Specks

While writing a poem the hot wire of  thought welds together strange chunks of this and that.

It can’t completely combine the disparate elements and make a new element of them, but it can loosen the edges of mutually disinterested materials enough to bond them so that a serial lumpy going on is achieved, crude emergency bridges made, say, of  brush and old doors, just barely strong enough to get the thought across before the furious townspeople show up.

Because thought is stolen, of course, ripped out of a case and carried off in a sack.

Anything nearby is pressed into service to forward the thought. The lathered horse falls out of   the picture as the horseman hurls himself and the sack onto the speeding train. When he leaps to a crane, the train falls away, and so on, according to the laws of attention and expedience.

And you will note the presence of “speed” in the middle of expedience: only high speeds permit the transmission of thought, the brief mutations of substance, the continued whispered advance of some articulation that is at once autonomous and at the same time completely the product of  what’s available to make itself out of.

Thus we could not separate thought from conversion; we must see the two forces melted into one, thought as conversion itself, and thus never static, never possessable, but like the edges of combustion where the creosote is bubbling to explode in a ripply red line advancing across the desert.

•

It’s not so much what poems are, in themselves, but the infinitely larger optimism they offer by their intermittent twinkles: that beneath the little lights on their tiny masts, so far from one another, so lost to each other, there must be a single black sea. We could have no sense of the continuousness of the unknowable without these 
buoyant specks.

•

The poem is a space capsule in which impossible combinations feel casual. The body of the capsule is of necessity very strong to have broken out of gravity. It is the hard case for the frail experiments 
inside. Not frail in the wasted sense, but frail in the opposite sense: the brief   visibility of the invisible.

•

Because what I am transporting in my hands is both weightless and invisible, and because it must be held loosely, it is impossible to know at the time if  I have carried it or if   what I have done is a comical act, a person pretending to carry something carefully; a farcelike delicacy of  manners.

•

Some people have one great dream in life which they fail to fulfill.
Others have no dream at all and fail to fulfill even that.

— Fernando Pessoa

I have a note beside this that says: ha ha perfect Pessoa.

Maybe some of us are wired backward and respond paradoxically to stimuli. Maybe what we think is orange is blue. But I for one have always laughed in the presence of the dismal. Not a rueful laugh but with fresh relish. I cannot tire of  Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet or Larkin’s night terrors. They are voluptuaries of the bed of aridity.

•

Yes, to write is to lose myself, but everyone gets lost, because everything in life is loss. But unlike the river flowing into the estuary for which, unknowing, it was born, I feel no joy in losing myself, but lie like the pool left on the beach at high tide, a pool whose waters, swallowed by the sands, never more return to the sea.

— Fernando Pessoa

As distinct as Pessoa is, he is nonetheless one of the category of 
writers who find themselves and their reactions so far outside the conventional that they have no tools but those they construct for themselves for knowing anything, for finding their bearings. They must synthesize gravity, direction, time, substance. They can’t use anyone else’s.

It explains these writers completely. It is as though the atmosphere, beautiful and breathable to everyone else, were toxic to them, a poison gas. They are urgently occupied with building a conversion 
machine. Oh, and this conversion machine can never be finished. Every day it has to be built over again, but differently. To an outside eye, the machines would look identical, but to the poet, panicking for lack of air, something has gone wrong again. It all has to be undertaken again — from scratch.

•

 

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of   snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
a change of   mood
and saved some part
of   a day I had rued.

— Robert Frost

I have a terrible time remembering anything, so I really appreciate a poem I can hold onto.

But additionally, greatness in a poem can be calculated as the relationship between means and ends: the bigger the disproportion the greater the poem. Which makes “Dust of  Snow” ridiculously great. It is one sentence. Only two words go to two syllables. It doesn’t have any metaphors. You could cover it up with a matchbook.

Nothing keeps the poem from being metabolized. The rhymes button perfectly into their button holes. The picture is black (crow) white (snow) and utterly simple. That’s all there is, out in the snow of  the empty page.

So it begins sinking into the mind and turning into our own personal shift: how any little surprise can dislodge everything. A bad day can go on forever; release from it is the putting-right of the universe.

It takes such perfect intuition to know to shut up like this, to know that all you have to do is get the crack started and let the crack continue in the reader.

The amount you need to say is so hard to gauge. How much can you not say, and something will still have the charge of the unsaid? There is a point at which what is said is too pale, or frail, one fears, to tip the mind into the unsaid. And the reason for the pallor might not be punctilio but a genuine failure of force.

But there is no failure of force here. Frost does what needs to be done to make his poem work. And if  it takes a minor adjustment to conversational phrasing to get the rhyme, he makes it. I mean, no one would say “saved some part of a day I had rued.” It’s not quite speech. Frost goes on and on about the “sound of   sense,” but you notice he’ll do what he has to do to make the poem stick in your head. Because above everything else, as he says in his Paris Review interview, “you’ve got to score.”

And back to the idea that it doesn’t use any metaphors: of course it is also only a metaphor. If  it were just a little Vermont stamp we would forget it. No, it’s the break-line where the welding of  the world comes loose.

•

 

Reference Back

That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.

Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique negroes blew
Out of  Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
to my unsatisfactory prime.

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

— Philip Larkin

His old mother hovers about, listening from the hall beyond the bedroom where he has ineffectually barricaded himself with his record player. It takes Larkin just six lines to set the trap.

I always want to laugh at the perfection of these setups. We know this desperate stuckness well from his other poems. There could almost be a Chinese character, one single figure that would mean in all its pent-up intensity, “Larkin’s fix.” He’s always in Larkin’s fix.

He’s such a comically unattractive character. It’s a marvel to me that he exposes himself so mercilessly. Another marvel to me is the sleight of hand that Larkin works on us from inside these suffocating chambers, dumping the emotional contents from stanza to stanza, room to room, mother to son, ear to ear, creating a sense of permeability and interpenetration while at the same time walling the poem up with contrary rhetoric. The effect is classic Larkin: irresistible fluidity completely boxed in.

“Blindingly undiminished” is sophistry. Things were never as they once were; I mean, even when they were, they weren’t. But that doesn’t take a thing away from the fact that these terrible nostalgic gusts (to which we are constantly susceptible) feel true. They are made up by us; they are abetted by the lyric temperament; we visit them and suffer phantom perfection.

The quick flash in the dark created by the phrase, “blindingly undiminished” — and extinguished by every other line in the poem — is the breeder reactor for the whole thing. It is such an unbearably 
intense radiation that only a sad sack like Larkin can wrap it in a sufficient number of  wet blankets to make it bearable to us.

Again and again it’s this threatened availability of everything we ever desired that puts the fire under Larkin’s kettles. How could we stand his poems otherwise? Why would we?

Today I feel the opposite of Borges, who wished all poetry could be anonymous, or at least his. I want the human trajectory, the 
feeling of the personal struggle against paralysis and despair and 
ridiculousness. I want Larkin to fight in his Larkinness. I want him to sneak through the obstacles one more time.

•

 

Something Matters but We Don't

In man, I can see no substance solidly;
it is as if  what we call man were no more
than an oddly angled look at something else.
Or is it my limitation, being man,
not to be able to see whatever is there?
And aren’t these two alternatives the same?

Let me leave off speaking, unknowing as I am,
but not before I speak of the limits of speech,
or tell of   man that there is nothing to tell,
or tell of   what we discern perhaps there could be
to tell that we know too little except it is there
and, if anything happens, it must be it happens there

and not to us, not by us: good
or evil, it doesn’t matter what we do.

— William Bronk

I was enjoying the grind of Bronk, admiring it this morning.

We are all trying to focus, but we each have a particular distance we care about. Some people are after a granular closeness, some want a middle range. For Bronk, the remoteness is extreme. He’s so hungry to get some faraway focus and he just can’t. All of  his poems are these barren tripod marks, where he set up his glass once again, where he tried again.

I don’t know why the evidence of failure should provide consolation but it always does.

•

 

#1099

My Cocoon tightens — Colors teaze — 
I’m feeling for the Air — 
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear — 

A power of   Butterfly must be — 
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of   Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of   Sky — 

So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if  at last
I take the clue divine

— Emily Dickinson

Higginson was right; she is spasmodic. Dickinson terrain is hard on the brain suspension. In any poem of more than one stanza, one stanza 
is likely to bottom out.

# 1099 has several things not going for it. First, I always worry when it looks like she’s going to inhabit an insect. These experiments can go bad in the fey direction. (Recall the “little Tippler / Leaning against the — Sun — .”) And here she is in stanza one already sensing herself  in the early stages of  becoming a butterfly.

It’s a very odd condition, squeezed into a Cocoon while also still in her Dress — not fey but off-balance and unsettled. She isn’t the one thing or the other quite yet; her condition is conjectural. “Colors teaze,” and she feels “A dim capacity for Wings.” So far the picture’s funny and ill fitting and, well, let’s just say so, ravishing: it takes massive poetic wings to think of “a dim capacity for Wings.”

Then stanza two just isn’t very strong, essentially some Dickinson boilerplate to say, Butterflies fly. Of course it is useful for the advancement of  her idea, which is that if she is to be a butterfly she must get beyond the cocoon stage. And it does serve the purpose of making a bridge to stanza three, the stanza for which I have dog-eared this page in Johnson.

Here she works one of  her false-reason tricks, starting the stanza with “So,” as though what follows will be the result of  what has gone before. As though it won’t be a cosmic leap. As though she cared about those old stanzas anymore. But this is a different plane. By now she is purely addressing the poet’s interior puzzle: how can I move in the direction of  what I sense — not as a butterfly, but as a poet?

This is   just such a strange capsule of a stanza. I am so interested in her heavy emphasis on clumsiness here, saying it three ways in three lines: she must baffle and cipher and make much blunder if she’s ever going to “take the clue divine.” She’s turning it over and over: the way of  the poet is the way of awkwardness and error.

I don’t know if  I’m getting across what seems rare to me in this. It’s the exhilarating unworkability of  it: one can only blunder into the light, or whatever the “clue divine” is. It’s not gradual, or progressive, 
or accumulative: you don’t get better or make fewer blunders, approaching the godhead step by step. Blundering doesn’t work, except it does. It can’t lead you there, except it’s the only way to get there. 
I will go so far as to hazard that blundering might be generative, meaning that rooting around in a haystack long and fruitlessly enough could conceivably breed a needle.

•

 

The Poet Hin

The foolish poet wonders
Why so much honour
Is given to other poets
But to him
No honour is given.

I am much condescended to, said the poet Hin,
By my inferiors. And, said the poet Hin,
On my tombstone I will have inscribed:
“He was much condescended to by his inferiors.”
Then, said the poet Hin,
I shall be properly remembered.

Hin — wiping his tears away, I cried — 
Your words tell me
You know the correct use of   shall and will.

That, Hin, is something we may think about,
May, may, may, man.

Well yes, true, said Hin, stopping crying then,
Well yes, but true only in part,
Well, your wiping my tears away
Was a part.

           But ah me, ah me,
So much vanity, said he, is in my heart.
Yet not light always is the pain
That roots in levity. Or without fruit wholly
As from this levity’s
Flowering pang of melancholy
May grow what is weighty,
May come beauty.

True too, Hin, true too. Well, as now: You have gone on
Differently from what you begun.

Yet both truths have validity,
the one meanly begot, the other nobly,
And as each alone glosses over
What the other says, so only together
Have they a full thought to uncover.

— Stevie Smith

 

Why is this so wonderful?

Because it is utterly headstrong and meant to amuse and gratify her own self, meant to keep herself good company and also to console her, and along the way stumbles into some wisdom.

The most beautiful thoughts and feelings can barely settle or they break us. We can’t endure more than the briefest visitations. That’s the cruel fact. Almost every writer almost always crushes her own work under the weight of   thoughts and feelings.

Nobody knows how to be light much of   the time. Maybe not even the Dalai Lama. Stevie Smith had some natural advantages, a natural distance from conventional behavior.

The only reason it’s bearable to know the things she stubs her toe on is the offhand method of arrival and her chronic throwaway, “hi-ho” tone. She sends very hot things through the cooling coils of her poems and plays with them in her bare hands. For of course poems must include hot things; if all the hot things are removed the result cannot be poetry since it is the job of poetry to remain open to the whole catastrophe.

In “The Poet Hin” she manages to say things she utterly means:

1. I am condescended to by my inferiors.
2. Levity contains pain and weight and beauty.

But these heavy matters enjoy the particular weightlessness conferred on the reader’s mind by the assurance that they are the ravings of an individual. The reader of  Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget that she is looking through the cock eyes of   Stevie Smith. Everything that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained; 
we can examine them as if   they were toys although they are not.

There is nothing so freeing as someone pleasing herself.

Work that pleases itself first just snips so many binding strings in the minds of others.

 

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“Reference Back” from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, llc. “Something Matters but We Don’t” by William Bronk reprinted by permission of the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. “My cocoon tightens, colors teaze” by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College, from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Massachusetts (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of  Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College). “The Poet Hin” by Stevie Smith reprinted by permission of  New Directions Publishing.