Tiktaalik
November 8, 2013 § Leave a comment
Tiktaalik
Tell-tale wrist
and slender finger bones
chiselled from the quarry—
slivered ks and ts
amongst saxifrage
and campion, arctic
cottongrass and
willow, lodged
in the scoured
crevices and
fingerholds of
language.
melos, opsis, root: miscellany 3
October 28, 2013 § Leave a comment
Stephen Spender, Life and the Poet:
“…there is no dividing line between the poet and the audience which enters into his poetry. The poet puts into words the potential poetry of other minds. If they accept it as poetry, it is because they accept it as their own poetry, something which they, given the illumination, now see, and might have said.” p.50
–“The greatest poet of an age is the poet who accepts most of life whilst penetrating farthest with his question ‘What does this signify?’ The greatest modern poet would be the poet most capable of accepting the most anti-poetic and brutal phenomena — war, slums, tyrannies — and revealing them as expressions of man’s spirit even in being denials of man’s spirit. All the conditions created by humanity are a language of phenomena, however destructive and oppressive.” pp.51-52
Sapphic stanza
— 4 lines: 2 hendecasyllabic verses followed by a third in the same form + continuing with 5 extra syllables (which becomes the 4th line in modern verse, known as the Adonic or adonean line)
— key: — long u short x ‘anceps’ = free
— u — x — u u — u — —
— u — x — u u — u — —
— u — x — u u — u — —
— u u — u
from Welsh, Roots of Lyric
— “The ‘real core of poetry’, [Frye] writes, is not descriptive meaning, and not the poet’s cri de coeur (which is a description of an emotion), but a subtle and elusive verbal pattern that avoids, and does not lead to, such bald statements’ (p.81).” p.18 Welsh Roots of Lyric
— roots of lyric are melos (music/’babble’) and opsis (image/’doodle’ a la Frye); motion or movement through time & stasis, the still image
— that melos & opsis are “fundamental powers” p.21, not a plaster stuck on to some underlying ‘meaning’; that riddle and metaphor (opsis) “engenders thought by teaching us something” p.32; a riddle creates a space for knowing; “The riddle’s peculiar vision leads to complex and paradoxical ways of knowing something, ways that good poets will not allow to be resolved simply” p.44; images as an “intuitive language”
— Pound’s “ideogrammatic method” as a kind of thought that moves from the concrete towards the abstract (cherries/rose/flamingo/iron rust = redness); there are energies between images
— similarly, rhyme can also draw connections between words: “…rhyme in poetry has a way of moving beyond ornamentation, a way of discovering significant connections between the meanings of the rhyming words” p.123
— Frye, on the origins of the music of lyric in language: “‘an oracular, meditative, irregular, unpredictable, and essentially discontinuous rhythm, emerging from the coincidences of the sound-pattern'” p.134 (Anatomy p.271); i.e. an organization of “sound echoes” distinct from metre p.134
–“Melopoeia… is a force that leads poetry away from precisions of word and meaning, but that may be, as Pound said, a bridge to non-verbal consciousness….” p.155
Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
–“When an original grows old, its dated words and syntax serve as a kind of watermark. Age in itself gives substance–what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem’s increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind: they enter not only the physical painting, but our vision of it as well.” p.67
Terrence Des Pres, Praises and Dispraises
–“The odd carnality of words is that they arise ex nihilo, become incarnate in their saying, then instantly depart while at the same time they leave an imprint that resounds. Poetry activates memory through its soundings — through rhyme, alliteration, etc., but also tone, inflection, and finally the entire ensemble of ‘voice,’ which is the earthly shape of sound in motion. Language of this memorable kind is capable of persisting through a void or, on the other hand, through the dense chaos fo language in the world. Poetry — any set of lines we prize — sorts itself out from the infinitude of babble and allows us moments of coherence, of lucidity and self-possession as close to unity of being as most of us shall come…” p.27
–“Language and imagination together constitute a system of grace and a force…” p.27
— use metaphor to be precise–how seeing similarity or likeness in disparate things can help to bring the thing into better focus, as if applying to it a series of lenses
— describe materials his body will become: resemblance//becoming sinew, string, root; the organic body described in terms of other organic things, & inorganic materials
Gerald L. Bruns, The Material of Poetry: 3 theses:
1. “that poetry is made of language but is not a use of it” p.7 i.e. “Poetry is language in excess of the functions of language….” p.7
2. that poetry is “not necessarily made of words but is rooted in, and in fact already fully formed by, sounds produced by the human voice…” p7/8
3. that poetry “does not occupy a realm of its own…poetry enjoys a special ontological relation with ordinary things of the world” p.9
“The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas thinks of language not as a mode of cognition and representation but as a mode of proximity, sensibility, or contact, as if language were corporeal, like skin.” p.9
“no poet ever aspired to become ‘President of the Earth'”: miscellany 2
October 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
“The people M. referred to as ‘we’ were those he continued to converse with all his life, even when they were no longer here. There were three of them — but apart from these three, there was also the whole of world poetry, which knew no bounds of time and space. It does not matter what place a poet has in it however small it may be. The very smallest place — just a couple of successful lines, one good poem, a single well-said word — entitles him to enter the fellowship of poets, to be one of ‘us,’ to partake of the feast. I am quite sure that no poet ever aspired to become ‘President of the Earth’ — the very title was only a joke of one of the most naive of them…The pass to poetry is granted only by faith in its sacramental character and a sense of responsibility for everything that happens in the world.”
— Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, pp.116-117
“M. was clear in his mind that poetry is a purely personal affair — this was the secret of his strength. Communing with oneself alone, one says only things that really matter.”
— Hope Abandoned, p.90
“With joyful anticipation, he thought of the day or two which he would set aside and spend alone, away from the university and from his home, in order to write a poem in memory of Anna. He would include in it all those random things which life would send his way — a few descriptions of Anna’s best characteristics; Tonya in mourning; street incidents on the way back from the funeral; and the washing hanging in the place where he had wept as a child and the blizzard had raged.”
— Dr. Zhivago, p.89
from Roger Payne’s Among Whales:
— humpback whale songs follow rules similar to human songs; prob. not song lines, as in Australian aboriginal songlines (“Songs that store descriptions of many points and features needed to keep track of where one is, what landmarks to look for and points at which to change course during a long journey” p.155)
— “We don’t even know where in their bodies to look for the sound-making apparatus.” p.159; perhaps are shunted through valves & sinuses in their heads; they don’t have to open their mouths to sing — sound travels from watery (95%) body to water of sea easily
— “When you are very close to a singing whale you can hear it singing right through the hull of a quiet boat. The boat’s hull acts as a kind of sounding board to help the sound pass from water to air.” p.160
— “Music is fluctuating patterns of energy. When music is played, everything is affected and shaped: the drum, the drum skin, the wood of the drum, air, ears, walls, floors. The physicist Brian Swimme notes that ‘We think of the drummer as playing the drum only; in truth, the drummer is playing the world.'” p.166
watermark
— image or pattern in paper which appears as shades of dark & light when seen by transmitted light — caused by variation in thickness in paper; digital watermark: embedding information into a digital signal (audio, video); steganography: “data is carried in the signal itself”
“Poems in Celan are instrumental, dialogic, orientative, because the East is always and only the vanished other person. Poems are intended to engage in the recovery of orientative possibility — the mother’s body, let us say, which has disappeared — by putting language (the competence for which is the specifying difference of humanity) in service of Richtung, orientation in space and time. Enlightenment has inflicted upon language a wound — a reality wound (Wirklichkeitswund — wound, trauma of knowledge, darkness inflicted by light).”
— Allen Grossman, “Poetry and Enlightenment” True-Love p.10
from Shale Magazine (Gabriola) Issue 17, Sept. 2007:
— “Unweathered sandstone in the upper-Nanaimo Group formations is a bright bluish grey with flecks of black amphibole, milky-white feldspar, and sparkling mica. On exposure, it quickly develops a weathered ‘surface zone’ that has an overall sandy-brown colour. (When fresh, the colour sometimes includes warm-coloured hues such as pink, orange, rose, buff, dark red, or brown). Sandstone that has weathered for a very long time, including below the surface zone, has lost most of this colour and appears predominantly dull grey often with a brownish or greenish cast, with the surface zone being typically darker. The surface zone itself may acquire a patchy, eggshell-thin, dark-red or dark-brown rind that eventually turns black” p.51
“Geothite, which is named after the German poet, is usually very dark brown, which, when old, appears black.”
“Hematite, the possible intermediary between ferrihydrite and geothite, is dull to bright red (seen in Gabriolan-made bricks and the sites of bonfires on the beach.” p.53
— on the ‘honeycomb’ holes in the sandstone: “One admittedly attractive idea is that ‘rock bees do it,’ presumably at night when nobody is looking. An interesting variant of this theory, worth a couple of points, is that the holes are the burrows of ancient molluscs, only now being revealed to the outside world by the erosion of the rock.” p.53-4 Vo.9 August 2004
from Shale Magazine, Issue 2, March 2001: Coast Salish place names on Gabriola:
— tle:ltxw (False Narrows): “Sounds like tla alt. The word means ‘rich place’ or ‘expansive dwellings.’ This site is the site of a winter village and large clam bed. Burial sites are extensive throughout this area. An important creation story is linked to this site. It is the story of Mink, the trickster, who lived here with his grandmother, sought out the Chief who kept guard over fire. By kidnapping his child and deceiving him into believing that many people live at tle:ltxw, Mink was able to convince the Chief to give him his fire drill. From this time forward, the Snuneymuxw have had the ability to make fire.” p.24
— xwkwumluxwuthum (Thompson Point): “Sounds like wh kwumlo whuthom. The word means, ‘little roots.’ Roots, particularly camas roots, were an important food resource for the Snuneymuxw.” p.24
— qwunus (a rock west of Indian Point): “Sounds like kwun us. The word means, ‘whale.’ This is a rock in the shape of a whale with its mouth open.” p.24; there used to be many whales, esp. humpbacks, in the Strait of Georgia
Seamus Heaney, 1939 — 2013
August 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
Friday 18 September 2009
I find reading Heaney, then Larkin, that you begin to see the structure of the poet’s mind which is both recognizably human, in that I recognize myself, but at the same time utterly alien and unknowable. Grossman: “A poem is a fiction of a self seen from within.” Summa Lyrica p.246. No, perhaps that isn’t right — not unknowable, because I am in fact able to see or to begin to see this structure of another’s mind, which would, under normal circumstances, be completely inaccessible. Yet still alien, in that this is another mind. With Larkin, I identify and recognize the misanthropic gesture, while with Heaney I yearn for the possibility of transcendence and absolution he describes.
Monday 7 December 2009
What is it that so appeals to me in Heaney’s poems, which I want to emulate in my own? There is an economy of words in his free verse, which gives the appearance of form — 4- or 5-word lines, lines divided into stanzas — tercets or quatrains, although not always…I want to replicate the spareness of Heaney’s earlier poems, combined with his complexity of imagery — startling at times. There is also its groundedness, linked to its subject matter, his childhood on his parents’ farm…I like also the references to writing, letters, school satchels, common objects….His optimism. Their lyrical beauty — this comes through especially in his later collections — The Spirit Level, Seeing Things. They don’t chatter. They sing.
Saturday 2 January 2010
Reading Byatt’s The Children’s Book where there is a lot of discussion of pottery, clays, slips, glazes. I love the word ‘clay.’ …The words draw me — clay, slip, glaze, the metals and elements that produce distinct colours, And I thought of Heaney’s poem in The Spirit Level — ‘To a Dutch Potter in Ireland’: “Grey-blue, dull-shining, scentless, touchable — /Like the earth’s old ointment box, sticky and cool” and “Hosannah in clean sand and Kaolin/And, ‘now that the rye crop waves beside the ruins,’/In ash pits, oxides, shards and chlorophylls.” I like “sticky and cool” — the /k/s, and the word ‘sticky,’ the short and then long vowel, and the idea of clays in the ground that you dabble your fingers in like an ointment box, and of praising clay, the elements. Again it’s the alliteration — ‘clean’ and ‘Kaolin,’ although I don’t know what Kaolin is, the s‘s and sh‘s and then the final /k/ in chlrophylls. And again some kind of progression of vowels — ae, short o, long a, long o — short through long? several kinds of ‘a’? I don’t have the technical vocabulary to precisely describe this yet.
Tuesday 23 February 2010
Rain. It always makes me want to write, to sit quietly with a pen in my hand and a notebook, and work on a poem. I am learning some things about writing poems, about refusing lines that come too easily, holding out for a sharper, more precise or startling image. And about sudden turns in the direction you thought you were going, when the language takes you elsewhere. Reading some of Heaney’s poems — the earlier ones, in North for example — there is a sense of watching an artist at work on a canvas, seeing the technique of laying down words, sounds, a sudden gesture that turns the poem in a new direction, taking you sideways, or turning something inside out, the process of defamiliarization. I’m not describing it right. Throw-away lines, that seem so casual — the last lines of ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,’ about pampooties. A lightness, and a way of deflecting the too easy (too heavy) conclusion. Or the ending of ‘Bone Dreams,’ although I don’t understand it, about the animal pelt and its tiny eyes. Well, I would like to do that.
Tuesday 6 July 2010
I was reading some of the poems in North while my students wrote their in-class essay last night. Trying to think about the elements that make them distinctively his —
1. place, setting — N. Europe, the bogs, N. Ireland, and also language & dialect as place or location in which you reside;
2. his focus on violence — Iron Age violent deaths, carried in the bodies of the bog people, mapped onto the violence in N. Ireland, if obliquely;
3. A precise, even technical vocabulary, not easily accessible. For example, in ‘Bog Queen,’: turf-face, demesne wall, glass-toothed stone (i.e. granite w/inclusions? glazed with ice?*), braille, Baltic amber, crock, diadem, ‘Carious,’ peat floe, bearings (as in ball bearings), sash, glacier, ‘Phoenician stitchwork,’ ‘retted’ (what is this? “retted on my breasts’/ soft moraines”), fjords, fledge, coomb, stone jambs, skull-ware, tufts. As if looking at a stone wall, all sharp hard words, of one-syllable. No, not entirely — coomb, moraine, floe, fjord, these are all soft. Perhaps I am thinking of the meaning — archaeological or geological terms, applied to a new domaine — the woman’s preserved body. Some descriptions are modified by adjectives that suggest rotting — “slimy birth-cord/of bog,” “bruised berries.” There are nouns made into unusual verbs, “kinned,” “ossify myself” — from different poems (‘Kinship,’ and ‘Bone Dreams’?); *or, a stone wall topped with shards of glass
4. Brilliant Metaphors — “My body was braille/for the creeping influences” — the body like a tactile text read by the elements. The body as text is not uncommon, nor is land as text to be read — a common colonial gesture. But here it is the land reading her body — this is new, isn’t it? It strikes me as original and startling. Or “they lie gargling/in her sacred heart” — as if a blood rattle, their deaths — from ‘Kinship.’ Or her brain fermenting — “a jar of spawn/fermenting underground”;
5. Spareness, precision. Each line and stanza is pared down, stripped of excess, 7 syllables per line at most, many with less, like imagist poems. There is nothing common, or clichéd, or soft — except in terms of a body which is rotting or bruised. There is economy — a “cured wound” in ‘Grauballe Man;’
6. The erotic — some element of the erotic in these descriptions of her body? Is this because it follows on the heels of ‘Come to the Bower’ and ‘Bone Dreams’? an effect of resonance? from one poem to the next. And there is the erotic married to the violent — nipples like blown amber, always in the description of the woman (Ondaatje does this also) as if describing a rape, that which is taken;
7. Content? What are the poems about? What do they mean? Is this a naive question? And yet they seem deeply significant — at the level of individual words engaging with issues of colonialism and the violence inflicted by language in addition to the historical violence towards which they gesture. e.g. in ‘Bone Dreams’ where he addresses English literary heritage: “I push back/through dictions/Elizabethan canopies,/Norman devices,//the erotic Mayflowers/of Provence/and the ivied Latins/of churchmen/to the scop’s/twang, the iron/flash of consonants/cleaving the line.” As if pushing back through overgrown, flowering plants, he reveals a cross-section of the English language, which his poem cuts through like the flash of consonants where Anglo-Saxon words cleave the line — ban hus, bone house;
8. Abrupt, unexplained transitions — in ‘Bone Dreams,’ the final section on the dead mole? He loses me here. Or is it meant to take us back to the bone he finds in the grass in the opening section? This mole also will decay, and already suggests to him a whole landscape, the “small distant Pennines.”
And then the question becomes, what can I do, what have I done?
Wednesday 15th September 2010
I am reading Human Chain, which came in the mail on Monday, and I saved until late Tuesday night….I’ve only skimmed through it and now want to read it through again, slowly. There are poems on books, and scribes, and writing tools, scraps of Virgil and Keats, echoes of earlier poems he’s written, which is disconcerting — for example, echoes of ‘The Rainstick’ from The Spirit Level in one poem, as if you’re hearing a song transposed into a different key that’s foreign to you ( a different scale?) or a song translated into a foreign language similar to your own. Some repetition of style which has become a verbal tic, like scar tissue. And it also reads like a private summing up of a life — you are welcome to listen in, such an intimate offering, but he doesn’t offer many signposts — you are on your own.
lyric/epic modes and the recognition of persons
April 19, 2013 § Leave a comment
In the poem as trace of an event 2 I mentioned that the American poet and theorist Susan Stewart in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), offers an interesting discussion of the ethical element of lyric when she distinguishes between lyric and epic poetry: she suggests that epic poetry is the voice of the nation (it voices the official perspective of the nation at war) while lyric poetry is the voice of the individual, who may be caught up in that war, but speaks alone, as one:
“I would like to take seriously [Rorty’s] suggestion that literature is a vehicle of moral progress if by such progress we mean an increasing recognition of individual persons and a reciprocal attention to the consequences of actions in relation to intentions. But I would argue that we can as readily find an analogue to the contrast between the abstracted and sublime view of human suffering and the immediacy of first-person experience in the contrast between two poetic modes: the first associated with public representations of war and the expression of tribalism and nationalism — the epic — and the second associated with the expression of the senses and emotions out of first-person experience — the lyric.” (p.296)
She goes on to argue that the lyric mode is best able to present the idiosyncratic consciousness of an individual, those “senses and emotions” that arise from first-person experience, over the engineered ideological pronouncements of the state. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the Iliad, and Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), which could be described as a reworking of Homer which attempts to rescue the individual soldiers and their deaths from the relentless (at times cinematic) narrative of battle in the original poem.
Oswald writes in her preface to Memorial, that
“ancient critics praised [the poem’s] enargeia, which means something like ‘bright unbearable reality.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves. This version, trying to retrieve the poem’s enargeia, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping. What’s left is a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers, both of which derive (I think) from distinct poetic sources: the similes from pastoral lyric (you can tell this because their metre is sometimes compressed as if it originally formed part of a lyric poem); the biographies from the Greek tradition of lament poetry [….] I like to think that the stories of individual soldiers recorded in the Iliad might be recollections of these laments, woven into the narrative by poets who regularly performed both high epic and choral lyric poetry.” p.1-2
Her “translation” then is based on her interpretation of the Iliad as “a kind of oral cemetery — in the aftermath of the Trojan War, an attempt to remember people’s names and lives without the use of writing.” p.2 As such, and in light of Stewart’s comments above, Oswald is working against the grain: to salvage the individual perspective by lifting it from its surrounding epic (state) narrative, to give us tiny glimpses of individual soldiers at their deaths, of who they were, their preoccupations, their loves.
In practice, Oswald constructs the bulk of Memorial by presenting first a description of a soldier’s death, followed by an epic simile, which is repeated twice. The repetition suggests a certain ceremonial, religious aspect, as in a litany or a prayer for the dead. It also suggests the ways in which memory circles back, returning again and again to recall the ones we have lost. As example, I’ve selected her description of the death of Skamandrios (Scamandrius in Oswald’s version):
First, here is the death of Skamandrios, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation:
The henchmen of Idomeneus stripped the armour from Phaistos,
while Menelaos son of Atreus killed with the sharp spear
Strophios’ son, a man of wisdom in the chase, Skamandrios,
the fine huntsman of beasts. Artemis herself had taught him
to strike down every wild thing that grows in the mountain forest.
Yet Artemis of the showering arrows could not now help him,
no, nor the long spearcasts in which he had been pre-eminent,
but Menelaos the spear-famed, son of Atreus, stabbed him,
as he fled away before him, in the back with a spear thrust
between the shoulders and driven through to the chest beyond it.
He dropped forward on his face and his armour clattered upon him. Bk. V. l.48-58
Here is Oswald’s translation or version, including the twice-repeated simile she adds to the biography:
SCAMANDRIUS the hunter
Knew every deer in the woods
He used to hear the voice of Artemis
Calling out to him in the lunar
No man’s land of the mountains
She taught him to track her animals
But impartial death has killed the killer
Now Artemis with all her arrows can’t help him up
His accurate firing arm is useless
Menelaus stabbed him
One spear-thrust through the shoulders
And the point came out through the ribs
His father was Strophius
Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip
Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip
p.18/19
Some of the personal information of Skamandrios is in the original, including the irony of the hunter now becoming the hunted and the slain. Oswald draws more however upon the senses and emotions Stewart points to as the province of lyric; it’s as if we see through his eyes (what he used to hear in the “lunar/No man’s land of the mountains”). And the shorter line is more familiar to us than the original hexameter of epic poetry. But it is in the simile where Oswald diverges widely from Homer. The simile itself isn’t in the original, at least, not attached to Skamandrios’s death; rather, it appears at the opening to Book 16, when Patroklos comes to Achilleus:
and stood by him and wept warm tears, like a spring dark-running
that down the face of a rock impassable drips its dim water;
and swift-footed brilliant Achilleus looked on him in pity,
and spoke to him aloud and addressed him in winged words; ‘Why then
are you crying like some poor little girl, Patroklos,
who runs after her mother and begs to be picked up and carried,
and clings to her dress, and holds her back when she tries to hurry,
and gazes tearfully into her face, until she is picked up?
You are like such a one, Patroklos, dropping these soft tears.
(Bk.16, lines 3- 11)
Achilleus is not so sympathetic to Patroklos and his sorrow for the wounded Greeks; the implication is that such “soft tears” are not the appropriate response of a warrior; rather, they are the response of a child — a girl child no less, who seeks the comfort of her mother. Yet we know that Patroklos will in fact take on the heavy responsibility that is Achilleus’s to bear, and lose his life for it.
Oswald takes (or maybe rescues) this simile of a young child who desires to be picked up and carried by a mother and attaches it instead to the death of Skamandrios, and in so doing, transfers the emotions of the young girl-child wanting her mother to those of the soldier at his death. She is true to the original simile, but adds some lovely details: in the truncated grammar from the child’s perspective, its entire being suffused with wanting the mother (“wants help, wants arms”); in the idea of “wanting to be light again,” lifted from the heaviness that life has become; and in that final realistic detail, missing in the original, but so true to a mother’s experience, wanting to be “carried on a hip.” I envy her these lines.
Other adapted and transposed similes in Memorial come equally from the human world of labour, and the natural realm, each simile drawn from the original poem, but now married to the description of a soldier’s death. For example:
Like a wind-murmur
Begins a rumour of waves
One long note getting louder
The water breathes a deep sigh
Like a land-ripple
When the west wind runs through a field
Wishing and searching
Nothing to be found
The corn-stalks shake their green heads. (Memorial p.14)
or:
Like when the wind comes ruffling at last to sailors adrift
Trying to manage the broken springs of their muscles
And lever and lift those well-rubbed oars
Making tiny dents in the ocean (Memorial p.43).
The strength of Oswald’s technique in Memorial is in the particularized description of each death, lifted out of the original narrative of war; each soldier and his death is given equal weight, no longer subsumed by the larger story of Achilles. And each death is then attached to a simile, as if a ritual mourning for that death. At its best, as in the example of Skamandrios above, lyric’s potential to tap into emotion and sensual experience is used to particularize the soldier’s death and present him as individual.
Yet, sometimes I feel that the similes drawn from the natural world — by which the soldier is transformed into grain, into waves, into earth, into sounds — begin to naturalize and thus possibly even sanction such deaths, these bloody deaths in the service of the state. That is, that Oswald attempts to resist the ideological ‘gravity’ of the Iliad by using lyric elements to lift the soldiers’ deaths out of the epic narrative — to carry them on the hip — but that Memorial is ultimately dragged back down into the Iliad’s heavy ideology because of the naturalizing similes, and may become complicit to some extent with the viewpoint of the state embodied by the epic form of the original. It’s as if the similes at times in Memorial erase the event’s trace, and the death is made clean. In this, the similes work against the particularizing force of the initial description of the soldier and his individual death; it is his death, yet it is given without question to the state.
At other times, I think there is something more positively transformative happening in Memorial, as if the Iliad is a cloth of many stitched pieces which Oswald has ripped apart at the seams and then rescued and stitched back together again, these lyric scraps meant to create a new hybrid poem to challenge the original epic, reframing its energeia, its “bright unbearable reality.”
in the margins of Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings
February 9, 2013 § Leave a comment
Things I have found in books: a Taiwanese passport; a sheaf of notes for an essay on ocular metaphors in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; an ultrasound image of an embryo in utero; a cardiograph printout; $120 in cash; a phone message slip from a Vancouver motel circa 1950 (please call); a letter written to the poet Allen Grossman by his publishers, thanking him for being their author and offering him complementary copies of his book, The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle.
I bought The Long Schoolroom from the Advanced Book Exchange online, and assume that this was one of the complementary copies offered to Grossman by his publisher, copies he seems to have immediately sold to his local used bookstore. I don’t remember which book the phone message slip came from, only that it was another second-hand book from a local bookshop in Vancouver. The cash was mine, misplaced on a ferry trip to Victoria and then found several years later between pages 193 and 194 of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I never finished. The other items I found while discharging books as a library assistant at the Woodward Biomedical Library, which might explain their medical provenance. Although oddly enough, the notes on ocular metaphors were my own: years before I had taken a graduate course on the nineteenth century novel, borrowed a book from Woodward on the history of the eye, left the notes inside the medical history, and then found them again several years later, by chance.
And one day at Tanglewood Books, in their old location on Broadway near Granville, I found, inside a Faber and Faber copy of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings — a fern-green copy from the 80s when they used to stipple their covers with tiny “f’s” — not a physical object, but a series of pencilled annotations by another reader. But this reader wasn’t writing the annotations for himself or herself, but for a woman (“Kate”), to whom I assume (s)he planned to give this book of poems as a gift. So as I read through Larkin’s poems for the first time, I also read the unfolding story of the relationship of this reader-annotator and the woman I think (s)he loved.
For example, after “Talking in Bed” (“Talking in bed ought to be easiest/Lying together there goes back so far…”), my annotator has written:
O God I pray that this never happens to you and the man I want you to find some day, so please be careful when you choose. Hat.
And after MCMXIV (“Never such innocence,/Never before or since…”):
Not a happy poem and I am personally not prepared to accept. Hat.
Or after “A Study of Reading Habits”, where the final line has been underlined: “Books are a load of crap”:
Don’t believe this Kate because it all depends on the author and the factors that the reader accepts at the time of reading. Hat.
Why might my annotator be a man? The ego of it, perhaps. (Is this fair? Probably not.) The fact that he signs each somewhat banal pronouncement? The slightly condescending tone: let me teach you about the world, my love, you need protection, this is what I hope for you.
Or perhaps she is a woman, somewhat older, assuming a worldly tone for a younger woman she cares for. The name “Hat” might be short for Harriet. Or, if a man, “Hat” might be a nickname, a last name. The addressee is mute, as is almost always the case in the love poem as well. I know I have created a story for them: perhaps my annotator loved Kate, but was rejected; their friendship continued, and now (s)he acts as confidant, or guardian.
I think the annotator is sincere; but I feel the same uncertainty I often feel reading Larkin — what exactly is Larkin’s attitude towards the place, subject, lover, he describes in any given poem? is he really as coarse as he sometimes presents himself to be? and is he sometimes as tender as I think he is, as in the brilliant opening poem of The Whitsun Weddings, “Here,” and possibly in its concluding one, “An Arundel Tomb”? And perhaps this uncertainty towards the speaker is connected to the unstable relationship between poet and lyric “I” filtered through language, a distance which Larkin plays upon, or hides behind. Perhaps I reveal my own desire for sincerity, for the poet’s fidelity.
At more cynical moments, I think the annotator must be playing a game; a clever student bored in class, making up annotations to amuse herself, making up a story.
When I feel the annotator is sincere, I think of how strange it is to be reading these poems in tandem with my annotator, gauging my own reactions to the poem with Hat’s own; and I begin to like this idea, how Hat’s annotations remind me of the many readers who have come before me and who will come after. Here, in Hat’s pencilled annotations, (s)he leaves some small trace of an encounter with poetry, and perhaps with love.
And if Hat ever ended up giving this annotated volume to Kate, I guess she did respond in a way — I found it, after all, for sale in a used bookstore.
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
I can’t improve the blunt, stark fact of the last line. It is satisfying and beautiful. Hat.
Remember to ask me what I can tell you of my “blackness” experience. Hat.
PS From page 37 onto this page there is little for me to comment on because the underlined line above says it all. Hat.
kim trainor 