There was one summer day in 2007 when I thought I saw my friend’s ghost twice in the same hour. I was annoyed rather than sad, and I uttered (but was immediately horrified with) the words, “Damn you, Carter” Then I figured that every poem-writer should be allowed at least one death/eulogy poem, so I meted out mine:
Carter, Dead
At times I think I see your shade Out corners of my study keeping dusty with ambition I keep on lights past midnight Having only the void and no vision
This is one of those poems that has not yet been found by it’s reader, but I refuse to forget it, because it hints at a great and preposterous anger that I still feel from time to time. I once had someone tell me he didn’t like it because it was cliche, a notion I reject more now than I did then.
I wrote the title in French not to be artsy or obtuse, but because the first draft of this had been in French, written during the semester when I took a couple French classes while finishing my dumb thesis.
Have I talked too much? It’s not usual, but like the long quote that precedes this short poem it just feels right to over-introduce sometimes.
Un Ciel en Hiver
...these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. Melville, Moby DickA fingernail clipping glows in the sky, Hangs there, mere years from a white sparkling fly, whose dead, lonely shell still clings to the shades of unending sharkskin midnight palisades.
Re. Dejection
Coleridge in all his finery looks every bit a gentleman. Small shame to him the opium. But he's a Beast for spilling naked dreams upon our snow-white sheets; seeds of sin from an overwrought pen.
Every story, every poem, is toxic ectoplasm I Must Expel…
…even if in the end it’s deemed fakerey, insubstantial, or only true for the medium.
Through Chris Lott’s recent reminiscence on poetry, which was referenced on Twitter, I discovered a new blog post by Gardner Campbell, an
professor of English lit and adventurer in new media. Mr. Campbell has made available
an audio
file of his reading of several Samuel Taylor Coleridge poems,
including “Kubla Kahn”.
I myself have a working memorization of “Kubla
Kahn”, and have recited the poem aloud dozens of times over the last
dozen years. It’s not an easy poem, but it gets easier each time you
read it. And because I don’t recall anyone else ever reading this poem
to me aloud, I’ve tried various oral interpretations of the sometime
befuddling language. Particularly curious to me was the following:
And all who heard should see
them there,
And all who should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
You’ve probably noticed what I notice every time I read it: the “who”
in the second (quoted) line is confusing. For a long time I’ve read it
as if there were a comma after “should”, making the “all who should”
refer back to the “heard” or “see”. This invisible comma also causes
an awkward pause which I’ve capitalized on to catch my breath before
bellowing “…cry, Beware! Beware!”
In terms of comprehending Coleridge’s unusual phrasing in this line, I’d blamed the
anomaly on archaic usage, or else opium.
Those who know this poem are already giggling at me, for my memorization is erroneous. Listening
to Mr. Campbell’s reading, I listened anxiously for his interpretation
of that line, and was stunned to discover my memorization of “Kubla”
embeds an invention: the extra (and confusing) “who”.
The Old Main Amphitheater at
USU
I have to wonder
if it wasn’t a bad text that incurred this extra “who” in my long-term memory. In retrospect, I imagine I
memorized it off of an early Project Gutenberg text from the mid 90s
while I was in college, and a handful of friends and I would print off
poems to compile our custom reading lists for oral delivery at the Old
Main Hill amphitheater.
So by happy chance Gardner Campbell’s eloquent reading has enlightened me to the error in my memory, and we have yet another instance of Twitter as a catalyst for learning.
P.S. I can’t help but notice that, in listening to Mr. Campbell’s
reading, the line “As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing”
still makes me chuckle after all these years. Apparently C.S. Lewis wondered to
his pupils about the pants in question:
John Dougill’s Oxford in English Literature: The Making,
and Undoing, of ‘The English Athens’ notes that Lewis’s pupil John
Betjeman complained peevishly
that his tutor had forever ruined Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ by wondering
whether the ‘pants’ in the line … were made of wool or fur.
Based on the earth’s reaction, I say wool. Or else chain mail.
The other night at Borders I picked up a few books off of the discount rack: the 2007 Writers Market (the dream persists), a (meagerly) annotated edition of T.S. Eliot’s major poems, and The Best American Poetry 2004.
The latter I picked up out of curiosity more than passion. Let me now claim to be enthusiastic about poetry, a devotee, an eternal student, a reader, and a listener. Though I tend to trust most of my precious available reading time to the classics and the Western Canon (to paraphrase Harold Bloom [fair warning for those of you who detest him], Life is Too Short to Read Bad Literature), I do my best to listen to and read new poetry whenever possible. I usually ‘get’ modern poetry, and believe several living poets to be among the best that American writing has cultivated. Having said that, I haven’t bought a BAP in half a dozen years, perhaps partly out of disappointment but certainly in part out of laziness and disinterest.
My expectations for BAP 2004 were mixed. On the one hand I’ve read enough new poetry to know what to expect: A poem launched from a cliche that turns our understanding on it’s head. Poems that vigorously attend to white space. The poem where the narrator does something by himself, reflecting on relationship, strained or wholesome. The poem that serves up a dated political lambast. The poem that accuses a part or the whole of civilization (in quotes) of murder or injustice. And maybe, just maybe, a wholly readable poem with brilliant turns of phrase, unusual but precise application of words, and meaning that both provokes and satisfies.
I also expected, structurally, that BAP would start off with it’s strongest poem(s), much like a rock album (Dirty Three and the White Stripes spring to mind for some reason).
But I couldn’t get past page 26 of Best American Poetry 2004. I had begun reading it at Borders in the cafe, and though I was let down with only mild amusement at the predictable haughtiness of the first poem, Kim Addonzio’s “Chicken”, I continued on, slowly, carefully. I continued reading at stop lights and even as I sat in the drive-thru of Taco Bell on my way home. 5 or 6 poems in was stupefied. Not because the poems were so bad (they were neither poor nor great), but because I could not imagine that they would be accessible to Normal Human Beings.
This point was emphasized by my environment at the time, for I was comfortably by myself, one link in a chain of many cars–a crouching train of idling engines, waiting for our turn to drive off, receive food, pay, order. We were all hunting our “Fourth Meal”, subjects in a scene of benign banality, of innocent, ignorant human appetite, as un-literary and low-brow as one can imagine. Mixing poetry into the equation seemed both ridiculous and perfectly appropriate, a very modernist posture to take.
And as I struggled to parse through the overstuffed and obscure vocabulary of Will Alexander’s “Solea of the Simooms”, stuttered over Bruce Andrews’s gleefully obtuse and surreal “Dang Me”, I caught the scent of exhaust from the car in front of me, and a horrible epiphany hit:
It’s no wonder people neglect this, the supposed highest form of art. These poems are so inflated, vulgar, convoluted, or simply inaccessible that they can only be counterproductive to the cause of poetry.
I have always believed that, though there is ample room in the art for experimental poems and even poems laden with difficult, intertextual richness, most poems should be written for Normal Human Beings. Not scholars, not critics, not other poets. If I who am passionate about poetry and in fact trained (BA in English lit, MA in Language Teaching, and a voluntary drop-out of a highly-ranked English grad school) to read closely become so frustrated with so much new poetry so easily, the question is begged: Who _is_ the audience of modern poetry?
Though I say I am trained, I don’t claim to be a definitive expert. Though I do have a Masters, I dropped out of my subsequent grad program in English lit because I found little chance for pleasure-reading from under the strictly academic mantle. Rather than profess literature I chose to worship it. Yet what more damning evidence could there be than for Devotees/Readers to read poems from BAP and say, “I don’t get it” or, worse, “It’s boring/What’s the point?”
Putting aside the clearly narrative poems, the meaning of many of the pieces in BAP were nearly inextricable on a first reading. To make matters worse, I could find little pleasure in reading them even superficially, the way I might “read” a non-representational painting that I might not “get” at first glance. A relaxed, pleasure-of-sound reading is hindered when vocabulary is sinfully overwrought, toilsome, excavated from the bottom of the list of entries in thesauri so as to be toothless. I’m not afraid and think it not naive to suggest that much of what I read was simply adjectives for adjectives’ sake. “Big, stuffy words that nobody uses” is one of the most common indictments of poetry from the non-literati (and this is often admitted with some degree of self-consciousness and guilt, for no one wants to appear an ignoramous), and so many ignore or avoid poetry. How pretentiously this practice scars our noble art!
Hemingway remarked that literature is akin to an iceberg where 7/8th of its mass is under the water, but if we can’t even visualize the tip of the iceburg with any reliable degree of clarity, how will we ever desire to discover the whole? Who will this sort of poetrt appeal to? How will this bring any more significance or reflection to normal peoples everyday lives? Who will buy these books? Read these poems? Thirst for more?
Apoplectic with the obviously talented but (what word can I used
except) corrupted poets, I tore out a page in the drive-thru of Taco
Bell & wrote my own poem about a train, the exhaust of
civilization, hunger, and groping for brotherly love. It was not a good
poem, but it was a simple poem, one in which I sought to bash out in
plain language to contain what the poems I’d just finished had lacked:
tangible imagery, and at least one meaning that could be accessed by
any member of my immediate or extended family, adolescent or older.
12 hours later I’ve had a chance to read more of BAP 2004, and even reflect on some of the strong choices in earlier BAPs. There are a number of good poems in the collection, but no where near a full 75. I think of the Willesden Herald’s short fiction contest, in which no winner was chosen due to lack of quality entrants. One argument against this abandonment of a winner was that the contest was not so much about granting an award to signify quality, but a stimulus for discussion of the short story. Perhaps BAP is something like that, and the bother to fill up the 75 (which is not a requirement but nonetheless has not been strayed from in 19 years) is more of a provocation than a gift. For those of us with less time to lose, we might just wait for Harold Bloom to reflect and edit out another Best of BAP.
P.S. Immediately after finishing writing this I leapt into my car, and Robert Bly was reading on the radio. In less than a stanza this great poet reminded what the art is all about, and has not only depressed my general criticisms, but also buoyed my hope for poetry in spite of everything else. I have not changed the rest of this entry to capture the true frustration and destitution that I’d felt the night before, so that some day I will remember how Important Poetry Was to Me.
Lies
My mouth sweats of lies, yet laps at those I spat to the floor, Serves them raw, then offers more.
