Our readers write

Marianne Moore disliking it.

Welcome to 'Our readers write', where we throw out a question related to poetry and ask readers to jump up and catch it. Got a question you'd like answered? Drop it in the comments section for use in the near future.

Reading over the introduction to New Poetries V and thinking about canons and contributions, who for you is an important poet with a small oeuvre?

Dan Burt: I take your question [w]ho for you is an important poet with a small oeuvre to mean, a dead poet to whom I return regularly. They are: Ransom and Snodgrass (Americans); Housman and Eliot (English).

Julith Jedamus: I would choose Bishop and Larkin: both perfectionists, both intensely private and self-censoring. Bishop published, if I recall correctly, seventy-eight poems in her lifetime; Larkin’s output, during the ten-year gestation of High Windows, was reckoned to be two-and-a-half poems per year. It is hard, in both cases, not to wish for more—and yet we have their prose (her travels, his jazz), their letters, and, controversially, their notebooks. How glad I am for his crossed-out cul-de-sacs, and tracks gone cold or stale; and her snatches of description (‘begonias ghostly in a galvanized bucket’) and rejected titles, her lists of possible rhymes (imposture/imposter) and musings on her art. In the unfinished essay ‘Writing Poetry Is an Unnatural Act’ she wrote that the qualities she admired most in the poems she liked best were ‘Accuracy, Spontaneity, and Mystery.’ Ah, yes....

Evan Jones: The question strikes me as very Modernist: Eliot published sixty-six poems, Marianne Moore seventy-one. But it brings to mind immediately a little-known Canadian-America poet, Joan Murray (1917-1942), whose work was published posthumously in one slim book, selected by Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Competition in 1947. For John Ashbery, she is 'one of the poets of the forties I most enjoy rereading'.

Rory Waterman: Well, there are many obvious choices, for all sorts of reasons: Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, A. E. Housman. But where would we be without the remarkable and tiny oeuvre of Ian Hamilton? No poet has squeezed so much out of so little. And whilst I'm on the subject, our perpetually back-patting generation (of poets, critics, magazines) would benefit equally from taking note of his editorship and his incisive criticism, as well as his catholic tastes.

Rory Waterman on Henry King's 'Windower'

A Windower by Henry King

The house has too many rooms, now;
there’s too much room in the bed.

A daughter in the Met, a son
at Cambridge; at home, long quiet spells.

On bright days, he stands by the window
looking into the garden. A windower.

Twenty, thirty years like this? Years
of evenings, weekends. Christmases.

from New Poetries V © Henry King

Consider the title and the form. There is the ghost of cruel wit in the term 'windower', denoting (presumably) a widower who spends much of his time gazing redundantly out of a window, and this is preceded by the indefinite article, to remind us that he is one of many: 'A Windower'. And the claustrophobic little poem below this title is in couplets, each line having its partner. Then immediately the poem strikes us with other pairings, in the repetition and near-repetition of words and phrases ('too many rooms' / 'too much room', 'window' / 'windower', 'years' / 'Years'), and in the juxtaposition it sets up: his children – a daughter and a son – are doing well at the start of busy adult lives, and the poem's subject is alone and anything but busy nearer the end of his.

The first couplet is metrically the first two lines of a ballad stanza, but this is 'let down' by the more prosaic second couplet, emphasising the grim bathos of the subject’s life. The balladic rhyme our ear expects does not happen, just as the subject's apparently busy and productive life has been replaced without warning. Our windower’s existence is now marked by 'long quiet spells' – a superbly dull cliché that only emphasises the seeming emptiness and redundancy of his life. But, the word 'now' in the first line implies that once his big house was busy, that a family fitted it perfectly, and we should be appalled to realise that the man we pity could so easily be us. And like us he has – if he is lucky – plenty of time left for things to get even worse, the clink of internal rhyme at the end of the poem sounding with the finality of truth. He is in the anteroom to death, and the wait would appear to be quite a long one. How on earth did he end up like this? It hardly seems to have been his fault: his wife has died, not left him; and his children are pursuing success – perhaps much as their father did. I am reminded of Philip Larkin's words at the end of 'Dockery and Son', that life is replaced by 'what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age'. The windower exists in a purgatorial stasis brought about by what something hidden from him chose, a fate he might not have imagined.

So, what are we to take away from this short, tight piece of beautiful miserableness? King does not moralise, of course, but a message seems to inhere in the move from irreverent term of description to the portrait of what might be someone we know. We could be the son or daughter; or we could be on our way to becoming the windower, even if our lives seem successful, happy, ripe. Behind the grinding lethargy of the windower's life, then, is a call to urgency. What a marvellous, multi-faceted, emotionally intelligent poem.

Rory Waterman

PN Review 200th Issue Celebrations!

All are invited to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester from 5.30pm on Thursday 8th September for wine, discussion and debate to celebrate the 200th issue of the UK's leading poetry magazine, PN Review. The evening will include a lecture by Booker-prize longlisted author (and New Poetries II contributor!) Patrick McGuinness, who will discuss Donald Davie and the history of PN Review. This will be followed by The New Editors' Forum: a discussion about the future of poetry magazine publishing, chaired by John McAuliffe (Manchester Review) and featuring panel members Rory Waterman (New Walk magazine), Carol Rumens (the Guardian) and James Byrne (The Wolf). There will also be a poetry reading by Tara Bergin and Jeffrey Wainwright. 

PN Review, the outstanding poetry magazine of our time, was founded in 1976 as Poetry Nation by Michael Schmidt and Brian Cox. The complete PN Review digital archive was launched in January. This vast online resource, spanning four decades of literary writing, can be accessed at www.pnreview.co.uk.

David Yezzi on Rory Waterman's 'The Lake'

The Lake by Rory Waterman

Mid-May now, and the hawthorns have started
foaming and stinking. They glow under clear night sky.
The car-park is empty, the vending hatches shut.
When I was too small to stand somebody left
a girl near here to die, unconscious, full of come,
and gagged, in case. Flopped her in the silt
with care. The moon flutters a meaningless smile
and on the surface it skits everywhere.

from New Poetries V © Rory Waterman

In the space of eight well-crafted lines, Rory Waterman's 'The Lake' takes the reader from the surface of the natural world—the surface of a lake—to the menacing undercurrent of memory below. The poem’s opening sets up an expectation of bucolic serenity—lake, May, hawthorns—then quickly dashes it with 'foaming and stinking', a foreshadowing of something rotten in this leafy scene:

Mid-May now, and the hawthorns have started
foaming and stinking. They glow under clear night sky.
The car-park is empty, the vending hatches shut.

Perhaps it is off-season or merely off-hours but the parking lot is empty and the concessions closed in this place of recreation or resort spot (maybe). Shuttered boardwalks are particularly eerie because of the missing crowds that haunt the place by their absence, like ghosts. One ghost in particular rises in the speaker's mind, the spectre of a girl raped and murdered near this spot:

When I was too small to stand somebody left
a girl near here to die, unconscious, full of come,
and gagged, in case. Flopped her in the silt
with care. The moon flutters a meaningless smile
and on the surface it skits everywhere.

Waterman sets up a disturbing tension between the small boy and the young victim and meaningless violence, echoed eerily by the meaningless 'smile' of the crescent moon. The most powerful moments in the poem for me are not the gut-punches of 'full of come' or 'gagged', though those are almost searing in intensity. It is the quiet, horrible precision of 'in case' (meaning 'in case she somehow survives') and 'with care', which conveys the cool calculation and even perhaps, and more horribly, the tender thought of a savage murderer.

The motion of the poem is cinematic and reminds me of David Lynch's shot in Blue Velvet, as it sweeps past an average front yard and a gleaming fire truck before plunging into the undergrowth to reveal (even there!) an animal violence underlying the appearance of things.

David Yezzi's latest collection of poems is Azores (Swallow Press).

William Letford on Rory Waterman's 'Family Business'

Family Business by Rory Waterman

The boatman stares through million-pock-marked waters,
tapping a cigarette, shying from the rain
in mac and wellies, beneath a London plane
that rustles and drips. He turns and tells his daughter
to bolt the hut. Tonight the summer’s over.
He heaves the skiff to the boatshed, ties the lines
and double-locks the door. She fits a sign:
CLOSED FOR SEESON. They load a battered Land-Rover
with cash-tin, radio, stools, as fast as they can,
for it’s raining harder. Lightning blanks the dark,
and then they’re away, the wiper thwacking its arc.
She glances at this ordinary man
then shuts her eyes: she’s damp and tired and bored.
He drives more gently. Neither says a word.

from New Poetries V © Rory Waterman

When commenting on form, measure, and other technical apparatus, Frank O’Hara put it down to common sense, ‘If you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will go to bed with you.’ This sonnet needn’t worry about the lonely nights.

For me the poem kicks on the eighth line, CLOSED FOR SEESON. Why the spelling mistake? Is it to highlight ignorance, to degrade the father and daughter, both of whom, it seems, have spent a summer passing the sign without correcting the error? Is it humour at the expense of simple people? Obviously this is not the case. There is, however, something simplistic about the father and daughter’s lifestyle. When closing up, ‘They load a battered Land-Rover / with cash tin, radio, stools, as fast as they can’. Few businesses could close for the year and transport what’s necessary in two hands. ‘He turns and tells his daughter / to bolt the hut. Tonight the summer's over,’ a wonderful proclamation, almost biblical. They’re moving with the seasons, in step with nature. This, paired with the impending storm, gives the poem tension, an otherworldly feel.

Having kicked on the eighth line, the poem pivots on the eleventh, ‘Lightning blanks the dark, / and then they’re away, the wiper thwacking its arc’, strong use of sound and imagery, and a succinct, powerful way to move the action from beneath the storm to the safety of the car.

The final three lines reveal the heart of the poem. ‘She glances at this ordinary man / then shuts her eyes: She’s damp and tired and bored. / He drives more gently. Neither says a word.’ Like the misspelling of season the word ‘ordinary’ leaps at the reader (me). An ordinary man, is that an insult? The word is softened when the father intuitively responds, by driving more gently, to his daughter’s tiredness. Something has been captured here. How many times has this scenario played out over the years, over the centuries, the word ‘ordinary’ is the daughter’s. It’s how she views her father, her stifled life. We know she’s loved by the way her father responds to her mood / glance. How old is this girl? Is summer over for the business, the daughter, or the father? Perhaps for all three. And so the sense of the poem continues beyond the last line.

This isn’t about business, how much money is in their cash tin, whether or not they’re maximising profits, whether or not the sign has been spelled correctly. It’s about family, the business of the family. Real business.

William Letford