Carson is intent here on the relation between fact and documentary, on jealousy, on the feeling of wrongness, and on “decreation,” a notion (about effacing the self) borrowed from Simone Weil. The poet stalks her subjects from oblique angles, but her critical readings are often bullying and contrived. Elizabeth Bishop’s Man-Moth becomes, courtesy the temple of Asklepios and Jacques Lacan, not a strange unworldly creature but “sleep itself.” There’s not much in the poem to support this reading, but Carson’s slippery use of symbol (she has the love of symbolic readings found in those with a taste for psychoanalysis) is like the philosopher’s stone—with it, you can turn every scrap of metal in the junkyard into gold.
Many of Carson’s ideas are first pitched as essays; by the time they’ve been worked into poems, they seem pawed over and secondhand. She knows she has an odd view of things; when she trusts her inspiration too much, she seems to believe every idea brilliant because it is odd. Her oratorio “Lots of Guns,” a self-conscious tribute to Gertrude Stein, uses five performers, each “equipped with a triangular white paper flag on a long stick, … snapped smartly up and down,” and has choruses even kindness can’t help giggling over:
The mythic past.
The curious past.
Lots of guns expressing restlessness.
Lots of guns with cherry cobbler.
The man is tremendously.
The woman almost.
For pompous silliness, this is hard to beat, but her opera manages to beat it. A single stage direction may give the flavor: “Sung by Simone and Madame Weil waltzing in an empty factory while the Chorus of the Void do calisthenics in slow motion.” The Chorus of the Void consists of ten transparent tapdancers. What are the lyrics like? Here are Madam and Mademoiselle Weil:
Please translate the word thankyou.
Ontologically not new!
Theoretically blue!
Naked as the dew!
I’m lime green who are you!
No idea what to do!
Just be glad this song is through!
No comment.
I linger over Carson’s striking insights into classical texts (a beautiful passage is devoted to sleep in the Odyssey) and the psychosocial dialogue in her poems, recording the fraught moments of couples at odds. Even her offhand remarks can be provoking—who else would have noticed the “poached-ineternity look Beckett has in his last photos”? Yet far too much of this book has the burnt-toast reek of academic air—her poems have become parlor games of extraordinary tedium. When you’re told that the opera requires “7 female robots built by Hephaistos,” you’re not sure whether Carson has spent too long reading R.U.R. or watching Star Wars.
Geoffrey Hill
No sooner do I finish reviewing one book by Geoffrey Hill than another thumps onto my desk. In late age, Hill has found a devil-may-care giddiness, a taste for diatribe and invective that seems unstoppable this side of the grave. This famously taciturn and thin-skinned poet, so constipated in his early years, can be forgiven for carousing now—it took him a quarter century to publish his first five books, but in the last decade he’s published half a dozen more. His new style may well be the result of antidepressants, as he confessed in an interview; but who will complain if the muse can be found in a pill bottle?
Hill’s recent books have been at times unreadable, even by those who want to read them (taking pills against depression has done nothing for his cussedness). Without Title is clearer and less frustrated than his ranting monologues, but its short poems and one long sequence are no less stringent in their demands. Hill has often given the impression of wanting to communicate, if only he didn’t find it humiliating (communication being an act of love)—he has dressed up this aversion in thunderous essays, but I don’t believe that clarity inevitably soils meaning with the unctuous language of public consumption. Besides, there are moments when no living English poet has written more gorgeously:
the singing iron footbridges, tight weirs
pebble-dashed with bright water, a shivey blackthorn’s
clouded white glass that’s darker veined or seamed,
crack willow foliage, pale as a new fern,
silver-plated ivy in the sun’s angle.
Hill’s redolent landscapes have excited suspicion among critics, though it’s possible to see them as indulging in the aesthetic, like a warm mineral bath, while calling such beauty to account—his snarled complications allow him to have things both ways. (“Shivey” is wool cloth full, like Hill’s poems, of dark burrs or splinters.)
The new poems live gloomily under sentence of death—” Death fancies us but finally / leaves us alone,” he says mordantly; and it takes a second to register what that leaving alone means. Hill believes in syntax’s autocracy, and a reader must sound the sentences before the drama of meaning comes plain (the violent riddles beneath syntax are more darkly defended). When the mood takes him, he’ll coat every phrase with tar and dare the reader to grasp it:
Vorónezh: Ovid thrusts abruptly wide
the ice-locked shutters, discommodes his lyre
to Caesar’s harbingers. Interrogation,
whatever is most feared. Truth’s fatal vogue,
sad carnifex, self-styled of blood and wax.
Even these brutish lines can be winched to the surface, given patience and a stout cable. Mandelstam was exiled to Voronezh, cast like Ovid far from the warm society of the capital. The interrogation remembers 1984, where men were broken using their worst phobias (rats, in Winston Smith’s case). A carnifex is an executioner.
There are poems here of the most defiant opacity, others that descend into an old man’s muttering, especially the fraught meditations of a series of “pindarics” (a form Congreve called a “bundle of rambling incoherent thoughts”), each inspired by a scrap from Cesare Pavese’s journals. It’s easy to grouse about Hill—the phrases piled up like rear-end collisions, the “savage rudeness” (to use a phrase quoted from Emerson), the knee-jerk wordplay, the odd marks of punctuation, the Colonel Blimpish apophthegms (“Women are a contagious abstinence,” “Small hotels are to die in”). “I tell myself,” he boasts, “don’t wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense.” Don’t murder your darlings, then—simply embalm them.
Hill desperately needs a group of acolytes to tease out his meanings. It’s not that his verse is austere and forbidding, not that the price of admission is so high—the truth is that Hill just doesn’t like the reader all that much. Readers are a tax on his purity, but few can bear to be loathed by the books they read. (Reading, after all, is a voluntary labor.) Pound, however difficult, has a far more welcoming intelligence; but Pound longed to be a teacher—hence his lectures, and The ABC of Reading, and his plans for an Ezuversity. If Hill wants to transform the reader, it’s a prophet’s task; the only reader worthy enough may be Hill himself, though poets are forever deprived of the salvations of their work.
One solstice has swung past, the immeasurably
varied, unvarying, profusion of hedge-burgeon
stays richly dulled, immoveable for a while.
Over by Studley the close air is dove-grey,
a hollow without sun
though heat had filled it; shadow-reservoir,
more than a mirage, however you chance to look.
More than any poet alive, Hill has the pulse of English inside him, knowing like a lawyer all its loopholes and vagrancies. The stopped energy of his landscapes has become a valediction, the epitaph of a poet who cannot give up his rages, even as age grinds him down. In a few months this book will be available in the United States. That this brilliant, maimed, and cantankerous poet lost his American press and was for a time published only in Britain did not flatter our publishers, much less our poetry.
Attack of the Anthologists
The Oxford Book of American Poetry, ed. David Lehman
American poetry began with a governor’s daughter, a Puritan minister on the Massachusetts frontier, a ship captain who edited an a
nti-Federalist newspaper, and a slave. Often the best thing about these poets is their biographies. All but the captain were born outside the colonies; but, even before there was a United States, they wrote in the democratic helter-skelter of the New World. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the verse written during the century and a half before the Revolution was “like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”
Anne Bradstreet leads off anthologies of American poetry because she’s the first American poet who wasn’t perfectly awful. Daughter of one governor and wife of another, she wrote with the high-minded clumsiness of the imperfectly educated.
Art can doe much, but this maxime’s most sure,
A weake or wounded braine admits no cure.
The early American poets were naifs with the memory of sophistication, like carpenters working with primitive tools under primitive conditions. There’s a quaintness to the work of the preacher Edward Taylor and the ship captain Philip Freneau and the slave Phillis Wheatley, but sometimes a queer rightness, too. When Taylor writes, about infinity, “Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?” you think how much Donne would have liked the metaphor; but you only have to compare the work of these poets to what was being written across the water by Dryden and Pope to see how bad the home team was.
The glimmers are the more disheartening for being only glimmers. Joel Barlow, the most technically accomplished poet of the Revolutionary period, wrote heroic couplets with the droll intelligence to bring them off. “The Hasty-Pudding” embodies the American drive to meet the British on their own terms and go them one better, even if he is competing with Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” a poem most of a century old, its style long out of date.
Poets born after the Revolution grew up in a different world, where Americans developed the self-consciousness necessary for a literary tradition not so intransigently innocent. This was the age of literary men who made their living as editors and lecturers and even poets, an age where the economies of leisure meant that a man could earn his bread by his words. Yet with that self-consciousness came a certain conservatism. William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were poets of more power than originality, still looking over their shoulders to check what the British were doing; and with every backward glance they failed to behold the America lying before them.
We should wonder, not how an American at the age of seventeen could compose a poem as death-hunted as “Thanatopsis,” but why Bryant produced such porridge afterward. He’s not the only might-have-been in American poetry, just one of the saddest—his poetic powers were soon lost in “rosy depths” and “plashy brinks.” Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand, is a reminder that our poetry has often depended on wounded oddballs more than literary men but that not all wounded oddballs make good poets—he wrote in a fanciful poetic diction coated in tar and set alight.
Emerson, though only a mediocre poet himself, was the first to see that there was an American poetry to be written. Imagine his excitement as he read a thin vanity-press quarto published by an anonymous author, a quarto titled Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman, that American self-invention, was not the rough in a slouch hat he pretended to be but a Brooklyn printer and newspaper editor with an overactive imagination. He had seen the West only from the deck of a Mississippi sidewheeler; yet his longings held a mirror to the American soul, its taste for guilt and reinvention, its wanderlust, its love of its own raw language. Whitman gave Emerson exactly what he’d asked for, a poet of our “ample geography” who could make use of “our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, … our boasts, and our repudiations.” More than he ever realized, Emerson was responsible for Whitman’s imposture and masquerade.
We must not forget that secret sharer who influenced American verse in more subterranean ways. Emily Dickinson’s self-mutilating psychology and silvery unhappiness give a differential specimen of the American character. A bloodless recluse in Amherst, indrawn as a clam, she developed her own shorthand language, one so powerful the rhythms borrowed from hymns seem resolutely her own. Dickinson wrote almost half her poems during the Civil War, scratching out a poem a day during the hard year of Shiloh. Perhaps something of the horrors far to the south touched the death fantasies within her. From these two damaged psyches, American poetry has borrowed more than it cares to admit; yet our poetry was just as tormented and even more deeply molded by the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and many another Briton. It was our language and our landscape that we were a long time accepting.
The dirty secret of American poetry is that until Whitman and Dickinson it was no damned good, and until the modernists it was not good again. It takes only ten pages for the new Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, edited by David Lehman, to get through the seventeenth century, and ten more for the eighteenth. The whole nineteenth century takes fewer than two hundred, half of these devoted to Whitman and Dickinson. After that, for nine hundred pages, it is one long diet of the twentieth century.
Lehman, though a poet himself, is better known as editor of the annual series The Best American Poetry and author of Signs of the Times, an attack on deconstructive literary theory . The Oxford Book of American Verse, as it was first known, was edited by the distinguished scholar F. O. Matthiessen in 1950 and, as The New Oxford Book of American Verse, revised by the equally distinguished Richard Ellmann in 1976. Lehman’s introduction, a good deal of it a defense against his predecessors, lives in a prose world where assumptions are governing, essays seminal, and stock always goes sky-high. He’s proud of what he calls the “widening of focus” here, though it’s hard to see why this isn’t just “out of focus” by another name. Matthiessen, as Lehman notes, included 51 poets, and Ellmann 77; Lehman has 210, a quarter of them born between 1940 and 1950. This grotesquely overrates the wartime and baby-boom generation, still an amorphous crowd of genial talent through which Lehman offers no path.
A good anthologist must have a few bizarre quirks, though preferably not too many. Lehman’s catholic taste and appreciation of minor voices make him ill at ease with major ones. Take his treatment of the moderns, the most radically complex generation American poetry has produced. Robert Frost, whose dark American pastoral is heir to Dickinson’s private shadows, produced such a crop of famous poems it’s difficult to leave any out; but Lehman offers too many of the chalk-board set pieces beloved by generations of high-school teachers. Marianne Moore’s most disturbing animal poems and the later meditative poems of William Carlos Williams are ignored. Wallace Stevens finds himself naked without even a stanza from his long poems, while T. S. Eliot is begrudged the roustabout humor of the Sweeney poems or “The Hippopotamus.” And Ezra Pound, poor Ezra Pound, hardly sets foot here, receiving fewer pages than any of the others despite his influence on a century once called the “Pound Era.” After the moderns, the next major American poet is … W. H. Auden! Auden lived in New York for some thirty years and wrote poems about his adopted country; but it’s odd to include a poet of such English intonation and character, especially with poems written, a few of them, before he’d ever set foot in America.
Lehman is such a democrat, he can hardly bear to leave anyone out (sixteen of the eighteen editors of The Best American Poetry are included, and the missing pair were born after 1950, the cutoff). It’s one thing to leaven the majors with wits like Dorothy Parker or kooky originals like H. Phelps Putnam (who wrote, among other things, a pair of sonnets about genitals), quite another to try to revive the long dead reputations of Emma Lazarus, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Samuel Greenberg, Leonie Adams, Mark Van Doren, John Wheelwright, and dozens of other trivial worthies (even on a bad day, a battered stanza by Eliot makes these poets look like a dish of mealworms). In a lengthy anthology, this means there are vast desert spaces between the poets worth reading.
The editor has wisely not welcomed song lyrics, though he has wavered enough to include one hymn,
two blues, and a song by Bob Dylan; yet I miss a section of American folk songs and ballads. We’re given little more than “Casey at the Bat,” that great American paean to failure. None of the poets, Lehman claims, has been favored for race or gender (too many anthologies balance the great white males of the past by ignoring the lesser white males of the present); but it’s no improvement to offer, as representative of contemporary poetry, a swarm of mediocre white men and almost as many mediocre white women.
Lehman’s introduction is not much help in coming to terms with his taste. He’s suspicious of overanalyzing poems and would prefer that readers experience a poem’s “uncanny mysteriousness,” which sounds like the credo of the Know-Nothing Party. (This may explain the book’s frustrating lack of notes. It can’t explain why the poems are littered with errors.) “I prize, as do many readers,” he declares, “eloquence, passion, intelligence, conviction, wit, originality, pride of craft, an eye for the genuine, an ear for speech, an instinct for the truth”—this must be more gaseous blather than any anthologist has fit into one sentence for a long time.
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