An Editorial By: |
Chasing the Scent of Laurel: Matters in the Po-Biz |
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An Editorial By: |
Chasing the Scent of Laurel: Matters in the Po-Biz |
Last year
I attended a Halloween party as the poet Virgil. I was inspired to do so
after Robert Fagles, famous for his translations from the Greek of Homer,
Aeschylus, and Sophocles, read from his translation-in-progress of the
Roman poet at Bryn Mawr College (later, Fagles was kind enough to sign my
copy of The Odyssey—his completed Aeneid appears this
month from Viking). In order to distinguish myself from the “Bluto”
Blutarsky variety of toga-wearers at the Halloween party, I declaimed, in
clumsy dactylic hexameter, the opening lines of the Aeneid, “Arma
virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam, fato profugus,
Laviniaque venit,” and so on. Even at a party attended largely by
writers, antiquarian book dealers, and the staff of one of the more
successful American poetry magazines, these pompous maneuvers failed to
drive the point home (an amateur Byronist at the bar corrected my
pronunciation). Just in case, I also wore a sizeable laminated portrait of
Virgil accompanied by his name in bold letters. Taking
it down a notch this year, I attended a party dressed as a classic
“escaped convict” in a striped boiler suit, replete with handcuffs
(borrowed from the ladies in the art department at my day job) and a ball
and chain (the contemporary orange suit is too close, to reality, for
comfort). A poet in prison? Mr. Wilde aside, it’s not such a strange
thing, really. Apparently, Pete Doherty, the famously dissolute singer for
the English rock band The Libertines (from which he was expelled for
bad behavior) and now front man for his own band Babyshambles,
recently explained that he enjoys passing time during his regular stints
in jail with a good book of poetry. (He is equally famous as the notorious
former boyfriend of supermodel Kate Moss, and the British press frequently
portrays him as a poet.) Doherty was quoted in the Guardian discussing
poetry and its importance to him, with a tad less restraint than Dylan
Thomas achieved on his last tour of the United States. Doherty roared
about Emily Dickinson’s coolness: “Aargh, she’s outrageous man!
She’s fuckin’ hardcore! Can’t ignore her.” One imagines the Belle
of Amherst flinching, just a bit, as Doherty excitedly sprays lager
spittle across the bar. He also expressed great admiration for First World
War poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (he read Sassoon’s
“Suicide in the Trenches” on British TV). You might wonder which poet
tops Doherty’s list of greats. That would be Rimbaud, of whom Doherty
bellowed: “He ended up losing a fucking leg! Did you know that?” It is
to be hoped that Doherty will escape the French poet’s influence in that
regard.
On another obliquely musical note, while reading the Times
Literary Supplement between sips of coffee this morning I was
delighted to learn of the existence of a poetry “boy band,” called Aisle16:
a self-described “collective of five poets and one comedian with a
distinctive hard-edged style which attacks the status-quo of media and
celebrity driven worlds.” One of their slogans is: “Dude! Doesn’t
poetry really mess with your headspace?” For a few days, I was convinced
they were an invention of Viz Comics or Ricky Gervais. But they’re real,
and, by all accounts, rather popular. They are also broadminded in
choosing venues. They have performed at both “Patrick Neate’s highly
acclaimed literary nightclub Book Slam” and “John Betjeman’s
Centenary Cornish Birthday Party.” They may pose for photographs holding
dusty volumes of verse, but they are closer in style to fashionable
British hip-hop acts like The Streets than the Poet Laureate (who also
tried his hand at “rap” lyrics a few years ago, you will recall). Due
to their ostensible nod in the direction of great versifiers, they have
received a British Arts Council Grant, which is not, to my knowledge, a
staple for hip-hop acts, though perhaps it should be. To continue for just
a moment on the topic of boy bands, it occurred to me that after a wave of
superstar boy bands swept America in the late 1990s, rock critics were
quick to argue for the mop-topped Beatles as the first authentic boy band.
I will now make the case for Auden’s Oxford Group—some prefer the
“Auden Generation,” and I submit the “Wystan Hugh Experience”—as
the precursor to Aisle16: Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, C. Day
Lewis, and heartthrob novelist Christopher Isherwood, though you might
find it’s not only girls shrieking hysterically at the gates. This
season enjoyed the discovery of several new poems. My fiancée is an
archaeologist, and in her circles everything is more or less newly
uncovered, quite literally. In the literary world, however, such
discoveries can be mixed blessings. Any addition to our store of common
knowledge is, of course, welcome, but it is unlikely that an author will
have allowed his or her greatest creation to slip through the cracks.
Happily, a recently found poem by Robert Frost is of considerable
interest. Frost wrote out “War Thoughts at Home” in a copy of his
second collection, North of Boston (an inscribed first edition of
the book, in the scarce preferred binding, even lacking the dust jacket,
can sell for well over $20,000; with the dust jacket, it will fetch even
more). The poem echoes the quiet style of Frost’s friend, the British
poet Edward Thomas, whose otherwise late Georgian pastoral poems are
rattled by his collision with the First World War across the Channel. Like
so many others, Thomas did not survive the war. An energetic graduate
student named Robert Stilling, who found the poem, views it as an
important step toward understanding “To E. T.,” Frost’s poem for
Thomas. Frost had dated the recently found poem in 1918, and this helps to
make it an exciting addition to our stockpile of First World War poetry.
As a rare book dealer, I have encountered quite a few volumes of Frost’s
poetry with full poems copied out on the endpaper. Often, well-meaning
citizens call in to tell me they’ve discovered a previously unknown
Frost poem. A quick glance at the first-line index of the collected poems
on my desk will typically dispel this scholar-adventurer’s hopeful
notion. A small joke in the business is that a virginal first edition of
Frost’s earlier books not signed or inscribed with a poem would
bring a greater price in the trade. Stilling discussed the poem on CBS
News and wrote a splendid introduction
to the poem’s appearance in the much-lauded small magazine Virginia
Quarterly Review. On the subject of First World War poetry, a new Siegfried Sassoon poem has been discovered, though it has more to do with the mushroom clouds than with mustard gas. Sassoon is best known in England for his nostalgic accounts of pre-war life in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), the first part of his masterful trilogy, which includes Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). In America, he is more likely to be remembered principally for mordant and devastating war poems, which angrily satirize civilian complacency and bankrupt military policy. While Sassoon was famous for those works, he had difficulty gaining recognition for his poetry after the Armistice. Accordingly, he often circulated poems privately to a group of friends, much as an Elizabethan gentleman might (Sassoon, whatever else might be said of him, was a gentleman). One newly uncovered poem was written in 1952 and takes as its subject the possibility of nuclear war: While the face of youth dissolved and went I heard the drone of endless
armament.
Although its clanging lines hardly approach the excellence of earlier war
poems like the sardonic “To Any Dead Officer” or the startling
“Repression of War Experience,” the discovery shows that Sassoon
continued to think of his poetry as relevant, even in the nuclear age.
Unfortunately, the delicately framed Horatian satires he crafted during
the Great War would seem poor weapons against a horror that could easily
have dwarfed that of Flanders Fields. The newly public poem, along with
several others, will be on the block at Christie’s South Kensington
(London) on November 1st. Also included in the sale is a suite
of letters written by Sassoon to Lady Ottoline Morrell (lot 138), one of
which expresses Sassoon’s contempt for modern poetry (he was a Georgian
to the bone): “If you knew how depressed I got about the utter
ineffectiveness of modern poetry to justify its claim to be relevant &
necessary! Anyone can write nonsense and get away with it!” This cry of
exasperation has proven at least as timeless as the defiant tone of his
best poems. On
October 16th, US poet laureate Donald Hall was again a guest on
the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He spoke with Jeffrey Brown about the usual
topics: his ancestral farm, loss of wife Jane Kenyon, and, inevitably, the
“place of poetry in our society.” Hall acknowledged he is quite
optimistic, explaining: “In my life, I’ve seen [an] enormous increase
in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no
poetry readings. Now you can’t walk down the block without hitting a
poetry reading somewhere. Poetry is simply more popular. It’s still not
as popular as dog racing; I understand that.” Two things immediately
struck me about this comment. First, there may be more poetry readings now
than in the 1950s, but what blocks is he strolling down in danger of
inadvertently crashing a poetry reading? The second thing awry is Hall’s
casual assumption that poetry is not as popular as dog racing. In terms of
sheer numbers, poetry could well be the more popular of the two. This is
true for both the number of active participants (people who write poetry
themselves) and the quantities of monies involved. It is likely that the
number of self-described poets in the United States runs into the millions
(online poetry-pyramid schemers Poetry.com list well over a million
“poets” on their site alone). Also, one should not neglect to note the
amount of money circulating through the American poetry world, with
thousands of students, thousands of books, thousands of magazines,
hundreds of prizes, some as hefty as $100,000 (the Ruth Lilly and the
Wallace Stevens, won respectively in the past year by Richard Wilbur and
Michael Palmer). Poetry has the advantage of being less controversial and
usually less cruel (depending on the poet) than dog racing. On any given
day, I would put my money on poetry, not dog racing, as the more popular
American pastime. I wonder if Hall knows about Aisle16? Poet
and editor Kevin Prufer, one of the genuinely noble members of my own
generation of poets, is currently engaged in what I feel to be a crucial
battle facing the determined critic: sifting through the past in order to
reassess the reputations of poets now largely forgotten, or to assign them
a reputation in the first place. Consider that Emily Dickinson’s first
book of poetry was not published until 1890, four years after her death,
and in an edition of merely 500 copies, virtually unobtainable outside a
library special collections department today. During her life, she
published only eleven poems, fewer than the typical MFA student. Her first
book appearance was in the little-known anthology A Masque of Poets
in 1878, part of the “No Name” series, in which the poems were
published anonymously (not that her name would have mattered much at that
point). All her other appearances were in magazines or newspapers. It
would have been quite easy for such a slender contribution to be utterly
obliterated, except that it wasn’t really so small. While she had no
public life as a poet, the roots of her achievement ran deep. After
Emily’s death, her sister Lavinia was astonished to stumble upon a
locked box brimming with an astounding 1,775 manuscript poems. Just
imagine what would have happened if Lavinia had been a less devoted sister
or cared less for her late sister’s versifying. Prufer
has undertaken a task nothing short of heroic, considering the deluge of
new poetry published in the past ten years (even read at the rate of one
book per day, it could take more than a lifetime just to read the poetry
published in the US since the start of Clinton’s second term). Rather
than rinsing the Augean stables, as some critics prefer to do, he has
begun a quest for the Golden Fleece. Prufer and Joy Katz have edited an
anthology of out-of-print poetry called Dark Horses: Poets on
Overlooked Poems (again, with “dark horses” the trope of betting
hovers over poetry this season). Prufer puts the case bluntly: “If you
restrict yourself to poetry books printed by mainstream corporate
publishers or, worse, those giant anthologies you used to lug to your high
school English class, you’ll miss out on 99 percent of the best poetry
written in the last 50 years.” I can identify fully with Prufer and his
mission. I confess that I too am the sort who lurks in the faintly lit
aisles of used bookstores poring over books of poetry, endlessly searching
for some breathtaking gem I have yet to encounter. In fact, I buy several
books of poetry a week, more than half of them used, and I have fond
memories of inspecting the shelves of little bookstores in San Francisco,
Paris, Boston, London, Oxford, New Orleans, New York, Venice, Savannah,
Las Cruces, and my current home, Philadelphia (It is a matter of time
before the euphemistic trends in American business catch up with the book
trade and we run into “certified pre-read books”). Following the first of what I imagine will be many sorties, Prufer’s highest recommendation is for “Dunstan Thompson, a WWII GI who published two masterful, erotic, violent books in the 1940s, then disappeared from the poetry world.” Here is an example provided by Prufer: The lion is like him and the elusive leopard: Nine lives, he ranges—killer cat—my heart. Green is the hanging moss, and green the jungle Creeper: green where the gold plantations part Their bamboo branches for a murderer’s head. In
green courts he eats meat from the green dead. Unfortunately,
Thompson’s obscurity seems to be guaranteed. As Prufer explains: “On
his deathbed, Mr. Thompson asked that his books not be republished, that
his poems never be printed again.” Thompson’s books are impossible to
find, and, when they do surface in the future, are sure to achieve
unusually high prices, given the usual habits of the internet book market. At
the end of my summer editorial, after evaluating Cynthia Ozick’s poetic
broadside to Walter Kirn, I joked that poetry might once again be used as
a universal tool of persuasion and argument. The irons were rather more
heated Down Under, recently, when poet John Kinsella’s Fast Loose
Beginnings: A Memoir of Intoxications set off a chain reaction of
insults and, according to at least one judge, outright threats in the form
of poetry, resulting in “restraining orders against two fellow poets”
who are themselves threatening defamation suits. Kinsella was scheduled to
read at the Byron Bay Writers Festival but was forced to cancel, fearing
violent retribution from poets Anthony Lawrence and Robert Adamson, whom
he describes in his book as drinking and enjoying pornographic films with
him. The Brisbane Courier Mail describes what followed as a
“stream of emails in verse—replete with allusions to blood, gore, and
death.” Melbourne University Press, Kinsella’s publisher, adds that
the book also includes “intimate portraits of Dorothy Hewett, Les
Murray, American literary critic Harold Bloom and French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, as they have never been seen before.” On ABC Radio
National’s “The Book Show,” Kate Bochner remarked, Kinsella’s
“assessment of his former friends is mean, actually. It’s not my place
to speculate as to why he needed to be so unkind about them but a basic
rivalry seems likely.” An Australian friend of mine commented over a
pint, “It’s good to finally see some poetry biffo going on. Here we
have a couple of boofy blokes leading the charge, but we’re still seeing
too much chin-wagging and not enough chin-hitting. Let’s keep it going,
lads!” Needless to say, I raised my glass.
Several concerned readers, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote
in about my last editorial, mistakenly thinking that I had somehow
endorsed Richard Wilbur for the most recent Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Even
if my opinion could sway a judge, their fear was baseless. While I am a
dedicated reader of Wilbur, having reviewed his Collected Poems at
length in the New York Sun, he has won twice before. Winning yet
again would be a bit perverse, particularly given that the book that
previously took the prize was Wilbur’s New and Collected in 1989,
which contained much of the same material as his more recent Collected
(his first win was in 1957 for Things of This World). While Robert
Frost won the Pulitzer no fewer than four times (New Hampshire, Collected
Poems, A Further Range, and A Witness Tree), anything
more than two prizes seems excessive, if not vulgar. Robert Lowell won
twice (Lord Weary’s Castle and The Dolphin, bookends to an
epoch-making career) as did Robert Penn Warren (for Promises and Now
and Then, though we should not forget that his novel All The
King’s Men won for fiction) and Edwin Arlington Robinson (for Collected
Poems and The Man Who Died Twice). Multiple wins may be a thing
of the past, but as a betting man I would advise John Ashbery to leave
another space in his trophy cabinet, as a precaution. If I personally had
to choose one of the books on the table in 2006, I would have gone with
Dean Young’s Elegy on a Toy Piano, which I found both moving and
amusing in many ways (though at times muddled and frustrating compared
with his accomplished earlier volumes). No offense intended, Ms. Emerson. With all best wishes, and until next time, stay warm (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) and enjoy the coming holidays, Ernest Hilbert Editor, Contemporary Poetry Review
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