19 The WELL, Miscellaneous Conference, Topic 871, no. 8, September 22, 1993. The topic has since been retired and frozen and is no longer extractable unless you add an “-r” (for “retired”) to the command string; i.e., “!extract -f ‘lumber of my life’ -r misc.” If it is like most topics, it will eventually be deleted entirely, and my citation of it will be the only record of its existence. Electronic media have an underdeveloped sense of the value of their own history; all but a small fraction of what was actually posted on the WELL since 1985 has vanished.
20 What got Bishop interested in lumber? Had she been reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who is her kind of writer in several ways, funny and observant and lesbian and mail-loving, and who has a passage in a letter of October 10, 1716 (partially quoted in the OED’s history of lumber) about the cabinets of curiosities in the Emperor’s repository in Vienna? It sounds a lot like Bishop: “Two of the rooms were wholly filled with relics of all kinds, set in jewels, amongst which I was desired to observe a crucifix, that they assured me had spoken very wisely to the Emperor Leopold. I won’t trouble you with the catalogue of the rest of the lumber; but I must not forget to mention a small piece of loadstone that held up an anchor of steel too heavy for me to lift.” Horace Walpole, another letter-writer who would have appealed to Bishop, cattily dismisses Versailles (a symbol of civilization one could set in opposition to Crusoe’s island) as a “lumber of littleness,” which is an adaptation of a couplet in one of Pope’s Moral Essays, about a uselessly grand house:
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!
The whole, a labour’d Quarry above ground.
(I found the Walpole reference in an endnote to Essays and Criticisms, Thomas Gray, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup, 1911. Gray, on May 22, 1739, says of Versailles, “What a huge heap of littleness!”) Or had Bishop been reading Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, which came out in 1971, about the time she may have been writing her poem: “In the dozen years or so since I had last been at Thrubworth more lumber than ever had collected in these back parts of the house, much of it no doubt brought there after requisitioning. There was an overwhelming accumulation: furniture: pictures: rolled-up carpets: packing cases.” Or had Bishop simply grown dissatisfied with “junk” and “stuff” in earlier drafts of her poem and looked in a thesaurus? It’s always a possibility.
21 Moll Flanders, though, says of a stolen trunk, or “Portmanteua,” as Moll spells it, which she has safely gotten past the Custom-House officers: “I did not think the Lumber of it worth my concern.” (Oxford ed., p. 266.) Owens and Furbank’s A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1985) took me there. Woolf’s and Nabokov’s customs-inspection similes are traceable to this scene in Defoe’s proto-novel.
22 Or I was reading it, anyway, until vol. III was stolen from the front seat of my car. The thief either was planning on pawning it, or possibly wanted to add to his book collection.
23 I don’t resent the witty Anthony Lane, who, in The New Yorker of February 20–27,1995, beat me to an American review of the English Poetry Database. Lane pursues the word lard for a moment, and mentions “the old Housman principle that good verse should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck” (did Housman really shave the back of his neck?), and he makes an excellent point: “Yet I found myself stirred, not engulfed, by the flow of mediocrity. ‘English Poetry’ offers a way out of the crucial, and frankly tedious, impasse that has stiffened within the academy in recent years—the standoff, in broad terms, between the élitist and the democratic.”
(vi)
Ah, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage (1993), a book-length poem of paired run-on lines, is the latest attempt at the ultramundane. It announces its age-old transfigurative hope right up front, on its dedication page, which reads:
to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers,
wordsmiths—the transfigurers, restorers
Some of the poem, heavily metaled with lumps of arrhythmic Green-Party pulpitry, sounds surprisingly like Cardinal Newman’s little brother, quoted many pages ago. For example:
… the ditchwork of the deepest degradation
reflects waters brighter than common ground:
poetry to no purpose! all this garbage! all
these words: we may replace our mountains with
trash: leachments may be our creeks flowing
from the distilling bottoms of corruption …
But some of the dross-dressing is, on its bewildering syntactical spree, good, and aptly self-critical:
my
poetry is strawbags full of fleas the dogs won’t
sleep on or rats rummage: I am the abstract inexact’s
chickenfeed: I am borderlines splintered down
into hedgerows: I am the fernbrake ditches
winter brown, the shaggy down springs’ flows
accrue: but think what it would be like to get every word in
And at one point the grandly spatted old Wordsworthian commonplace of renewal gets suddenly reshod, made new by a kicker at the end about poetry’s post-transfigurational residue: the poem, Ammons writes,
reaches down into the dead pit
and cool oil of stale recognition and words and
brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays
with light and strings with shiny syllables and
gets the mind back into vital relationship with
communication channels:1 but, of course, there
is some untransformed material, namely the poem itself
Ammon’s National-Book-Awarded Garbage is in fact the latest of many books of poetry and collections of essays or stories that, in low-mimetic contrast to Renaissance fardle-words like jewels or flowers or garland, point proudly to the unpromising material that will be remade in the trash-compaction of the book they entitle.
How might we find some of the others? One way is to begin with the second (1853) edition of the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (by Peter Mark Roget, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., F.G.S, “Author of the ‘Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology,’ etc.”), which gives several lumber groups. Under INUTILITY it has
Litter, rubbish, lumber, trash, orts, weeds.
And under UNIMPORTANCE it has
Refuse, lumber, litter, orts, tares, weeds, sweepings, scourings, offscourings; rubble, débris, slough, dross, scoriae,2 dregs, scum, flue, dust, see Dirt.
If you search a library catalog with this handful of alternatives in mind, and add a few more as they occur to you, you can amass a relevant poets’ and writers’ Garbage checklist without too much trouble. There is an Orts by Ted Hughes (1977) and an Orts by George MacDonald (1882); an Orts and Scantlings by H. C. Dillow (1984), and Scantlings: Poems, 1964–1969, by Gael Turnbull. (An ort is a morsel of leftover food.) There is Tares, by a poet named R. S. Thomas (1961), and Tares: A Book of Verses by Rosamond Marriott Watson (1898). Or you can try the charming-sounding Chaff and Wheat: A Few Gentle Flailings (1915), by Francis Patrick Donelly, or Sweepings (1926), by Lester Cohen, or Slough Cup Hope Tantrum, by Alan Davies (1975). Stephen Vincent Benet brought us The Litter of the Rose Leaves (1930), following up on Frank William Boreham’s Rubble and Roseleaves, and Things of That Kind (1923). The poets of the Sludge Collective came out, in 1973, with Sludge: Daughter of Ooze, Son of Stain. Ohio University Press published Conrad Hilberry’s Rust: Poems in 1974; Turkey Press produced Michael Hogan’s Rust: Poems in 1977. Out of the Dunghill: A Series of Fifty Odes by Gordon Jackson came out in 1981. Allen Ginsberg published 150 copies of Scrap Leaves: Hasty Scribbles circa 1968; Marietta Minnigerode Andrews gave us Scraps of Paper in 1929; Edwin C. Hickman is the author of Scraps of Poetry and Prose, from 1854, preceded by Scraps and Poems, by Mrs. R. A. Searles, published by Swormstedt and Power of Cincinnati in 1851, and by Scripscrapologia, or Collins’ Doggerel Dish of All Sorts, a collection by John Collins from 1804.3 There
is a book of prose pieces by Rod Mengham called Beds & Scrapings, and Scrut,4 poems by George Roberts, published by Holy Cow! Press in 1983. Someone named Tuschen published Junk Mail: Poems in 1970; Richard Le Galliene published The Junk-Man and Other Poems in 1920; Jack Kerouac’s “Junk” came out as a postcard poem in 1976. In Old Junk (1918, revised 1933), a little-known though moving collection of World War I essays intersprinkled with thoughts on toadstools and bedside reading, H. M. Tomlinson describes entering a French town after the German withdrawal and has a G. K. Chestertonian moment:
The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments.… It is perplexing to find how little remains of the common things of the household; a broken doll, a child’s boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a corn-chandler’s ledger.…
I don’t know that I ever read a book with more interest than that corn-chandler’s ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a commonplace record of the common life which circulated there, testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have been no matter to me.
Tomlinson even gives a wartime inflection to lumber in his preface: “My friend added his own gas-mask and apparatus to the grim lumber on the hat-rack. The floor was wet, and was cumbered with heavy boots, guns, and dirty haversacks.”
Back to cheerfuller Garbage-heaps, though. Charles Ira Bushnell published Crumbs for Antiquarians, a book of revolutionary war studies, in 1864–66; and the Reverend Elnathan Corrigton Gavitt came up with the fine title Crumbs from My Saddle Bags for a book of pioneer reminiscences published in 1884. About then T. De Witt Talmage tried the simpler Crumbs Swept Up. Dylan Thomas published “The Crumbs of One Man’s Year” in The Listener in 1947. Nathaniel Parker Willis offered The Rag-Bag, a Collection of Ephemera (1855); Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes produced an anthology called The Rattle Bag in 1982. There is Waste Basket, Husks of Wheat, Dump Truck, Debris, Sewage, Bin Ends, Stubble Burning, Stubble Poems, Dirty Washing, The Waste Land, Out of the Bog, Bog Poems, and Disgust, which are books of poetry by Charles Bukowski, Diane Wakoski, Keith Abbott, Madge Morris, Valerie Hannah Weisberg, Victoria Rothschild, Roland Gant, Willie, Sylvia Kantaris, T. S. Eliot, Harold Strong Gulliver, Seamus Heaney, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, respectively. Layton Irving is the author of Droppings from Heaven (1979); Thomas MacKellar in 1844 wrote a book of occasional poetry called Droppings from the Heart; and the poet Duncan McNaughton titled one of his books Shit on My Shoes (1979). There is even a Poop, and Other Poems (1972) by Gerald Locklin. Douglas Houston produced With the Offal Eaters: Poems in 1986, and Ordinary Madness Press published Doug Hornig’s Feeding at the Offal Trough: Poems in 1983.
Ammons, performing a subject search in an online catalog for “Garbage Disposal,” was (so he tells us in Garbage, p. 49) pleased to retrieve nothing, since it gave him a “clear space and pure / freedom to dump whatever.” Ammons’s online catalog (presumably it is Cornell’s) has more clear spaces than mine: on the day I devoted to this offal search (December 1, 1994), I found several books by typing FIND SUBJECT GARBAGE DISPOSAL: one was a Combustible Refuse Collection Survey performed in Cleveland, circa 1940, by the WPA. But I found no books of poetry or collected prose entitled Sullage, or Dregs, or Rinsings, or Squeezings, or Medical Waste, or Filth-Inhabiting Flies, or Draff, or Vetch—and I hereby reserve the right (nonexclusive, of course) to use any or all of these, alone or in combination, for future books. Most surprisingly, there is no book of poetry or gathering of fugitive review-essays called simply Lumber. Lumber and Other Essays: one can imagine some minor turn-of-the-centurion like Augustine Birrell or Edmund Gosse or W. E. Henley5 settling on it as a title, but as it happens, none of them quite saw their way to it. There is, however, an ahead-of-its-time book by one Selina Gaye called The World’s Lumber Room (1885) that A. R. Ammons would probably like. Its epigraph is a slightly emended quotation from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield:
I regarded myself as one of those vile things that Nature designed should be thrown by into her lumber room, there to perish in obscurity.
Selina Gaye (also the author of The Maiden of the Iceberg: A Tale in Verse, published in 1867 and not included in the English Poetry Database, though it is available on microfilm) has left out an adjective: Goldsmith’s sentence actually reads (I flipped through the Vicar three times before I found it), “… there to perish in unpitied obscurity.” The World’s Lumber Room is an interdisciplinary study of “dust” and its sources and users—it occupies itself with decomposition, the recycling of Victorian household refuse, the social hierarchy of Parisian ragpickers (or chiffonniers), kitchen middeners, ants, flies, coral reefs, volcanoes, beetles, the medicinal jelly made from ivory dust, brewers’ refuse (“draff”) pressed into cakes and fed to horses, and old rugs:
A carpet which covered the floor of one of the rooms in the mint of San Francisco for five years was, when taken up, cut in small pieces, and burnt in pans, with the result that its ashes yielded gold and silver to the value of 2,500 dollars.
The following passage in particular, from Gaye’s preface, is oddly inspiring:
The World’s Lumber Room, comprising the three great departments of Earth, Air, and Water, is in fact co-extensive with the World itself, and, so far from being the sort of place which the worthy Vicar’s son seems to have pictured to himself, is rather a workshop or laboratory, where nothing is left to “perish,” in his sense of the word, but the old becomes new, and the vile and refuse, instead of being “thrown by” in their vileness, are taken in hand and turned to good account.
Perhaps I am not so very misguided, then, in deliberately making a lumber-room of my head with the present study, so long as that room is, as Gaye contends, coextensive with the world itself. No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account. Still, if I’m going to quote from the long and illustrious line of lumber-into-treasure commonplaceholders, if I’m going to cite Horace and Wordsworth and Emerson and W. E. Henley and Saki and A. R. Ammons, there is no excuse for my having left out of this series the most adept and amazing commonplace-transfigurer there ever was, or will be. “He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems,” Leslie Stephen writes, in an essay called “Pope as a Moralist,” but in another passage Stephen grants, as we all must, that Alexander Pope has “a probably unequalled power of coining aphorisms out of common-place.” Of Pope’s Essay on Criticism the harsh Reverend Elwin says that all the classical doctrines of criticism in it “might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning,” and he concurs with De Quincey’s dismissal of it as “mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.” And yet what an extraordinary multiplication table it is, and what lucky sewer rats we readers are! Tiny known quantities of sense, operated upon in accordance with known metrical law, yield in Pope’s arithmetic hands infinitely long and unrepeating decimals of truth:
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.
Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest; nobody, though, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here.6 At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay, seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:
>
Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,
Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.
Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezings” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs, and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was
very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant,—ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.7
We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the Krazy Glue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine—a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion, though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books),8 in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:
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