with an economy based on flattery and self-protection?
and a sewage system of selective forgetting?
and an extensive history of broken promises?
What did I get in exchange for my little bargain? What did I lose?
Where are my natural resources, my principal imports,
and why is my landscape so full of stony ridges and granite outcroppings?
These lines are deceptively good-natured, and they’re as deep as he gets. There’s nothing terrible about such poetry—Hoagland has a ready-to-wear style, the kind you can throw into the washer when it’s dirty and take out half an hour later, wrinkle free. Such a style can take on any subject, yet never put two words together in a meaningful way. If he can reduce the awful heritage of slavery to a TV tennis match, world peace should be a snap.
Perhaps it’s enough to write such mild, self-conscious, smugly unambitious poems. Hoagland’s subject is the late, declining American empire; and he intends to watch the fires from the comfort of his sofa. You don’t ever get the feeling that he reads, or is affected by anything he can’t shut off with a remote control—he’s made so uncomfortable by AIDS he calls it “one of those diseases / known by its initials.” Despite the yammering presence of myriads of Hoagland’s friends, I’ve rarely read a book that seemed lonelier. Even Narcissus wasn’t that lonely—he had himself for company.
Spencer Reece
The Clerk’s Tale was written by the assistant manager of a Brooks Brothers store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a world as distant from poetry as Wallace Stevens’s office in the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. How unlikely (and unlike anyone else’s), however, Stevens’s poems were. Spencer Reece’s confident, stagy, slightly occluded first book proves that poetry not written by academics can be just as academic as any assistant professor’s.
It cheered me up to think the title poem might have a little Chaucer in it, but “The Clerk’s Tale” is rather the cri de coeur of a man who works in a clothing shop, a man perhaps a little like the author. Though verging on self-pity, it portrays the lives endured blankly on the other side of the counter, reminding us how much the customer must mask out just to buy a shirt. (That, indeed, was the whole point of keeping servants faceless presences—when you start to sympathize with them, someone somewhere starts sewing mob caps.)
Reece’s mature if slightly overheated voice shows how much can be gained by waiting a few years to publish a first book. He’s in his early forties, about the age when Frost and Stevens published theirs. I’m not drawn to all parts of Reece’s talent—he has a taste for short declarative sentences, sometimes half a dozen in a row, that sound like tabloid reportage. Elsewhere the touches of artistry, and even aestheticism, offer transcendence on the cheap:
when the maple sweats and saps at the corners of his mouth
and when the oak shakes his leaves like a thousand horseshoes
is the time my heart bangs with barn-joy and I breathe in the subtle
approbation of death coming as I recognize the Byzantine look
of the trees emptying themselves of themselves.
Barn-joy, eh? The poet’s exuberance seems heartfelt but somewhat demented, and he can’t help himself from busting out into lines like “encircled by a halo of rocks, trees, crops, rivers, clouds—/ by every blessed thing conspiring together to save my life” or “I’ve been waiting for the tulip bulbs, those necessary ambulances, / to come and sound the emergencies of the world. Nothing so far.” There’s only so much a reader can take before wanting to crawl under a blanket to shut out the neon signs.
Reece includes two sequences of ghazals that aren’t ghazals at all (they’re scraps from John Ashbery’s wastebasket: “Tra la la la. Lovers fling their arms open like medicine cabinets, / offering their baptized scalps to fun new people like thesauruses”). Some young poets can make new selves from their influences, but Reece gets into his influences’ skin the way he might throw on a Halloween costume. The book ends with an overlong sequence of unpunctuated poems that sound more like late Merwin than Merwin.
It’s easy to catalogue the problems in these poems—their preciousness and exaggeration of feeling; their news-at-eleven opportunism; their taste for freakish similes, as if W. H. Auden’s executors were having a fire sale (a severed tongue “in her hand like a ticket,” “fish disappear like keys,” “hydrangeas shift in their pitcher like wigs”). Indeed, though a few poems possess a beautiful modesty, many are afflicted with a boorish loudness, as if they had caught Dylan Thomas disease—Reece’s diminuendi might be other poets’ crescendi.
Yet if Reece makes some mistakes young poets make, and some winningly his own, there are enough moments of raw talent and character to make those promises young poets are known for.
Inside everything was Episcopalian—
the wicker chaise lounges, the small spotted mirrors,
the rattan dining room set, the tears.
No one saw tears. We hid them—
especially the men, who buried their tears
in the sea, or so I once dreamed and wrote down,
until the dream became what I believed and what I wrote.
…………………………………………
There was a yacht club meeting every summer
with a cannon that went off−baboom!
Women arrived in their thin Talbots belts,
carrying wicker purses shaped like paint cans
with whalebone carvings fastened on top,
resembling the hardened excrement seagulls drop.
Occasionally the purses would open,
albeit reluctantly, like safe-deposit boxes.
Men wore cranberry trousers and Brooks Brothers blue blazers.
There’s product placement for you! Many of the descriptions are rendered with similar lightness, only occasionally coming too close to the tears the poet always seems on the verge of shedding. In his best poems his modesty becomes suffering and his discontinuity, rage. His portraits are reminiscent of those by the elderly Rembrandt, pushing paint this way and that, almost from pure joy, until the painting has been thumbed into life.
Charles Wright
Buffalo Yoga is the silliest title in a body of work that gives it close competition in Zone Journals and A Short History of the Shadow. Charles Wright, who turns seventy next year, has for a long while been among our best poets. My complaint has been that lately he hasn’t written any poems, just bundles of lines, loose as kindling, offered to the reader with a crooked country grin, as if to say, “Why, you can’t hardly find so nice a bunch of kindling in fifty mile.” And you couldn’t, if what you were after was kindling.
Wright is a master of the natural image—he exemplifies what Pound wanted when he said the “natural object is always the adequate symbol.”
The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge,
And evening with its blotting paper.
lifts off the light
Indeed, if they didn’t sometimes have the air of a later day, Wright’s images would seem pilfered from Pound’s notebooks. The problem in Wright’s work has been that he gets beyond such gorgeous images only to indulge in garden metaphysics. He has read the Chinese poets Pound was so influenced by—the new poems often resemble ancient Chinese scrolls, otherworldly but static. At times he’s like some bearded sage crossed with Mammy Yokum, puffing on a corncob pipe:
God’s ghost taps once on the world’s window,
then taps again.
And drags his chains through the evergreens.
Weather is where he came from, and to weather returns,
His backside black on the southern sky,
Mumbling and muttering, distance like doomsday loose in his hands.
The silliness here doesn’t quite outweigh the pleasure, the calculation and risk; when Wright pulls off such pretentious humbuggery, you’re glad he took his chances. Yet the poems are too often saddled with maundering esoterics, Sunday school phrases like the “stained glare of an
gel wings,” and moments when the poet waxes philosophic about his work, having perhaps read more of late, apologetic Pound than is good for a man: “I tried to give form to the formless, / and speech to the unspeakable. / To the light that shines without shadow, I gave myself.” Pound earned the right to say similar things at the end of his life; here there’s just the sound of a man patting his own back.
Wright has been writing fragments for too long; the new poems that make the most impression hold their form in narrative or reminiscence, corrupted by memory (and the defaults of memory), by old dreams and desires. The poems are haggard and loose-hipped, sometimes winning in their refusal to force a story into shape, yet often collapsing into a banal gloss on memory and narrative—they’re so affectless and cool, it’s hard not to grow irritated when they pass off as profound the most appalling cornbread platitudes: “Imagination is merely the door. / All we can do is knock hard / And hope that something will open it.” The poet’s lyric fragments are an admission that telling a tale is beyond him.
By his fifties or sixties a poet has taken out a certain number of patents (perhaps all he is likely to), and these he defends to the death, whether or not they’re worth it. The best poets may take out hundreds, scattering them across the public domain, secure that no one will be able to use them quite as well. Like most older poets, Wright has sunk into a mire of self-imitation, and sometimes self-flattery. Yet here and there, broadcast through this self-indulgent book, are stanzas of astonishing freshness and needle-eyed vision:
Shadows are clumsy and crude, their eggs few,
And dragonflies, like lumescent [sic] Ohio Blue Tip matchsticks,
Puzzle the part-opened iris stalks,
hovering and stiff.
New flies frenetic against the glass,
Woodpeckers at their clocks,
the horses ablaze in the grained light.
You’d have to go a long way to find a poet who does these things so well (though where was the copy editor when Wright tried to strike the match of “lumescent”?). It’s like finding a man who makes brilliant origami out of Playboy centerfolds—you love them, but you wonder if it’s an art worth pursuing.
Philip Larkin
When Philip Larkin died in 1985, he was the most beloved poet in Britain; only the year before, he had turned down the invitation to become poet laureate. Anthony Thwaite, his old friend, edited the Collected Poems (1988; U.S., 1989) by placing Larkin’s poems in chronological order and infiltrating scores of uncollected poems among the published verse. This might have been a sensible procedure for another poet; but the earlier volume, which this edition replaces, concealed the strengths and diluted the intensity of the most important British poet between Auden and Geoffrey Hill.
Larkin’s reputation has been in free fall since the publication of Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s literary biography Philip Larkin: A Writer’ s Life (1993), which revealed that behind the poems’ miserable loner lay a real loner, one nasty and misogynist and racist to boot. Why were people surprised? Yet they were surprised. Many readers apparently thought that Larkin’s morose self-hatred concealed something lovable, that a man so wise about inadequacy and foible must have been exaggerating the ugly part of his personality. Few thought he might have toned down his opinions out of embarrassment or shame, that instead of a shy librarian he might be an alcoholic who kept porn magazines in his office closet.
Larkin was “one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.” The world had changed around him, and what he disliked was that it had changed. The repulsive opinions appear in his letters, not the poems; but there are worse things than concealing private intolerance behind public respectability (think how despicable the reverse is). Whether he’s referring to Morocco as “coonland,” or calling the government “decimal-loving, nigger-mad, army-cutting,” or saying, “The Slade is a cunty place, full of 17-year-old cunts,” we have no idea what Larkin felt when he wrote such things. He may have been indulging in matey blokishness (the remarks are made mostly to old school chums), proving himself immune to new public manners, or merely revealing the lethal prejudices he’d learned to keep private. It might have been a mixture of these things; but it is crude to assume he was moved only by hatred, just as it would be exculpatory to believe his impulses were without trace of hatred.
In a tell-all age all must be told, but it’s crucial to remember how recently such language was common. If we’re going to call Eliot an anti-Semite and Larkin a racist, we ought to start drawing up an indictment of Sylvia Plath, who noted in her journals a girl’s “long Jewy nose”; or Wallace Stevens, who wrote, “I went up to a nigger policeman”; or Marianne Moore, who mentioned in a letter that a “coon took me up in the elevator”; or William Carlos Williams, whose letters are peppered with references to wops, niggers, and Jews. Until very recently such remarks were so prevalent in Britain and America, we do ourselves no credit by turning into scapegoats the writers who merely succumbed to the bigotry of the age.
We are no better if we condemn such opinions without seeing where Larkin rose above them, sometimes merely by exposing the insecurity and self-loathing at their heart. His poems may be the record of how a man converts his basest feelings to something more humane; and we read him, not because he is less base, but because the flaws reveal his pathos. In all their quiet generosities, their humility despite themselves, the poems make clear they were not simply a way of concealing from the public taste his gruesome prejudices.
Indeed, why should we assume that letters are any more trustworthy than poems? If I lie about myself in my poems, trying to appear wiser or more charitable, in my letters I may make myself seem dumber and more intolerant. People who don’t want to be known in public don’t necessarily drop their trousers in private. The current taste for meae culpae is no more laudable than the self-criticism Communist governments used to demand of prisoners before standing them against a wall. Will later generations value so highly the poets who quoted only the approved opinions of our day or preached only the pieties the age demanded?
Anthony Thwaite, no doubt stung by the protests raised by critics, has now done more or less what he ought to have done originally, kept the poems in the order Larkin wished (few poets constructed their books so carefully), with appendices to collected the strays. The new introduction is, alas, defensive and unapologetic. Having omitted any poem the poet failed to publish, Thwaite has thrown some of the babies out with the bathwater. Almost a hundred minor poems no longer appear here—though few will be missed, two or three (among them, “An April Sunday …,” “The Dance,” and “Love Again,” all of which Thwaite laments not including) deserve a place in Larkin’s collected works.
Larkin ought to be considered (though the idea would have given him the heebie-jeebies) a confessional poet avant la lettre, revealing himself as brutally in his way as Lowell and Plath in theirs. He’s our great poet of mixed feelings, of disappointment and self-doubt (and as good as Frost—who was also something of a monster in private—on the complexities of human nature). Larkin’s poems catch the tension between impulse and reserve (reserve always winning out), proclaiming, not in the least ironically, the virtues of ordinariness—“May you be ordinary,” he wrote to a new baby.
Though his early poems were influenced by Yeats and Auden, the model for Larkin must be Housman. They share the same taste for moral observation, the wry and somewhat sour demeanor, the preference for the memorable phrase over the clever one. In other ways they could not be more different—Housman looked for classical virtue and often gave way to sentiment, while Larkin pursued only his own unsentimental muddles amid the bric-a-brac of English life. His most heartbreaking poems fear that life is going on somewhere else—he’s a wonderful poet of nothings (“Nothing,” as he said, “like something, happens anywhere”).
The list of Larkin’s best poems must include “I Remember, I Remember,” “Mr Bleaney,” “The Whitsun Weddings,” “MCMXIV,” “Talkin
g in Bed” (has there ever been a better poem about the bedroom?), “Dockery and Son,” “Church Going,” “An Arundel Tomb,” “The Trees,” “Going, Going,” “Homage to a Government,” “This Be the Verse,” “Sad Steps,” the great swansong “Aubade,” and dozens scarcely less fine. In the past century, no British poet except Housman and Auden has written verse as memorable, or better suited to public memory. The virtues of Larkin’s ordinariness have never been more necessary—every age needs to be reminded that the ordinary sometimes requires a kind of heroism.
The Most Contemptible Moth
Lowell in Letters
In the spring of 1936, Ezra Pound received a letter of introduction from a young poet.
I am 19, a freshman at Harvard, and some relation, I don’t know what, to Amy Lowell. All my life I have been eccentric according to normal standards. I had violent passions for various pursuits usually taking the form of collecting: tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc; buying books on Napoleon. … At 14 I went to St. Mark’s and never mixed well or really lived in the usual realities. … I was proud, somewhat sullen and violent.
This raw bundle of nerves wanted to sail to Italy and sit at the master’s feet.
I began reading Homer thru the dish-water of Bryant’s 19th century translation. … A poor translation is an ugly photograph.
Last spring I began reading English poetry and writing myself. All my life I had thought of poets as the most contemptible moth.
The young man hoped to drop out of college (instead he just quit Harvard) and claimed, not very convincingly, “I am not theatric, and my life is sober not sensational.” Intimate, blustering, full of cheerful blarney and the roaring bonfire of ambition, this extraordinary letter turned phrases that few nineteen-years-olds could.
A man’s letters have a different claim on privacy than his poems and therefore a different claim on truth. Letters lie in the uneasy realm between writing published (the words, if not anonymous, a writer must stand by) and writing meant for no one else’s eye (the best diaries are often those published from the grave). Letters are usually directed to one person alone, like a whisper, though in some centuries they have been passed around like dime novels (when Nelson captured letters in which Napoleon grumbled over Josephine’s infidelities, he published them). The inky page, the homely sheet of paper itself, becomes the property of the receiver; but the words remain the writer’s, not to be published except where leave is given—in this way letters follow a peculiar byway of property law.
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