet foods. At best, the
metabolism of poetry can withstand only so much concentration of proteins
in its intake, or conversely, their sudden depletion, without the risk of
overshooting the Mallarmean azur
entirely on the one hand, or
collapsing rhythmlessly into sloppy seconds on the other.
Throughout the history of verse, poets have been fascinated with testing
how far the envelope of the Dylanesca’s “no direction home”
could be pushed before the “dead letter” effect propelling language
beyond the pale of re-enlivenment irreversibly set in. For years now,
differences between verse lines noticeably distended syllabically and raw
“prose poetry” (or, less respectably, poetic prose) have become
progressively more difficult to spot. Meters once spotlighted by rhythms
as distinguishable as drum tattoos have increasingly flipped into retreat
mode before the onrushing tumbrel of fourteeners and other horrors of the sans-culotte
prose lobby, offered either straight-up as a in shot glass or watered
down into a litany-sans-ground
parodying the “stiff burdoun” (or deep-chested descant) to the
prick-song reported to have been sung by Chaucer’s Pardoner in The
CanterburyTales.
Anyone
who has researched the off-tempo march of poetic forms knows that vers
libre is a cow that centuries other than the twentieth have viewed as
eminently serviceable if not of the flat-out sacred variety. Most reliable
literary handbooks offer accounts not unlike the following to remind
students of its pertinacity: Hebrew
verse (like much Oriental poetry) is based on large rhythmical units and .
. . our familiar Psalms
and Song of Solomon are as
definitely free verse as anything Carl Sandburg has written. Nor is the
form new to European literature: France has practiced it for many years;
Heinrich Heine used it in his The North Sea; W. E. Henley and
Matthew Arnold practiced it in England; Walt Whitman shocked America with
it before 1860. Stephen Crane employed it before Amy Lowell. . . Text production of free
verse has often threatened the more sensitive musical ear with
indiscriminate swamping, as witness the eclipse of Paul Verlaine in the
1870’s at the hands of the cult that burgeoned around his drunken
boat-mate, Arthur Rimbaud. And who, much more recently, has not marveled
at the ascendancy of John Ashbery’s “willful poetics” over the
“strong measures” advocacy of less fibrillative technicians like
Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg?
Finally, how to account for the fading-in-the-stretch (barring a brief
period of reascendancy in the ‘80s which fizzled before the ‘90s were
properly under way) of the entire post-war American neo-formalist movement
from the early 1960’s on? Could readers at last have become fatigued
with too much of a good thing registering as an auto-immune system become
allergic to itself?
The
argument that the last half-century of American vers libre has helped keep
the art form of poetry alive in ways no strong-measured stroking in
tide-pools could have made possible remains one difficult to unseat. The
formalist verse of those decades was not uncommonly beset by an arcaneness
of subject matters that even the revivalist tent of its own shortsighted
pitching could not long sustain. (One typically towering example of this
tendentious sin: Edgar Bowers’s Collected Poems of 1999 in
general and the relatively early “From William Tyndale to John Frith”
in particular.) Absent the brief flutter or two of wobbly resuscitation,
its hospital stay was a matter of one I.C.U. relapse after another, with
little promise of a turn-around in vital-signs that any but the most
credulous could foresee. The disappearance from the scene not long ago of
Donald Justice, one of the last succulents still judged Hardy among the
still-standing annuals and perennials of American formalism, no doubt puts
the capstone on an elaborate tomb whose construction work may have endured
numerous layoffs and work stoppages but has nonetheless advanced toward
completion with relentless drive. Launched by a revival of neo-Audenian
practice and kept tenuously afloat by aging oarsmen during the ‘70s and
‘80s less keen on exploration than on braving shallows and hugging
shores, this Beowulfian flame-bucket has been listing badly ever since
Donald M. Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry proved the
surprise undergraduate hit of 1960. Frederick Morgan’s Hudson
Review
and Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion can pretend until the cows come home that the
trumpeting heard over those vales was taps and not reveille, but it was
journals like Brad Morrow’s Conjunctions,
with its unlikely blend of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E sound poets, third-generation
Projectivists, and geriatric New York Schoolers to which credit was
ultimately due for having whipped the post-Vietnam generation into a
froth, and not any Tours to Jurassic Park undertaken in honor—or honour—of
Andrew Marvell or Samuel Johnson. Whether one approved of it or not, the
banner of vers libre flew high over Poetry’s city on the hill all
from the ‘70s through the ’90s and beyond, even as trendy if less
gold-plated ‘zines risked looking obsolete to confound the skeptical
with a lot of faux experimentalism whose siren calls Parnassus
would not for a moment countenance and the ancient trend-setter, recently
luxuriant in its hundred-million-dollar digs, could never (until the
tenure of Christian Wiman) quite face up to. Whence
derived the moxie to risk defying not only centuries of sang froid
congealed into short lines, but also the dead march of Cultural Studies
whose philistine phalanxes were willing to trample in the dust any art
reluctant to prostrate itself before the People’s sovereign right to
have its maw stuffed with as much politically correct pap as it could
possibly hold? Probably
from the refusal of certain visionaries to write “30” to exercises in
futility afflicted by the likelihood of turning off readers not having
reached that age, while sending into tailspins of nostalgia numerous
others having been around more years than a score and ten and with little
more to look forward to than extended panting sessions on mortality’s
ever-narrowing strand. Does anyone really doubt that before very long in
this new millennium of ours American poetry, whether wholly vers libre-ed
out or endlessly rebraided into retro-morphs of the Petrarchan sonnet,
will seem to Generation Z as moribund as the dream of Michael Jackson’s
to have himself refloated as Coke’s or Pepsi’s King of Pop? Perhaps
Frank O’Hara’s City of Poets 2.0, or even 3.0 is
finally upon us, having insinuated itself as the vampire matrix of choice
in today’s heartland of the Resolutely Undead. In many ways this would
be entirely fitting, since as a place of stopped time where zombies on
decasyllabic drip continue to re-animate the image of cardiac arrest
occurring in an infinite regress of monitors and life screens. Such a
frenetic vision of limbo would at least preserve in formaldehyde what in
livelier times had been relied upon to keep the blood flowing to each and
every vesicle of the body impolitic—living speech. But
enough about the not quite dead. Less Anne Rice-ish but still lacking
adequate wind-tunnel is the overdrawn but by no means exhausted downdraft
of “nearly new” poetry which, with the help of such veteran Draculans
as Ashbery and (C. K.) Williams, has successfully interposed itself
between morbidities that have demonstrated themselves embraceable by both
past and present and unfailingly reliable as cash cows. A proven
pander to lapsed affairs, poetry’s answer to the talkies has flourished,
one can only assume, as a result of the embarrassment many writers (and,
needless to say, readers) have felt over the parlous state of contemporary
verse, with its paint-ball skirmishes between Dead Poet
Societies—late-Blooming Stevensians against gangs of motor-mouthed
recyclists calling themselves “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.” The problem is
not one of a decided tropism toward prose poetry, but with the not always
reasonable facsimile of that Baudelairean anomaly which is proving
positively ubiquitous in many print journals and on the internet. (This
phase of the argument will be taken up in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Prose Poem,” the present essay-triptych’s projected third panel, as
well as in the conclusion to a second installment devoted to the
enpurpling of prose that continues unabated in much current fictional, as
well as non-fictional, writing.)
If it is true that in the course of slavishly
retracing the figure-eights etched on bourgeois probity’s wafer-thin ice
by épatineurs
of la belle époque like Paul Verlaine and Tristan Corbière, 20th-Century modernists rendered more than just their own
lines blurry by not credibly distinguishing a largely faltering poeticism
from newly resurgent prose. The determination shown by these writers to
extend the conversational range of verse beyond the pale to which the
likes of Kipling and Hardy had often absent-mindedly consigned it should
likewise not be cheated of the discredit it richly deserves. For these
modernists, the Game seemed everywhere afoot and pursuable for stakes far
greater than any imagined by insufficiently late Victorians who either
were tardy in dumping their stock in Nineties aestheticism or with equal
desperation grabbed up as much of it on margin as a plummeting market
allowed. At issue was not what a poem could be empowered to say, but what,
by fair means or foul, it could be enabled to move and shake. No doubt
this explains why so much phantom dust was raised over poetic
modernism’s vaunted letch for the vernacular and for as many unfiltered
and near-to-obscene evils as could be made to flower, Aubrey Beardsley-like,
on its pages. Hordes of critics uninterested in the modernist phenomenon
on principle were of course quite exercised by this. They spared no effort
in trilling the mordent that the sit-com laugh-tracking the over-stayed
welcome of the 19th Century-avant-garde had slipped
ignominiously into re-runs and the naiseries of the Continental
Follies of 1848, despite deceptive repackaging, were merely déjà
vu all over again. By their lights, having to endure the book-publishing
Eliot of 1917 rehashing the otiose laments of the as yet barely known one
of 1910 about having been slighted by mermaids whose only crime, so far as
anyone could tell, lay in their refusal to serenade a wallflower
inadequately disguised as a prophet whom even the ventriloquist
responsible for his voice refused to be associated with, recalled rather
too vividly, it was thought, indignities perpetrated on the burghers of
France four decades earlier by an even more wretched clutch of pranksters
led by those insufferable enfants terribles, Arthur Rimbaud and
Jules Laforgue. Again, what cried out for something other than random
voicing was a stand—principled if need be— against all such
resurgences of nostalgie de la boue of the sort taken by M.
Cuvillier-Fleury, the unflappable house critic of Journal des Débats, when a review copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary landed with an
echoing thud on his desk in the fall of 1857. It’s enough to cite but
one of the turbo-harrumphs directed by him at that book’s incorrigible
human screw-ups: “Ce sont des mannequins ressemblants.”
Flaubert’s own Bouvard and Pécuchet
could hardly have put the matter more succinctly. The
“gutter Parnassians” (as poets prepped by Rimbaud were dubbed) made
much of isotopic prose passing itself off as radiant poetic folderol. They
feigned chagrin at any allusion to apocalypse because to mention it was
not only showy but masochistically titillating past any level they could
own up to without simultaneously acknowledging their kinship to the
crassest of feuilletonistes. Because verbalizing on or about such
debasements could engender real pain on when committed to print, they
promoted to carnivale what earlier sideshow operators like
Baudelaire had been content to market as loss-leader sadism or faux-Saturnalia
for the perversion-deprived. It doesn’t take a Lacanian with the Imaginaire
of a rocket scientist to see triumphalism gesticulating wildly in all such
spasms of the maladroit. Rather, one wonders why the resident geniuses on
either side of that cultural divide were so slow in calling a shot heard
round the world. What Rimbaud and his cousins from their distant but still
accessible remove from established poetic paradigms ended up sponsoring
was not a revolution in poetic taste and manners but a mysterium more
taken up with the investiture of a High Prosaics than with
psychedelicizing a late-to-flower Romanticism adept at in turning on poets
from Keats all the way to America’s own Hart Crane.
Poets
whose practices anticipated those of the Church of Latter Day Symbolistes
(always excluding, of course, Mallarmé)
were stayed from experiments with an ever-loosening poetic line because
they feared—sensibly and with due cause for alarm—a precipitous
descent into doggerel or a mongrel derivative every bit as mangy and
unmanageable. In historicizing this, one is reminded of the casualties
inflicted upon practitioners of the Tudor daredevil act known as the
“fourteener” which, in the hayday of template tectonics presided over
the two Georges, Gascoigne and Puttenham, dragged, even more haltingly
than the Alexandrine, its slow length along. Who but their contemporary,
Arthur Golding, master illusionist and tyer of Ovidian slipknots elidable
into Shakespearean rope sculptures, could have imagined that such fleet
footwear could be conjured from so pedestrian a kitbag of iambics? Lag,
droop, waddle, and halt can, by dint of the appropriate magic, convert
themselves into a ballet of perfections, but only when a master skilled in
neutralizing torque that would otherwise herd outriding syllables into
strings of front-loaded tongue-twisters is put in charge of them. For
those who believe the flaccidities of the fourteener beyond anyone’s
ability to keep its prosody safe from apoplexies of ritard, it’s
hard to imagine, as does Pound in his perdurable ABC of Reading, an
Ovid enthusiast giving this beast the ride of its life and revealing it a
thoroughbred through and through. True, most Elizabethans who essayed its
use never got past insertion of the bit, bestriding its unstraddlable
girth as though they were seeing a mechanical bull eat up the last of its
springs, but not Arthur Golding. Not only was he artful at counteracting
the lag, droop, waddle, and halt the hendecasyllabic was notoriously heir
to, but he left marble what nearly all translators of the Metamorphoses found, and
were content to leave—quartz:
Nor day, but middle bound of both
a man
may term of right.
The house at sodaine seemed to shake,
and all
about it shine
With burning lampes,
and glittering fires to
flash before their eyen.
And likenesses
of ougly beastes with gastful
noyses yeld.
Fore feare whereof
to smokie holes the sisters
were compeld
To hide their heades,
one here and there
another for to shun
The glistering light.
And while they thus in
corners blindly run,
Upon their pretie limmes
a fine crispe
film there goes
And slender finnes
instead of handes
their
shortened armes enclose.
But how they lost their former shape
of
Certaintie to know
The darknesse would not suffer them. . .
.
But,
ah the woe that betided those for whom the castles reared on that peculiar
prosiness over whose chasms Golding resyllablized Ovid’s course in
advanced physics appeared construction projects best tackled from the top
down. Why were English poets so long in accurately appraising that
schematics of darkness (a full century was to elapse before the epic cup
of ténèbres poured by Milton was given leave to run over—in blank verse) this
prince of poets so splendidly made visible?
II Modern
revivers of the elastic poetic line have not been unaware of the hazards
incurrable when producing verse that falls between the cracks—as the
current solecism would have it—of sporadic gassiness and full-on
flatulence:
She used the neighbor’s roof as a
reference point, liking its precarious
congruity,
a mobile performative at the nightline:
what a woman thinks about
before she conceives. See how they run,
driven with carelessness,
clouds cutting up over the rooftops like
comedians, like blind mice
dispensing with threes. As this was a
theatrical positioning,
I sat between them, trifocally, an
intermediate vision
held commonly at arm’s length: Take my
hand, I can’t see.
The boundaries of the third term blurred,
there is in some part
a percentage of the other part. May as a
fifth month or an auxiliary,
each a dispensable conditioning, given
the farmer’s wife,
who, at this point, may be reaching out a
hand to cover the distance,
as if to carve out a bridge or a tree. Thus
does Catherine Imbriglio’s “Triskelion” set forth in a rattletrap
that crepitates toward felicity and grace with all the directional sense
of a three-legged gopher in a hailstorm. But Imbroglio’s embroglio
hardly represents the lowest perch to which such “working the crank”
can sink. “Triskelion” at least trundles its measure along past the
“theme and variations” seriatim of, say, a Norma Cole (in, for
example, “Conjunctions”), or a Leslie Scalapino in a romp as dismally
choreographed as “The Tango.” A C.
K. Williams can, but not always does, make good on the promise held out to
the ear by those suspension bridges of breath (kept obsessively in trim
throughout much of Whitman) which have been known to shimmy like wild
thyme in the wind in grosser hands:
An erratic, complicated shape,
like a tool for some obsolete task: the
hipbone and half the gnawed shank of a small, unrecognizable ani
-mal on the pavement in front of
the entrance to the museum; grimy,
black with fire-dust, soot, the blackness from our shoes, our ink,
the grit that sifts out of our
air. . . .
(“Bone,” from Repair
[1999]) It’s
a long way back from here to Golding’s supple fourteeners, or for that
matter anyone else’s from that period worth a representative quotation.
But even a Gascoigne could tell a hawk from a handsaw when groping for
sounds unlikely to turn even reciters unfortified by Hamlet’s advice to
the players into fumbling marshmallow-mouths. A throw of yarrow stalks
wasn’t necessary to predict when lines weighty with excess cushioning
and folds of bazaar-damask (Gascoigne’s seldom failed to make the cut)
were likely to totter and go plop with something less than Longinian
sublimity. Nor did he need jousts with contemporaries to tip him to when
samples of his work came a cropper and popped before they could properly
fizz. Augustans like Pope
knew which sort of laughter was likely to meet practitioners of “the art
of sinking in verse” when they failed to distinguish lines that did in
the satirist from those intended to fell the satirized. Content to be
helots indentured to the oligarchy of genres Virgil and Horace
established, they never had to confront—as the modernists did
repeatedly—the space of dismantlement where genre, hardly more than a
spent force, had callowly dissolved into shadowplay. The Romantics had
preceded the modernists in transforming the fact of enfance disparue
into a Disney-like world in which visionary gleams exist only to be later
noted as having lost their auras. Unfortunately, this deprived the
visionary poet of anything meaningful to do beyond concocting Byzantiums
from the remains of what all-inflating innocence leaves behind when
childhood gleams give way to “whither-is-fled”’s. If there is one
shortcoming to Augustan poetry that cannot be easily explained away, it is
that the rather brief season spent by it in the sun came up lamentably
short in providing for its post-“shock and awe” period. No major poet
before Auden thought to point out that the singular glory of the age of
Pope and Johnson, the heroic couplet, had died intestate, nor why the
reputations of so few of its leading lights were dragged out of mothballs
before the New Critics like W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Maynard Mack awakened
doubters of those poets’ artistic worth from their slumber. Even so
devoted a disembalmer as T. S. Eliot found the lengthy pastiche of The
Rape of the Lock intended for The Waste Land a scrap not worth
scrapping over when his friend and mentor Ezra Pound declared its quality
too far beneath its model’s to be admissible as evidence of satire’s
Vorticist use as reflecting pool wherein the modern corruption of elegance
could be seen as the flip side of the early 18th Century’s
elegant view of corruption. To
encapsulate the double helixes of the Augustan era as unromantically as
the Romantics did, it was an age of prose. Following the purge of
stylistic excess undertaken by the Royal Society in the 1660’s—in
England, at any rate—the “prose of the realm” became a fortiori
Thomas Sprat’s “So many things, so many words,” construing
with lambent finesse “an idiom devoid of all adhering even secondarily
to the ‘poetical.’” Late-flowering Augustans could go on as windily
as they liked and with “cheek enow” even to haul Grub Street all the
way to Hampton Court, but their harpings on Aeolian instruments betrayed
as little of personal loss as that elegy by Milton which made untimely
drowning a passkey to lyric immortality. In their eyes the problem was not
an overabundance of prose, but in an almost universal decline in
readership for well-crafted verse. Writers of taste in the time of Pope
found little difficulty in swallowing that division of labor between
poetry and prose which the gods themselves not only sanctioned, but with a
fervor like unto Olympian insistence formally decreed. Poetry was poetry,
and prose—candor being honesty’s default setting—was merely prose,
though that qualifier could be translated from a vice to a virtue by any
number of canny means. All
that notwithstanding, the Romantics of Wordsworth’s generation were
virtually unanimous in indicting the prosody of the period before their
own as hamstrung by a temperament, a sensibility—yea, a ruling
passion—that exalted “verse” above genuine poetry, the most noumenal
of dingen-an-sich short of the divinity himself. Verse was inferior
because next to poetic marble, it could be no more than a plaster
cast—never the real thing. And that further, it was constrained by
metrics and scansion (both abysmally scanting the free flight of the
poet’s lyric impulse) led poets no less than readers to exalt a
factitious lark-in-couplets over a full-throated songbird singing its
heart out at the gates of heaven. The heroic couplet itself, for all it
Horatian sonority and deference to ars longa over vita brevis,
was no more than a twin-prop masking business-class accommodations with
social-climbing dissimulation and the complicity of cup-bearers on loan
from Central Casting. The Augustans’ view of themselves as fiddling
second-stringers honoring the Heifetzes and Hubermans of Rome’s golden
age with less pricey but still respectable wit of a silver one was reduced
in the Romantic mind to an idée
fixe centering on bells and whistles of an orchestra that long ago had
ceased to play. Slice and dice it as one might, Wordsworth’s “Preface
to Lyrical Ballads” remains, despite Coleridgean reservations,
utterly unambiguous on the point of the previous century’s poets’ rank
inability to rise to grasp and retain hold of “the vision thing.” For
surely that, even the shakiest fan of Auguries of Innocence
would affirm, was what real poetry was all about. Yet,
to be fair, it was not unusual for visionaries in those times to suffer
abuse at the hands of sentimentalists masquerading as verse-prophets
snootily thumbing their noses at anyone drawing distinctions between
bonkers Blakes nattering about Zoas and batty Chattertons blathering in
pseudo-Spenserese of things as little tied to this earth as the Great
Chain of Unbeing Boehme and Swedenborg heard clanking among the celestial
spheres. Such littering of the ramp to the Sublime sat poorly with readers
weaned on verse jubilations of a Kit Smart turning the Lamb of God on a
backyard spit to feed the multitude with mutton of Albion sure to stick to
its ribs. Though the 18th- Century-loathing Wordsworth thought
Chatterton worth a couplet—
I thought of Chatterton, the
marvelous boy, The
sleepless soul that perished in his pride —it
was one as close to boilerplate as any toast made by Falstaff when John
Barleycorn was a more intimate companion than “officious grief.” Like
Peter Pans passing in the night and oblivious to the impact each would
someday have on the Tintern Abbey destined someday to be reconstituted in
Buena Park, California, such poetic soul-mates exemplify electable
affinities far more than differences that might have undergirded the war
of nerves then being waged by Lancastrian poets zonked on the Triumphs of
Life against the York pretenders, their outcast cousins-in-verse,
themselves knee-deep in Gray’s Elegy and awash in night thoughts
better left to the young at heart. By
the time Queen Victoria died, though, romanticism in England was casting
its nets far wider than Matthew Arnold’s untidy shores, gathering in
sea-waifs from the existentially non-conformist Gérard de Nerval and Friedrich Hölderlin to contrarian monsters like Poe, Hoffmann, and the ever-irredentistical
Baudelaire. Likewise, in France a new breath lay on the deep whose frissons
were tearing through the haunts of l’homme moyen sensuel as
unstoppably as farts in an organ loft, though countermeasures were already
deep in rehearsal to foil any attack on national morale. Seldom
quick to react to assaults made on pudeur by mere poets, the
custodians of French mores were far likelier to turn savage over affronts
waged from full margin to full margin, flinging their wad of outrage at
authors whose tantrums kept them to a low metaphor count when passing
sentence on deviations from la gloire. French Romantic poets,
however else they managed to make accommodating private posture to public
scrutiny a martial art, never forswore allegiance to that prosy
extrapolativeness which had long served them admirably in times of need.
In this, however, they wore their Rousseauvianism on their sleeve,
shrewdly hoarding its solidarity with humanity’s baser orders in small
and large dollops and always under separate cover of speech dutifully
labeled “of common men.” What the “aristos” spoke was held
incurably arch, affected, and at heart (the only receptacle that really
counted), snide—not to mention patronizing—down to its perfumed
ruffles and expensive gaiters. The French Revolution, if not having quite
successfully dealt aristo-culture the desired coup de grace, still
left it disfigured beyond recognition, having scarred it in such a manner
as to forever certify the fragility of sure things beyond all promise of
1848, 1917, 1933, or even, in its own miniature-railroading way, 1968.
Though it was May 1968, and not May 1848 that most starkly revealed the
changes wrought upon European culture by that upheaval 180 years earlier
whose effects, though visibly earth-shattering at the time, proved
considerably less durable than the aristocratic hauteurs its
street-rabble had labored to consign to history’s dustbin. (The next
decades would show that even a scion of the tradiitional left like François
Mitterand could carry himself with the disdain of a Duc d’Orleans when
downwind of le riff-raff.) Yet, the resurgent imperium of
Louis-Napoleon III also made cause with a new bourgeoisification of French
culture by which, with the help of figures as Jacques Offenbach, the
heroic values of les Parnassiens verse were corroded through
deflationary dandyisms such as the noble soul-in-extremis (tempered
always with deflationary irony and rendered in récit-like forms like the prose poem, for which the extended cuffnotes filling out
Baudelaire’s Mon coeur mis à
nu soon became the template)
and the guttersnipe sublimities of a 16-year-old revisionary hot on
seasoning (none too recreationally) in hell. Richard Terdiman’s Discourse/Counter-Discourse
(1984) documents the tremors initiated and endured in this period with
admirable if occasionally pedantic brio, though his account notably
ignores the steady shifting of borders between the poetic and prosaic in
the age of Balzac and Lamartine. His book shows that what stamps itself as
“poetic” (say, in a passage of prose by Stendhal) meets what leaps out
as prosaic in a passage of verse (by, say, Alfred de Musset) at a
“constructivist” vanishing point where conveyor meets up with belt to
make the product line being turned out indistinguishable from the
design-model being moved along by “suits” whose fashion sense extends
no further than the executive suite. Prose,
however one slices and dices it, remains intractably grounded in the
sentence, and any attempt to transport it from there to a halfway house
run by the cut-up methodists of verse tips the balance between poetic and
prosaic inclinations over, if only by a micron or two, away from one
toward the other. Safaris need not be launched into the Schwarmenveldt of
the prose poem to find examples of sentential grounding being tugged every
which way, either to make a point seem more pointedly pointless or less
so, springing up all over the lot. It hardly matters whether such
point-making via pointlessness is carried on in the spirit of an Ann
Lauterbach, or in the garrulously conscriptive manner of a Wallace
Stevens, or in the volcanically rumbling tones for which Dylan Thomas was
famous. Being altarwise by the latter’s owl light proves finally no more
rewarding or illuminating than communing with Stevens’s owls in the
sarcophagus, or Lauterbach’s Cagey nightbirds, no matter how much
midnight oil one burns lucubrating on such whos-without-portfolio.
William
Empson was doubtless correct when, in reviewing the writings of R. P.
Blackmur in an essay published in 1955, he seized upon the lack of
identifiable content which that least foolable of American critics had
noted in Stevens’s poetry. However, what he and Blackmur both failed to
credit was Stevens’s innate tendency to treat the iterability of the
poem as of a piece with the dictational ephemerality of the simple office
memo. While it might be possible to attribute this to the many years spent
by Stevens writing surety bonds for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity
Company where he was employed from 1916 until the time of his death in
1955, the innateness of that tendency was as deeply rooted in symbolist
practice as it was in hieratic business’s monkeydom. Essentially a prose
poet who, having served his apprenticeship to gaudy wordplay and Commedia
del arte in Harmonium (1923), found in putting together collections like Parts of a World (1942)
and The Auroras of Autumn (1950) a walking cure for his blues
which, if not productive of much green, was serviceable enough as
therapeutic andante to permit a high order of dabbling by what this
Pierrot felt born to do, which was to post on notice boards of his own
mind’s eye exquisite meditations on themes distinctly Valéryan,
laid out in ever more blankly booming (and boomingly blank) verse. Of
endlessly increasing decreasing relevance was the fact that the space in
which those anecdotes, disquisitions, postcards from volcanoes were
displayed was already thick with exotic travel posters, exhibition
catalogues touting Gromaire and Matisse, lore relating to beasts, both
real and imaginary, of which Jorge Luis Borges might’ve been a
contributor, and other species of who knows what yellowing curiosities.
That every now and then Stevens would smooth an edge or two of these
ageing antimacassars so that their post-its in verse wouldn’t seem quite
so sere or posthumous is of consequence only to those who believe the jury
deliberating his ultimate place in American letters is still out. One
thing at any rate is certain: Stevens stands as the absolute
antipodes of W. C. Williams, the Objectivist heretic willing to take the
whole of European literature off the books where American writing is
concerned, and with an insouciance that makes even Walt Whitman’s appear
mealy-mouthed. A local variety of what even by Saturday Review
standards is a hothouse bloom, the Stevensian stemwinder emerged from out
the nowhere whence emerged the Emersonian essay, the Longfellow pop-up
epic, whether of Finnish or Acadian provenance, and the James Russell
Lowell panegyric on nobody-in-particular. Until certain influential
critics took up its cudgels (mostly after the patent holder’s death), it
seemed bound for the same terminal as his predecessors’ versions of the
form, despite the musicality of some of its broadband. Left behind by this
giant of a man in fee were a handful of genuinely unique lyrics composed
late in life; a number of others, mostly of conventional length, as well
as some justly celebrated anthology pieces like “Sunday Morning” and
“Esthétique du Mal” running somewhat longer; many more of what could be
called “character pieces,” with lines or even passages of enormous
astuteness dotting their wordscapes; and still others—many others—of
the stemwinder variety alluded to earlier (“Auroras to Autumn,”
“Transport to Summer,” and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” being
the three most notable ) which were to give Randall Jarrell and critics
like him the hives and conniptions. All in all, the Stevensian
correspondent breeze still had a quarter-century or more in its Oz-bellows to run
after the poet’s death, mostly in boutiques frequented by Ashbery
imitators, but that approach to things, never much lauded by any but those
determined to be rid of whatever Marjorie Perloff was buying, was pretty
much vieux chapeau by the late ‘80s and ‘90s. The replacement
for it tended to be what Alan Williamson, himself a poet, called the
“poetry of the sentence,” a mode achieving boldest relief in the verse
of C. K. Williams, already been cited in defense of the poetic line which
extends to both the “hyper-long” and the longingly hyper. One
interesting use for this device may be seen in “The Nail,” a poem that
clears a space for itself by not letting the merely supernumerary
determine its line-length, though the invoking of tutelary spirits in
whose name naming since Adam has proceeded is high on its agenda of
time-fillers:
Some dictator or other had gone
into exile, and now reports were coming
about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false
imprisonment, cruelty and corruption,
but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had
disposed of enemies was by hammering
nails into their skulls,
Horror, then, what mind does
after horror, after that first feeling that
you’ll never catch your
breath,
mind imagines—how not to be
annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap,
feels it in the tendon of the
hand,
feels the way you do with your
nail when you’re fixing something, making
something, shelves, a bed; the
first light tap to set the slant. And then the slightly harder tap,
to
embed the tip a little more . . . Lines
like these might seem sentential, but the fact that they do so only
perfunctorily render that impression at best marginally valid. The oblique
angularity of Williams’s syntax makes stunning bank shots off nodes of
understatement, while leaving other, more salient lumps and masses to
clutter thought the way a video game’s tactilities infuse leisure with
addictive feedback. Finding himself ushered by this poem into a confidence
he neither desires nor feels comfortable with, the reader quickly learns
that the trick behind Williams’s approach to billiards is to leave the
table of green fields so encumbered with blocked lines of vision that the
next shot has to be made with not a single pocket open. What establishes
“The Nail” as verse rather than prose manqué
is the rhythmic verve with which it accomplishes the snookering of its own
possibilities, artificially compounded as that process might seem. Of
course, such hustler-like tactics occur at the opposite end of the
spectrum from where the circular viciousness dogging the poetic impasses
of a Paul Célan
like a dark familiar. Given the habit of that poet to double the strands
of genetic material binding each of his poems with intertwined helixes of
dissociation, even his reductions of the tragic to German-language Escher
sketches of loss have little of the game-player’s preoccupation with
losing about them. But
there and there precisely appears the cursor on either side of which the
occasioning of paraphrasable texts finds its poetic prompt. Poetry can
traffic in elaborate detail but it cannot imbibe the sum total of its
specificities neat. Should it even try to do so, one should not be
surprised at the sudden coming into play of a comic mutantcy the issuance
of which being something in the nature of a fishhead atop a human torso
with the entire ensemble articulating some such visual pun as “Salmon
Rushdie.” Unsure whether, as a hybrid, it is prosifed verse or versified
prose, all this chimera can do is ask over and over, “Which way is it to
the Caucus Race?” To conclude this phase of the tour of the roundabouts, let’s just say that C. K. Williams’s poetry, for all its gutsy transcendence of easy moral stances (the stock in trade of a Philip Levine or Robert Pinsky) inhabits a recognizably human planet, and Célan’s, for all the miraculous stents applied to what stops the heart of the heart of the poet’s own inner country, does not. Which is not at all to suggest that Williams is a more “together” poet than Célan. While respectful of the talent that brought Love Poems and Poems about Love into the world, to even imply such a thing would be to put Houdini and eternal recurrence on the same plane. Some comparisons kill through their own outlandishness, their inadvertence resulting in a double murder. As with an algebraic equation in which both sides equal zero, the splaying of unknowns across a crevass of noughts confronts nothingness with itself in a recognition scene that is both blinding and self-cancelling. Imagine the Medusa catching her own glance in a mirror and simultaneously watching everything turn to stone but her own reflection.
Next month: Mr. Rother returns with Part II of his essay, "Between Poetry and Prose."
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