Category: Poetry

It’s raining in California

In this recent post, I referenced Joan Didion’s telling of an episode in which she was unable to get out of her head Ezra Pound’s famous, ‘not quite’ haiku, imagist poem:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- Ezra Pound, Poetry magazine (1913)

And Didion then pondering what her momentary obsession with these lines could have possibly meant, and me wondering, of course, along with her – but not immediately reflecting back to first principles and thinking about what exactly it was Pound was thinking about in the first place anyway! Very bright girl that she was, I dare say Didion would have had an interpretation – in the sense of Pound in Paris circa. 1913 – at hand, but, however clever, it would not necessarily have been one that would account for her sudden fixation on Pound’s words in her present. In fact, I understand her musing on the ‘petals’ being representative of ‘the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie’ to be her own diagnosis of that fixation in that moment. To that end, I belatedly note that she goes on to say:

[in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…] A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community.

Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (pp. 41-42). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

It surely can not be a coincidence that Didion describes the tension she perceives in society (that later in the essay she then believes to break) as ‘vortical’, nor that it was to Ezra Pound’s poetic experimentations (and artistic flights of fancy) during a particular period that Joan Didion was drawn in her search of an adequate means to describe the California ‘state of mind’ in those years. Her choice may not be so surprising, and very much in accord with Pound’s thinking at the time: that it is possible to make art (and write poetry) composed from an essence, a ‘vortex’; built upon, layer upon layer, enabling the representation of many facets, many people – of a state in the union or observed at a Paris metro station, for instance. The following essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1914 :

Vorticism.
This article first appeared in the Fortnightly Review No. 96 [n.s.], 1 September 1914, pp461–471.

Pound not only explains the circumstances and place from which “In a Station of the Metro” arose – his walking around about the La Concorde metro station in Paris – and the intellectual imperative – how he could encapsulate all the fleeting moments (all those ‘beautiful faces’) adequately, but also how later he was able to resolve his creative struggle.

[…]The “one image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a  poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like  sentence:–

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.”

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought.5 In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention.

“Vorticism” by Ezra Pound in the Fortnightly Review

Extending the Vorticism definition as applied to the visual arts, where the emphasis is on the layers of mechanical and structural framework that obscure stillness at its center, Pound was imagining a poetry that got to that still core – a stripping away of the layers to expose the essence. And, in the process, redefining his position on Imagism. Pound relates all this in a very convoluted way, with flashes of the avant-garde and mathematics which I couldn’t swear that I absolutely kapiert.

Supplementing the above, I make note of Pound’s essays “Vortex” and “A Few Don’ts” (Imagism) at the Poetry Foundation – whether either make the ideas any clearer is debatable, but … and, here is a copy of the legendary 1914 BLAST with the original Vorticist manifesto – which will absolutely NOT. But as historical documentation fascinating just the same.

Both movements and their manifestos were short lived (a feud being one reason behind their demise – Pound vs. Amy Lowell) but even after more than a century it remains worthwhile to consider the ways in which practitioners of different art forms synthesized and co-operated in an effort to create an art, a language, to adequately explain the dynamic acceleration of change in society.

continue reading …

Philip Larkin b. 1922

…that year again

This time, the birth year of the British poet Philip Larkin. With little tolerance for “modernist” pretensions, or that which he may so have considered, it is interesting that Larkin should be born at a time when that particular movement was turning the literary establishment upside down, and in that year that such legendary modernist texts like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s novel Ulysses were published and creating furor. Perhaps from mother’s womb, to the cradle and onward, Larkin was predestined to rebel against the new or, at least, make the old new again.

Philip Larkin (1969) by Fay Godwin. © The British Library Board

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry on 9 August, 1922, a hundred years ago today, and died on 2 December, 1985. In the years since his death, and particularly those most recent, Larkin has fell afoul of many who seek to (re)define the British literary canon – an endeavor not without merit. His sins appear to have been numerous (and contested) – misogynistic, sexually compulsive and irresponsible, racist, antisemitic, and some would say just plain not very nice – traits so defining and presumably inextricable from his work that examination boards have dropped him from the curriculum (not being cancelled, though, says The New Statesman).

Larkin’s poetry is only as difficult as one wants it to be, highly accessible and, I think, not at all dated – definitely stuff for young, curious minds. Certainly I could imagine a contemporary British school student, irrespective of background, being able to imagine more in Larkin, getting more from Larkin, than, say, a young German vis-à-vis Goethe. Yes, Goethe, he who is being relegated from the compulsory to the optional category of the German secondary curriculums in some states. Including, Bavaria, the state in which I live, with the demotion of Faust in 2024. I am quite sure Goethe’s well documented erotic predilections had nothing to do with that decision, rather a reasonable approach in broadening the range for a particular epoch in which Germany is not short of literary representation. Unfortunately, in England, Larkin seems primarily to have fallen victim to his white maleness as educationalists scramble to make amends for the colonial mindset and lack of diversity that had hitherto characterized the curriculum. That is understandable, but … Why Larkin?!

What do I know about Philip Larkin? Not much. I haven’t read Andrew Motion’s biography nor any other biographical material, including controversial correspondence with mother, girlfriends and others that have surfaced, nor anything much in the way of scholarly or gossipy articles. But it seems clear Larkin was a very complicated man, plagued by melancholy and inadequacy to the point of depression, and influenced (as are we all) by the society (human and situational) he kept. And, a wonderful poet. I only know some of his work, and those the familiar pieces known to many, but I think them splendid. Following are links to some of these, and other reference material.

Auntie, reluctant to show her age these days (change: all just a matter of cosmetics), lets herself go this week and the next and, with the (probably fleeting) acceptance of their listener’s demographic, presents “Larkin Revisited” on Radio 4: “Across ten programmes and ten Philip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, finds out what happens when he revisits and unpicks Larkin’s work in his centenary year.”

April is the cruelest month…

…’tis indeed this year, 100 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that famously so begins. And for some much more so than for others. Embedded below a wonderful recitation by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins (for BBC Radio 4 presumably).

In this early Spring 2022, my thoughts continue to be preoccupied with the once, and now again, “bloodlands” at the heart of Europe, and hope, pray even, that they will not be so for evermore. Reading the opening verses of Eliot’s immortal work anew, I am not wrapped in the memories of the Countess Marie and the Austro-German provinces, but think this time instead of other fertile lands in the here and now, one that produces food for the world, that would in any normal Spring be awakening from the long, cold winter and now instead perhaps just abandoned, a muddied quagmire left by monster tanks and trucks and man.

I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
                      Frisch weht der Wind
                      Der Heimat zu
                      Mein Irisch Kind,
                      Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.

[...]

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)

The entire poem can be found all over the place of course. For instance, at the Poetry Foundation linked above and this annotated version at Bartleby. Audio files of Eliot’s own reading are here. And, this essay by Pericles Lewis (adapted from his Cambridge Introduction to Modernism) is informative.

To every picture be there a poem

“Musee des Beaux Arts” – W. H. Auden (1938)

A subscription is probably required to access this interactive tour de force at The New York Times, but it is such a remarkably timely piece that I feel inclined to make mention of it here.

Elisa Gabbert does her own close reading and analysis for the Time’s “Close Reading” series of W.H. Auden’s 1938 poem “Musee des Beaux Arts“, an ekphrasis which is in turn, if not an analysis, the poet’s own particular appreciation of two narrative paintings from Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Firstly, The census at Bethlehem (1566) and then Landscape with The Fall of Icarus (1555). An appreciation of an appreciation if you will.

The census at Bethlehem (1566) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium.

Or, in respect to the Icarus painting, even a couple more iterations of appreciations. For Bruegel also looks elsewhere for inspiration; finding it in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses – itself an inspired narrative work with mythological and historical elements. Bruegel arranges his scene as Ovid does (compare just a few lines and the painting below); but he has the spectacular event met with indifference rather than astonishment. As if a boy falls from the heavens every day. Or was Bruegel inserting a temporal dimension suggesting that, in any precise moment, a lapse in attentiveness, a diversion, may mean that something is missed? And that something could be a boy falling from the sky or something much more real – like the darkening clouds of war for instance. (Like everywhere else in Europe, the low countries were permanently engulfed in one conflict or other during Bruegel’s lifetime.)

Beneath their flight,
the fisherman while casting his long rod,
or the tired shepherd leaning on his crook,
or the rough plowman as he raised his eyes,
astonished might observe them on the wing,
and worship them as Gods.

- Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book VIII) Eng. trans. Brooks More, 1922.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1555) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique © Bridgeman Art Library / Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

As Gabbert points out, neither the painting nor Auden’s poem overtly signal approaching disaster let alone impending war, yet dangers are lurking in both. In the painting, Icarus has indeed fallen; his flaying legs barely noticed by a folk going about their business or just not caring, nor by the viewer eagerly progressing from one master work to the next, not seeing what Auden saw. After all, unprompted, human nature will have it that we see what we want to see – or we don’t see at all.

Looking eastward from Germany in these day, one can see the result of a political culture that was too concerned with economic interests and chose to look away for too long.

On the lost art of mastering disaster

Again, in one fell swoop, all my petty irritations with The New York Times dissipated into nothingness with this interactive interpretation of Elizabeth Bishop’s much celebrated 1976 poem, “One Art” – a well put together analytical piece from the NYT critics, Parul Sehgal and Dwight Garner, enhanced through referencing Bishop’s drafts and an exposition of the poet’s methodology.

Elizabeth Bishop builds her poem with the consummate skill of one who has honed her craft; working up from a very concrete foundation – the loss of an object, keys perhaps – to that of the more transient – some place, be it near, like one’s home or the greater space that surrounds. And always lurking; pesky, ephemeral time – taken, wasted, forever lost, and so done in the interest of another loss. Loss multiplied, if you will.

Beginning with generalization, her distanced voice evolves into a personal address, and in the last stanza, a much more intimate loss is revealed – that of one loved. Has the lyrical self convinced one own self that such a loss can be conquered by rational means, as those others have been before? She doesn’t say, but as the poem concludes it’s to be supposed she is working on it still – mastering this art of losing.

And maybe she never succeeded in doing so, but Elizabeth Bishop certainly mastered the art of the villanelle; a composition form that she only used on this one occasion. Long live the villanelle!

Should the NYT not deem to let you in: Whilst very much copyrighted of course, “One Art” is available to be read all over the place, including here at the Poetry Foundation, along with a further selection of her works – me, I’ve always especially loved “At the Fishhouses”.

I herewith remind myself of a still outstanding book recommendation, given to me quite some time ago: “On Elizabeth Bishop” (Princeton University Press, 2015), an introduction to the life and work of this great American poet by the wonderful Irish writer, Colm Tóibín.

NYT Book Review: Sylvia again!

Not Sylvia again? What more is to be said? Daphne Merkin rhetorically asks of herself. And in her review of Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is more than pleasantly surprised; in fact, inspired to think again, delve even more into this light that burned so brightly on the literary horizon, only to be extinguished too early and to pass into the dubious category of legend.

RED COMET The Short Life and Blazing Art of SYLVIA PLATH by HEATHER CLARK, Pub. Knopf

As one, from the generation after, who fell captive to that legend others built around Sylvia Plath’s life and death, and equally so fell for the legend that she, herself, created in her only novel The Bell Jar; a work of autofiction (and written before that term existed) some would contend, and that Plath would not live to either affirm or deny. It was because of The Bell Jar and Plath’s life (and her death) that I first read her poetry – at the time I was of the age at which she was when she was writing, and remember wondering at the intellectual and emotional depth, and to this day I gladly read her again. Perhaps some would consider her work too removed from contemporary concerns, too beholden stylistically to the old, now dead, white men who dominated twentieth century poetry, but in her last works she was shedding that influence, and I ask: was the beating heart and yearning soul of a young woman in the 1950s really so different to now?

Merkin’s review convinces me that there is more to know – of Plath’s life; of Aurelia and Otto, and always there the complications of Ted (after more recent revelations and denials, I didn’t think I wanted to go there again either!), and her art and her legacy.

Yes, Sylvia again! Or, still. Another, for my must read.

Making connections

Connections these days seem to bombard one! Or maybe it is that they only ‘seem’ to do so, given time enough to contemplate, reflect and make connections that may otherwise pass unnoticed. This then in The New York Times today, criticising and giving an ultimatum of sorts to the renowned Poetry Foundation relate in some ways to my two previous posts; firstly, that in respect to my revisit in the last days to The 1619 Project, and secondly, one about a call from black and minority writers for equal consideration in publishing.

Portrait of Phillis Wheatley.

In a literary section of the Project, mentioned mostly for the point of mentioning Jesmyn Ward!, I did also enjoy very much a poem by Eve Ewing, probably because her subject, Phillis Wheatley, a most extraordinary woman, born in West Africa, sold into slavery as a child and transported as a young girl to Boston, was known to me (from a poetry course I did a few years ago), and Wheatley’s story is such that one tends not to forget, and Ewing’s verse honours her short, tragic life. Following is a poem by Phillis Wheatley; from the Poetry Foundation [sic].

On Being Brought from Africa to America

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

- BY PHILLIS WHEATLEY

Ms. Ewing is amongst the very many initiators of a letter to the Poetry Foundation criticising not only the Foundation’s tepid response to the current antiracism efforts, but more generally the lack of structural and financial support of marginalised groups. And they don’t pussy foot around with their demands!

Eve Ewing and Jesmyn Ward, poetry and prose; black and gifted and successful, but ready to fight this fight for writers of color, or those otherwise marginalised, who may not have a voice.

From the NYT article, one also learns of similar initiatives in the theatre. Could it be that there really is change afoot? Could this be the moment, the generation, to continue fulfilling dreams not dreamed out?

More from Mecklenburgh Square

Certainly a most talked about publication in the UK at the moment! Further to my previous post, BBC Radio 3 has also given Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (amongst other things woman, classical & academic) consideration on their Free Thinking program  or the “Goddesses of Academia” episode of their Arts & Ideas podcast.

And, yes, the Jane Harrison, Hope Mirrlees relationship which I remarked upon does indeed come up, as does her modernist poem “Paris” printed by the Hogarth Press in 1919. The British Library has digitized a first edition for all to see, and what a delight it is. Literary wise – why has Mirrlees been forgot? (perhaps because she forsook poetry for “the novel” and other interests) – and in terms of handwork – the Woolfs had only been doing this stuff for a couple of years (they bought a printing press in 1917) for goodness sake!

Interesting, is that Mirrlees’ poem spans just one day in Paris, portraying the vast, ever-changing cityscape and the tempo of a new modernity, all set against the dark shadows still cast by war and an uneasy peace. The much better known “one dayers” are a few years away – Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1925.