Poetry Notebook by Clive James
Old wounds leave good hollows
Where one who goes can hold
Himself in ghostly embraces
Of former powers and graces
Whose domain no strife mars –
I am made whole by my scars
For whatever now displaces
Follows all that once was
And without loss stows
Me into my own spaces
For all we know, one of his scars is the memory of the Fifth Panzer Army heading towards him through a snowstorm. But what we can be sure of is that he had a lot to get over. When he finally went home to New York, he disappeared into a fifth-floor walk-up whose lack of luxury has to be seen to be believed. The Bloodaxe edition has an accompanying DVD that shows him in situ, reading his poems aloud. His voice is wonderfully rich, but everything around him spells poverty. Obviously this monk-like self-denial is part of his dedication, although you might say that he sacrificed his purity when he let a camera through the door. One is very glad, however, that his privacy was invaded, because the message of dignity in old age, after a long life of uncomplaining commitment, is one that all young poets should hear. That, and the message that there has to be bedrock beneath meaning even if the bedrock is no longer visible. Kandinsky’s abstract painting grew from the precisely drawn outlines of the church and the town square.
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When proposing, as an ideal, the art of getting a lot said in a small space, one should in fairness keep room in the mind for the counter-argument by which some poets who get a little said in a long space are still saying something unique. (Think of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, whose demented sprawl contains far more lyricism than his lyrics.) As critics get older, they very easily succumb to the notion that there is no more room in the pantheon. But there is always more room in the pantheon, because the pantheon is not a burial chamber for people who have said things, it is an echo chamber for things that have been said. I was in the middle of concocting some pontifical statements about Shakespeare’s powers of compression when a long chain of memory led me back through Ovid (whose Metamorphoses Shakespeare knew by heart) to Ovid’s title The Art of Love, and from that to the niggling recollection that Kenneth Koch had written a longish poem of the same name, and that I had once thought enough of it to make a mental note that I should read it again one day.
Nowadays, dogged by the knowledge that ‘one day’ had better be soon, I try to follow up these mental notes if I recall them. So I searched out Koch’s Selected Poems of 1991 and soon found myself enjoying a passage of his ‘The Art of Love’ against my will – almost always the best way to enjoy anything. I like things kept short, and Koch, even in a comparatively short (for him) work like ‘The Art of Love’, spread himself around as if his readers had all the time in the world. The poem is a kind of how-to handbook, telling prospective lovers what to do in a variety of circumstances:
What to do when one lover is in a second-floor apartment,
the other in the first-floor one;
Openings in the ceiling, and how to make them; how to answer the question
‘What are you doing up there on the ceiling?’ if someone accidentally comes home.
Whitman is somewhere behind the technique, or at any rate behind the conscious lack of it, but there is a Tom and Jerry cartoon behind the mental picture, and really the vividness of the image settles the question: without the casual looseness of the construction, the gag wouldn’t work. As for whether the gag is poetic: well, how is it not? Is lovemaking ever a dignified posture, even for Leda and the swan? It’s quite easy to imagine our learned quarrel continuing indefinitely, but the longer it does continue, the more it becomes certain that Koch was only one of the names among the many American informal poets who achieved effects in a conversational tone which a formal structure would probably not have allowed.
My favourite post-war Americans might be strict formalists like Wilbur and Hecht, but my appreciation of them – and of semi-formalists like Lowell and Bishop – would be weaker, I think, if I did not recognize that there were things done by ragbag technicians, or even dedicated anti-technicians, which nevertheless achieved the most concentrated possible version of an effect. Michael Donaghy was quite right to say that Ginsberg’s Howl was the result of hard reworking. But the work went into making the lines sound as if they had never been worked at even once, and the aim, surely, was to sound as if he was just saying it, without really having written it. It’s the ‘just saying’ that the reader with book learning finds hard to accept. He should accept it, because the rewards have to be acknowledged.
In James Wright’s poem ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ we have the perfect placement of the final sentence, borrowed from Rimbaud, ‘I have wasted my life.’ We love it when Gregory Corso cries out ‘I want penguin dust.’ Few of these effects would have been brought into being by the pressure of a form. It’s more likely that they were brought into being by the pressure of avoiding a form. (The urge goes deep, and a long way back: Ben Jonson cursed Petrarch for his Procrustean urge to shape everything into a sonnet.) One’s chief objection, when reading such poets, should come about as a result of noting the successes; and then noting that they are few and far between. If Koch could have put more of his best moments beside each other he would be a much brighter light now.
Whether formal or informal, the post-war Americans were blessed with a vast reservoir of colloquial language to draw upon. (Once, in conversation, the British critic Al Alvarez – who promoted the American heavyweights to the detriment of his own countrymen, much to the annoyance of Philip Larkin – trumped my contrary argument by saying, truly, that the Americans by now had the advantage in the spoken language: ‘Their gags are better.’) The verbal bounty was already apparent before the Second World War, in the scripts of the screwball comedies, but the war gave it a tremendous boost. It makes some sense to contend that the informal poets deliberately broke the dam of form so as to release the flood within, but it makes at least as much sense to say that the flood did the job all by itself. The free-form idioms got into everything. Before the war, S. J. Perelman wrote whole prose poems that consisted of nothing except showbiz jargon, restaurant menus, and billboards. After the war, the poets could pull the gold dust out of the air.
Considering this fact, it is remarkable how John Ashbery, by now revered as the supreme American post-war poet, decided not to avail himself of the abundance. In his poem ‘Pyrography’ he wrote ‘This is America calling’ but in most of his later work the calling is not notably American, or anyway not the American of everyday flip talk. Early on, he made full use of it: most notably in ‘Daffy Duck In Hollywood’ which I think is one of the great modern American poems. (I would mention it less often if more critics and scholars would hail its qualities: but they seem to like him better when he says nothing that doesn’t need them to explain it.) The poem’s riches are too sumptuous to list: the brand names and cheap objects pile up like a satirical paragraph from H. L. Mencken (‘a mint-condition can / Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy / Gonzales’) and resonant lines of dialogue are seemingly designed to be used against the poet by a puzzled customer (‘If his / Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others, / What’s keeping us here?’).
But nothing I have tried in any of Ashbery’s collections since the Daffy Duck poem was written has captured me in the same way. It is a bit like my failure to engage with the later Wallace Stevens, a failure made all the more uncomfortable for me by the fact that I was so transfixed by one of the early poems from Harmonium (‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’) that I can still recite it from memory. Like the later works, it too is hard to figure out, but every part of it is a flaring image; whereas later on, I find, and especially in the long poems, all the components link together in a blur, smooth but bland: mere words, an extended flourish by Parolles, using his hat like Osric. I still haven’t given up on the mature Stevens, even though h
How will it all end? That geranium glow
Over Anaheim’s had the riot act read to it by the
Etna-size firecracker.
The rhapsody goes on unbroken for a full ten lines and I still can’t understand it. But I think the world of its movement and imagery, and if I can’t find those things in his later decades, it is always possible that I haven’t looked hard enough. I doubt, however, if I will ever now find him getting down to bedrock. For some reason he decided that such an aim wasn’t interesting enough. Shakespeare thought it was, but perhaps he did such a good job of proving it he scared everyone else off.
And there is no doubt that poetry can spring from the way a bedrock statement is rearranged to show that the lyricism, rather than in the thought, is in the arrangement, as when Anne Sexton says of the pheasant:
He drags a beige feather that he removed,
one time, from an old lady’s hat.
We laugh and we touch.
I promise you love. Time will not take away that.
By putting ‘that’ at the end, she puts emphasis on it, as Seamus Heaney puts the emphasis on ‘it’ when he writes ‘I’ll dig with it.’ The syntactical bravura is not just catchy, it has become part of the impulse. If we are looking for characteristics that define modernism, that would surely be one of them. The urge to make the syntax do tricks could emerge only after the long, founding age when the syntax was always a modest servant. But one of the paradoxes of Shakespeare, to get back to him, is that even his modesty was spectacular. In Henry V, the young king is proud of speaking ‘plain soldier’. And indeed, talking to a few of his plain soldiers by firelight, he is trying to express himself as simply as he can when he warns against optimism:
The man, that once did sell the lion’s skin
While the beast liv’d, was kill’d with hunting him.
So there they are, the thought and the words together, and even though, to the enchanted ear, the combination is as light as pumice, still it is bedrock, the deepest of all considerations, and as far as you can get from mere words.
Interlude
Until, in modern times, the brief fad for ‘concrete poetry’ proved that any poem which made a shape on the page was unlikely to accomplish much that George Herbert hadn’t, the idea of concreteness still seemed attractive. Concrete language supposedly entailed a use of language more specific than abstract. The result, surely, would be closer to bedrock than any metaphysical argument could go. In actuality, there are good reasons for thinking that metaphysical poetry was more concrete than anything that happened for almost two centuries afterward, but in the long term the wish for a hard-edged diction always lingered as something to be desired. The desire grew intense in the twentieth century, and finally reached its full crystallization in the use of brand names. A language prevalent in newspapers and magazines, on the walls of buildings, and finally on a shining screen, could be relied on, it was thought, to register the tone of the age like nothing else. We already lived in a manufactured world. After poetry began using the names of the manufactured goods, industry was accepted into poetry, and might even, it was fondly hoped, have been civilized by the process. The use of brand names, however, if too emphatic, could easily look like a complicit submission to capitalism. It was less reprehensible to just place the product: a casual mention, as if the artefact was an occurrence in the natural world. By now we have been taught by the young and alert, who live and breathe these developments, that the movies are full of placed products: nothing with a name shows up by accident. There is even a reverse language, by which a corporation of sufficient power forbids the sight of its name without payment, even when its name is part of the landscape: hence the absence of Coca-Cola signs in the otherwise authentic sets of Boardwalk Empire. Things haven’t reached that stage in poetry yet and probably never will, because the audience is too small, too poor and – let’s be proud of it – too bright. All that has happened is that there has been an increase in the vocabulary of reality: the words and phrases that were in the language already have been augmented by the words and phrases dreamed up by advertising copywriters, some of them with every poetic gift except the ability to live on a pittance.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN MODERN POETRY
Early in the twentieth century, E. E. Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be. Along with his love lyrics that achieved notoriety by fragmenting all over the page like sexy grenades, he wrote poems that were meant to be satires. In his 1926 collection, is 5, the star among the would-be satirical poems was ‘POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR. VINAL’. (Always playing tricks with typography, Cummings might have put the title in capitals specifically so that later editors of anthologies, when they cited it accurately in the contents list, would look as if they had made a mistake.) In the poem’s opening stanzas, capitalist America is mockingly addressed:
take it from me kiddo
believe me
my country, ’tis of
you, land of the Cluett
Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint
Girl With The Wrigley Eyes (of you
land of the Arrow Ide
and Earl &
Wilson
Collars) of you i
sing: land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham,
land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve –
from every B.V.D.
let freedom ring
All those brand names were fresh contemporary references at the time. Any American reader would have spotted them with ease. Later on, it would have taken consultation with an old-timer or several trips to the library. Reading the poem for the first time in Australia in the late fifties, I committed the lines to memory without having a clue what the proper names referred to, except perhaps for Abraham Lincoln and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, which had been handed out by American troops all over the Pacific area with such liberality that it was a byword even in Japan. Nowadays we can all look up the names on a machine. The reader will come away from an hour of googling with a lot of information. In 1929, a few years after the poem was written, Cluett Peabody, makers of shirts, took over the Arrow brand, and in 1985 the remnants of Cluett Peabody were absorbed into the GTB (Gold Toe Brands) Holding Corp, which today still holds the licensing rights to the ‘Sanforized’ process of pre-shrinking fabric, originally devised by Sanford L. Cluett himself. In the advertising for Arrow shirts, the Arrow man, a predecessor of the Marlboro man but dressed up for an elegant evening out instead of being dressed down for the West, was a painted fantasy by the eminent commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker.
Though he didn’t exist, the Arrow man drew up to 17,000 fan letters a day: a fact worth filing away if you are trying to convince yourself that there will never be enough American voters to put Sarah Palin in the White House. Securing an immortality somewhat more certain than the one conferred by Cummings’s poem, the Arrow man can also be encountered in chapter seven of The Great Gatsby. Ide collars were manufactured by George P. Ide & Co. and had nothing to do with today’s Integrated Drive Electronics. Lydia E. Pinkham’s highly successful herbal medicine might have owed some of its popularity among women to an impressive ethanol content. The standard treatment for acute menstrual pains at the time was to remove the ovaries, so getting slightly blotto was no doubt an attractive alternative. The poem was a few years too early to record tha
Today we are used to the idea that a free market economy, except when it collapses, goes on changing and growing inexorably, with a multifariousness that can be analysed only up to a point, and never fully described. No matter how dumb, every artist and intellectual has caught up with what Ferdinand Lassalle tried to tell Karl Marx: that capitalism was something far more complex and productive than he, Marx, could honestly reduce to a formula. Marx preferred to believe that capitalism was heading towards extinction. And indeed, in the twenties there was a crisis on the way, but it was still boom time when Cummings was writing satirical poems in Greenwich Village. The commercial world had a creative force of its own, to which the creative artists could not help responding, even when they despised it politically. Hart Crane scattered brand names throughout his long poem The Bridge. A monumental three-part novel much less read now that it once was, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, is punctuated with free-form poetic rhapsodies full of industrial facts and names. Those passages are by far the liveliest parts of the book. Many of the names are unrecognizable now, but strangely they remain as enticing as when he first transcribed them. The same applies to the trademarks in Cummings’s early poems.