Sherry Chandler

Smelly cat

IV

catpiss smell,
the pink bloom open:
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your veins to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.

— Seamus Heaney, “from Field Work” in Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)

The shape of a poem

I am taking an eight-week poetry class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Called “The Path of a Poem,” the class is led by Leatha Kendrickk. I take Leatha’s classes whenever they’re offered because she is not only a fine poet and a fine teacher with a wide-ranging knowledge of poetry and prosody but also because her classes always attract the best poets in the area, so the quality of the discussion is high and often technical.

All of which leads me to my point, which is that last night was my night to be critiqued and I had submitted the sonnet crown that has been languishing in my drawer in one form or another for, well, ten years if you go back to some of the root ideas.

The verdict last night was the same as always: there’s some great stuff here but it doesn’t quite make it all the way there.

I ask myself why I keep resurrecting this monster. Over the years I’ve been forced to abandon any number of poems by the knowledge that they were never going to quite make it. As William Stafford says, we have to write our bad poems as well as our good ones.

But this poem is different.

Maybe it’s just my way of running scales. Even master musicians have to do it. Maybe this is just my practice piece, the poem where I burnish up my formal chops.

But why bother with form? Part of the reason is explained by this passage I ran across this morning reading in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). The question was: Would you be offended to be called a formalist?. The answer, in part:

I wouldn’t be offended but I think it would be a mistake. “Formalist” to me sounds like a kind of doctrinaire position. I totally believe in form; but quite often, when people use the term, they mean shape rather than form. There’s the sonnet shape, fair enough, but it’s not just a matter of rhyming the eight lines and the other six; they happen to be set one on top of each other like two boxes, but they’re more like a torso and pelvis. There has to be a little bit of muscle movement, it has to be alive in some sort of way. A moving poem doesn’t just mean that it touches you, it means it has to move itself along as a going linguistic concern. Form is not like a pasty cutter — the dough has to move and discover its own shape. [p. 447]

If you think about that — you don’t impose a sonnet shape on a poem, you write a poem that discovers its shape as a sonnet.

Sounds mystical but it’s a matter of running the scales until your fingers bleed and then, if you also have some talent (not necessarily genius), you can improvise, you can be free-form within the form.

I think that’s why I keep worrying at my sonnet crown. Every time I ratchet it up to the next level of competence, I discover a level beyond that.

If I can get it right, maybe I’ll have become a poet.

Which, when I think about it, will never happen. If one practices poetry, one is always becoming. That’s part of the deal.

Seamus Heaney wins Cohen Award

From The Guardian:

Irish poet Seamus Heaney was recognised for the “sheer scale” of his literary achievements with the �40,000 David Cohen prize this evening.

His fellow poet and chair of the award’s judges, poet laureate Andrew Motion, honoured Heaney for a body of poetry that over the past 40 years has “crystallised the story of our times, in language which has bravely and memorably continued to extend its imaginative reach”, and for his critical writing, his translations and his lecturing, which “have invigorated the whole wider world of poetry”.

The prize, one of the most prestigious honours for living British writers, has been won in the past by Heaney’s fellow Nobel laureates VS Naipaul and Harold Pinter. It is awarded biennially for a lifetime’s excellence in literature. The prize is unusual in that the winner receives a further �12,500 to be donated either to a literature organisation that supports young writers, or to an individual writer under the age of 35. Heaney chose to give the �12,500 to an annual poetry speaking competition open to all post-primary students in Ireland, Poetry Aloud.

Digital Yeats

Yeats has been digitized at the National Library of Ireland, and reading about it yesterday in the NYTimes lent a certain irony to my opening my volume of Seamus Heaney’s Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) to his lecture on Yeats and Philip Larkin, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.”

The irony, a very mild one to be sure, is that Heaney presents Yeats as a poet over against science in the sense intended by Czelaw Milosz:

As Czeslaw Milosz has observed, no intelligent contemporary is spared the presssure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning, all of which are part of the intellectual atmosphere we subsist in; and yet Milosz notices this negative pressure only to protest against a whole strain of modern literature which has conceded victory to it. Poetry, Milosz pleads, must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries-old hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy. [Heaney, p. 153]

Heaney contrasts Larkin’s “Aubade” with Yeats’s “Cold Heaven,” both poems confronting the inevitability of death, and gives the laurels to Yeats.

The ghost upon the road, the soul’s destiny in the afterlife, the consequences in eternity of the individual’s actions in time — traditional concerns like these are profoundly relevant to “Cold Heaven” and they are also, of course, typical of the things which preoccupied Yeats for the whole of his life. Whether it was fairy lore in Sligo or Buddhism with the Dublin Hermetic Society or spiritualist séances or Noh dramas which imagined the adventures of Cuchulain’s shade in the Land of the Dead, Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side. His studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic and yet his intellect remained undeluded. [pp 149-150]

Well, perhaps after all it is appropriate that Yeats should become virtual. It is sort of the nerd’s version of resurrection.

I myself have been wrestling with a poem lately, on a much lower plane than either Yeats or Larkin of course, that confronts death and whether one will be able to carry through to the end with some dignity and courage. I am not quite ready to say, with Larkin:

…Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

There’s something to be said for “not scaring others” if you love them, but let that go.

Neither am I comfortable, after years of having religious fundamentalism oppose science to our great peril, with the notion that poetry must be hostile to reason and science. A poet like Linda Bierds finds much poetry in science itself, and while I don’t find myself at home in her work, I can recognize its worth. As Gregor Mendel could be both monk and scientist, so perhaps can a poet be both poet and rationalist (without going over to the dark side like Larkin).

I think I understand why a poet like Milosz would feel that way he does. I have read his essays in Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983) and I think I understand that he was reacting to the nihilism that struck Europe in the period between the two world wars and in the post WWII period. But the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now we can see that “belief” can be as absurd and anti-meaning as “reason.”

But let Heaney continue:

Rational objections were often rationally allowed by [Yeats], if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed. Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.
…
Yet it is because of Yeats’s fidelity to both perceptions and his refusal to foreclose on either that we recognize in him a poet of the highest attainment. [pp. 150, 151]

It’s a middle way we see Heaney praise here, not one that rejects reason but one that refuses to be cowed by it. Because

…I have repeatedly tried to establish through several different readings and remarks in the course of these lectures…that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital factor in the achievement of that goal, is what Yeats called in “Under Ben Bulben” the “profane perfection of mankind.”

In order to achieve that goal, therefore, and in order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a print-out of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. …The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it. …We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. [pp. 158-160]

I am not utterly convinced that humankind is the crown of creation but most of this reasoning makes sense to me.

You can visit the virtual exhibition at this link (broadband and flash required).

Jesse Stuart, the Appalachian Hugh MacDiarmid?

It struck me that the following passage, from Seamus Heaney’s essay “A Torchlight Procession of One” on the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, could also describe the man who might be called an Appalachian nationalist poet, Jesse Stuart. Both men were what you might call vernacular poets. McDiarmid’s work preceded Stuart’s by about ten years:

He was very clear-headed about his productions and in the 1960s wrote to a BBC producer as follows: “My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.” From a person of less abundant capacity and with a less compulsive appetite for overdoing things, this could have sounded like an excuse; from MacDiarmid, however, it emerges as a boast. With him, the speech from the dock is sure to be a roar of defiance. No wonder Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of his death should be marked each year by the observance of two minutes of pandemonium. “He would walk into my mind,” MacCaig said at the graveside in Langholm in 1978, “as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets…”

Still, although his vitality was epoch-making, MacDiarmid has probably written more disconcertingly than any other major twentieth-century poet. Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an un-get-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigiousness of his blather. The task for everybody confronted with the immense bulk of his collected verse is to make a firm distinction between the true poetry and what we might call the habitual printout.

— Seamus Heaney, “A Torchlight Procession of One: On Hugh MacDiarmid” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp 104-105

More on the politics of meter

sort of.

Consider this passage from Seamus Heaney’s essay “Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander,” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995):

…we have been rightly instructed about the ways native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,” and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things. …Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential.

…for it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically “above the brim,” beyond the established norms. These things are the artistic manifestation of that affirming spiritual flame which W. H. Auden wanted the good person and the good poet to show, a manifestation which has less to do with argument or edification than with the fact of articulation itself. (pp. 24-25)

A clarification about grammar: the indicative mood says “she did,” optative mood says something like “if she had done” or perhaps “she might have done.”

As an Irish poet, Heaney is saying that it is good to know that works in the canon of English literature are based on certain empirical assumptions, and that their actions don’t always look all that noble from the point of view of the conquered “barbarians.” Same with Latin literature or Greek.

Even so, says Heaney, there is something about the literature that rises above the politics of the time and that something is found in its music, its form, its art, in the joy it brings us from its playfulness and audacity.

On the political nature of redress

A passage from Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) that seems to me somewhat relevant to my post earlier to day about Woodrow Wilson’s CPI:

[Political activists] will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise in leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. (pp. 2-3)