The genetic relations which the forms of these poems often bear to the clerihew and the caricature prevent them from attaining the kind of large orchestration that they are always tempting us to listen for. And if they are the real thing when measured by Auden’s definition, they miss the absolute intensity required by Emily Dickinson’s definition: when you read them, you don’t feel that the top of your head has been taken off. Rather, you have been persuaded to keep your head at all costs.
Irish Times, 1976: review of Stevie Smith, Collected Poems (Allen Lane, 1975)
Joyce’s Poetry
He wrote to Ibsen and identified with him, he was championed by Pound, he fostered Beckett, he was an outsider from the start – all true. Yet at the very start his dealings were with Yeats and AE and that ‘old hake Gregory’ because, at the very start, verse was his medium.
The poems were entered in longhand on folio sheets. They were shown to friends, to his brother Stanislaus, to W. B. Yeats, and through Yeats’s assistance they made their way to magazines and publishers.
Joyce’s first book was a sequence of thirty-six poems published in 1907 as Chamber Music. Twenty years later, twelve more poems and a ‘Tilly’ thrown in appeared for a shilling as Pomes Penyeach. And when the Collected Poems came out in 1936 there was only one new poem added, the well-known ‘Ecce Puer’, written on the occasion of his father’s death and the birth of his own grandson. This is the canon of his ‘official’ verse. Unofficially, he released two broadsides, ‘The Holy Office’ (1904) and ‘Gas from a Burner’ (1912).
For some novelists – Hardy and Lawrence, for example – verse offers itself as a medium for extending and refining apprehensions that their prose fiction has failed to render altogether satisfactorily. There are poems by Hardy and Lawrence which we would be inclined to keep in preference to certain parts of their novels. The same, however, cannot be said of Joyce. Sure, the poems are well-tuned and well-turned, there is a technical fastidiousness about them, a touch of elegy and pathos. But their chief interest is that they were written by Joyce, their chief surprise the surprise of contrast with other parts of the œuvre. This stanza from ‘Ecce Puer’ could be by Francis Ledwidge:
Of the dark past
A child is born,
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
There is a conventional touch to this, a kind of rehearsed tenderness that recalls a Celtic Twilight poem like Padraic Colum’s ‘O men from the fields’. The heavy end-stopping of the lines, the regular metre, the candid rhymes – it is an unexpectedly unsophisticated performance from an artist who was at the same time splitting the linguistic atom in Finnegans Wake.
If I seem to be doing Joyce down, he can stand it, because he himself set the standard by which he must be judged. The great poetry of the opening chapter of Ulysses, for example, amplifies and rhapsodizes the world with an unlooked-for accuracy and transport. It gives the spirit freedom to range in an element that is as linguistic as it is airy and watery, and when the poems are compared with writing that feels so natural, spacious and unstoppably alive, they are seen to be what Yeats said the earliest of them were – the work of a man ‘who is practising his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops’.
Perhaps that is the way for us to take pleasure in them – at a slight aesthetic distance, with a connoisseur’s awareness. And that, in fact, seems to be the way Joyce himself appreciated poetry. Stephen, in Portrait, like Joyce in real life, loves the songs of the Elizabethans, the mournful and melodious rhythms of Nashe and Dowland and Shakespeare’s songs. It is poetry as the handmaiden of music, as evocation, invitation to dream.
Stephen is not worked upon by the poetry he remembers; rather, he works upon it, savouring it and transposing it to the keyboard of his own mind and senses. In Portrait the shock of recognition for Stephen comes in his encounter with a word like ‘suck’ or ‘tundish’. Poetry per se evokes a less directly sensuous response, something more cultivated and delicate, and it would seem that Joyce would have been content with just such a response to his own verse.
What I am saying applies only to the ‘official’ lyrics. The unofficial satires, those couplets that cut the air sometimes with the exact deadliness of Toledo steel, sometimes with the thick-witted ferocity of a faction-fighter’s stick – those are a different case and remind me of one of the many triumphant and possessive insights in Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper.
Stanislaus there credits Yeats with divining that prose, not verse, would be his brother’s medium, and then goes on, ‘but I take personal satisfaction in recording that I was the first and perhaps the only one to understand that ruthlessness, not delicacy, would be the keynote of my brother’s work.’ Right on, as they used to say in the Bay Area.
‘Gas from a Burner’ and ‘The Holy Office’ may not be as self-consciously beautiful or as well finished as the lyrics but they are in earnest. The language has all the roused expectation of a loosed ferret. The thing may be hurried but it has angry momentum. And it is a performance. The connoisseur of styles is showing off, but at the same time the hurt human being is giving vent to his rage. Significantly, this is the stuff that people tend to know by heart.
’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,
Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye;
’Tis Irish brains that save from doom
The leaky barge of the Bishop of Rome
For everyone knows the Pope can’t belch
Without the consent of Billy Walsh.
Ο Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!
The instrument is being put to work at last. Stand back there!
Sunday Tribune, January 1982
Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar
Symmetries and arithmetics have always tempted Italo Calvino’s imagination to grow flirtatious and to begin its fantastic displays. His new book has three main sections entitled ‘Mr Palomar’s Vacation’, ‘Mr Palomar in the City’ and ‘The Silences of Mr Palomar’. Each main section has three subsections and each subsection three parts and Calvino has created a numbering system for them. ‘The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index,’ he writes,
whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and inquiry that, in varying proportions are present in every part of the book.
Those marked ‘1’ generally correspond to a visual experience....
Those marked ‘2’ contain elements that are anthropological, or cultural in the broad sense....
Those marked ‘3’ involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world.
(translation by William Weaver)
But can this tongue that stays so neutrally in its cheek as it explains the book’s structural principles woo us into pleasure and assent all over again in the actual text? Happily, the schema turns out to be not just a prescription; what might have been a grid acts in this case like a springboard. Each of the pieces has the feel of a single inspiration being caught as it rises and then being played for all its life is worth – though not for an instant longer than it takes to exhaust its first energy.
Mr Palomar is a lens employed by his author in order to inspect the phenomena of the world, but the lens is apt to turn into a mirror which reflects the hesitations and self-corrections of Mr Palomar’s own reflecting mind. The book consists of a graduated sequence of descriptions and speculations in which the protagonist confronts the problem of discovering his place in the world and of watching those discoveries dissolve under his habitual intellectual scrutiny.
So the very first movement is entitled ‘Reading a Wave’ and here Mr Palomar attempts to see and describe and kidnap into language the exact nature of a single wave. His precisions, which he must keep revising, are constantly accurate and constantly inadequate; yet i
t is these very frustrations which constitute the reader’s pleasure. By the last movement, however, Mr Palomar has turned his gaze inward and is now, as the title of the piece puts it, ‘Learning to Be Dead’. But his appetite for certain knowledge remains equally tantalized and unsatisfied: ‘You must not confuse being dead with not being.’ In between there are another twenty-five texts, which one hesitates to call prose poems since it makes them sound much too affected and humourless, or meditations, since that undersells their lovely metaphorical ease and rapture.
Calvino’s line whispers and lazes and tautens and sports itself very cajolingly. His gaze, like Mr Palomar’s as he contemplates the stars, ‘remains alert, available, released from all certitude’. ‘In August,’ he tells us, ‘the Milky Way assumes a dense consistency, and you might say it is overflowing its bed.’ The lavish simplicity of that, its double gratitude for the world and for words adequate to the world, its mingled sense of something sweetly and personally discovered yet also something of almost racial memory, this atmosphere of spacious and buoyant reverie is typical of the whole work.
Here is a large unhampered talent sailing a middle course between the sophistication of the avant-garde and the innocence of the primitive poetic imagination, between the kind of intelligence that constructed the medieval bestiaries and the preliterate intuitiveness that once chanted hunters’ prayers. If the persona of Mr Palomar is haunted at times by the petulant shade of Beckett’s Molloy, trying to devise an infallible method by which to rotate his sucking stones from pocket to mouth to pocket, and at other times by the urbane Jorge Luis Borges, softly expatiating upon the question of whether writing gets done by ‘Borges’ or ‘I’, the reader is not worried. Nor is Mr Calvino. He knows that everybody ends up worrying about the same things anyhow.
Mr Palomar worries and watches incessantly and in Italian; but William Weaver has me persuaded that I now know his fastidious, easily beguiled and graciously implacable mind in English. The rhythms and savours of Mr Weaver’s language can render equally well the punctilio of Mr Palomar’s intellectual searches and the civility and eroticism of his daydreams. It is a language that brings us nearer that destination which Mr Palomar constantly aspires to – ‘a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavours, composed of memory and imagination at once’.
Behind every cheese, [he muses] there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it.
Nevertheless, for all its sensual felicity, the writing is philosophically impelled. Mr Palomar, who takes his name from the famous telescope and observatory, is both an ‘I’ and an ‘eye’, ‘A world looking at the world’, as the title of one of Mr Palomar’s meditations suggests, a question mark retroactively affecting his own credibility: ‘Is he not a piece of the world that is looking at another piece of the world? Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the “I”, the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world. To look at itself, the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr Palomar.’
Which mercifully takes us, Mr Palomar and Italo Calvino beyond the impasse of solipsism, the distrust of language and the frigid fires of ‘experiment’. There may be a problem of knowledge, but the consciousness only comes alive to this problem by suffering those constant irrepressible appetites for experience which want to rampage beyond the prison of the self. Mr Calvino may divide and categorize in triplicate the visual, the cultural and the speculative aspects of Mr Palomar’s world, he may prompt and tag and analyse and juxtapose to his (and our) heart’s content, but Mr Palomar himself remains wonderfully spontaneous and receptive to the pell-mell of the senses. Lawns, breasts, starlings, planets, lizards, the moon in the afternoon, the blackbird’s whistle, the clack of mating tortoises, the fog of memories in ‘Two Pounds of Goose Fat’ where ‘in the thick, soft whiteness that fills the jars, the clangor of the world is muffled’ – all these things and a thousand others keep the mind from its ultimate shadow feast. Mr Palomar may collapse at the end, like the book named for him, in a syllogism, but not before he has outstripped his conclusion in one incandescent apotheosis after another.
If it often seems in the course of this book that Italo Calvino cannot put a foot wrong, this is because he is not a pedestrian writer. Like Robert Frost, his whole concern is for himself as a performer, but whereas Frost performed at eye-level, as it were, on vocal cords and heartstrings, Calvino is on the high wires, on lines of thought strung out above the big international circus. Yet such high-wire displays engage us only if the performer is in fact subject to gravity and genuinely at risk. A lightweight can throw the same shapes but cannot evince that old, single, open-mouthed stare of hope and wonder which we all still want to be a part of. What is most impressive about Mr Palomar is a sense of the safety net being withdrawn at the end, of beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination being carried off not so much to dazzle an audience as to outface what the poet Philip Larkin calls ‘the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do’.
The New York Times, 29 September 1985: review of Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar, trans. William Weaver (1985)
Paul Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile
Robert Frost, a poet whose roguery and tough-mindedness are admired by Paul Muldoon, once wrote about the art of filling a cup up to the brim ‘or even above the brim. ’ This impulse to go further than is strictly necessary is presented by Frost as the most natural thing in the world. It’s why young boys want to climb to the tops of birch trees and why grown-up poets write poems.
John Keats expressed the same thought in another way when he said that poetry should surprise by a fine excess. In poetry, Keats implied, enough is never enough. What’s called for is an extra dimension, a way of saying that transports reader and writer (and the subject, too, of course) to a new plane.
Poetry is language in orbit. It may start with recollected emotion or immediate anger or rapture, but once that personal boost has helped a poem to lift off, it runs on its own energy circuit. And the energy coursing in the circuit is generated and flows between the words themselves, between the words and the metre, the metre and the line, the line and the stanza and so on.
Formal and technical excellence in the best poetry is therefore not just a matter of surface finish or verbal ingenuity. It always embodies a transformation of the writer’s excitement and is a guarantee of his or her engagement with the subject. Something has been made of something else – that’s what artwork entails, after all – and the more that’s made of it, the better. Above the brim, in this context, does not mean over the top.
In Paul Muldoon’s new book, for example, personal grief and creative glee keep playing into one another’s hands. One of several extraordinary poems here is called ‘Incantata’, a lamentation for the premature death by cancer of a young and gifted artist. This is both a cry of heartbreak and a virtuoso performance. The higher the lift-off that the poem achieves, the deeper the registers it engages. In this, it is a work that resembles Eibhlin Dubh Ní Chonaill’s great ‘Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire’ and will survive comparison with it. Both poems have an immense rhythmical surge and an overload of immediate grief, the same wild frankness, the same anger at the loss of a loved one and the same ecstatic sense of the dead person’s enduring worth.
‘Incantata’ commemorates the life and work of Mary Farl Powers, an artist who was much cherished because of the intensity of her striving for spiritual and technical perfection. ‘Incantata’ is an example of what we might call ‘the Lycidas syndrome,’ whereby one artist’s sen
se of vocation and purpose is sent into crisis by the untimely death of another. Here Paul Muldoon is possessed by a subject that puts all his brilliance to the test, with the result that he blossoms into truth and humanizes his song to an extraordinary degree.
But grief is not the only humanizer. Some of the most delightful poems in the book were written to celebrate the birth of the poet’s daughter and once again the metaphorical speed of the invention is a match for the fleetness and sweetness of the emotion. ‘The Sonogram’, for example, is a meltdown of ancient history, satellite technology and parental joy and its ease in yoking together these heterogeneous elements is altogether typical of this poet:
Only a few weeks ago, the sonogram of Jean’s womb
resembled nothing so much
as a satellite-map of Ireland:
now the image
is so well-defined we can make out not only a hand
but a thumb;
on the road to Spiddal, a woman hitching a ride;
a gladiator in his net, passing judgement on the crowd.
It looks and sounds casual until you look again and find that the shape and the sound that beguiled you are not as casual as they were pretending to be. There are, for example, those nicely placed half-rhymes of ‘womb’ and ‘thumb’, ‘hand’ and ‘Ireland,’ ‘ride’ and ‘crowd’; and there is a whole bitter vision of history in the unexpected moment of inversion at the end. In the Roman amphitheatre, after all, it was the crowd who gave the thumbs up or the thumbs down to the gladiator, but here it is the unborn child who is considering the verdict and seems ready to consign us, the readers, to the ranks of the condemned.
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