Grog-blossomed

Robert Graves -- whose work I hadn't thought about in years, and never, except for Goodbye to All That, took seriously -- has been forcing himself on my attention from all sides. (I wonder, is a Graves revival in the works?) Snippets follow:

1. A marvelous piece by Graves on L'Allegro (Verdict: "[with Shakespeare] the probing cold-chisel of criticism rings against the true rock of poetry. With L’Allegro, the plaster flakes away and the rubble tumbles out." Elsewhere, he speaks of "jolly old father Zeus himself, with a thunderbolt in his fist and a grog-blossom on his nose.") I have never liked these poems, which must have something to do why I enjoyed the Graves piece so much.

(It occurs to me that I haven't made full use of the newly-free TNR archive.)

2. Geoffrey Hill, in a lecture (nominally on war poetry) that Calista sent me, has much to say about Graves. The glib summary of the first 10-15 mins of the talk is that Seven Types, and its interest in verbal tensions and ambiguities, was ultimately the fruit of Graves's interest in psychology after WW1. (I'd known, of course, about Empson picking up the idea from the Graves/Riding analysis of "the expense of spirit(s)", but Hill pushes the chronology back a decade. I'm not sure this has more than bibliographical interest, though.) Later in the lecture, Hill quotes a short and really very good Graves poem that I hadn't prev. seen:

On Portents

If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

It is almost free of Graves's signature tweeness, except possibly for "tourbillions" which I can't make up my mind on; Hill, to his credit(?), treats the word as a serious literary choice rather than a symptom. (Obviously he is really drawn to the poem by that "ever-reluctant element"; recalcitrance of any kind seems always to have had an irresistible romance for him -- his first book begins with the line, "Against the burly air I strode" -- but this is all a story for another time.)

(As a note to self, if one ever finds the elementary excitation responsible for turbulence, "tourbillion" is a good name as it sounds international and has the "-on" ending.)

3. Speaking of Graves's style, Richard Wilbur on Graves, in the relevant PR interview:

Still, it can be useful and safe to read someone like Robert Graves who, as John Holmes said, is a great starter. You read Graves and he reminds you how delightful poetry can be at its best, and what a fine game it is—and it makes you want to write a poem. Not, however, a poem by Robert Graves, but one of your own.

Symptomatic, perhaps, of his own not-unrelated tweeness, that he should say this? Elsewhere, Randall Jarrell remarks about some of the Auden poems in Nones, 'If you see such a poem, what can you say except, "Ah, Graves, poor dear Robert Graves! Inimitable, isn't he?" But how extraordinary that Auden [should have written it].' I must also confess that few things set my teeth on edge as effectively as hearing Graves read his poems.

4. And, before burying this topic, I should recall that marvelous bit in Goodbye to All That where he meets Thomas Hardy:

[Hardy] said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written `his shape smalled in the distance'. Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough — only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect's office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer's Iliad, he protested: `Oh, but I admire the Iliad greatly. Why, it's in the Marmion class!' Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)

"Vastly replenished"

1. A fine article in the LARB on dining out with Marianne Moore; here is Moore as theater critic:

But a production of Phèdre by the Comédie-Française with Marie Bell had impressed her when she hadn’t expected to be impressed. “I was so enthused after seeing Marie Bell’s Phèdre that I bought myself a bag of hot chestnuts and came home vastly replenished!”

A few bracingly negative views of younger poets (I agree with both of these):

“Randall Jarrell makes patchwork quilts of mediocre poetic ideas. His poems are good, realistic, honest — but not outstanding,” for instance, or “Richard Wilbur’s poems don’t stay in my mind, which must be an indication of their worth — to me, at least. He’s very accomplished, though. I like his translations of Molière.” When making “pronouncements” she had a way of tilting her head back a bit and lifting her right hand in the air, fingers curved, almost as if she were preparing to play the piano. 

2. Geoffrey Hill has been knighted; this particular honor seems esp. appropriate in his case. I have quoted his poems in the past, but feel obliged to record an appearance of snouts therein (Mercian Hymns XI):

Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil.

Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout intimate with worms and leaves.

"Not all good poetry is also 'important poetry'"

Mark Ford has a good article in the new LRB (gated) on A.S.J. Tessimond and Bernard Spencer, two largely forgotten English poets of the Auden generation; on the strength of the quotations, Tessimond seems reasonably worthwhile, Spencer less so. (Ford's remarks on Spencer seem muddled to me. Not only is all the quoted verse bristling with Audenesque phrases -- "a word or a lock which gunfire may not break, / Or a love whose range it may not take" -- but surely the idea that one couldn't write tentatively while under Auden's influence is refuted by the example of Louis MacNeice.) Anyway, here is Ford on Tessimond:

Tessimond can’t be said to have developed as a poet in any clearly discernible way, and it’s not easy when reading his posthumously published poems to decide which is early, which middle and which late. All seem buoyed up by his wit and curiosity and compassion; this is especially surprising given that in middle age he developed severe manic depression and underwent extensive electric shock therapy.

And here are two Tessimond poems quoted in the article, both of which I like:

Letter from Luton

Dear Hubert,
                  Bored, malevolent and mute on
A wet park seat, I look at life and Luton
And think of spittle, slaughterhouses, double
Pneumonia, schizophrenia, kidney trouble,
Piles, paranoia, gallstones in the bladder,
Manic depressive madness growing madder,
Cretins with hideous tropical diseases
And red-eyed necrophiles – while on the breezes
From Luton Gasworks comes a stench that closes
Like a damp frigid hand on my neuroses,
And Time (arthritic deaf-mute) stumbles on
And on and on and on.
                      Yours glumly,
                                       John

In that cold land

Ghosts do not kiss, or, if they kiss, they feel
   Ice touching ice, and turn away, and shiver;
But there as here, perhaps, we still can steal
   Quietly off, and talk and talk for ever.

"Urn burial and X"; monarchs and minors

1. Ed Park's article on minor poets at the Poetry Foundation website [1] got me thinking about how boringly conventional my response to literature often seems; one needn't be a hipster to want to have unheard-of kindred spirits in the safely inimitable past. (Major poets are not kindred spirits, being major.) There are some I am idiosyncratically drawn to -- Dunbar, Skelton, Ralegh, Peele -- but none of these is really sufficiently minor or sufficiently kindred; to get some good examples one has to turn to contemporary poetry and to a writer (not obscure enough) like Amy Clampitt, who scooped me on the Urn Burial template. I had been meant at some point (probably years ago) to write a poem about urn burial and the stability of matter, but discovered that she had already written a long one on the much better theme of "Urn burial and the butterfly migration." (Google wildcard search yields no other instances of this template; it probably bears recycling.) This is not one of my favorite Clampitt poems (O the overdone apostrophes!), but there is still much to like, e.g. this bit near the beginning:

Bark-creviced at the trunk's
foot, ladybirds' enameled herds
gather for the winter, red pearls
of an unsaid rosary to waking.
From the fenced beanfield,
crickets' brisk scrannel
plucks the worn reed of
individual survival.

And this bit:

_______Listen
as the monarchs' late-emerging
tribes ascend; you will hear
nothing. In wafted twos or threes
you may see them through the window
of a southbound Greyhound
bus, adrift across the
Minnesota border,

or in flickering clots, in dozens
above the parked cars of the
shopping malls of Kansas -- this
miracle that will not live to
taste the scarce nectar, the
ample horror of another summer.

Cf. D.H. Lawrence's wonderful comparison of a mosquito to "a dull clot of air." I remember finding it stirring, in the late fall a long time ago, when the year's entire stock of swallows materialized at the Hartford Greyhound station during a layover. I had never been off the bus at this stop -- which I later discovered was a terrifying place with armed ATM guards and meth-addled Subway customers -- and it might as well have been anywhere else with a lot of sky and a lot of concrete. The swallows gathered in small circles that merged into larger and larger circles -- the temporal version of a gear (or gyre) if you will -- and then everything went in reverse as clumps of swallows split off from the main body and trailed away in various directions, as if they were collectively enacting the imminent disintegration of their individual bodies. I've always been attracted to this inverse of the butterfly effect -- a relevant technical term, btw, is "enstrophy cascade" -- as a picture of a sensibility like Sebald's, in which a catastrophe is repeatedly relived on smaller and smaller scales with no loss of vividness.

2. On the topic of monarch butterflies and the inevitable chaos theory ref., see also Muldoon's "Milkweed and Monarch" (linked site has the wrong title).

3. It was probably inevitable that "littoralist of the imagination" should have been taken, but the title surely fits Bishop's sandpiper much better than A.R. Ammons.

4. Re minor poets, seventydys on twitter has been rediscovering Nathaniel Wanley, a devotional poet roughly contemporary with Dryden. (Here is a Review of English Studies article, there is supposedly a brief mention by T.S. Eliot in the TLS in 1925 but our TLS back issues link has been malfunctioning.) As far as kindred spirits go I fear Wanley won't cut it, despite the name, but there is a good deal to like in his verse, esp. the vividness of some bits ("to have the knife / not cutt but saw the thread of life"), the crisp cleverness of some bits,

False heart that dost pretend to thrust
Through flames and floods and death to Rest
Yet dar’st not quitt one bosome lust
For Gods or thine owne Interest.

and the obvious virtues of "The Resurrection":

Can death be gratefull and the grave be just,
Or shall my tomb restore my scattred dust?
Shall every hair find out its proper pore
And crumbled bones be joined as before,
Shall long unpractis'd pulses learn to beate
Victorious rottennesse a loud retreate,
Or eyes Ecclipsed with a tedious night,
Shall they once hope to resalute the light?
What if this flesh of mine be made the prey
Of Scaly Pirates cannibals at sea
Shall living Sepulchres give up their dead
Or is not flesh made fish then perished?
[...]

----
[1] Much of Park's article is an appreciation of the Ashbery/Schuyler collaborative novel A nest of ninnies. I wasn't as fond of it as Ed Park; I don't remember much of it but for what it's worth I wrote an Amazon review at the time. Like most of my Amazon reviews, it's a little painful to reread.