“poetry was to be found everywhere”: miscellany 1
September 19, 2013 § 2 Comments
“Poetry was to be found everywhere.”
— Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet, p.138
“The abandonment of the autonomy of the will of the speaking person as a speaker constitutes a form of knowledge — poetic knowledge. The knowledge that not ‘I’ speaks but ‘language speaks.’ (Heidegger).”
— Grossman, Summa Lyrica, p.210
“Seriousness is the state of feeling which arises when consciousness, encompassing the circumscription of its own life, becomes centred in itself and becomes heavy with the gravity of its own solitude. Seriousness is a quality of lyric.”
— Summa Lyrica, p.240
Papaver Orientale, ‘Beauty of Livermore’: “Crimson-scarlet with black basal blotch”; “Clumps of divided leaves clothed in bristly hairs catch the light, especially if spotted with dew, and sumptuous flowers, crumpled at first, open to reveal satiny petals and a boss of dark, velvety stamens.”
Anemone x Hybrida, ‘Honorine Jobert’: “The pristine white flowers on five-foot stems, appear luminous at dusk.” (flower manual — which one??)
a poem consists of : a) movement in time (prosody), and b) movement in intellectual time (poetic mode–the analogue of plot in fiction)
— Mary Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, p.14
Kinzie, on reading a poem: “Words. You are not just reading messages or extracting meanings or drafting editorials to put into lines: You are thinking in words. You are thinking so hard in the atmosphere created by words that they enter you like your breathing. This means first, looking at words by themselves, with all their weight and subtlety; it helps to think about their length, complexity, and language of origin, too.” p.5/6
and: “One of the ways a poem grows, which the act of reading imitates, is to send out tendrils from the word toward the sentence of which it becomes a part, and from the sentence to the surrounding trellis of the lines.” p.6
M: “Poetry. Tamatoe (rymeing poem)
red sliced or diced Jucy or
nice in my Hand squishy squishy squishy”
M: “Poetry. Lemon. (non rhymeing poem.)
sour lemon and lime flaver sour sour more sour.”
“As M. H. Abrams notes, Coleridge held that ‘literary invention involves the natural, unplanned, and unconscious process by which things grow.’ Like a plant, the poet gathers material from the atmosphere around him and puts out branches and leaves. The poem itself, also like a plant, begins with a seed or ‘germ.’ It finds its natural or inherent shape, having assimilated materials from the atmosphere.”
— Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters, p.14
“The first consequence of the first reading [of a poem] is the silence of the reader who was a speaker–his privilege as a speaker has been conceded to the speaker in the poem. The final consequence of first reading is the silence of acknowledgement of difference, the primordial apprehension, not of the otherness of another in terms of characterizing marks, but of the characterizing marks of another in terms of the inference of something personal which is not the self–the new planet, the unnamed thing which was always there but never to this moment acknowledged. This is the paradox of discovery. Discovery creates nothing but concedes the existence of a thing ‘not previously known.'”
— Summa Lyrica, p320
“Prickly leaves twined around pale brown letters. A tiny red dragon’s head was spitting out flowers over the stained paper.” — Inkheart, p.39
“My hand is cramped from penwork
My quill has a tapered point.
Its bird-mouth issues a blue-dark
Beetle-sparkle of ink.”
–Seamus Heaney, translation from the Irish, “Colum Cille Cecinit, I. Is scith mo chrob on scribainn”
“The memory of my ‘builder’ is a storehouse of materials used by his predecessors: these discoveries, their signs and symbols. This is how poets carry on ‘the conversation begun before us’ — to use Pasternak’s phrase for their response to each other that knows no bounds of time or space. As transformed in the mind of a new ‘builder,’ such borrowed elements help to bring out his purely personal feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Words themselves, in fact, are nothing but distillations of the meaning put into them by all the generations who have ever spoken the language — besides what was already built into them during the pre-history of the language, before it split off from the group to which it belongs.”
— N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p.620
“The Orphic machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.”; “Each poem is a reinvention of the speech source, because each poem establishes again, and is also identical with, the fictional ‘I’ (the severed head) which is the machine that has speech as its product.”
— Summa Lyrica, p. 364
“Think of it as the shell, the skull, the mummy, the golden bird, the garden, the rose, the ark, the bee-box, the labyrinth, the whale, the stone, the grail, the bridge, the tower, the pyramid, the temple, the knot, the breast, the mountain, the sea, the harp, the wind, the countenance…The source of speech, the source of poetry and the source of world are co-implicated. Symbolic representations of the origination of poetic utterance in Orphic objects and machines indicates that poetry is the speaking of being and that being comes first. Poetry is the speaking of being in the process of discovering itself as an occasion of the visibility of a person. The Orphic machine is the state of the object at the point of that discovery. Poetry issues from world at the point of submission of world to countenance, that is to say, at the point of its brokeness as world.”
— Summa Lyrica, p.365
“Williams was turned to ash on August 15 on the coast of Tuscany, Shelley the day after at Viareggio on pyres of pine, frankincense, wine, oil, honey, and salt.”
— Posthumous Keats, Stanley Plumly, p.101
from Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, Gerald Bruns:
–that to Aristotle, “Words thus appear to be regarded as so many atoms in space, available for combination into molecules according to a linear model. This linear model is clearly at work in Aristotle’s discussion of diction in the Poetics, where he distinguishes, together with the letter, noun, and verb, the syndesmos and arthron, two anatomical terms meaning ‘ligament’ and ‘joint.'” p.29 i.e. they bind together parts of the sentence (conjunctions or articles)
–“It was customary among the Greeks to identify the letters of the alphabet (and with them the indivisible sounds of speech) as stoicheia, literally physical particles…” p.30
–on Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, in the 4th book, P. & friends encounter strange sounds at sea — frozen words and cries of people in a bloody battle the winter before, their words frozen in the air; as the thaw comes, the words melt and can be heard
–P. throws “‘on the deck a whole handful of frozen words…and when we had somewhat warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow and we really heard them.'”
–“This frozen state is another way of describing the condition of the written (and particularly the printed) word, the word reduced to the extended, purely spatial mode of existence of the phonetic alphabet. It was by means of the alphabet that man learned how to fix the spoken word in space by transforming it into a sequence of objects. To read the written or printed word, of course, is simply to reverse this process: it is to re-create the utterance, to return it from space into time.” p.37
–“Signmund Burckhardt, in an essay entitled ‘The Poet as Fool and Priest,’ has observed that ‘the nature and primary function of the most important poetic devices–especially rhyme, meter, and metaphor–is to release words in some measure from their bondage to meaning, their purely referential role, and to give or restore to them the corporeality which a true medium needs.’ After all, language for a poet is rarely or never a purely transitive medium–a medium acted upon solely for the purposes of signification. Gerard Manley Hopkins once said, in his essay ‘Rhythm and the Other Structural Parts of Rhetoric-Verse,’ that ‘we may think of words as heavy bodies, as indoor and out of door objects of nature and man’s art’; and he went on to observe that, like natural bodies, words possess centres of gravity and centres of illumination. The function of a word in a rhythmic structure is to be found in the relationship or interplay between these two centres, which determines, respectively, its stress and pitch.” p.196-7
–“‘It is an impossible absolute that all words, that the texts, be written in such a way as to allow the words their complete semantic thickness. This is impossible. But if one has that sensitivity to the thickness of words, to the fact that they do have a history, that they have provoked associations of language, then this provides a much thicker material that is not superficial, which is a thing that one can mould precisely because it has the quality, the thickness, of potter’s clay. It is a physical object with many dimensions.'”
— Francis Ponge, qtd in Bruns, p.280-1
Rosalind, teasing the lovesick Orlando: “There is a man haunts the Forest, that abuses our yong plants with carving Rosalinde on their barkes; hangs Oades upon Hawthornes, and Elegies on brambles; all (forsooth) deifying the name of Rosalinde.” III.ii.352-5
“But ‘He is a god in my eyes,’ fragile and ephemeral as the action it imitates might seem, catches and holds the light of things as they are, everywhere, always, as surely as does the Iliad or the Antigone.”
— W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric, p.83
“‘The circumstances of my life, living in the domain of a foreign tongue, have meant that I deal much more consciously with my language than before — and yet: the How and Why of that qualitative change the word experiences, to become a word in a poem, I’m unable to define more closely even today. Poetry, Paul Valery says somewhere, is language in statu nascendi, language becoming free.'”
— Paul Celan, qtd in Felstiner, p.77
“It is Keats’s use of consonance, however, as a stay against the flow of vowels, that really grounds the substance of the music to its meaning–both its source and statement. Keats’s consonants hold what his vowels would let go, the ‘subtle’ tension of which enacts the mortality of ‘the wasted breath’ that Yeats himself calls lyric poetry.”
–Plumly, Posthumous Keats, p.345
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.
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 