Poetry Notebook (2 page)

Cambridge, 2014

For most of the notes in this
Poetry Notebook
, Christian Wiman of
Poetry
(Chicago) must have my thanks for providing a resplendent first home. I should also thank
Alan Jenkins of the
TLS
for agreeing to print the Notebook’s last chapter. Near the end of the book, before that last chapter, I have placed a sheaf of commissioned pieces that I have
written in recent years. I am grateful to the editors concerned. The pieces are not strictly in note form, but one of my role models, Randall Jarrell, never minded mixing various types and formats
of essay, as long as they fitted his view of poetry; and anyone who reads Jarrell’s
Poetry and the Age
today might soon decide that nobody’s view was ever more coherent, as if
poetic quality were a world in itself.

My thanks to Prue Shaw, to Deirdre Serjeantson and to David Free for reading the manuscript. Prue Shaw, in addition to several other crucial comments, employed scholastic means to prove that an
apparently rogue apostrophe in a line by Marvell actually belonged there; and Deidre Serjeantson reminded me that Milton might not necessarily have thought he was doing an unpoetic thing when he
unloaded a classical library into the Garden of Eden. Martin Amis also spoke well in praise of Milton. My daughter Claerwen James designed the book’s cover for the British edition. My
assistant Susanne Young played a crucial role in assembling the working manuscript: in our cybernetic era there are so many ways of laying out a poem on the page, and almost all of them are wrong.
The
Wall Street Journal
, the Poetry Archive and the Reading for Life organization deserve my thanks for encouraging the idea that I should try to pack as much judgement as possible into a
small space, at times when I felt that a short piece might not just be best, but all I could do.

I should also thank the editors of publications in Britain, the USA and Australia that asked me for book reviews and for articles about poetry: the
New York Times Book Review
,
Standpoint
,
the
Monthly
, the
Spectator
,
Prospect
and the
Financial Times
. Don Paterson, in his role as poetry editor of Picador, commissioned the chapter on Michael Donaghy and
also, in his usual generous fashion, edited the initial manuscript of this book. Watching from New York, Robert Weil of Liveright was inspiringly determined to get a transatlantic edition
published, even though, in present-day America, the issue of permissions makes it so expensive in time and trouble for the critic of poetry to quote what he is criticizing. Robert Weil also
suggested the possibility that there might be some linking interludes to help students conclude that I was not deliberately being elliptical about a subject sufficiently elliptical already: a
suggestion that Don Paterson endorsed. So really I had two editors, and I am grateful to both of them; but the opinions are all mine, although here and there, for the sake of narrative logic, I
have modified the chronological order in which I wrote them down.

Almost fifty years ago, Hart Crane was one of my starting points as a reader of modern poetry. He still is. But my admiration for him always led to a quarrel, and it still
does. By now, I hope I can do a better job of framing the quarrel as an argument, instead of as one of those impatient snorts we give when we are drawn in but not convinced, put off but can’t
let go. The argument starts like this. If ‘Voyages’, one of the stand-out pieces in
White Buildings
, had maintained its show of coherence all the way to the end, it would have
been a successful abstract poem sequence. It didn’t have to make sense, but it did have to keep up its confident, even if drunkenly confident, tone: and it didn’t. Or, to put Hart Crane
back into the present tense which is his due, it doesn’t. The show breaks down in section IV, where the second stanza seems to be beginning with its second line, a first line having
apparently gone missing.

A textual crux that Crane might have designed specifically to help give his future scholars tenure, the phantom first line could have been a surmountable anomaly. (Plainly the
narrative syntax is a put-up job throughout the poem, so any ellipsis is a hole in a mirage.) But the credibility drops to zero when we encounter ‘Madly meeting logically’. In the first
three sections of the poem there have been plenty of adverbs as self-consciously fancy as ‘irrefragably’; and the main reason ‘The chancel port and portion of our June’
rings dead, apart from the exhausted wordplay of ‘port and portion’, is that we have met too many similar structures previously (‘In these poinsettia meadows of her tides’).
But ‘Madly meeting logically’ is too much. We might have forgiven the stanza’s cargo of leaden echoes if the mad logical meeting had not forfeited our attention, as when a barroom
war hero piles on that fatal implausible detail too many.

After this sudden and damaging loss of pressure in section IV, you don’t, for the rest of the poem – two and a half more numbered sections – hear much that doesn’t remind
you of what you have heard before. The structures of phrases and sentences are made more recognizable because the content they had earlier in the poem has not been equalled, so that they stand out
like ribs in a starved chest. ‘The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits’ is new and strangely gorgeous, but precious little else is, whereas the first two thirds of the poem, up to
the point of breakdown, glitter with fragments that you can’t forget. I first read ‘Voyages’ in Sydney, a city in which you can taste the ocean in the summer air, and I can still
remember the first thrilling impact of such moments as ‘The waves fold thunder on the sand’, ‘The bottom of the sea is cruel’, ‘Of rimless floods, unfettered
leewardings / Samite sheeted and processioned . . .’ (but I thought ‘Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love’ was painfully weak), ‘. . . the crocus lustres of the
stars’, ‘Adagios of islands, O my prodigal’ and the catchily florid, neo-‘Adonais’ lines near the end of part II:

Feeling tolerant, at the time, about preciousness if it sounded sufficiently compressed, I was much taken by that floating flower, and also, of course, by the killer line at
the very end of that same section:

For several days I practised a wide spindrift gaze myself, until it occurred to me that I might look like a seal in search of a mate. But the embarrassment didn’t stop me
writing nonsensical sequential poems on my own account. In several unfortunate instances I managed to get these published by student magazines. Not very many years later, I started having
nightmares in which I featured as a fireman from
Fahrenheit 451
vainly searching for any copies of those magazines that I had not yet incinerated. The nightmares stopped when I was at last
able to see how unlikely it was that anyone had ever remembered a line I had written. And anyway, like abstract painting, abstract poetry extended the range over which incompetence would fail to
declare itself. That was the charm for its author.

But even the most dull-witted author was obliged to realize that his freely associating work of art – proudly meaningless, although really meaning everything – would have no readers
unless it had its moments. Whether in a formal poem or an informal one, everything depended, and still depends, on the quality of the moment. Formality and informality are just two different ways
of joining the moments up. The question will always be about which is superior, and the ‘always’ strongly suggests that neither of them is. Whatever kind of poem it is, it’s the
moment that gets you in.

Just lately I was granted a powerful demonstration of this when I started rereading Robert Frost, something that I have done every ten years or so throughout my adult life. I would never stop
reading him if there were not something talkatively smooth about him that allows me to convince myself he is not intense. Then I pick him up again and find that his easy-seeming, usually iambic,
conversational forward flow is a deception, a way of not just bringing show-stopping moments to your attention but of moving them
past
your attention, so that you will form the correct
impression that he has wealth to spare and does not want the show stopped for such a secondary consideration as brilliance. Take a poem like ‘At Woodward’s Gardens’. For more than
half its length, the monkeys in a cage could be characters in a prose narrative that just happened to possess an iambic lilt. But after the monkeys steal the boy’s burning-glass, suddenly you
get this: ‘They bit the glass and listened to the flavour.’ The moment is so good that the way it serves the poem to perfection is only part of its appeal: once we know about the
monkeys and the burning-glass, the line becomes memorable on its own. And I think we could all give examples, from our memories, of how a poetic moment can put the poem it comes from in the shade.
Without going to the bookcase, I can write down one of the first lines by Empson that ever bowled me over. ‘And now she cleans her teeth into the lake.’

And it
was
a first line, of a poem that has always seemed dark to me after that first magnesium flash. As a diehard formalist myself, I don’t like to admit that the unity of a poem,
its binding energy, might not be the most important of its energies. But there are clearly cases where this is so. Take ‘Good Friday’, Amy Clampitt’s wonders-of-the-biosphere poem
that starts in the Serengeti and does a pretty good job of getting evolution into a nutshell. For its knowledgeable precision, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop would both have recognized a
worthy acolyte. But the poem would hold together better if there were not an isolated burst of lyricism tearing it apart. The second stanza, the one about the cheetah, is the one you remember, and
even then only for its first three lines:

After which, the narrative falters too. Rhythm doesn’t concern Clampitt very much. The syllabics of Marianne Moore are probably somewhere in the background, but not even
that system for manufactured unpredictability means much to her. She is just out to avoid the iambic pulse, as Pound once advised, confident as he was that it was creatively exhausted. Clampitt
writes poetry shorn of almost every formal effect. But we see the consequences when a moment stands out like the alteration of the cheetah’s coat. Not even the rest of the stanza can keep
that up, let alone the rest of the poem.

Defenders of the formal poem could plausibly say that it has a better, not a worse, chance of joining the moments up, so that its ability to contain them, and intensify them with a symmetrical
framework and a melodic structure, becomes a satisfaction in itself. Frost did so, many times: ‘The Silken Tent’ is not only wonderful throughout, it is especially wonderful
because
it is wonderful throughout. In whatever form he chose, writing a poem, not just writing poetry, was what Frost was after. (As Frost wrote to Wallace Stevens after they dined together
in Key West, ‘our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems’.) And most of us would not have much trouble in compiling a list of well-separated poems that we keep complete, or almost
complete, in our heads: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’, Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’, Dowson’s ‘Vitae Summa
Brevis’, Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, Cummings’s ‘You shall above all things be glad and young’, Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of
Ice-Cream’, MacNeice’s ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, Auden’s ‘Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love’, just to name some of the poems I could at one time or other
in my life recite from memory. (In the old Australian school system, you had to get poetry by heart or they wouldn’t let you go home.) There are poets who mainly write poetry but still write
the odd poem that gets an extra dimension from being poised like a silken tent: Dylan Thomas’s ‘In my sullen craft or art’, for example. We don’t necessarily have to
remember the whole poem. (We might not
want
to learn it. Even though I can recognize and place almost any line from Larkin’s collected poems, I have never set out to learn one of his
poems by heart, because somehow, I find, they frown on that activity.) But we can always remember that it struck us as being all of a piece.

Frost made that his aim. Even in his longer poems, the aspiration to self-containment was always there. His often-stated ideal ‘the sound of sense’ was meant to be a unifying
element. Sometimes the dialogue passages in the longer poems got too high above that unifying tonal range. In ‘Snow’, the hero, Meserve, is meant to be naturally eloquent, but anyone
talking about him becomes eloquent too, so exchanges crop up that sound like nothing ever spoken since the Elizabethan theatre was in flower.

It isn’t that Frost’s dialogue isn’t good. It’s too good: too good for the otherwise well-separated poem. But you’d hardly call the fault
characteristic. It comes from a high, indeed hieratic, ambition; and his more usual ambition, the more demanding ambition, was the genuinely humble one of ‘lodging a few poems where they will
be hard to get rid of’. There is no need to think that he was poor-mouthing himself when he talked like that. He knew very well that the poem that could be remembered as a whole, and not just
read through, was the hardest target to aim at. And he hit it dozens of times. If some nervous graduate recites ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ at a commencement ceremony, that
isn’t a sign of how Frost played the grizzled wiseacre, although he sometimes did: it’s a proof that he attained his object as a poet.