Morning breaks like glass.
I sidle through the kitchen,
naked as a hoptoad, but nary a glance
hipes my way.
My love, he loves me with an H; he feeds me
with hay and hieroglyphs. Hélas.
Cold wind blusters under a second-rate sun.
The speckled rooster hoicks his brag to heaven.
Our only news is bad news,
squawk his twelve insatiable hens.
Their feathers blow backward. In the patchy daylight
they shimmer like a straggle of dahlias.
Sing ho for the new year, croons the magazine to an empty room.
The stovepipe ticks,
but Nothing, nothing, nothing, says the clock.
My love, he loves me with an H; we breakfast
on hum-birds and humble pie,
though yesterday we ate husks.
Time flies! shouts
the rooster, and the yeast agrees.
It swims in a blue bowl,
morning-glory blue, color of a blind eye.
Every headlong day my love’s heart sings,
Weariness, yes, weariness, and never enough cash.
O holy night-before-last, when it forgot the words,
when I dreamt of turrets and stairs. Only
the radio kept muttering the tune.
[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]
9 comments:
Every headlong day my love’s heart sings,
Weariness, yes, weariness, and never enough cash.
O holy night-before-last, when it forgot the words,
when I dreamt of turrets and stairs. Only
the radio kept muttering the tune.
That's wonderful, Dawn -- how I wish I'd written it or, even better, somebody had written it for me!
Which makes me hope you will forgive me for going on with the idea of writing poetry for somebody -- which is a very important part of accessibility in poetry, it seems to me. And that's been our topic, but it's getting so far down now I doubt if anybody will see it unless I put it up here.
So one more careful shot, if I may. On Accessibility.
~
There's a fierce competitive element in the writing of poetry in America today which doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, I don't think, even in Canada.
Not only do young American poets today start thinking about how to get published at a very young age, like 18 or 19, but they attend writing courses right from the start. If the young student is noticed by a writing instructor, who is very likely to be on a rung of the writing ladder herself, the student may get a reference to an illustrious 'mentor' at the graduate-level – and that's a big, big step. Because even with the noblest and most generous financial aid, an American MFA is expensive, and few students emerge from such programs without serious debts. Young poets with ‘good degrees’ need what Americans call ‘good jobs,’ and they need them fast. They look for those jobs in Creative Writing programs, of course, and their mentors are the ones who hold the keys to the kingdom -- the programs, the journals, the reviewers, the festivals, the anthologies, the prizes and, of course, the publishers.
You all know that, but you may not realize just how extra-ordinary the situation is -- because none of this existed at Columbia, Yale or Cambridge when I was there between 1958 and 1969. Indeed, I bumped into it head-on when I found out that the $25.00-a-pop packets I’d been sending to The Contemporary Poetry Series from 1995 to 2008 were very likely never even opened.
If you click on my name and go to “About Cowpattyhammer,” you can read more about my travails. It’s a story every contemporary American poet ought to know, but few can tell it as personally as I do.
~
One final observation -- poetry is not just about how to write it. Indeed, for poets like myself who never got taught to write poetry, how to write it was a relatively minor concern compared to the urge to say something important to somebody we love. Most of the poetry I wrote from the age of 16 to 50 (1956 to 1990) was written because I had something important to say to someone, often female in my case – partly because I was a single parent with three daughters, which was important, but not the whole story, needless to say.
But I wasn’t naïve. I was well-schooled in literary theory (Wimsatt, Lewis, Leavis and I.A. Richards are all in my personal resumé), and when I wrote I had plenty of very good models as I’d read everything. On the other hand, I never once in my life wrote for a workshop full of ambitious poet-peers what is more for a poetry mentor, and I never sent anything out either – or even thought about it. Yet when in 1990 I did start sending out, James Laughlin, Theodore Weiss, Joseph Parisi and Alice Quinn, among many others, wrote me back, and we corresponded at length. My exchange with James Laughlin is preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard, for example, and you can see how Marilyn Hacker got me started in The Kenyon Review a year later-- and what a correspondence lies behind that!
Christopher
Forgive the repeat -- there's just been a coup in Thailand and the media are fast being sorted out. Two attempts appeared to have been lost in cyber space -- and an hour later they both appeared right here.
Please do delete one of them -- and think about me.
C.
I'm not exactly sure how your comment relates to accessibility, but certainly it does link to my more recent remarks about the shifting concept of the academy. While of course you are right about the sudden way in which the study of poetry has been formalized and certified, I think we shouldn't forget that, informally, there have always been mentors and networks. Leigh Hunt was Keats's mentor, and Keats was anxious to become accepted into Hunt's circle because he wanted both to improve his poetry and to share it with others who had position and credibility in the art world. Yes, Keats grew beyond needing Hunt, but that, really, is the ideal of mentorship. The best teachers always become unnecessary to the best students.
The news from Thailand is disturbing. Stay safe.
Thanks - a thoughtful response.
I'll be alright -- this is nothing compared to ...
C.
Dear Dawn,
I've been trying to figure out why what I've been trying to say about 'accessibility' doesn't make sense to you.
The fact is that the key to a closed door is as often in our own minds as it is in the door itself -- if we feel frightened we can't open a door anymore than a child can look under the bed. In addition, the less we are able to confront our own anxieties, which in poetry include our proprieties, outrages, prejudices, assumptions, allegiances etc. etc, the tighter and more implacable the locks.
When the new Formalism first appeared there were many Modernists who simply couldn't read it, for example, it seemed so regressive, and now it's all the rage. And of course there are still anti-modernists out there for whom "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a tightly locked, stupid low door.
I myself simply can't read most of the table-talk poetry that is so popular today, what is more the hyperrealist stunt-stuff and the goobledy-gook, because one of my assumptions is that poetry has a certain dignity, that it matters not in spite of but because of it being by nature precious, framed and veiled. That’s why when poets adopt nonchalance as if it were artistic license they feel fake to me -- one line of such trivia locks the door for me on a whole poem. Adolescent, I call it (hear my prejudice ring!).
On the other hand, for me Billy Collins' door is wide open, he can be such a fine artist, yes, fine and sensitive like Norman Rockwell, so you can see what I mean. On the other hand, I also love all the artists that were inspired by Paul Gauguin and later, and quite differently, by Gustave Klimt – the enormous, celestial power he created on the surface of things. I like to think I write a bit like Gauguin and Klimt myself, which may be one reason why nobody can read me. It's not because I'm "inaccessible" but because I'm so unlikely, I think, preposterous, pretentious even, they feel, getting angry -- an Animist into totems, banshees, muses, high-wire girls, randy gods and purple ghosts? And I put gold-leaf on everything too, which is obviously not the key to anybody's anywhere just at the moment.
I think you’re right when you talk about poetry having become “formalized and certified” in recent years. And isn’t it an irony that the quantum expansion of poetry has locked as many doors as it has opened!
C.
In some ways, accessibility is as simple as taste, and maybe poetry criticism would be less vituperative if people would just acknowledge taste as a driving force in discovery. I don't have a taste for either Billy Collins or Norman Rockwell, so in certain ways they are inaccessible to me. Nor do I have a taste for John Ashbery and Salvador Dali. I don't especially admire the poetry of Poe, a fact that certain critics would take as proof of my idiocy. On the other hand, I have a strong attraction to Hayden Carruth, whom a poet acquaintance has forthrightly told me she dislikes. So be it. We have to follow our own eccentric pathways.
Yes, in the end that's all we can do, Dawn, I agree. But we're very lucky if we know someone we like and trust who nevertheless writes stuff we don't understand. Because there's also a chance there may be a disconnect going on here, or even a blindspot in ourselves, and that it's not necessarily an inadequacy on the part of the poet. When there's friendship and trust we have the opportunity to explore some of our own limitations, it seems to me, and shouldn't just assume that revision can make any poem accessible. Because it can't if we're not willing.
C.
Just yesterday a review came up of the BBC Two new Biopic, "A Poet in New York."
"Dylan Thomas knew he was a toe rag, which made it all the more shaming that he went on and on being one. Some toe rags don’t know they’re toe rags; their arrogance or stupidity blinds them to their awfulness. In a way, this is a kind of mitigation: you can’t blame someone for a crime they don’t realise they’re committing. Perhaps if those arrogant or stupid toe rags knew they were toe rags, they’d be horrified, and stop being toe rags. But Dylan Thomas wasn’t arrogant or stupid. He knew when he’d behaved badly, and it filled him with self-loathing. Just not enough self-loathing to prevent him behaving in exactly the same way again."
In a sense Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath were toe rags too but time has shown they're inimitable. Like Emily Dickinson, who would dare to perform so foolishly? Many poets try to write like them, particularly poor ones, but all three remain so rooted in who they were personally that writing like them always sounds like a bad hair-day got up as a spoof at a frat. And of course they're also too good.
Poetry can give the impossible an entrance, and once a door like Dylan Thomas' has been opened, why, the whole world can enter. Yet still it remains forever safe and intact.
~
That'll be it, dear Dawn -- and thanks for your patience.
C.
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