The Craft of Eavan Boland

In addition to its humanity — its giving voice to people that history and art have often overlooked — one of the great pleasures of Eavan Boland’s poetry is the way it layers time and moves through time. At our last meeting, the Book Club for Poets focused on poems from Against Love Poetry, several of which show Boland’s ability to merge past and present, historical and personal, the captured moment and the fleetingness of time.

In “Making Money,” for example, the poet devotes the opening five stanzas to a narrative describing how women living near the River Slang were employed to make money for the British government. Boland describes the process closely, from the “first ugly hour” of the women’s waking, to “the toil / of sifting and beating and settling and fraying / the weighed out fibres” of “rag” and “hemp.” The poem then shifts into what the women themselves cannot see — the consequences of British wealth in Ireland, compressed into a single stanza:

And they do not and they never will
see the small boundaries all this will buy
or the poisoned kingdom with its waterways
and splintered locks and the peacocks who will walk
this paper up and down in the windless gardens
of a history no one can stop happening now.
Nor the crimson and indigo features
of the prince who will stare out from
the surfaces they have made on
the ruin of a Europe
he cannot see from a surface
of a wealth he cannot keep

The poem then challenges its readers. If we can’t acknowledge that the past is “a crime we cannot admit and will not atone,” the women are still there “in the rainy autumn” as the “wagons of rags . . . arrive.” The women will always be “facing the paradox” of making money in their poverty, “learning to die of it.”

In “Thankëd be Fortune,” the poet moves from “constellations, / orderly uninterested and cold” to “the bookshelves just above” the sleeping narrator and her husband:

all through the hours of darkness,
men and women
wept, cursed, kept and broke faith
and killed themselves for love.

The poem then shifts from literary time into the present of the couple as they wake and hear their child waking — “listening to our child crying, as if to birdsong” — and the poem ends with an evocative, mysterious image: “the grass eking out / the last crooked hour of starlight.” Is the grass photosynthesizing starlight? What, to human eyes, seems like the timelessness of the constellations is translated into the more mortal time span of the grass.

Boland creates a similar moment in “The Pinhole Camera,” noting first our knowledge of the natural world and how time works here (“the reason for the red berries / darkening”). The speaker then describes the narratives that humans have created to explain phenomena like solar eclipses (“if this were legend / the king of light would turn his face away”) — before the poet captures the workings of the universe in an everyday object, a piece of paper below the pinhole camera:

But this is real —
how your page records
the alignment of planets,
their governance.
In other words,
the not-to-be-seen again
mystery of
a mutual influence.

Besides the pleasure we get in reading Boland’s poetry, we can also use these poems to remind ourselves to consider how time moves in our own poetry. Can we include more than one scale of time in our own poems? Can we explore when to be leisurely and when to move swiftly, compressing events?

Sources

Boland, Eavan. “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 296–297.

— — —. “Making Money.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 292–293.

— — —. “The Pinhole Camera.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 280–281.

— — —. “Thankëd be Fortune.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 286.

The Craft of Billy Collins

The Book Club for Poets decided once again to discuss a book by the latest Hall-Kenyon Prize winner, and the poet selected for the 2013 award was Billy Collins, who gave a reading at the Concord (NH) City Auditorium on October 3, 2013; the audience was large and enthusiastic, applauding after every poem. Several national figures have praised Collins’s work. But when I told poet friends that we’d be discussing Collins’s Horoscopes for the Dead at our next meeting, I got mixed reactions, including a “I won’t be going to that one” and a simple but fairly hostile “Why?”

Why does Collins inspire such polarized views among other poets? That was the question I decided could be our way into Horoscopes for the Dead. What are the strengths of this poetry? What are its weaknesses? If Collins wasn’t such a wildly successful poet financially, such a popular writer, would he instill the same kind of reaction?

His work is admired by accomplished writers. In choosing Collins for the Hall-Kenyon Prize, poet Wesley McNair told the Concord (NH) Monitor, “He’s intelligent, wonderfully witty and urbane, just as the critics say. But the Billy Collins who engages me most is the naif — the poet of the curious imagination, who shows us that the world is a source of delight and mystery, and the only reason we haven’t seen this is that we’ve been standing in the light.” Stephen Dunn admires how “we seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going.” Dunn says, “I love to arrive with him at his arrivals. He doesn’t hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered” (Academy of American Poets). In a review of Picnic, Lightning in Poetry, John Taylor notes, “By forming these odd but somehow convincing associations, Collins helps us feel the mystery of being alive. Beneath his tongue-in-cheek humor, a deeper melancholy reminds us that a human being can hope for little more than emotional, mental, and physical experiences of this mystery.”

But not everyone admires Collins’s craft. Paul Stephens has noted in the Drunken Boat,  “The dominant impression one gets when reading a Collins poem is one of sheer lack of ambition. … There is nothing engaging whatsoever about the construction of [“The Lesson”]. The prosaic domestic setting is typical of a Collins poem. There is in fact no specific ‘History’ to speak of. ‘History’ becomes a sort of non-threatening daydream of some past life where things might actually have been interesting.”

This last comment comes closest to that of those poet friends of mine who declined to be part of our discussion of Horoscopes. The work, they said, was glib, overly sentimental, not ambitious, not well crafted.

So the Book Club asked ourselves what we liked in Collins’s work—and what we found disappointing.

In Collins’s favor, the club noted his humor, his willingness to be whimsical, his willingness to risk sentimentality — and the strategies he uses to undercut it. Critics sometimes object to Collins’s “pandering” to the audience in his performances, but Don Kimball noted that without the humor of “The Lanyard,” the poem would be unbearably maudlin. The poem also gets more serious at the end, a technique the poet uses frequently.

One of the things I personally respond to best in Collins’s work are the moments when he shifts dramatically, in tone, in time and space, or in point of view. In a poem like “Horoscopes for the Dead,” for example, most of the poem mines the humor of prosaic newspaper horoscope-speak and its inappropriateness for the dead:

Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals,
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

The prosiness is intensified, I think, by the neatly self-contained stanzas. Occasionally, the language is elevated by more music (listen for the long i sounds, the s’s, and the l’s below) and by image and metaphor:

… that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

Collins reserves the ending for his most dramatic shift. Compared to the narrator, who is “pedaling along the shore road by the bay,” the dead “you” of the poem is both stationary and moving, flying, beyond the dimensions of this world:

And you stay just as you are,
lying there in your beautiful blue suit,
your hands crossed on your chest
like the wings of a bird who has flown
in its strange migration not north or south
but straight up from the earth
and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

In a poem like “Good News,” however, the Book Club thought the whimsy and sentimentality were not balanced by something sharper or more ominous. The dog’s “long smile” is such a satisfying image in the penultimate stanza, but the final lines seem unremittingly sweet and discursive: “and your brown and white coat / are perfectly designed to be the dog you perfectly are.” In contrast, in “Two Creatures,” the narrator is willing to risk the sweetness of contemplating a pet dog’s point of view but ends somewhere much more interesting: “I have never once worried,” the narrator says at the conclusion of the poem,

that she would take off in the car
and leave me to die
behind the locked doors of this house.

Such a shift, it seems to me, invites us to ask questions about our relationships to the creatures we have under our care. What’s the hidden cruelty, or at least the hidden callousness, in such a relationship?

Other poems from this collection that take similar leaps or shifts are “My Unborn Children,” “Roses,” and “Thieves,” which moves from the narrator’s human point of view to that of the mouse he sees “ducking  … into stone wall.” The ending also illustrates Collins’s sly allusions, the language of the first line of this stanza recalling Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse”:

my wee, timorous mind darting in after him,
escaping the hawk-prowling sunlight
for a shadowy cave of stone
and the comings and goings of mice —
all that scurrying and the secretive brushings of whiskers.

This movement to the inward and the small is intensified by the narrator’s just having imagined “the monstrous glacial traffic of the ice age.” (The final image reminds me a bit of the sudden intimacy of the bee in the foxglove in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Moose.”)

At his best, Collins writes a musical line:

all that scurrying and the secretive brushing of whiskers (“Thieves”)
delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish (“Table Talk”)
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills (“Table Talk”)

At other times, he doesn’t seem as interested in loading the rifts with ore:

“It’s the size of a basketball / but much more interesting” (“The New Globe”)
“the drawings you would bring in” (“Girl”)

In the poems the Book Club enjoyed most from Horoscopes from the Dead, Collins’s narrator is saying, in the conversational way he has, something complicated, as in the series of inner landscapes, private worlds, compressed “to the size of a bedroom,” for instance, in “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne” — the world of the lovers in Donne’s poem “contracted” a second time, as the narrator memorizes it, “into a little spot within” the narrator himself. At other times, the poems express deep ambivalence, as in the dead father’s silence in “Grave,” which is described so delicately but that seems withdrawn, withholding, perhaps punitive. In comparison, a poem like “On Reading a Program Note on Aaron Copland” is clever—the famous composer traveling only from Brooklyn to North Tarrytown over his ninety-year life span — but never really goes beyond cleverness. The world of the poem seems completely imagined, self-contained within its own whimsy. But the poem on the facing page, “After I Heard You Were Gone,” has both a clever extended metaphor but much more emotionally at stake, the world transformed, made surreal, by the “you’s” absence:

I could have sworn the large oak trees
had just appeared there overnight.
And that pigeon looked as if
it had once been a playing card
that a magician had transformed with the flick of a scarf.

Sources

Poems quoted from Collins, Billy. Horoscopes for the Dead. New York: Random House, 2012.

Dunn, Stephen. Quoted in “Billy Collins.” Academy of American Poets, http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278.

McNair, Wesley. Quoted in “Poet Billy Collins Selected for Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize.” Concord (NH) Monitor, April 29, 2013, http://www.concordmonitor.com/home/5932297-95/poet-billy-collins-selected-for-donald-hall-jane-kenyon-prize.

Taylor John. “Picnic, Lightning / The Art of Drowning.” Poetry 175, no. 4 (Feb. 2000): 273. ProQuest.

Stephens, Paul. “An Apology for Poetry, or Why Bother with Billy Collins?” Drunken Boat 4 (Spring 2002), http://www.drunkenboat.com/db4/stephens/apology.html.

The Craft of Natasha Trethewey

About Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, Ange Mlinko has said that the book “is structured like a dialectic, in three parts: the autobiographical as thesis, the historical as antithesis, and the intertwining of the personal and the historical as synthesis.” On reading this comment, I realized that the Book Club for Poets hadn’t yet considered the structure of an entire book of poems — and that Native Guard would be an excellent book for this kind of craft discussion. The individual poems of this collection — which received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry — are impressive in the range of forms Trethewey takes on: the pantoum, villanelle, a crown of sonnets, and even a palindrome, among other. But in addition to the mastery of individual poems, the overall structure of the book shows us how careful ordering of poems can create something greater than the sum of its parts. In our discussion, we basically walked through the book from title and dedication through to the final poem, paying attention to the shifts and echoes created with each additional element. We don’t have space to cover that entire discussion here, so I’d like to focus on the introductory poem.

Including a proem, or prefatory poem — one that appears in the volume even before the official first section — can be a risky technique for poets. Such a poem must bear the weight of a great deal of expectation: readers will want the poem to be both representative of the book as a whole and particularly strong on its own. The title of Trethewey’s proem is “Theories of Time and Space,” which sets the focus of the book at the broadest, most abstract view of how we experience history and memory as well as location. The poem starts with a meditative/discursive passage:

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. …

The colloquial tone of the opening two couplets contrast to the formality of the title, though both title and stanzas are similarly abstract. The opening lines reminded members of the Book Club of the New England comment “You can’t get there from here” (a wry remark about the remoteness of certain locations) and the Southern “You can’t go home again” of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. So the poem hints already at the North and South of the Civil War, which be the setting of “Native Guard,” a sequence of sonnets in the middle section of the book. The opening stanza also suggests a journey to a place we’ve been before, a place in our past — although “there’s no going home,” the lines suggest that “home” is precisely what the “you” of the poem had originally hoped to find.

Similarly philosophical is the second couplet, which brings to mind the Heraclitus’s familiar concept of time as a river: you can never put your foot into the same river twice. Time itself changes a location, or at least our understanding of it — the fixed point of place altered by history and our individual experience of the passage of time.

The narrator of the poem then says, “Try this: / / head south down Mississippi 49.” These lines break through abstractness by introducing a specific location and the specific action of driving. What follows is a long lyrical passage heavy with imagery, the imperative mood, and right-branching syntax:

… one-
by-one mile
markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion — dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain.

The location is clearly a Southern one: Gulfport, Mississippi. Psychologically, the images suggest waste, frustration, damage, threat: the minutes of life are being “ticked off” in travel to a “dead end,” the “stitches” of rigging suggesting the mending of cloth or flesh, though this mending is “loose.” Even the weather is “threatening.” We’ll learn later in the book that Trethewey’s mother was from Gulfport, so the proem is setting up that echo. The poem continues:

… Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp — buried
terrain of the past.

The landscape of Gulfport echoes back to the idea of the epigraph that precedes the proem: lines from “Meditation on Form and Measure” by Charles Wright, lines that declare that “everywhere” something is “underfoot,” “buried” beneath the present. Other burials later in the book will pick up on this idea of events and people being hidden from view. Sometimes these burials are specific, autobiographical, as in “What Is Evidence,” about Trethewey’s mother; other times, the burials are historical, as in “Native Guard,” the bodies and graves African American soldiers wiped from history — until the poet writes about them.

The narrator of “Meditations” then advises the “you” of the poem to “Bring only / / what you must carry — tome of memory, / its random blank pages.” So memory is a necessity, but also random and blank, something to be filled in.

The poem ends with a narrative yet to be unfolded: on the “dock” of departure for “Ship Island,”

someone will take your picture:

the photograph — who you were —
will be waiting when you return.

Whatever this journey is, the “you” will be changed by it. The photograph can capture only “who you were,” not who you are after experiencing Ship Island. Even if the reader is unaware of the history of Ship Island — the site of a prison for white Confederate soldiers guarded by the black Union guards — the reader understands that the journey is significant. What is learned or experienced there will change the “you” — and, by implication, the “we” of Trethewey’s readers.

The proem has established markers that recur throughout the book: the history of the Deep South, travel and return, memory, “tomes” of writing and history, the lost and buried. All of these elements will recur throughout Native Guard — in the first section, about the poet’s mother; in the center section, about African American history; and in the final section, in which the mixed-race narrator herself embodies both black and white and, in Mlinko’s words, “refuses to give up her legacy, which encompasses the land and its history, its mess and its murderousness.” As an example of a prefatory poem, “Theories of Time and Space” is extremely successful: it is powerful on its own and yet anticipates what’s to come.

Sources

Ange Mlinko, “More Than Meets the I,” Poetry Foundation, www. poetryfoundation.org /poetrymagazine/article/180081.

Natasha Trethewey, “Theories of Time and Space,” Native Guard (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 1.

The Craft of Donald Justice

The Book Club for Poets was so impressed by Ellen Bryant Voigt’s discussion of Donald Justice’s poetry when we discussed her Art of Syntax in January 2013, that we decided to devote our April meeting to Justice’s Collected Poems. And what we learned about the role of Donald Justice in American poetry was also impressive: his career bridges the poets he studied as a young man, such as John Crowe Ransom, to the poetry of his teachers, including John Berryman and Robert Lowell, to his classmates, such as Philip Levine and W. D. Snodgrass, and finally to the many poets who were his students. In the New England Review shortly after Justice died in 2004, C. Dale Young listed some of the poets Justice “helped to develop: Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, James Tate, Jorie Graham, Larry Levis, Tess Gallagher, Brenda Hillman, Rita Dove, Eric Pankey …”

When critics discuss the poetry of Donald Justice, two words always come up: nostalgia and craft. Some of us expressed surprise, at our April meeting, that his poems are so often focused on the past and on loss. Critics like James McCorkel note that behind Justice’s nostalgia lies a powerful desire to recognize, honor, preserve:

In his essay “Meters and Memory,” Justice comments that one motive for art is “to keep memorable what deserves to be remembered”; meters in poetry allow for emotion to be fixed and “called back again and again” … for both the audience and the poet. Justice continues, remarking that “for an audience the meters function in part to call back the words of the poem, so for the poet they may help to call the words forth” … Indeed, it may be argued that Justice’s project fuses poet and audience into a sustained moment of retrieval.

In contrast, Stephen Burt makes this comment about Justice’s Collected Poems: “[The post–World War I] world, its moods, and the properties that match them—repeated words, carefully balanced lines, childhood, retrospect, old south Florida—dominate Justice’s last poems as they did his first.” Burt states, “The absence of any transcendental dimension—the poet’s decision to refuse even hints of religious (or politico-historical) purpose—made nostalgia, bittersweet longing, and recognition of loss almost the only consolations his poems could seek.”

The Book Club had already read “For the Suicides of 1962” and “To the Hawks” in our January meeting—two poems that, I think, do in fact more than hint at “politico-historical” purposes and social issues, to powerful effect. But a question arose in our discussion of this critical response: when is a dominant tone or obsession effective in our own writing—and when do we undercut our ability to reach readers when we focus to a large degree on one kind of emotion?

One thing that critics agree on uniformly is Justice’s mastery of craft. For now I’ll focus on larger issues of structure rather than meter. Justice is especially skillful in using forms that suggest the obsessive quality of memory through repetition—forms like the pantoum, the villanelle, the sestina. Justice can follow such a form closely, but he is also masterful in varying expected patterns of a form. As Phoebe Pettingel puts it, Justice “dazzles us with his dexterity in complex metrical forms … [while] teasing our expectations with half-rhymes and parodies of the baroque, classical and romantic traditions.” One poem that “teases our expectations” is “Nostalgia of the Lakefronts,” a poem that sets up a pattern of repetition and almost immediately and continually varies it. Like a sestina, the poem is built of six stanzas, most of them containing six lines (though two in “Nostalgia” have a seventh line). The poem often uses repetition of end words, sestina-like, though not in a sestina pattern:

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood once vast with terrors and surprises,
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance—
And always the sad piano in the distance,

Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)
Or some far horn repeating over water
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,
And this is the world we run to from the world.

Or the two worlds come together and are one . . .

This poem reminds me of a quality I discussed in my post about Kay Ryan: how her “recombinant” rhymes suggest a form that feels familiar—even while resisting any traditional form. Justice’s stanzas in “Nostalgia of the Lakefronts” are enough like those of a sestina to bring it to mind, but his order of repeated end words is nothing like that of a sestina—though his use of the same words across two stanzas is indeed reminiscent of the stepping-on-one-another’s-heels repetition of the end word in line 6 of one sestina stanza and line 1 of the next. In the stanzas quoted above, for example, “distance” bridges the two stanzas: “Is fading to a landscape deep with distance— / And always the sad piano in the distance, / / Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling.”

Justice continues to vary his patterns in the third stanza, where he uses rhymes rather than repetition in lines 5 and 6: “And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo. / (Would this have been summer, 1942?)” In the first line of the fourth stanza, he uses assonance rather than repetition as the link between stanzas: the long oo sound of cockatoo and 1942 recurs in June in “By June the city always seems neurotic.” He also uses rhyme rather than end words later in this stanza, linking lines 4 and 6 rather than in 5 and 6, as he did earlier in the poem:

Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique—
To anthropomorphize the inanimate
With a love that masquerades as pure technique?

What connects these closing lines to the next stanza is neither repetition nor rhyme but a rephrasing of an idea: “O art and the child were innocent together!” Because we’ve come to expect the ending of one stanza to echo in the first line of the next, we’re more likely to interpret “art” as another way of saying “a love that masquerades as pure technique.” Justice uses a similar connection between the final two stanzas, with both the assonance of time/pine and the similar ideas of history/time acting as the bridge: “Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines. / / And after a time the lakefront disappears.”

This is, finally, a poem about the passing of time—and how art, “a love that masquerades as pure technique,” preserves what time otherwise steals: “the lakefront disappears / Into the stubborn verses of its exiles / Or a few gifted sketches.” Music also spurs the memory in this poem, in the “ghostly tinkling” of the “distant” piano in stanzas two and three, and the “far horn” playing its “lost note,” also in stanza two—and even in the wry hint of “the blues” in the fourth stanza, when the color of the lake is mentioned: “famed among painters for its blues, / Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection.” (The Book Club noted how often this kind of subtle punning in Justice’s work both lightens and creates tension with the sense of loss in the poems.)

The poet is just as gifted in the patterning of his free verse. One of my own favorite Justice poems is “On the Night of the Departure by Bus,” which is composed of two stanzas followed by a single-line stanza expressed as a question—and then another two stanzas followed by a second single-line question. (The poem was modeled on a poem of Rafael Alberti, as Walter Martin notes in his essay “Points of Departure.”) The first half of Justice’s poem focuses on a memory of youth and love and passion, and the repetition of words evoke both ardor and humor:

Tell me if you were not happy in those days.
You were not yet twenty-five,
And you had not yet abandoned the guitar.

I swore to you by your nakedness that you were a guitar.
You swore to me by your nakedness that you were a guitar.
The moon swore to us both by your nakedness that you had abandoned yourself completely.

Who would not go on living?

The repetition of “abandoned”—with its different meanings—is especially playful. What follows in the second half of the poem focuses on transformation via art, on departure, on imminent loss, as the future tense of the fourth stanza quickly shifts into the present perfect before the imagery that follows evokes a rapidly deteriorating scene:

The typewriter will be glad to have become the poem,
The guitar to have been your body,
I too have had the luck to envy the sole of your shoe in the dead of winter.

A passenger has lost his claim-check,
The brunette her barrette,
And I—I think that there are moths eating holes in my pockets,
That my place in line is evaporating,
That the moon is not the moon and the bus is not the bus.

What is the word for goodbye?

The passion is still here, in the extravagance of “I too have had the luck to envy the sole of your shoe in the dead of winter”—but confusion is swiftly entering the poem, possibly the confusion that comes with advancing age: “I—I think there are moths … in my pockets, / That my place in line is evaporating.” In the final line, the narrator is not even sure of the word necessary for this departure between lovers: “goodbye.”

We ended this Book Club discussion with another writing exercise and a challenge to take home with us: to write a poem of our own that uses some form of refrain or repetition—especially one that we could vary as well as repeat.

Sources

Burt, Stephen. “An Unillusioned Life.” Boston Review (February/March 2005). https://bostonreview.net/BR30.1/burt.html.

Justice, Donald. “Nostalgia of the Lakefronts.” In Collected Poems. Knopf, 2006. P. 222.

——. “On the Night of Departure by Bus.” In Collected Poems. Knopf, 2006. P. 138.

Martin, Walter. “Arts of Departure.” In Certain Solitudes: On the Poetry of Donald Justice. Ed. Dana Gioia and William Logan. University of Arkansas Press, 1997. P. 47.

McCorkel, James. “Donald Justice: The Artist Orpheus.” Kenyon Review 19, nos. 3–4 (Summer/Fall 1997): 180–188. ProQuest.

Pettingel, Phoebe. “Salt for the Spirit.” New Leader 87 (2004). ProQuest.

Young, C. Dale. “In Memoriam: Donald Justice.” New England Review 25, no. 3 (2004): 121.
Selected Works for Biographical Information:

“Donald Justice.” Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/donald-justice.

Hoy, Philip. “Donald Justice in Conversation.” Excerpted from Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 2002). http://waywiser-press.com/imprints/justice.html.

Rosenheim, Andrew. “Donald Justice: Award-Winning Poet Revered by his Peers and Influential to a Wide Range of Younger Writers.” (London) Independent, August 18, 2004, p. 29. ProQuest.
© 2013 Martha Carlson-Bradley

Ellen Bryant Voigt on the Craft of Syntax

When a poet doesn’t want to explore sentence structure in poetry, I opined at the last Book Club for Poets discussion, it’s as serious as saying that he or she isn’t interested in imagery or metaphor or alliteration. Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Art of Syntax offers numerous examples of the ways in which syntax is a powerful poetic tool: it heightens the music and rhythm of a poem, affects the pacing and unfolding of ideas and images, creates and varies patterns of language, and reinforces or plays against the unit of the line. And this tool is as essential in free verse as it is in metrical verse. Voigt says toward the end of the book,

It’s true that during the twentieth century, coincident with a greater tolerance for dissonance in all the arts, more room was sought for asymmetry and variation in poetry, but this now seems less a revolution than an evolution of aesthetic intent. And after one hundred years of free verse invention and mastery, contemporary poets need not focus solely on lineation … Lineation affords quite evident and audible opportunities for making pattern, and we will and should go on exploring them all. But it’s useful to remember that other sorts of pattern are also there for us to use—rhythms inherent to the language we write in, the source of its muscle and sinew and music, its clarity and its resonance and its power. (144)

Those patterns-beneath-the-patterns are what we focused on in our discussion of The Art of Syntax. In Donald Justice’s “To the Hawks,” for instance, the sentence structure creates certain kinds of repetition and variation, in addition to the more obvious couplets and internal rhymes. Voigt notes, for instance, that the poem both begins and ends with sentences that are complete, end-stopped, within the couplet stanza (101–102; 108). Here are the opening stanzas:

Farewell is the bell
Beginning to ring.

The children singing
Do not year hear it.

And here are the concluding stanzas:

Her mouth is open
To sound the alarm.

The mouth of the world
Grows round with the sound.

In between this opening and ending, the sentences begin to overflow the unit of the couplet, so that the fourth and fifth sentences are much longer (104): the fifth sentence is over ten lines long; the fifth, eight lines. The syntax also becomes more complex, including “hypotaxis” (sentences that include both a main and dependent clauses) (104-105):

… The sun Is in fact shining
Upon the schoolyard,

On children swinging
Like tongues of a bell

Swung out on the long
Arc of a silence

That will not seem to
Have been a silence

Till it is broken
As it is breaking.

Justice’s poem also shows how syntax can unfold in a way that puts particular emphasis on an image. See how the delayed predicate in these lines emphasizes “farewell”:

The young schoolteacher,
Waving one arm in

Time to the music,
Is waving farewell.

What Voigt calls a “violent enjambment” (107) also slows our comprehension of what is happening here: “Waving one arm in” seems to be a description of movement—as in, I’m not waving my arm outward toward the world but inward, toward myself or toward the interior of a building. But the rest of the sentence “corrects” this initial reading: the teacher is waving “in / Time to the music.” After that momentary adjustment, our minds are hit with the final line and, with it, the reality of what’s happening in the poem: students and teacher in a schoolyard being interrupted mid-gesture, mid-song, as a nuclear bomb hits.

In our discussion, we also spent time reviewing statements Voigt makes about English in particular—that it is a language that relies on the stress of syllables to create meaning and that our syntax depends heavily on the order of words in a sentence (rather than word endings to indicate “subject,” “direct object” and so on). What all this means is that the tension between metrical patterns and speech rhythms is particularly marked in English. I have already discussed meter and syntax—quoting Voigt—in my post about Larkin’s “The Trees” and “Cut Grass,” so for now I’ll point out what Voigt notices about the “flexible grid” (54) that meter often has to be in English poetry, as illustrated in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.” She notes how the Bard slowly unfolds the “fundament” of subject and predicate, delaying the completion of his first sentence—while varying the iambic pattern in virtually every line of the poem (54-61). Try reading the poem aloud and listen especially for the bunched stresses, as in men’s eyes, outcast state, deaf heaven.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising
Haply I think on thee—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Do you see it? The first main clause of the poem does not appear until line 10: “Haply I think on thee—” And at this point, the entire mood of the poem also shifts, from despair to joy. What also anticipates this shift—in terms of sound—is the truly iambic rhythm of “With what I most enjoy contented least,” which Voigt identifies as “the poem’s first exactly iambic pentameter line, one that is completely consistent with lexical, syntactical, and rhetorical stresses” (57-58). This line concludes the poem’s opening octave, and the following sestet also ends with a line in which the spoken rhythms of English match the abstract pattern of iambic pentameter: “That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” The emotional resolution of the poem is mirrored by the regularity of the iambic pentameter, which gives the poem what Voigt calls its “unmistakable and gratifying closure” (61). Far from being a “flaw” in English poetry, this tension between meter and syntax gives poets an opportunity to embody and resolve tension and drama.

For this session of the Book Club for Poets, we had time not only to look at one of Voigt’s own poems in terms of its syntax but also to do a writing exercise ourselves. I’m hoping to do more exercises in the future.

We were also so taken with Donald Justice’s poems in Voigt’s discussions that we decided to discuss Justice’s Collected Poems (Knopf, 2006) for our April 16, 2013, meeting. If you have favorite poems within the collection, let me know, and I’ll try to fit them into our discussion.

Source

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2009).

© 2013 Martha Carlson-Bradley

The Craft of Jane Hirshfield

The Book Club for Poets had decided, months ago, to discuss the work of whichever poet won the 2012 Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. That poet turned out to be Jane Hirshfield, and in many ways, this “chance” selection seemed uncannily appropriate for us. While expressing her own distinct voice, Hirshfield’s poetry also echoes many of the qualities we find in the work of poets we’ve already discussed, such as the spirituality of Li-Young Lee’s work and the gnomic quality we noted in both Kay Ryan’s and Emily Dickinson’s poems. The Book Club also benefited from the many interviews Hirshfield has given and the essays she has published. Two in particular—“Spiritual Poetry” and “Two Secrets: On Poetry’s Inward and Outward Looking”—amplified points we made in our summer discussion about how craft can help us express the inexpressible.

In my summer post about Li-Young Lee’s poems, I focused on two of the techniques identified by Mary Johnson as ways of expressing spiritual experiences—rhetoric and paradox. In “Spiritual Poetry,” Hirshfield identifies further techniques, such as expressions of “abundance” and the use of dialogue. We see dialogue in “The Promise,” for example, in which the narrator of the poem engages in a one-sided conversation with several actors in her world—flowers, a spider, a leaf, her own body, the earth itself. Each time she commands “Stay,” these actors immediately change or flee. Especially effective, I think, is the metaphor that compares the inconstancy of the speaker’s own body to the well-meaning but futile—and comic—attempts of a dog to obey its master:

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

The one exception to the pattern of failure are the human “loves” of the speaker, who come in at the conclusion of the poem:

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

The rhetorical device of repetition—Stay, Stay, Stay—at the beginning of the first five stanzas heightens the effect of each disappointing response and gives an ambiguity to that promise of the lovers in the final stanza. It’s possible to read that Always as a promise doomed to failure. (Like the cut flowers, no human lover is immortal.) Or we can interpret that Always as the exception to the rule: love outlasts even the people who inspired it and shared it with us. Or we can see both endings as true, simultaneously.

Several other Hirshfield poems we discussed use dialogue, such as “Bruises,” which addresses the narrator’s aging body and possibly an aging lover, and “Shadow: An Assay,” which explores several possible roles and meanings of the narrator’s shadow.

Much of what Hirshfield has said in print focuses perhaps less on specific ways of using language and more on the attitude of the poet toward the world. “Permeability,” for example, might mean allowing an image to contain multiple meanings. (“The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of Buddhist awakening,” she notes in “Spiritual Poetry.”) But permeability is also an openness to all aspects of experience. “If a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing,” Hirshfield says in “Spiritual Poetry,” “it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.“ A poem that illustrates this willingness to be open is “A Blessing for Wedding,” which also demonstrates the technique of “abundance.” In the poem, the narrator lists images taken from someone’s wedding day:

Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm …

We noted, during our Book Club discussion, that the imagery is satisfying not only for its precision but also for its surprises (the egg releasing not a wren but its song) and for subtle echoes and variations: the red of the fox kits is echoed in the maple’s leaves and the fire, for example; the cold of the snow is balanced by the warmth of the fire, and the ripening of the persimmon is balanced by the dying of the leaves. The abundance and fullness of the images in the poem help create a sense of “the richness of all that passes—a passing we know ourselves part of” (Hirshfield, “Spiritual Poetry”). But the when the listing continues, the narrator does not censor out aspects of life that we might normally consider inappropriate for a wedding day:

Today when someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
or someone who will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace.

It’s not that the images get increasingly ominous here: instead, the speaker alternates between death and birth, drought and rain, hunger and starlight, sorrow and embrace. What the narrator is wishing for the married couple is not just happiness but fullness of experience. Only by being open can the couple fully experience their marriage, which must include joy and grief, sensuality and mortality: “Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly / Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears …”

Similar to permeability are the modes of expression that Hirshfield identifies in “Two Secrets.” These modes concern specific language techniques but focus even more on the poet’s attitude toward—relationship to—the outer world. Here is how Hirshfield defines these “inward and outward” looking modes:

Outer images carry reflective and indirect meanings as well. Poems … generally take one of three possible stances. In the first stance [subjective mode], outer reference serves the poet’s interior thinking: the world beyond the self appears, but the relationship is that of monologue, with a human-centered consciousness dominating. In the second stance [reflective mode], the poet and the outer world stand face to face in mutual regard; out of that meeting, the poem’s statements arise. Here the relationship is that of dialogue, with the wider world treated as both equal and other. In the third stance [objective mode], the poet becomes an intermediary, a medium through whom the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness may speak; in poetry’s transparent and active transcription, language itself becomes an organ of perception. (131. Boldface added throughout. Phrases in brackets are Hirshfield’s terms, which appear also on 131.)

These modes are beautifully illustrated in Hirshfield’s own “Love in August.” The first stanza is written in objective mode, or “pure observation,” which, she says, is rare—in terms of entire poems being written in this mode—outside “Buddhist and Taoist traditions” (141). And, in fact, this stanza does read like a haiku:

White moths
against the screen
in August darkness.

This is a scene that will no doubt seem familiar to us, though the short lines focus our attention intently on each individual component of the image: the “white moths” seen first in isolation, then in location (“against the screen”), and then in contrast to the “darkness” of an August night. It’s hard for our metaphor-loving minds not to read significance into the ending of summer and into moths themselves, but the language is focused on the visual image of something in the “outer” world.

The even shorter second stanza is written in subjective mode: “Some clamor / in envy.” The narrator is projecting the human emotion of envy onto nonhuman creatures. It’s an imaginative leap that works, I think, to convey the restlessness and persistence of moths in response to a light they cannot reach. In less-skillful hands such anthropomorphizing runs the “risk,” as Hirshfield puts it, of “sentimental fog” and “solipsism” (“Two Secrets,” 131). But in “Love in August,” the poet uses the subjective mode with restraint and for the purpose of expressing the outer world vividly rather than using the outer world to look only inward.

The final stanza demonstrates the reflective mode—in which the nonhuman and human appear in equal stature, revealing something about both inward and outward realities, and the relationship between them:

Some spread large
as two hands
of a thief

who wants to put
back in your cupboard
the long-taken silver.

Because human interpretation is included here, we understand the relevance of the images, of the moths, to the human narrator: the moths themselves are a gift, and seeing them this clearly creates a sense of something being restored to us. But the moths are themselves “only”—and wholly—moths: though compared to something human, they aren’t forced to personify the narrator’s emotion or to suggest a reality “more important” than they are. It’s that intersection of the human and nonhuman—on the thinness of a screen—that is the gift.

In previous postings about our Book Club discussions, I’ve talked about the power of pattern and repetition in poetry. “Love in August” illustrates the power of variation. The layering and shifting of modes create much of our experience as readers of this poem. Consider how much the poem would lose if it were rewritten, for example, only in subjective or objective mode. Or think how less intense the poem would be if it didn’t contain the objective mode in the first stanza.

I think also that it’s important for us as poets to periodically ask the “big picture” questions about our craft. What do our own poems reveal about how we see our relationship to the outer world? And can we try to see the world in more varied ways?

Sources

Hirshfield, Jane. “A Blessing for Wedding.” In Come, Thief, 59. New York: Knopf, 2012.

———. “Love in August.” In Come, Thief, 28. New York: Knopf, 2012.

———. “The Promise.” In Come, Thief, 22.New York: Knopf, 2012.

———. “Spiritual Poetry,  Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178390; originally published June 28, 2006.

———. “Two Secrets: On Poetry’s Inward and Outward Looking.” In Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, 125-52. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

© 2012 Martha Carlson-Bradley

Saying the Unsayable—Li-Young Lee’s Poetry

When I’m asked to define poetry, I like to say that poetry is the use of language to express experiences beyond the ordinary scope of language. This way of thinking about poetry, it seems to me, includes the widest possible range of styles and schools of poetry. And this definition is especially relevant when we think about poets who focus on spiritual or mystical experiences, the way Li-Young Lee often does in his writing.

In the Valparaiso Review, Hila Ratzabi comments that Li-Young Lee “is not only one of our best contemporary poets of the sacred; he is an authentic mystic, in the classical sense of the mystic who uses language to access a realm beyond language.” When reading Lee’s books for our Book Club for Poets discussion, I remembered a wonderful class I took with Mary Johnson, author of An Unquenchable Thirst; her Writing Beyond the Senses class was offered during the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s 2011 Writers’ Day conference. It occurred to me that many of the techniques Johnson discussed for “expressing transcendent experiences” are illustrated beautifully in Lee’s poems.

Among the techniques that Johnson mentioned in our class were paradox, metaphor, and “wisdom’s voice,” which (for our Book Club for Poets discussion) I called “rhetoric”—the skillful use of word choice and syntax for artistic effect, especially when the effects resemble those of the Bible and other spiritual texts. For today, I’ll be focusing on rhetoric and paradox.

Let’s look at rhetoric first. In “Persimmons,” a poem in Rose, Lee’s first book, the poet concludes the poem with elements of what Johnson calls “wisdom’s voice”:

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

The Oh recalls other poems and spiritual texts, like the Bible. (A quick online search in the King James Bible shows that “oh” is used ten times in the Book of Job alone, and in eleven of the Psalms, among many other passages.) And, as the Bible often does, this final stanza of the poem uses listing—or “litany,” as Johnson puts it—as a rhetorical device, in this case, a list of noun phrases: the strength, the tense / precision; scent of the hair, texture of persimmons, the weight. The last line also shows how effective variation within repetition can be. Hear what would be lost if Lee had too strictly followed the noun–prepositional phrase pattern in the last thee lines:

scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
the ripe weight in your palm.

This isn’t bad, but the inversion of the phrases in the last line, as Lee wrote it, keeps the pattern from sounding too predictable and also puts the emphasis on the physical sensation of the persimmon in the palm—ending the poem with the ripe weight. This is the phrase and the image that lingers in our minds.

Another poem that the Book Club discussed, “Become Becoming,” also uses repetition and variation very successfully. Many of the lines have similar beginnings:

Wait for evening.
Then you’ll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don’t forget the one who listened in silence …

In teaching poetry workshops, I’ve often been surprised by how powerful simple anaphora can be. I’ve asked participants to write five or six short, related sentences—and to then experiment by writing “And” before each one. The pattern, with its echoes of Whitman and the Bible, almost always gives a text gravitas and makes it sound like a poem. The effect is so immediate that it almost seems like cheating. What Lee does here is more complicated than simple anaphora. He repeats syntactical structures (clauses in imperative mood starting with wait; clauses that begin with then; noun phrases starting with the one) but alternates between them. The last line quoted above—“And don’t forget the one who listened in silence”—combines two forms that appear above it: the imperative command in “And don’t forget” echoes the “wait” clauses while the line also includes another “the one who” phrase. Some readers have interpreted the imperative mode and use of lists as Lee’s use of the language of self-help books, and passages in poems like “Immigrant Blues” certainly borrow phrases typical of self-help texts. But the imperative is also the language of prayer: Give us this day our daily bread. / And forgive us our trespasses …

The final lines of “Become Becoming” create a startling metaphor that is also paradoxical:

Then you’ll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.

The book is simultaneously read and destroyed—the way our lives are most fully fixed in our minds, that is, comprehended, when we also understand that they are fleeting. Another poem that concludes with paradox is “Falling: The Code”:

… and dream I know

the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-

body, the earth
falling to earth

once and forever, over
and over.

How can “the earth fall to earth”? How can something that occurs “once and forever” also occur “over and over”? And yet, if we see the apple as a product of the earth, this falling makes perfect sense. And if we imagine multiple apples falling, what happens “once” in a single apple’s existence occurs “over and over” as each individual apple joins its mates in falling. Earlier in the poem, the narrator has invited us to compare the apples to “bruised bodies,” who, like humans, can feel “the terror of diving through the air” and yet, in daylight, “all look alike.” It’s not much of a leap to imagine individual human lives “falling to earth / once and forever, over / and over.” It’s to Lee’s credit that he allows his readers have this recognition on our own. We get to interpret the imagery instead of having the poet do it for us.

When I read Lee’s poetry, it strikes me afresh that poetry in general—not just mystic poetry—uses language to create experiences beyond the scope of ordinary language. It is through the structures and patterns of language, not just imagery, not just ideas, that we create experiences for our readers.

Poems Cited

Li-Young Lee. “Become Becoming.”  Behind My Eyes (New York: Norton, 2008), 21–22.

———. “Falling: The Code.” Rose (Brockport, N.Y.: 1986), 28–29.

———. “Persimmons.” Rose (Brockport, N.Y.: 1986), 17–19.

© 2012 Martha Carlson-Bradley

The Craft of Elizabeth Bishop

I have to admit to feeling some anxiety about preparing a Book Club for Poets discussion of the work of Elizabeth Bishop. In the past, I’ve taught hour-long classes on just one poem by Bishop. How could I talk in a meaningful way about “her work” in just two hours?

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is writing that not only bears but actually benefits from repeated close readings, our appreciation of her craft deepening each time, especially for her masterpieces, like “The Moose.” I decided that one way to prepare our discussion would be to point out the kinds of things that Bishop can teach us about working both on the small scale of line and stanza and on the large scale of patterns across an entire poem. Can we set this as a challenge for ourselves as writers—can we produce poems that are artistically satisfying, compelling, on both the small and the large scale?

In preparing for this discussion, I was struck especially by the many uses Bishop makes of repetition in her poetry. Repetition can be used to emphasize rhythm and create pattern across stanzas, as in the opening stanzas of “The Moose”:

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in
the bay not at home;

The repetition of bay in the last two lines of the second stanza are not merely repetition, in the pejorative way we use that term when, say, grading compositions. Instead, the repetition creates music, both with identical rhyme in those lines (which also rhymes with day and bay in the first stanza) and with a particular rhythm: “the bay coming in / the bay not at home.” In addition, the third stanza also begins with another dependent clause starting with where, continuing the syntactical pattern set by the first two stanzas. Another way that the third stanza repeats the work of the second is through a similar use of comparison: Stanza two compares how the river moves at rising tide and at ebbing tide. Stanza three describes how the sun looks at high tide and then at low tide: the sun “sometimes . . . sets / facing a red sea” and other times “veins . . . / rich mud in burning rivulets.” The overall effect is very balanced and calm—an almost storybook opening, which will give way to swift movement and “interruptions” and epiphanies later in the poem.

Smaller-scale repetition like this can be used also to intensify imagery, as in “At the Fishhouses.” Look at the references to color and translucence in these lines:

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster poets, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks
is of an apparent translucence . . .

A bit later, Bishop describes other surfaces that shine in a pale, translucent way—the “layers of beautiful herring scales” that line the fish tubs and wheelbarrows, scales that look like “iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on them.” Not only does all this silver and iridescence reveal what is beautiful, even dreamlike, in an unlikely location—“down by one of the fishhouses”—but these images also intensify, by contrast, a  discordant image that soon follows: “an ancient wooden capstan” with “some melancholy stains, like dried  blood.” On the larger scale, echoes of the earlier shine and silveriness recur in the fish-scale “sequins” on the “vest” and “thumb” of the old man and, even later, on the “thin silver / tree trunks” making up the ramp that leads into the ocean, as well as “the gray stones” beneath the surface of the water. This is an important ramp: it marks the moment the poem shifts into the narrator’s meditation on the significance of the ocean and, eventually, of knowledge and time.

In a poem like “In the Waiting Room,” repetition serves another function: to evoke the perspective of a child. Note how often a form of the verb wait (which I’ve formatted in boldface) appears in the opening lines:

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs . . .

This repetition works to reinforce other elements of the language that suggest a child’s voice: the short sentences of “It was winter. It got dark / early” and the parenthetic and, strictly speaking, redundant statement about a childhood milestone: “(I could read).”

The repetition of key words and images is presented quite differently later in the poem. For instance, the syntax gets more complex when the narrator contemplates what it means to be human, and we start to feel the narrator’s adult voice assert itself. Instead of following the primary pattern of the opening lines quoted above—mostly clauses beginning with subject and verb, followed by modifiers—the sentence that explores the significance of the child’s epiphany delays the appearance of the main verb, forcing the reader to complete the entire sentence to understand the full meaning of the main clause. So even though this passage echoes images that appear earlier in the poem—boots, hands, voice, National Geographic, breasts—the poem feels as though it’s doing something very different than the opening lines did:

What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?

Similarly, the final stanza repeats many details already mentioned in the poem: the city and state, the season, and the date. But now, after the child has realized that she is “an Elizabeth,” a human being among many others, the repeated details take on a charged sense of significance. How strange that the world should still be as it was:

The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

The steady, primarily iambic three-beat pattern is very strong here, and the long vowel sounds—outside, night, cold, 1918—add to the music of the lines. This is clearly not the repetition of a child’s voice but a rhetorical frame that echoes the opening of the poem while amping up the music.

Other poems in Bishop’s work repeat key phrases in this heightened way. Look again at “At the Fishhouses.” After the narrator describes the ramp leading down into the water, she calls the sea “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal.” Several lines later—after a funny narrative passage about a seal listening to hymns—she says, “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy water . . .” This repetition, with some variation, introduces the most meditative section of the poem, which describes the sea as “icily free above the stones.” In this section the narrator again repeats the phrase, with variation: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” With each repetition, each echo, the narrator moves further away from the narrative moment and deeper into her final metaphor, in which “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.”

In the Book Club discussion, we also talked at length about the different modes Bishop uses, and these modes also form large-scale patterns in her work. In “The Moose,” the narrative of the movement through the Nova Scotia landscape is suspended by a lyric moment describing the fog, which allows the narrator an imagined intimacy with “white hens’ feathers,” “gray glazed cabbages,” and the flowers of the garden. This kinship with nature is echoed in a later moment of intimacy with nature, this time on a larger scale: the moose herself, “high as a church, / homely as a house,” brings all the passengers on the bus together in their response: “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?”

There is so much more to say about Bishop’s work. One participant e-mailed me later, saying that if I ever taught a course on Bishop to let him know. I’d welcome that opportunity, and if it comes along, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

All poems are quoted from  Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983).

© 2012 Martha Carlson-Bradley

The Craft of Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin’s poetry, on the surface traditional and apparently overt, is filled with tensions and contrasts: The poet both rejects the possibility of eternal life offered by Christianity and evokes our longing for that kind of certainty. His narrators are often detached, ironic observers of other people, yet Larkin’s poems focus on the common experiences of humanity. Larkin wrote most often, and masterfully, with the old tools of rhyme and meter—but his poems concentrate on contemporary experience and use conversational, natural diction spiked with more lyric phrasing. Some poems use swearwords, but his language is alliterative, assonant, and rhythmic. His poems are rooted in place and description yet often leap into metaphors that transcend the just here, the just now. His poems are frequently very funny, often deeply cynical, and always extremely intelligent. On a personal note, I’m very drawn to Larkin’s handling of time: how he evokes scenes in his contemporary world but also captures how time seems to slow, or leap forward, or circle back.

As we noticed in our Book Club for Poets discussion of some of Larkin’s shorter lyrics, it would be a mistake to confuse this poet’s clarity for simplicity. “The Trees” starts out by apparently striking the familiar chord of spring as a metaphor for rebirth: “The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said.” But by the fourth line of that first quatrain, this isn’t a statement of simple, optimistic renewal: “Their greenness is a kind of grief.” It’s the exploration of the source of that grief that drives the rest of the poem.

As Ellen Bryant Voigt has noted in The Art of Syntax, while the first stanza is extremely regular in its iambic pattern, the second breaks the pattern:

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.

(Voigt hears “No, they die too” as four stressed beats in a row. It’s certainly possible to read the line that way, though I think perhaps “die” is not stressed. Larkin doesn’t seem to stress it in a Poetry Archive recording.) Voigt notes that even though the rest of the poem reasserts the regular iambic pattern, “an unease has entered the poem at its center” (69). When Larkin returns to the image of the trees in “fullgrown” leaf, they only “seem” to be saying “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” The final word of the poem—“afresh”—is actually the source of our grief. The rebirth of the trees is an illusion—but even that illusion is beyond our human abilities. That sensation of renewal is powerful, however, and cheerfully asserted: grief and hope expressed to us simultaneously.

Part of our enjoyment in reading this poem comes from its music—its rhythms and sound echoes. Within that music, Larkin is capable of both colloquial speech and more traditionally lyric statement:

Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

It’s the contrast of that casual “yearly trick,” I think, that makes the music of the next line and its metaphor deeply satisfying, with its repetition of r sounds and very regular iambic meter. At the same time, “yearly trick” balances out, grounds, the poetic impulse to compare the growth rings of trees to something “written.” In the wrong hands such a metaphor might seem like a clumsy, or precious, personification.

Voigt notes that in “Cut Grass,” another short lyric, it’s easy to misread the poem as making a distinction between the “Long, long” death of the mown grass and the survival of a series of fruitful summer images—chestnut flowers, hedges snowlike strewn, Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, a high-builded cloud. But the prepositional phrases of the second sentences in the poem actually suggest that all the flowers and images of summer are not just living “in” June but actually dying “with” the grass:

Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
with chestnut flowers …

The trochees in this list of summer images—young leafed, lost lanes, high-builded—echo the opening double trochees of the very first line: Cut grass | lies frail. (See Voigt’s full discussion of the poem in The Art of Syntax, 73–77.) It’s the poem’s capacity to have two simultaneous meanings—one of them considerably darker than the other—that creates a sense of surprise in our reading of the poem, and it’s that surprise that makes the poem memorable.

Since our Book Club discussion of “The Whitsun Weddings”—a long, complex poem—I’ve had the chance to more fully explore the stanza structure of the poem. Joshua Weiner notes, “Larkin manages the easy naturalness of his voice so flawlessly that one hardly notices the poem’s rhyming stanza structure (ABABCDECDE), a kind of shortened sonnet (the quatrain is Shakespearean, the sestet Petrarchan).” Weiner points out that “Keats invented this stanza for his summer odes,” so Larkin both “evokes the summer season, its redolent promise and pastoral sweetness” and balances this sweetness with “grittier” images of “industrial froth” and “the stale smell of the cloth seats inside the train carriage.”

James Fenton also discusses this stanza form, including the effect of the shortened third line of each stanza of “The Whitsun Weddings” He compares Larkin’s formal pattern to that of Keats in Ode to a Nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness —
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Here the short line (“In some melodious plot”) doesn’t appear until line 8 and creates what Fenton calls “an interesting variation.” Because that short line appears well into the established pattern of the poem, it strikes me as evoking the opposite of “delayed gratification”: an early, easy fulfillment of the rhyme pattern—an ease appropriate to the “happy lot” of the bird.

Fenton notes that “Larkin imitates [Keats’s] design in The Whitsun Weddings, but he puts his signature on the form by varying the placing of the short line.” The resulting effect, Fenton says, is “a carefully prepared but relaxed, prosy effect: the urban details, lovingly marshalled, prepare us for the beauty of the rural evocation of the last two lines [of the first stanza].” I think the first short line, which comes so early in the poem, certainly seems more like an abrupt statement—with that proselike quality Fenton talks about—than an “interesting variation.” That is, there hasn’t been enough pattern established yet in the first stanza for that third line to seem like variation. Fenton observes that the short line in Larkin’s poem may have appeared early in the stanza by “chance.” “But,” he continues, “once it has happened in that way, in a regular stanzaic poem, the pattern must be repeated, but repeated in a way that is not repetitive. If you look at the short lines in The Whitsun Weddings from a technical point of view, you will find that each is handled in a slightly different way: enjambed with line before or after it, made to stand alone, broken with a comma, and so forth. Each variation seems utterly natural, but each has been prepared for.”

What I love in this poem is the way it shifts, subtly, inexorably, in place and time and attitude. The oddly quantitative opening—“Not till about / One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday / Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out”—will give way to descriptions of the landscape; then depictions, perhaps condescending, of working-class wedding parties; then multiple points of view, as the narrator imagines how the different people at the weddings—children, fathers, mothers, young women—feel about the ceremony that’s just taken place; to descriptions of the increasingly urban landscape; to the narrator’s recognition of at least the potential of marriage, in the phrase “all the power / That being changed can give”; and finally to that closing metaphor of “an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Time presses only onward, as the image of the “short-shadowed cattle” early in the trip is replaced by “Long shadows over major roads” later in the afternoon. At the same time, the pastoral and urban change in proportion to one another but always overlap in the landscape, as the pollution tainting the countryside in “Canals with floatings of industrial froth” makes way for a vision of  London as a kind of cultivated farmland: “I thought of London spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.”

In the penultimate stanza, the narrator has a vision that the married couples themselves do not: the past, present, future are brought together in a very moving, even tender way: “and none / Thought of the others they would never meet / Or how their live would all contain this hour.” In the future, the individual couples won’t recognize this shared journey as part of their past, which is now the present moment of the poem. Only the narrator sees past, future, present coalesce like this. His recognition of this moment—this journey of “some fifty minutes”—is underscored by his awareness that the moment is on the brink of passing, with the train’s arrival in London: “walls of blackened moss / Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail  / Travelling coincidence.” In an interview in the Paris Review, Larkin spoke about his desire as a poet to capture experience: “You’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience.” His narrator in “The Whitsun Weddings” seems to feel the same urgency to recognize, and so capture, the fleeting moment.

Running through all of this movement is the music of Larkin’s poetry. Note the alliteration and assonance of these line:

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose …

In addition to the end rhymes, these lines contain the internal rhymes All/tall in the first two lines; the long o echoes of slow, shadowed, floatings, rose; the long i sounds of miles and wide, and the short i’s of inland, industrial, dipped. There’s also the alliteration of slow, stopping, southwards; short-shadowed; floatings, froth; hothouse, hedges. The rhythm includes variations of iambic pentameter, with five beats in nearly every line. There is an example of poetic inversion of the syntax—“A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept”—but the language of the description is so clear and the phrasing of the first stanza was so matter-of-fact that this inversion doesn’t strike the ear, it seems to me, as “too poetic.”

Another poem that we discussed in detail was “The Explosion.” This poem isn’t rhymed, but it follows a metrical pattern, trochaic tetrameter, the same meter as Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Stephen Dobyns notes, in Best Words, Best Order, that this use of meter expresses a difference in class in British poetry, iambic pentameter being representative of elevated, upper-class language, and trochaic patterns of lower, “uneducated” classes (117).  The poem is also a wonderful example of how narrative and lyric writing can be combined in the same poem—and how Larkin creates a sense of surprise in his poetry. As the Book Club discussed, the explosion itself is not a surprise: the title of the poem sets us up to expect it. What is surprising, as Dobyns notes, is that “Larkin greatly diminishes the actual explosion” (47):

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The explosion is experienced for readers as it would have been for people at the surface, not down in the mine with the workers. As I noted in our Book Club discussion, the telegraphic phrasing and pauses of this stanza echo the description of the probably young miner earlier in the poem:

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

After the explosion, the poem suddenly shifts into the language of the church, quoted in italics: The dead go on before us. The opening of the next stanza, “Plain as the lettering in the chapels / It was said,” is intriguing. What is “plain as the lettering in the chapels”? And when does it become plain? Has the poem actually jumped to the event of the men’s funeral service? Or is the mind anticipating the funeral, the language of the church being imagined at the very moment of the explosion—that kind of tremor being subtly but unmistakably, to a miner’s wife, a fatal sign? That is, do the women’s thoughts jump from the first evidence of an explosion immediately to the immortality of the soul?

With the stanza that begins The dead go on before us, the poem doesn’t follow a strictly narrative approach. In lyric fashion, it jumps by association from the memorial service to the imaginations of the surviving widows—who envision how their husbands seem in death “Larger than in life they managed— / Gold as on a coin, or walking / Somehow from the sun towards them.”

As Dobyns says, “The shifts in time, language, and levels of reality all create surprises, that is, they are unexpected. … These surprises leave us uncertain as to what lies ahead and set us up for the main surprise, which is the reappearance of the eggs” (49). That final image of “the eggs unbroken” has been interpreted by critics as an allusion to the immortality of the soul, and eggs in Christianity certainly are associated with resurrection. But I think they also allude to the fragility of life, how easily lives can be broken—and to the irony that the natural workings of the world continue as they always have, despite the death of any individual human, no matter how beloved.

More than one of my teachers noted over the years that some writers are known for innovation, like Joyce and Eliot—while others are known for taking traditional forms and  fulfilling their potential in a masterful way. John Milton falls into this camp, as does Robert Frost and, I think, Elizabeth Bishop. And certainly Philip Larkin does. Even for those of us who may not choose to write in metrical forms, Larkin has a lot to teach us about pattern and variation, layers of possible meaning—even paradoxical meanings—tension, texture, music, movement.

When we turn to the poetry of Bishop for the April 11, 2012, meeting of the Book Club for Poets, it will be interesting to compare her work to Larkin’s. We’ll see in a poem like “The Moose,” for example, a complex journey similar to that of “The Whitsun Weddings” as well a combination of lyric and narrative approaches similar to that of “The Explosion.”

Works Cited

Dobyns, Stephen. Best Words, Best Order (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996; paperback 1997).

Fenton, James. “Writing to a Tall Order: James Fenton Looks at the Most Complicated Forms of Rhyme.” Guardian, September 20, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview24. (This article is an “edited extract” from Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry, the first American edition of which was published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2002.)

Phillips, Robert. “Philip Larkin: The Art of Poetry No. 30” (interview). Paris Review 84 (summer 1982), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin. (Larkin rarely gave interviews.)

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. “On the Grid.” In The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (Graywolf, 2009), 65–77.

Weiner, Joshua. “Philip Larkin: ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: Philip Larkin Swings” [in “Poem Guide” section]. The Poetry Foundation, 2011, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poem/178047.

© 2012 Martha Carlson-Bradley

The Craft of John Murillo

I had the pleasure of meeting John Murillo at the Frost Place two summers ago — and of hearing him read his poems and give a class on duende. So, in preparing my notes for our Book Club for Poets discussion of his Up Jump the Boogie, I was happy to find some of his comments on duende, in a review of John Crowe Ransom that Murillo wrote for the National Book Foundation in March 2011. Murillo, who finds duende in Ransom’s work, discusses a common misconception:

I can hear the criticism already: Duende is not a matter of craft, but quite the opposite. It’s that bright black heat boiling up from the ground, through the gut, and out the mouth or hands or whatever the artist is using to fashion his art. But I’d argue that this is an incomplete view, that Lorca himself was a craftsman of the highest order. (He once wrote — tired, I believe, of critics treating him as if his work were all viscera and no brain — that if he is a poet by virtue of the duende, he is also a poet by virtue of knowing exactly what a poem is and how it works.) Although he argued for art that started from and ended in soulcry, he also knew that the means of achieving this — the wrestling with the duende that he spoke of — is by way of craft. (Consider Valery’s proposition that the poet’s duty is not to experience what he called the “poetic state,” but to evoke that state in others by using whatever technique he has at his disposal.) Duende, then, is both source of inspiration as well as a quality of art.

A bit later in the same review, Murillo also notes, “Lorca tells us that in Spanish and Mexican culture — where he considers duende most apparent — one of the defining qualities of duende is the way in which it engages death, embracing it as a necessary condition of this world.”

Murillo himself, in his own remarkable first collection of poems, exhibits both soulcry and craft, often “embracing death . . . as a necessary condition of this world.” Those who were murdered or died are remembered; and violence, with its potential for death, is explored in these poems.

The craft is evident in the music and rhythms of his language and in the many poetic forms he uses and makes his own in the book. In section V of “Renegades of Funk,” the narrator says about himself and his friends at age twelve: “few / There were among us couldn’t ride a beat / In strict tetrameter.” And there are indeed poems based on rap rhythms — as well as poems influenced by the repetition and variation of blues song, and sonnets and sestinas and poems written in couplets and other stanzas and in free verse. Listen to the music of the opening poem, “Ode to the Crossfader”:

Got this mixboard itch

this bassline lifted

from my father’s dusty

wax   Forty crates stacked

in the back of the attic

This static in the head —

phones   Hum in the blood.

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Renegades of Funk,” a sonnet sequence. Murillo plays with the form from sonnet to sonnet, though all end in a rhyming couplet, sometimes with a slant rhyme, sometimes with exact. The sixth sonnet, which traces African American song back to the time of slavery, is built not of quatrains or the octave-sestet pattern of traditional sonnets but of four rhyming tercets before a concluding couplet. The sequence as a whole marries passion and craft, including also flashes of humor often found in Murillo’s work, humor than can rapidly shift into more serious emotions. At the opening of “Renegades of Funk,” the narrator describes his twelve-year-old battle against oppression:

. . . So when Miss Jefferson —

Her eyebrows shaved then painted black, the spot

Of lipstick on her one good tooth — would praise

the genius Newton, I knew then to keep

Her close, to trust her like a chicken hawk

At Colonel Sanders’. I refute your laws,

Oppressor! I’m the truth you cannot stop!

 Notice the rhythms of the language, and the echoes of sound: spot, hawk, laws, stop. It’s funny to think of even trying to defy gravity, but of course break-dancers do attempt just that: “we taught ourselves to fly, / To tuck the sky beneath our feet, to spin / The world on fingertips.” Oppression quickly becomes more grim as the poems go on, as in the second sonnet:

. . . Ghosts come late

To find the crossroads cluttered, strip malls now

Where haints once hung. The young, it seems, forget

The drum and how it bled, the dream and how

It fed the mothers on the auction block.

This passage is rich in internal rhymes and echoes, like the short u sound of cluttered, hung, young and the short e sounds of forget, bled, fed — and the repeating consonants in crossroads/cluttered, haints/hung, drum/dream. The sequence as a whole celebrates the singers — of blues, of spirituals, of rap. The final poem in the sequence, I think, is especially moving, as it celebrates that impulse to sing as a way to renegade, whether or not the individual singers are remembered:

The walls are sprayed in gospel: This is for

The ones who never made the magazines.

Between breakbeats and bad breaks, broken homes

And flat broke, caught but never crushed. The stars

We knew we were, who recognized the shine

Despite the shade. We  renegade in rhyme,

In dance, on trains and walls. We renegade

In lecture halls, the yes, yes y’all’s in suits,

Construction boots and aprons.

We see consonance, assonance, and wordplay mastered here: “Between breakbeats and bad breaks, broken homes / And flat broke.” This sonnet as a whole is a song of praise, and I don’t want to spoil its impact for readers by quoting too much of it, piecemeal, here. It’s best read in its entirety, especially as part of the whole sequence.

The craft of Up Jump the Boogie is fueled, lit, by a need to connect to community — to the father and literary fathers of the narrator, to the Mexican side of his family, to poets and singers of many stripes. Read “Flowers for Etheridge,” which — in a passage I especially admire — imagines the narrator’s father, a Vietnam vet, talking with Etheridge Knight. Read “How to Split a Cold One,” in which the narrator faces questions of identity and how we express that identity: “Words / Like Corona and Cultura / Simmering in closed mouths.” Read “Sherman Ave. Love Song” for a remarkable, extended image of a shadow encapsulating first a specific narrative, then a whole history. Read “Variation on a Theme by Eazy Z” to explore how the narrator felt about participating in violence; then read the following poem, “November 26, 1980,” to see him witness the consequences of violence for the victim. Read the whole book.

John Murillo is clearly a poet committed to duende. He knows that “song” is a matter of balancing when to control the language and when to ride its sounds and rhythms, to let it sing.

© 2011 Martha Carlson-Bradley