In which Simon from Central City Library tells us about going to see poet Paul Muldoon, and the adroit adjective 'Eliotic' makes its first appearance in Books in the City:
The Writers Festival session "One thousand things worth knowing" featured acclaimed US-based Irish poet Paul Muldoon speaking about his career and artistry with our own C.K. Stead. Muldoon, a poet who enjoys a critical standing up there with the likes of Seamus Heaney (not to mention being a Professor at Princeton University and poetry editor at The New Yorker), was a warm and eloquent speaker. He read wonderfully and spoke with humour and grace. Stead is clearly less of a natural public speaker, (to be fair, he was a late stand-in for Bill Manhire), but knew Muldoon's work and antecedents more than well enough to help facilitate an interesting discussion.
The conversation begun with talk of formative influences. Aside from the impact of the immediacy necessary in radio, impressed upon him during his time working for the BBC, Muldoon admitted early poetic efforts also involved trying to "follow Eliot", which had often resulted in poetry that was "Eliotic."
In contrast, being an Irish poet, Muldoon had found it necessary to "work around" Yeats rather than aspire to, let alone compete with, his greatness. Stead expressed surprise that Yeats had not been mentioned more in the prior ‘From 1916 to Here’ festival event which Muldoon had been part of. Muldoon pointed out the irony that historical events after the fact had helped imbue a poem like Yeats’s “Easter 1916” with its verisimilitude. The British shooting of insurrectionists during the Easter Rising had in fact only happened after Yeats had composed the poem and not the other way round.
Even if he had begun as one of many Eliot acolytes, it was not the Eliotic that Muldoon was shooting for. Rather, he hoped he might induce an "electric shock" for the reader, or as Stead put it, "a kick in the behind." Muldoon elaborated that if the process of composing the poem is unexpected for the writer, this increases the likelihood that a similar shift, whether seismic or minor, will occur for the reader.
"If I know what I'm doing then everyone else will know too. . . If I don't know what I'm doing, there's a chance others will be surprised."
Further building on this contention, Muldoon went so far as to dismiss the "write about what you know" creative writing tenet.
Despite wanting to cause this shift in the reader, Muldoon was uncertain of the effect poetry might have on the world at large. He hoped it might do some good, and could see a world in which art took over the role of organised religion.
Muldoon read poems such as ‘Honey’ from his new volume One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, and older poems such as ‘Saffron’ and ‘Why Brownlee Left’. Muldoon contended ‘Honey’ was the type of poem which seemed to ask of itself: “Is this a poem at all?” The answer “Not much” was one Muldoon felt the culture of poetry as a whole should be more comfortable with. He read with a gentle determination that seemed perfectly in keeping with the tone of the poems.
A brief QnA session elicited charming and self-deprecating responses from Muldoon. When asked if he really felt he could “write about Saffron forever”, Muldoon said he felt that “subject matter” was irrelevant – that the whole world could be seen through the prism of something as seemingly minor as saffron. A second audience member enquired about what books had spoken to Muldoon in his youth. Stevenson’s Treasure Island as it turns out. “If I could write a book like Treasure Island, I wouldn’t bother with this stuff.”
-- Simon
May 30, 2016
Paul Muldoon at AWF 2016: A poet worth knowing
March 27, 2016
Popping up for refugees on World Poetry Day
As World Poetry Day rolled around this week I was taken aback to read on the website of its founder, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO for short, that one of its aims is to ensure that "the art of poetry will no longer be considered an outdated form of art". What? Someone thinks poetry is like hair jewellery? Who are these people talking to?
"Encourage a return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals" on the other hand, is an aim I am happy to get behind. Although "poetry recital" does sound -- if not quite outdated, perhaps overly quaint, evoking the poetry pursuits of school-days (of which, please note, my memories are all good) -- I am a huge believer in poetry being shared not just through books but by being spoken, performed, read aloud, and slammed.
The descendants of Homer who make up the Poets Circle in Athens also believe in the power of spoken poetry. They invited poets around the world to join together this World Poetry Day (also the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination) in performing readings calling attention to the cataclysm of our time, the refugee crisis.
It is so natural, so unsurprising, that this idea saw the light in Greece. Or better, under the light of Greece -- that incandescent, supernal light, as Henry Miller described it in the best book ever written about Greece by a non-Greek, The Colossus of Maroussi. "One would have to be a toad, a snail or a slug not to be affected by this radiance which emanates from the human heart as well as from the heavens," he writes. "Wherever you go in Greece the people open up like flowers".
Travelling in Greece and experiencing the same extraordinary hospitality fifty years after Henry Miller -- years in which the Greeks had suffered through occupation by the Axis powers during World War Two, a bloody civil war, and a repressive military dictatorship -- we used to say that it must have been because of the strength of their age-old tradition of having gods who were always popping down to earth in human form, so that any stranger knocking at your door could have been a god in disguise.
And the tradition continues:
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| Photograph: Kostis Ntantamis/AP via The Guardian |
This is a photograph of local people on the Greek island of Lesbos helping bring migrants to safety after their arrival by boat. "Refugee Crisis: how Greeks opened their hearts to strangers" is the title of the article in The Guardian which this photograph accompanied. "Despite six years of economic hardship, ordinary people have shown astonishing generosity in helping the 42,000 migrants stranded in their country".
In Auckland poets Ruby Porter, Gregory Kan, Ole Maiava, Mohamed Hassan and Siobhan Harvey responded to the invitation of the Athens poets by sharing their poems in a pop-up reading on the steps of the Central City Library, hosted by Auckland Libraries in association with PEN International and the World Poetry Movement.
How do you measure the weight of a human life, asked Ruby Porter, in a poem which caught at me with its mix of combativeness and eloquence:
How to weigh a life
Ruby will be one of the readers taking part in Central City Library's upcoming "A day in their shoes: the refugee experience" (Friday 29 April, 11am-2pm).
May 28, 2015
"Translation Gymnastics" at AWF15, with Anna Jackson and Daniel Mendelsohn
Thanks to Simon Comber from Readers Services for this guest post.
Tom Bishop facilitated an engaging discussion between American writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn and New Zealand poet Anna Jackson. Together the speakers explored the different ways a writer could interact with a bygone poetic voice.
As it turned out, only Mendelsohn was an actual translator of poetry, having spent twelve years working on his acclaimed translations of the poems of C.P Cavafy (Collected poems). The first section of Jackson’s recent volume of poetry, I, Clodia and other portraits, had been named after (and written in the imagined voice of), the love interest of the famous Roman poet of antiquity Catullus. Whilst Mendelsohn was deeply familiar with Cavafy in the original Greek, Jackson was only familiar with Catullus in translation. She spoke of her initial exposure through Ben Jonson’s Renaissance era translations, and C.K Stead’s resetting of Catullus poems to Auckland’s West Coast beaches.
As the discussion made clear, there were still many similarities to be found between the two guests and their respective relationships to poetry of the past. Mendelsohn noted that when in the midst of working on translations, you were both responding to and engaging with the poetic voice. There was an aspect of being “reactive” to both the original text and previous translations. Aspects of this, and of the wonderful word Mendelsohn liked to use to describe his role, “adaptrix”, could just as easily have been applied to Jackson’s relationship to Catullus.
In the midst of their research, both writers couldn’t help but be laying a palimpsest over what other translators were gesturing towards, although, inevitably, only Mendelsohn would ever find himself making alterations between the release of the hard and softcover versions of his translations. Jackson on the other hand liked to joke that, as more of an imaginative adaptor than a translator, her “translation” would always be the most perfect. I, Clodia simultaneously spoke back to and used the voice of Catullus.
Perhaps the Homeric image Mendelsohn fondly recalled from the tales of Odysseus sums up the activity that both writers were trying to articulate during this discussion. When Odysseus ventures to the Underworld he recognises his mother and repeatedly tries to hug her, but as she is only a shade, his arms find no solid body to wrap around. Mendelsohn was implying that both his and Jackson’s work was mirrored in this scene. Both Catullus and Cavafy are gone from the world, but through the work of the “adaptrix”, their spirits, and their voices, remain.
--Simon
May 25, 2015
Carol Ann Duffy at AWF15
“You don’t get to be Britain’s poet laureate by having a tin ear," notes Claire G of Grey Lynn Library, who relished the chance to hear and see the multiple-award-winning Carol Ann Duffy, and tells us about it in this guest post.
Here she is in Auckland at last, netting elusive truths as a skilled gillie might a slippery fish. Without fuss.
Carol Ann Duffy stands at the mike and reads – from The World’s Wife (Mrs Midas, Mrs Tiresias, Mrs Darwin), from Rapture (Text, Tea, Row, Syntax, Art) and from The Bees (Mrs Schofield’s GCSE, Premonitions, The Counties). Some of us have previously read these poems ourselves but we’re spellbound.
She talks a little, sitting across from broadcaster John Campbell, who leans forward as she just perceptibly leans back. She somehow – invisibly – holds that eager puppy at bay, tolerating his fond effusions without letting him lick her face.
“God I can’t recall when I was so nervous,” he tells us, and her. “Holy ****!” He indicates the bottle by his chair and the glasses of some dark liquid that he’s requested for himself and our guest. He claims, a little later, to have discovered a twinkle in the eyes of the black-clad, pale-faced poet. And “God damn it, Carol Ann,” he implores at one stage.
We knew she’d be wonderful with words and she is: you don’t get to be Britain’s poet laureate by having a tin ear. What we don’t expect are her silences. They are magisterial, magnificent – all the more so for occurring at a weekend that is essentially a talkfest, in which even the breaks between sessions are abuzz with conversations. The people who’ve filled the Aotea Centre’s ASB Theatre to hear her are hanging on her every word, but on her pauses too.
“Do you ever think, ‘God, Carol Ann, that’s good’?” asks John Campbell. (He’s just echoed, in a way that indicates he finds it marvellous, one of the lines from her reading of Mrs Midas.) For quite the longest time, she says nothing in reply. Then,
“No.” Another pause. “I was never quite sure about that one, actually,” she adds, in her northern-not-quite-Scottish accent. The repeated line has Mr Midas – the man with that golden touch – spitting out corn kernels like rich people’s teeth.
The whole ‘Mrs Midas’ poem might have taken two or three weeks to write, its creator says. “A lot of things come together before you put pen to paper.... There’s a lot of silence beforehand.”
In a way, that short work and its companions in The World’s Wife (1999) were forty years in the making. At school Carol Ann Duffy was taught about the figures from classical myth and legend, on the basis that they might be useful. They never were, so eventually she set them to work in poetry.
She reads next from Rapture (2005). This collection records a love affair from beginning to end by way of sonnets, which she describes as “kind of the little black dress of poetry”. Barely perceptibly – some might say sexily – she moves as she speaks.
“How true is it?” John Campbell asks. “Does it need to be true? Does it matter?”
For those who are desperate to see the personal in the poems, she agrees it’s there, but it’s like “the sand in the oyster that produces the pearl” – a simile she also uses in her (ever so slightly) more candid interview with Kim Hill on National Radio the previous day.
Carol Ann Duffy doesn’t discuss the affair. She is famous for being as mean with autobiographical detail, or gossip, as she is generous in the promotion of poetry, poets and other good causes such as public libraries, books in prisons.
J.C. is leaning forward again, his hand extended like (but less languorously than) that of a figure in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Finally, the creator of Rapture reaches out and touches his hand with her own. “I’m fine now,” she deadpans, looking him in the eye.
At question time people, including the playwright Roger Hall whom John Campbell enthusiastically introduces, leap to the proffered mikes. The laureate puts down – does she? – someone who asks a question to which he should perhaps already know the answer.
And the last questioner wants to know about The Dolphins, republished in New Selected Poems 1984–2004. Carol Ann Duffy explains that she once saw captive dolphins giving a public performance and as a result “felt very screwed up... about these poor creatures being forced to do tricks.”
How could she not?
--Claire G
Greg O'Brien and "Whale Years" at AWF15
“Mariners read the ocean much as you would a book. Each wave a page.”
Thanks to Ella from Readers Services for this guest post.
At the Auckland Writers Festival last week I descended into the belly of the great whale that is the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki to hear Greg O'Brien speak about Whale Years, his latest book of poetry, and the journeys and experiences in the seas of the South Pacific that have informed the collection and left an indelible mark on his prolific artistic output.
Greg O'Brien is a man of many talents. Well known as a poet and writer, as well as a visual artist, he's also known to be a bit of a “cultural odd job man”. Some of the odd jobs he's been involved in over the years include curating and writing about art; and importantly, advocating for the environment, our special place in the Pacific and the people and creatures that live within it.
Lately he has been preoccupied, or self admittedly obsessed by whales, even though he has never been lucky enough to see one in reality, and wonders if maybe he prefers it that way. He likes to explore ideas of fantasy and the subconscious in his work, and it would seem to be the intangibility and elusiveness of these ocean dwellers that appeal to his active imagination.
The hour was a meandering exploration of our oceans, our environment and the life that exists within them, including enthusiastic readings from Whale Years, beautiful images, videos and tall tales from Greg's travels.
Greg O'Brien has been writing and musing on whales ever since his 2011 voyage with a rag tag group of artists on the ship HMNZS Otago, which followed the migratory routes of whales to the most remote part of New Zealand, the Kermadec islands, and on to Tonga.
These experiences inspired something in Greg and the eight other artists on board, something that O'Brien admits he found hard to shake. The artists -- image makers, writers and poets, designers, a film maker and a sound artist -- took on their roles as ambassadors for the ocean with enthusiasm, producing fascinating imaginative responses to this experience.
The spirit of exploration, and collaboration that developed from this journey was present throughout the hour as Greg O'Brien introduced the audience to some of the work that came out of the trip. John Pule's etchings of imagined flora and fauna, Robin White's beautiful collaborative tapa works and Fiona Hall's sculptures, chosen to represent Australia in this year's Venice Biennale, were just a few of the many intriguing works that illustrated his poems.
We were brought back to reality when Greg started talking cold hard facts and the environmental purpose of this trip really hit home. In October 2011, a few months after the artists returned from their journey, this region was affected by the horrifying Rena disaster and the fate of the area became even more precarious.
This was a memorable talk which left me with much to mull over as I emerged, rather dazed, out into busy Wellesley St, images of whales still swimming through my mind.
-- Ella
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| John Pule, Kermadec Exhibition (www.studioj.co.nz) |
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| Whale Years |
March 30, 2015
"I moved in the great mystery": Tomas Tranströmer 1931-2015
Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature not quite four years ago, died last Friday, aged 83. When the announcement of the Prize was made, I had never read a poem by him. But what a name! Did we have a book of his poems? We did! A 30-year-old Selected Poems was squirrelled away in the good old Central City Library basement. Oh no, actually, not squirrelled away any longer: four quicker-on-the-draw readers had formed a queue within hours of the announcement.
"Transtr?mer's dominant moods are almost warily inward-turning..."
As well as being a great poet (as I discovered for myself when the book arrived, and you will discover if you keep reading), Tomas Tranströmer was also a noted entomologist, a beetle collector. There is even a beetle named for him, in an 80th birthday tribute. The “Tranströmers tornbagge” was discovered on the island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, where Tranströmer spent his summers as a boy. You can't help getting a whiff of Nabokov. The image in my mind's eye, in fact, is a Nabokov who never left a St Petersburg which never stopped being St Petersburg, as Max von Sydow would interpret him in an Ingmar Bergman film.
Of the beetle, the Tomas Tranströmer website tells us "Its habits are still unknown". The Great Enigma.
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| Mordellistena transtroemeriana photo: tomastranstomer.net |
"I moved in the great mystery. I learned that the ground was alive, that there was an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us. I caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in my boxes... they're sitting there, those insects. As if biding their time."
And so, to
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| (Image: npr.org) |
Vermeer
by Tomas Tranströmer (translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton, from The Great Enigma)
March 25, 2015
World Poetry Day: Untie that poem!
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
-- "Introduction to poetry" by Billy Collins
From The apple that astonished Paris, 1996
(University of Arkansas Press)
If you've ever had the traumatic experience of witnessing this being done to a poem, and especially if a residual sac of trauma is still bobbing around in your psyche, I recommend a dose of World Poetry Day. World Poetry Day has been around for almost a hundred years, is celebrated on March 21, and although other purposes are read into it, worthily (most notably UNESCO's adopting it to promote the saving of endangered languages), at its heart it's still about people sharing poetry with each other.
In our modern world, where few of us have anything like a village square in our lives, a good place to do this is on Twitter, not least because in cyberspace the day stretches out to become two or three, with people jumping on and off according to their time zones and whatever idiosyncratic hours they keep.
Here are some of my best catches from the World Poetry Day twitscape. I'm sure one of them will get you waterskiing!
This first one needs a bit of introduction. To celebrate WPD, cafés around the world invited people to swap a poem for a coffee, a new initiative which I hope will spread (do you read me, Running Horse Café?) and become a tradition. Here's The Guardian tweeting the phenomenon:
Keats-Shelley House (@Keats_Shelley) has long been one of my favourite twitter accounts, and they didn't disappoint:
Couldn't be a poetry day without Sylvia; I especially liked the choice of poem:
Ferlinghetti, one of my first loves (and his own hieroglyph: "the arrow"):
Mandy, do you know what James Dickey said about Robert Frost?
"Of all the haunted artists, Robert Frost is the most haunted of all":
and this was my contribution:
Apollinaire's friends had this poem inscribed on his grave.
Which makes me think of, "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee".
What better thought for a poetry day?
February 17, 2015
Remembering Philip Levine
...Somewhere
we'll leave the world weighing
no more than when we came
wrote Philip Levine in his poem "A late answer". After I learned that he had died this weekend, I got my book of his poems down from the shelf, and found I had left a marker at that page the last time I was reading in it -- a sheet torn from a local elections booklet, dated October 2013.
I can't place the circumstance, but I can of the other marker in the book, a folded blue post-it. Only my father would have had post-its on hand as he read poetry, and indeed, it was he who had used one to mark another poem, his favourite, the one with which he introduced me to Philip Levine, some twenty years ago now. "Have you read this?" he had said with palpable excitement, handing me the book. It was one of Levine's most famous poems, "They feed they lion".
I remember clearly that moment when I fell under the spell of Philip Levine, of his poem with its rumble of the assembly line, its incisive cadences, its fierce old-testament imagery, all driving it unrelentingly, hypnotically, to its conclusion. "They feed they lion", like James Baldwin's "The fire next time". The fire now. The poem is from the late sixties, the time of "Burn baby burn!", the terrible riots which erupted across America in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination. The city of Detroit, where Levine had worked on a car factory's assembly line with a man who spoke the words which became the poem's title (noticing that the burlap sacks they had been given to fill with old car parts were stamped "Detroit Municipal Zoo"), was one of the worst hit.
Here's Philip Levine reading it:
...From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
In the farewells flooding the media, I see Philip Levine being described as the poet who sang of blue-collar America. Having read his description of the effect the Spanish Civil War had on him as a boy in his wonderful memoir The bread of time: toward an autobiography , I can't help but feel that his wrath was aroused by injustice, greed, oppression of the spirit wherever, in whatever form. The workingman's plight was simply his own experience of it.
My own favourite Philip Levine poem differs from "They feed they lion" in being markedly personal, but it is just as intense. Written later in life, it's about his memories of his father -- the relevance of this does not escape me -- and the revelation (Levine's poems always have a revelation, or at least that's how I read them) is the indomitable capacity of the spirit, however world-weary, for renewal. It's called "Starlight", and amazingly enough, I had remembered the poem just this weekend, lying on a picnic table looking up at the night sky, watching for shooting stars. We were on "the Barrier", Great Barrier Island, far from city lights, from any lights, with the stars almost blindingly bright. Shooting stars didn't lack. I like to think that one of them was Philip Levine's spirit, passing over.
Here he is reading "Starlight", from the film "In person: 30 poets", and the text below so you can follow if you like.
Starlight
My father stands in the warm evening
on the porch of my first house.
I am four years old and growing tired.
I see his head among the stars,
the glow of his cigarette, redder
than the summer moon riding
low over the old neighborhood. We
are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.
“Are you happy?” I cannot answer.
I do not really understand the word,
and the voice, my father’s voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since. He bends and passes
a thumb beneath each of my eyes.
The cigarette is gone, but I can smell
the tiredness that hangs on his breath.
He has found nothing, and he smiles
and holds my head with both his hands.
Then he lifts me to his shoulder,
and now I too am among the stars,
as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.
He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!
And in that new voice he says nothing,
holding my head tight against his head,
his eyes closed up against the starlight,
as though those tiny blinking eyes
of light might find a tall, gaunt child
holding his child against the promises
of autumn, until the boy slept
never to waken in that world again.
Philip Levine, Selected poems
-- Karen
February 07, 2015
On the long-term poetry of snails
One of my most prized possessions is this decade-old clipping from the NZ Listener of a news item about a scientific study on memory. It's entitled "Lest we remember" and goes like this:
"Will it be possible for people to have their unwanted memories erased, or at least weakened? Who knows, but scientists at UCLA have reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that they have been able to erase the long-term memories of marine snails..."
"The long-term memories of marine snails"!
I was -- still am -- irremediably fascinated by the idea.
Take the conch. The conch, according to the marine biologist featured in Stanford University's "microdoc" video on conch, spends its life "cruising around" (changed to "wander" for the written version) in the deep waters near the reef, eating seagrass. What could a conch's long-term memories be?
So here I am, years later, reading about Shelley in Italy, the long afternoons under a shady pergola, reading poetry aloud with Byron or Leigh Hunt, and I come across the intriguing fact that Shelley's favourite poem was a work by Walter Savage Landor called Gebir, and that when he read it aloud, everyone, and he most of all, particularly admired the passage with the sea-nymph.
So I went and looked it up, and there it is. The conch's long-term memory.
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave;
Shake one and it awakens, then apply
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,
And murmurs as the ocean there.
The books
Young romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives by Daisy Hay (highly recommended, an enjoyable read whether you know a little, a lot, or nothing at all on the topic)
Shelley's ghost : reshaping the image of a literary family by Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger (a narrower focus, but worth having a look at for the photos of Shelley documents and relics with which the book is replete, as it was published to accompany an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Dove Cottage, Grasmere and the New York Public Library).
Shelley's poetry and prose : authoritative texts, criticism selected and edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat
January 07, 2015
"Do I dare to eat a peach?" T.S. Eliot lives!
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| The classic TS Eliot |
In a prime example, actor Stephen Dillane, who is described by the event organisers -- and here's where we see what 50 years mean -- with pride rather than offhandedness as "well known for his roles in Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", will read Four Quartets in Bloomsbury, "just metres from the site of the original Faber & Faber offices" where Eliot worked for four decades and where, noted his colleague Frank Morley at Eliot's 60th birthday symposium, he drew attention above all for his talent at writing blurbs. Other tidbits which have come to light include the fact that Eliot turned down Animal Farm because he thought that, well, actually the pigs were the most qualified to run the farm, they just needed to have more public spirit (you can read the rejection letter on the Open Culture website).
Too, the prize money for the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry was increased this year in honour of the anniversary, from £15000 to £20000; the yearly stipend the Bloomsbury group had wanted to put together so that Eliot could quit his earlier job at Lloyd's Bank was £500. Virginia Woolf and Co. were among the first to recognise Eliot's genius, though they also mocked his primness, with Clive Bell recalling, in his essay "How pleasant to know Mr Eliot", an invitation he received from Virginia which read, "Come to lunch on Sunday. Tom is coming and what is more, is coming with a four-piece suit." Eliot turned down the stipend, if not the lunch.
Lacked flamboyance
"Lacked flamboyance" was one of the subheadings in Eliot's obituary in the New York Times, where he is described as a "clerkish type", famed for his bowler and "tightly rolled-up umbrella". A clerkish colossus whose "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" ushered in the modern movement in poetry. In an Eliot 2-for-1, "Prufrock" also has an anniversary this year: its centenary. Its first appearance, in Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, was in 1915 -- the same year that Albert Einstein completed his General Theory of Relativity, ushering the concept of black holes, modernity in another form, into physics. |
| Rarer Prufrock-era image |
What was so shocking about "Prufrock"?
Let's hear it from someone who lived through those times. Desmond Hawkins, a disciple and a contributor to Eliot's review "The Criterion", decried in an essay for the 60th birthday symposium the "chumminess" and "sloppier sort of Romanticism" of the then-reigning Georgian poetry. But that was a minority view. By all accounts 1915 was Rupert Brooke's year. His poems were quoted in the TLS, read from pulpits, collected, and published to great acclaim, in coincidence with his death on a hospital ship in the Aegean Sea on his way to Gallipoli, just a month before "Prufrock" was published in Poetry magazine.
Here's a verse from Brooke's collection:
Now that we’ve done our best and worst, and parted,
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
I’ll think of Love in books, Love without end...
And here's what another beloved poet of the period, Walter de la Mare, was writing:
Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door
Some one came knocking
I'm sure, sure, sure...
Here's a taste of John Masefield's famous "Dauber", which came out in 1915 as well:
Then came the cry of “Call all hands on deck!”
The Dauber knew its meaning; it was come:
Cape Horn, that tramples beauty into wreck,
And crumples steel and smites the strong man dumb...
and of Alfred Noyes's "The Lord of Misrule", another 1915 publishing date:
Your God still walks in Eden, between the ancient trees,
Where Youth and Love go wading through pools of primroses
And then, suddenly, there was this:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table...
the story of an everyday hell, made up of failures, doubts and disappointments, with an epitaph from Dante's Inferno in which Guido da Montefeltro swears to Dante that he will speak the truth, as there is no point in fabricating, given that none of them will make it out of hell alive.
Here is a great recitation of "Prufrock" by Anthony Hopkins, which I highly recommend. I've always found it difficult, as a mere mortal, to be convincing on some of those inflections, even in my head -- "Do I dare to eat a peach?" must be one of the most difficult lines to read aloud in the history of poetry -- so it's nice to have someone take command. He does it at a very fast tempo, which I wasn't sure about then and there, but which turned out to be a masterful intuition (more pain, less pomposity). See if you agree. Text follows so you can read along.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Yep, I'm with Desmond Hawkins who, looking back in 1948, summed it up like this: "Eliot restored the position of poetry as high art and not merely a capricious effusion".
The writer Robert Sward told the story ("All at Sea with T.S.E") of how, around the same time, a US Navy officer expressed what I think is more or less the same concept, though he used slightly different terms:
In 1952, sailing to Korea, a U.S. Navy librarian for Landing Ship Tank 914, I read T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Ill-educated, a product of Chicago's public school system, I was nineteen years old and, awakened by Whitman, Eliot and Williams, had just begun writing poetry. I was also reading all the books I could get my hands on. Eliot had won the Nobel Prize in 1948 and, curious, I was trying to make sense of poems like Prufrock and The Waste Land.
"What do you know about T.S. Eliot?" I asked a young officer who'd been to college and studied English Literature. I knew from earlier conversations that we shared an interest in what he called "modern poetry." A Yeoman Third Class, two weeks at sea and bored, I longed for someone to talk to. "T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but he lives now in England and is studying to become an Englishman," the officer said, tapping tobacco into his pipe. "The 'T.S.' stands for 'tough shit.' You read Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, what one English Prof. called 'the first poem of the modern movement,' and if you don't understand it, 'tough shit.' All I can say is that's some love song."
The officer talks him through the poem and then he says:
"At some level in our hearts, we are all J. Alfred Prufrock, every one of us, and we are all sailing into a war zone from which, as the last line of the poem implies, we will never return."
December 31, 2014
"Was there another Troy for her to burn?"
Beguiled by the testament of a Yeats-loving lover
My Book Find of 2014 has to be this collection of the letters of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne, the Irish nationalist revolutionary who was Yeats's great infatuation, we could even say obsession, and the inspiration for many of his finest poems. And when I say "this", I mean this very one shown here, a book which was anonymously donated to the library for the annual used book sale, where I spied it and made it mine.It's not because it was a particularly good read. Yeats is one of my gods -- I even plowed through some of his astrological lunacy, albeit at a tender and uncritical age -- but only a handful of the letters in the book are his. In what might be seen as symptomatic of his relationship with Gonne, he seems to have saved all of her letters, whereas she did not find his worth such effort. Even the two letters he received from her just before her marriage (to another! to his immense dismay) were "very crumpled, as if carried around in his pocket and reread many times, then smoothed out to put away with the others", the Editor's Note tells us -- though I am surely not the only one to think it more likely that he had balled them up and thrown them across the room, only to pick them up the next morning and smooth them for keeping. In contrast, Maud Gonne had only kept two of his letters "particularly safe", one being his last letter to her.
No, it's something else which made this book my find of the year.
Yeats is the great poet of romantic yearning, and I've noticed on many occasions how the bond that Yeats lovers form with him is very romantic and viscerally personal. In his "bibliomemoir" Outside of a Dog, Rick Gekoski recounts his shock at discovering that his girlfriend had betrayed him with her English professor, with whom she was studying Yeats, using his copy of Yeats which he had lent her. He felt that was "unaccountably wicked". Later, with the book back in his hands, he examines her annotations."Her note to 'Leda and the Swan', that tale of the overcoming of innocence by male lust, seemed in retrospect positively prescient: 'Zeus -- passionate. Leda -- helpless and terrified'. So my loved one was overcome by a God-like teacher (the animal!), but it wasn't her fault. That was some consolation, though her notes stressing the purification that comes from the flames of passion in the margin to 'Byzantium' seemed to indicate that much good could, and had, come out of it for them both if not for me."
And long after a zealous janitor had removed it, the Dean of Colby College (and Yeats scholar) still remembered with regret the "Yeats lives!"graffiti which had reigned for many years on the basement wall of the library. Annie Proulx attended Colby College, but somehow I don't think it was her work.
And The Gonne-Yeats letters, or rather the copy of it I am celebrating here, captured my heart the minute I saw this inscription scrawled on the title page:25 August 2008
In comparison, we only have five more years to go, and, of course, I haven't asked your daughter to marry me...
The love story between William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne lasted 49 years, from the day he met her and was immediately enthralled by her great beauty and fiery spirit, to the day he died. He asked her to marry him a number of times, both before and after she had a child, a son, with a Frenchman who shared her revolutionary politics. She only told Yeats about the child after it had died, perhaps needing to explain her mourning attire, but claimed it was an adopted child. She then conceived another child with this man (the act taking place upon the dead child's mausoleum), a daughter this time, named Iseult. Yeats proposed to Iseult when she was 23, after yet another refusal on Gonne's part (she wanted to devote herself to freeing Ireland, she told him they would be united by love in another life, and anyway she didn't like sex, and she had already suggested he marry Iseult back when she turned 15), with no better luck. Iseult too turned him down.
If my calculations are right, someone was gifting this book to a lover of over 40 years, with "five more years to go", to match Yeats's record. Five years from 2008 would take us to 2013 -- the year the book was donated to the library. To be sold for a dollar! And still uncreased! What happened?
In his great poems inspired by Maud Gonne, Yeats charted the waning, as well as the waxing, of the love story which he once called the troubling of his life. Did the fate of these modern-day lovers reflect one of these?
Had they wearied?
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
-- Adam's Curse
Had love fled?
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
--When You Are Old
Did this wonderful man not make it?
I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel tree and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies;
Although the rushes and the fowl of the air
Cry of his love with their pitiful cries.
-- Mongan Thinks of his Past Greatness
Or was his beloved, like Maud Gonne, a beautiful troublemaker who would never be his, through no fault of hers, when all was said and done? I love all these Maud Gonne-inspired poems, but this one the most:
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
October 30, 2014
“Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”
"What's an envoy?" asks my non-native English speaker husband, busy reading.
"Oh, it's a poem, that in the old days poets used to put at the end of their book, sending it off and hoping people would like it."
Dead silence.
Me, getting suspicious: "Why, what does it say?"
"That the new Italian ambassador was one."
"Oh, that envoy!"
I am not actually so bookish as to think that a now-rare poetic device is more likely to be referred to in today's newspaper than a diplomatic title. But the "Go, little book" type of envoy (from the French envoyer, "to send", same root as the envoy sent by a government) has been on my mind recently, ever since I came across the exhilirating envoy by Russell Banks which I used as the title for this post, and it started me thinking, what better way to follow a post on the art of the dedication than with one on the art of the envoy?
The envoy dates back to classic Roman literature, meaning that it has been around for over 2000 years. Ovid, the greatest poet of the Augustan Age, affixed a touching envoy to his book Tristia (Sorrows), written from exile in what we now call Romania, but the Romans referred to as "beyond the Danube", by which they meant, at the outskirts of the civilised world, where the emperor had sent him for "a poem and a misunderstanding" (said Ovid).
The envoy opens like this (I include the Latin because English translations of Latin poetry always sound too chatty - so just before you read the English, say stirringly aloud "Ibis in urbem!"):
Parue—nec inuideo—sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!
"Little book -- I won't resent it -- go without me to the city
Where alas, your master is not allowed to go..."
But of course he resented it. A man of culture and refined habits, witty and urbane, Ovid found banishment among the (semi) barbarians -- who didn't even know Latin -- a cruel punishment. Cruellest of all, he never got to follow his book back to Rome, dying in exile.
By the nineteenth century, the envoy had become a trope, its more unexceptional manifestations ripe for mockery, as Lord Byron did with the efforts of the rather paltry poet laureate of his time, Robert Southey.
"Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters – go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.
Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise—
The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine."
The twentieth century! War, carnage, decay, disillusion, experimentation, modernism! If anyone was in the thick of that it was Ezra Pound, and he got it all, and Art too, into his revisitation of Edmund Waller's famous 17th century envoy "Go, Lovely Rose" (set to music by Henry Lawes), a poem firmly in the carpe diem tradition, which began:
Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be...
Here's Pound's "Envoi" from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1919):
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.
Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.
Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
Where could one possibly go after that, you might find yourself asking. Well, that's what I'm here for! Here, closing the circle and leading us back to Russell Banks, are two dazzling envoys from the second half of the twentieth century:
Go, little book. If anybody asks
Why I add poems to a time like this,
Tell how the comeliness I can’t take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names;
And how I give them names impatiently,
As who should pull up roses by the roots
That keep him turning on his empty bed,
The smell intolerable and thick with loss.
Robert Creeley, “Envoi”:
particulars they
fucking well will
get, love. For openers,
you—the stars
earth revolves about,
the galaxies their in-
struments neglect. I
walk down a road
you make ahead, not
(no negative) there ex-
cept my body finds
it. Love, love,
love, swirls—myriad
insects hum, the
air softens, the night
is here. So empty
these days with-
out you, a box
with nothing in it. I
am waiting, you
are coming, so what’s
the world but
all of it.
And here we are back at Russell Banks. I don't know if anyone else out there has written an envoy in prose, but this is one it would be tough to compete with. It comes at the end of Banks's novel Continental Drift, a tale of our times which mixes "low comedy and high seriousness" (as someone said about Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, which it reminded me of), sardonic descriptions of domestic dissatisfaction, low-end jobs, moral corners being cut, and suddenly, apocalypse.
"The world as it is goes on being itself. Books get written -- novels, stories and poems stuffed with particulars that try to tell us what the world is, as if our knowledge of people like Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville will set people like them free. It will not. Knowledge of the facts of Bob's life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives -- no, especially wholly invented lives -- deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book's objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”
*****
Post script:
The American poet Robert Creeley (of Pound-Olson-Zukofsky-Black Mountain lineage), sojourned in New Zealand in the 1970s (a trip organised by Alistair Paterson), and Auckland Libraries' Sir George Grey Special Collections has a number of books of his poetry relating to that time, including The Dogs of Auckland, a limited edition artist's book by the Holloway Press, which has this note in the catalogue, a poem by itself: "The binding is cloth spine with Canson Mi Teintes paper-covered boards, & the case & casing in are by Bound to Last, Auckland."
I realise that Canson Mi Teintes is just a mezzo-tinto, half-tint, but what it said to me when I first saw it, and what it still wants to say to me, is "Song, you tempt me!"
