Michael Schmidt on 'Classics'

The word 'classic' has specific meanings and implications, none of them to do primarily with popularity or range of appeal. Penguin Classics come close to the present in the work they include but in general acknowledge that a classic has already endured; a text can only become classic when it is stable, that is, when the author is no longer there to alter it. It would have strained the classic category had Robert Lowell, reviser par excellence, or David Jones, or W.H. Auden been admitted in their lifetimes. A living classic is put to death as soon as classic status is conferred. The text is set in stone. Several generations of schoolchildren read selections of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn and never had an inkling that Crow or Moly had occurred. Both poets stayed in the happy time-warp of their late twenties for decades, and they weren't even called Classics, though 'set text' is the next category down.

from New Poetries III © Michael Schmidt

Will Eaves on William Letford's 'Sunday, with the television off.'

Sunday, with the television off. by William Letford

I think of the future. My death bed. I imagine the man I will be. Then I pay that
man a visit. Ask him, what would you do?

So I leave the car and walk across town. Knock on my father's door to say hello
and listen to his stories, the ones I've heard before.

It's like I've travelled in time. Now he knows that someone is listening. On the
way home, the sun falls behind the buildings, and I walk into a supermarket.

from New Poetries V © William Letford

The poet thinks of the future, of his death and of his father; he makes me think about them, too, and about the way in which listening is so subtle a part of human attachment – a sensory connection that is the precondition for love, which matters whether or not we feel or can express love -- and of how not listening amounts to a cancellation of others' lives, and often informs our deepest regrets.

I think, too, of Henry James, when he said that 'to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement'. James's observation comes from the preface to his novel, What Maisie Knew. He is pondering more than prosaic clarity: he is speaking about what people like Maisie know whether or not they can express it, what they know regardless of what they are told they know, and therefore what they instinctively perceive, beyond the trap of language. It's a good way of thinking about poetry as well, and particularly William Letford's sort of poetry, which builds up
statements and rhythms like a run of bricks, so that you can see the wall clearly, but also sense, equally clearly, how real the rubble of life is – the state of 'muddlement' that is itself one of life's 'sharpest realities'.

I think this is a wonderful little poem. The muddle of going back in time, as one thinks about absent people, or mourns them, perhaps; the way one feels their absence as a kind of missed opportunity to right wrongs; the secondary loss (or is it a gain?) as the poet is brought back to himself and 'the sun falls behind buildings'; the artificially lit supermarket – all are present to me, and essentially mysterious.

Will Eaves

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).

Our readers write

A bear disapproves of Pound's middle period.

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.

Poets like a chance to take a swing at one another, but, as this blog aims to portray only positive poetry vibes, here's a question that comes through the back door: are there any particular poets whose work you don't think much of, but whom you think everyone should read?

Henry King on Evan Jones's 'Little Notes On Painting'

Little Notes On Painting by Evan Jones

Take a Spanish painter and put him in Paris. Take a Greek
painter and put him in Madrid. Take a Quebeçois painter
and put him in Paris, too, and a German and a couple
more Spaniards and also a Greek-born Italian. You wouldn’t
believe what I’m doing now. I’m up very late. I’m placing
an American painter in Albany and hoping school
will be cancelled tomorrow. There are fewer and fewer days
like this left; they fall like uses for wax paper. Don’t ever
mention abstract artists to my face or my books, my friend, for
who owns a house and has never been kissed in one? Right?
Take a Russian painter and put him in New York beside
a Mexican painter. I am two feet from the bed; the pillows
and blankets are swelling and rising towards the ceiling.
It doesn’t matter. Take a Javanese painter and put him
in Cairo. The phone won’t ring anymore. I called a street artist
“Picasso” but thought better of it as all those women were
going down on him one at a time and bearing him children.
Take a little-known Nova Scotia folk painter and put her,
posthumously, in Cleveland or Skopjë. The mattress is filling
with honey and the box spring is humming like bees; my hand is
in my pyjama bottoms. I stop and say, it isn’t love
that makes you weak, to the night table or maybe the bed frame.
Take an Italian Futurist for example. Take a 19th century
Japanese print and slip it between the mattress and the box spring.
Take a pregnant painter by the hand. I’m home and touching
the unborn child of her easel. It would be nice for a night
if silence was the colour of water but it would be nicer
to sleep in the desert. Take a stolen Brueghel from
the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and bury it
on Easter Island. I arrange the sheets every morning
to resemble Mount Athos so that every night I sleep
on God’s arm. What did I say about abstraction?
Take a British painter from a home he’s not once ever loved
and ask him why he never paints the same thing. Take a moment
to join an art school, the aristocracy or merely buy
a beret. A photograph of a painter’s palette is no
good to anyone and the sky outside is nothing like Van Gogh.
I just wanted to say that the moon’s going down.
I remember every moment. Thank you.

from New Poetries V © Evan Jones

'Take a Spanish painter and put him in Paris' – aha! I know this one: it's Picasso, isn’t it. Or maybe Juan Gris. Either way, the smoke from Gauloises in Montmartre cafés immediately fills one's eyes and nose. 'Take a Greek painter and put him in Madrid' – El Greco, at a guess. But then,

                                                   Take a Quebeçois painter
and put him in Paris, too, and a German and a couple
more Spaniards and also a Greek-born Italian.

The trivia’s getting harder. Then the speaker steps in:

                    I’m up very late. I’m placing
an American painter in Albany and hoping school
will be cancelled tomorrow.

Perhaps he’s revising for an exam – art history, probably – and meditating upon displaced artists. (Is an American displaced in Albany? A Quebecois in Paris? Are they doubly so?) But he's tired, and the room's spinning, 'The pillows / and blankets are swelling and rising towards the ceiling.' Dream-logic is taking hold, and with it, the teenager's sexual imagination:

                                                               I called a street artist
“Picasso” but thought better of it as all those women were
going down on him one at a time and bearing him children.

For a teenager stuck at home, with school in the morning, what could be more glamorous than to be a painter, to escape to Europe and get laid? 'Take a British painter from a home he’s not once ever loved' – the sentiment recalls Baudelaire:

Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! ('Le Voyage')

The whole world becomes a playground: 'Take a stolen Brueghel from / the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,' – remember how Picasso was brought in for questioning when the Mona Lisa was stolen? – 'and bury it on Easter Island.'

Finally, 'I just wanted to say that the moon’s going down' – it's dawn, but it's also Diana, chaste mistress of the chase, performing fellatio, as in a pornographic Poussin.

'Thank you', the poem ends. For what, though? Perhaps just for listening. But the operative word through the poem is 'take': take a painter, take a woman, take a moment. This may be rapacious, but it may also be generous, as in 'Please, take this.' And what is it to create art, if not to urge, almost demand somebody to take your creation? A gift economy is in play. But as Lewis Hyde wrote about gifts, 'There are times when we want to be aliens and strangers.' 'Take a Russian painter and put him in New York beside / a Mexican painter…'

Henry King

Helen Tookey on Lucy Tunstall's 'Aunt Jane and the Scholar'

Aunt Jane and the Scholar by Lucy Tunstall

In 1956, or thereabouts,
Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful
scholar from the subcontinent.

Her house is tall and thin like a doll’s house.
Pictures are filling in the walls,
but where the paint shows through in a chink
it is the authentic dull pink of oxblood and lime.

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still
like a still ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers (she must remember) a long trip
to the only part of Canada where it never snows,
weeks and weeks of sky and sea and sickness like snow-sickness.

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

We can easily imagine ‘Aunt Jane’ as the protagonist of a novel, say by E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf (conveniently ignoring the mention of ‘1956’, which puts her a bit too late for either of them); yet I think that this poem of sixteen lines tells us as much and as little about her as we would ever discover from that putative novel. The poem is wonderfully compressed, economical; yet we feel that it has given us the essence of a life, and of the oblique yet strangely close relationship between an elderly spinster and (perhaps) a child or young girl, neither of whom really fits in the proper adult world of relationships and talk and work. ‘In 1956, or thereabouts’, the poem begins, ‘Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful / scholar from the subcontinent’. We hear no more about this scholar – the poem immediately switches into a kind of timeless vivid present, the point of view of the speaker visiting the elderly, spinster aunt – yet the opening lines inform everything that follows; we can imagine the implied narrative, the impossible, impermissible love, the forbidden realms of scholarship, the single journey to Canada, and then the withdrawing into the ‘cloistered’ life in her house in London, which is ‘tall and thin like a doll’s house’ – a kind of pretend version of ‘real’ adult life.

The poem draws us (with its speaker) in close, through its language, which in the third stanza becomes a mimetic echo-chamber:

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still like a still
ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers...

We are caught, disturbingly so, inside chiasmus and echoing sound-patterns (‘well’, ‘walls’, ‘water’, ‘lawn’, ‘still’, ‘still’, ‘well’). The language holds us, with the speaker, with Aunt Jane, in a kind of stasis, immured and motionless, with only memory as a kind of half-life.

The final couplet, spare and compressed, completes the mimesis:

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

With their echo of Owen’s ‘drawing down of blinds’, the lines convey loss (the ‘beautiful scholar’, the journeying, the possibilities that then seemed open) and the slow ongoing aftermath of that loss; Aunt Jane’s horizons are reduced to the ‘square / of London sky’, while companionship comes only from the cypress, which leans over her perhaps with solicitude but also with age – like the ‘tall’, ‘thin’ house and the ‘deep’, ‘underwater’ garden, another mirroring of Aunt Jane herself. The last two lines seem to tell us so little of Aunt Jane’s life after its early promise, and yet (‘Ever after a drawing-in’) they tell us everything.

Helen Tookey

Oli Hazzard on Mina Gorji's 'Forbidden Fruit'

Forbidden Fruit by Mina Gorji

My first batch
of Poplar-cap, –
lightly fried,
on toast,
made me hesitate.
Dangers of the delicate:
the Deadly Web-cap
(easily confused
with Chantarelle)
or Avenging Angel
whose pale green cap
can kill,
the glycosides
in Bluebells
and in Buttercups
that blister skin
and make the heart
erratic,
and hemlock
that’s so easy to mistake
for Parsley, Fennel,
Lady’s Lace.

from New Poetries V © Mina Gorji

In Milton’s Grand Style, Christopher Ricks famously remarked that the original meanings of words take us ‘back to a time when there were no infected words because there were no infected actions’; it was Satan, an avenging angel, who introduced speech that was ‘ambiguous and with double sense deluding’, undoing the bond by which, for Adam at least, actions accorded to words. Mina Gorji’s poem ‘Forbidden Fruit’ stages a scene in which these Miltonic pressures upon meaning and action return with real life-or-death consequences; for Gorji’s mushroom-muncher, like Eve (who ‘knew not eating death’), ambiguity can be fatal.

The danger is both frightening and exhilarating, as anything forbidden is, and this confusion of feelings is performed with brilliant subtlety throughout the poem. After the realisation of the ‘dangers of the delicate’ (a phrase to be savoured), the poem’s pattern of syncopated k sounds – its erratic heartbeat – quickens and amplifies; and it does so precisely because it knows it is being overheard; it is the sound of a mounting, self-perpetuating, semi-irrational fear of poisoning, combined with a thrill of morbid speculation.

Yet the unsettling sonic momentum generated as the poem progresses seems to be resolved in the two lines that conclude the poem: ‘Parsley, Fennel, / Lady’s lace.’ This is, of course, a false resolution, not just because of the potential duplicity of the plants’ appearance; ‘Lady’s Lace’ here has two sonic and semantic allegiances, one explicit, one hidden. The first is its association with the harmless and alluring parsley and fennel, and their shared soft consonance; the second is a concealed relationship with the repeated k sound of the lines that precede it, suggested by the root of lace – laqueus – which means, aptly, noose or snare, a meaning that, like the pronunciation, was softened and subsumed over time. In a crafty move, the allure of the assonance entices us with its ‘ornamental pattern’, only to ‘snare’ us with the latent k lying in wait behind it.

While the poem is partly about pleasure, it is also a warning against complacency – an assertion of the importance of precision in naming and recognition that is reminiscent, I think, of Marianne Moore. Yet ‘lady’s lace’ introduces further, more disturbing implications about certain associations the language has encoded within it, which are consciously and unconsciously perpetuated in our speech and actions: it reminds us that the ornamentation of the female body is never far, in (usually male-authored) literature, film, art etc., from the intent to entrap. The achievement of Gorji’s poem is in its remarkable suspension of resolution; it remains as ambiguous, as unknowable, as the mushrooms it catalogues - even after we have tasted it.

Oli Hazzard

Henry King on James Womack's 'Complaint'

Complaint by James Womack

Death is not the end; some doors are never fully closed,
and hollow ghosts escape their coffins and ovens.
She had been—she is—buried in rowdy Madrid,
but last night, as I held myself in a breaking sleep,
Carlota came to me and leant over my uneasy bed.
She was like her photographs, the same steady eyes;
her right ankle still had its tattoo. But her skin was broken,
and her clothes were rags covered with dirt and clay.
She was there, she could speak, I knew it was her,
though the thumb-bones creaked in her fragile hands.
‘How can you sleep,’ she said, ‘how can you sleep?
I knew this would happen, that you’d forget it all:
the window-sill where my arms wore two smooth dents,
the code to my staircase, the heavy metal doors.
We broke into a fire-watchers’ tower and saw the city—
do you remember?—saw the city and made promises.
Were those light promises, are you allowed to forget?
Where were you when I died? Did you do anything?
If you had cried out for me to come back, I could have
at least for one day, I could have held myself alive,
but nobody, not you, not Julius, Arima, nobody...
None of you even knows where I am buried.
Would it cost you too much to find out, find me?
Is there anybody who talks about me with love,
who remembers me as I was, not just as someone
who died, who died young, who died too young?
You deserve to have me haunt you, keep you awake,
hurt you... but what’s the use? You’ll write your poems
which turn me into some amalgam of memory
and adolescent hard-on: I’m safe for you to use now.
Even these hands that grasp you, even these hands,
they’ll just be one more image among the others.
At least I have been faithful, I haven’t forgotten,
I remember you well and keep my mouth shut.
You can’t negotiate with me: my arguments are fixed,
and I will keep my counsel.’
                                              She touched my shoulder
and I reached up to her, those remembered arms
and her torso cold and so thin. But she twisted away,
propped herself on her elbows and looked into my face.
‘Find me. Do what you can for me, for my body.
Stop writing about me. I am not, I am not material
for you to appropriate and employ. Clean my grave,
lay some flowers there, give me an epitaph:
not one of your self-indulgent look-at-mes,
but something simple and worthy, for visitors
to read and understand. Of course, keep writing
but leave me out of it. And find other women
while you live: when you are dead you will be mine
alone, and we together shall be dust and ashes.’
She stopped talking, and lay down beside me,
but when I opened my eyes, my arms were empty.  
                                                    after the Latin of Propertius

from New Poetries V © James Womack

In The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner takes the episode recounted in Canto I – the nekuia, the interview with Tiresias – and interprets it in part as an allegory for translation: bringing living language to an ancient text, as Odysseus brings blood to ghosts. Of course, this doesn’t work so well for translation across living languages as it does for translation from a dead language, such as Propertius's Latin – which is more dead now, when few people are inclined or made to learn it, than ever before. In 'Complaint', then, James Womack brings fresh blood to the ghost of Propertius's text.

But Propertius's poem is itself about a revenant, Carlota (as Womack calls her, instead of Cynthia), who returns to berate her former lover for both getting over her too easily, and making too much of her in poems. Robert Lowell described her as 'hell on wheels', and she's pretty fierce: she repeats herself for emphasis, and accuses him of not even knowing where she's buried. He's already told us she's buried in Madrid; the point is, she doesn't let him get a word in edgeways. Paradoxically, the poet subtly implies that their relationship was always based on melodrama and exaggeration.

Pound himself wrote versions of Propertius, famously using deliberate mistranslations and anachronisms, about which critics disagree – because he didn't know any better, as some thought? To poke fun at more literal-minded translators? To critique British colonialism, as he explained to Thomas Hardy? Womack's anachronisms (photographs, electronic locks) work differently though, reprising the poem in the modern world. But this itself is an ancient practise: Dr. Johnson did it for Juvenal, Pope for Horace, and one can argue that Horace recommends it in his Ars Poetica. It's not just Propertius who's being conjured up, but generations of poets, the impetuous impotent dead.

Womack does add a genuinely modern touch to his version: a self-debunking reflexivity, as when Carlota says, 'Even these hands that grasp you, even these hands, / they'll just be one more image among the others'. This is not just modern language, but a modern concern about language, the fear that the sign abolishes its referent – and thus that in saying 'I', one is ventriloquized by the language itself. Carlota speaks through the poet; Propertius through Womack; Womack, and I, all of us, through the language that we've inherited from the dead, and will bequeath to others when 'we together shall be dust and ashes'.

Henry King

Our readers write

Fairfield Porter, Frank O'Hara (1957), oil on canvas

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.

William Letford's Frank O'Hara quote earlier this week brought to mind that poet's relationship with painters and the many portraits that exist of O'Hara. Are there any portraits of poets -- photographic, painterly, sculptural, conceptual, etc. -- you have hanging or you would like to hang on your wall?

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