Sherry Chandler

Sherry Chandler » A solace of ripe plums

A solace of ripe plums

Once upon a time, free verse poets called New Formalist poets “scum” and “the Republicans of poetry” (an insult that is taking on force again), but perhaps they didn’t start it. Traditional prosodists of the late 19th, early 20th century were not too kind to free verse poets either:

If “free verse” were to be admitted as verse at all, everything that had been achieved in the study of prosody would have to be rethought. Verse itself was defined, and still is in many dictionaries, as “metrical composition.” …But the issue was larger still. If the definition of verse were in question, so would be the nature of poetry, with which was habitually confused. And poetry was the pinnacle of civilized achievement, part of “what we fought the war for” against the barbarian Hun. …The prosodic theorists were defending civilization itself. Hence the almost apoplectic attacks on the New Poets: “These men are the Reds of literature; they would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and standards upon which literature is founded” [John Burroughs in Current Opinion, 1921]. At the time, this was not even hyperbole, but metonymy. Meter equals verse, equals poetry, equals culture, equals civilization.

— Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern, 1980)

This reminds me a bit of the vehemence with which Simone Weil attacked surrealism. The never-ending battle of the forces of chaos against the forces of order. And always, those of us in the middle, crying out, unheard, “Can’t we all just get along?”

In his essay “Time Out of Motion” (A Poetics, Harvard 1982), Charles Bernstein points out that, in the late 19th, early 20th century, there was a great influx of immigrants into the United States, so that by 1910 roughly 1/3 of the population either spoke no English or spoke English as a second language. William Carlos Williams, for example, was bilingual from childhood. What he helped to create was

an English language literature that does not evolve from Chaucer through other Island writers but has many roots in English and non-English (p. 109)

Of course one could say that the American tradition started to skew away from Chaucer a bit earlier, with Whitman and Dickinson. But both these poets are unique, inimitable. Nevertheless, it might be possible to see in Whitman’s logorhea and Dickinson’s stammering a sort of foreshadowing of the 20th century free-verse revolution.

And there was also, as Jerome Rothenberg makes us see, considerable influence from African and Native American cultures, an influence felt through dialect poets like Lafcadio Hearn and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

And so all this churning of language culminated in a poor old woman munching on a plum. I have little else to say about it, except that it seems a quiet, simple thing to have caused so much unease. I don’t have any great insights into its form. It is, of course, deceptively simple. It is also, I think, a poem meant to console.

What could be holier than this poor old woman seeking “a solace of ripe plums”? That phrase itself is worth the price of admission into whatever great poets school there is.

Though I can’t help but point out that it is a solace more difficult to find in these days of global agriculture when shelf-life is more important than taste.

Still, what else do we have as we grow old and civilization continues its mad rush toward destruction than these simple sensuous pleasures? And how could we savor them with her except through these famous lines: