appreciation Dolben

*
Digby Mackworth Dolben is a poet I'd never heard of before page 240 of "The Oxford Book of Sonnets" edited by John Fuller, published in 2000, a book I've been reading now for 10 years—

not straight through, I don't think I've ever read an anthology straight through, but off and on I've pulled this one from the shelf, mostly to reread old favorites—

but just recently I read Dolben's sole entry here, untitled—an English sonnet, with the customary four rhyme-sections:

One night I dreamt that in a gleaming hall
You played, and overhead the air was sweet
With waving kerchiefs; then a sudden fall
Of flowers; and jewels clashed about your feet.

—Not last night, but one night, meaning the dream still haunts the "I" from the past . . . Note the subtle internal rhyme-echoes: dreamt/gleam, played/head, gleam/sweet, over/air/ker, play/waving, then/sudden, etc. . . . . The contrast of head=feet. The hard "K" sounds of kerchiefs/clashed (which will reappear in the final 3 end-rhymes, so their foreshadowing here is strategic). Overhead where? over the head of the you who is playing (playing what? a piano, a violin, what?) or overhead the speaker, the dreamer: what is the I's POV? are they in the audience gazing up at the you? The air was sweet with waving kerchiefs: who's waving those kerchiefs (taken from off their heads in homage?), and do they make the air "sweet" with scent (handkerchiefs daubed with perfume)? Is that "sudden fall / of flowers" being tossed up on the stage by bravo-ing fans of this virtuoso: and the jewels, where the hell are they appearing from?
Since it's a dream, there doesn't have to be any audience, really, and the kerchiefs/flowers/jewels can simply be oneiric manifestations, bursts of fealty. Waving/falling/clashing: what active verbs, and how vividly they contrast with the somnolence of the passively observing dreamer. The meter is all iambic, with one perhaps variant foot: Of flow/ers; and jew/els clashed / about / your feet. Perhaps not, since "flowers" traditionally pre-20th century was elided, prosodied as one syllable. Still, the extra (extravagant) "urs" sound is poignantly effective just there, especially with the semicolon adding to its caesura-like length. 4 lines, 3 of them split by caesurae, breaks in the flow— Indeed, there are only 3 unimpeded lines in the poem: lines 1, 6, and 10. Eleven lines are broken by punctuation. Unusual for a sonnet, I think (though I haven't surveyed a lot of sonnets to see if that is true): at the poem's climax breakage becomes its signature motif . . .

Around you glittering forms, a starry ring,
In echo sang of youth and golden ease:
You leant to me a moment, crying—'Sing,
If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'—

Two variant feet: an anapest in line 5, and the trochaic substitution at the start of line 8. "Glittering forms"—the vagueness of this is shrewd: they're not men and women, individuals, they're less than that, nebulous diffuse they compose "a starry ring" around the player (pianist?), a backup chorus of secondary figures like the dancers framing Madonna/Lady Gaga in ancillary propitiatory posturings. In echo sang of youth and golden ease—this reminds me of two lines from Verlaine's Clair de lune: Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur / L'amour vainqueur et la vie oppurtune. The forms are misty apparitions befitting a dream-state, which is challenged and shattered line 7 by the sudden thrust of the active verbs: "You leant to me a moment, crying,—'Sing, [sing, damn you!] If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'— Prove your love, dude, join my posse. Chime in, chump. All these golden glittering groupies gang and glee me, serenade me, while I play me my guitar, I'm the star here, hey you say you love me, well, who doesn't: get in queue, fool.

[the beginning of line 9 is indented two spaces:]

In vain my lips were opened, for my throat
Was choked somewhence, my tongue was sore and dry,
And in my soul alone the answering note;
Till, in a piercing concord, one shrill cry,
As of a hunted creature, from me broke.
You laughed, and in great bitterness I woke.

—Choked/concord/cry, creature, broke/woke: the profusion of cacophony, the harsh K-sounds, not quite as explosive as "kerchief" and "clashed" in the first quatrain. In vain my lips were opened: that were seems significant, as if to suggest the I's lips were open (in awe) throughout the dream/poem, even before they were commanded to be. The variant feet: line 11, the anapest at the end (stretching out the aching answer that fills the soul's inarticulate enclosure); then line 12: Till, in / a pier/cing con/cord, one / shrill cry, / the trochaic substitution of "Till" concording a rhyme-struck spondee with "shrill cry." And the con/one rhyme. (A concord normally heals, doesn't it? Love: the concord that spears you.) Hounded first by the heavenly vision and then the cruel taunting of the you, the I is pierced by their own outcry, stabbing upward from one's most inward self it splits the heart apart. But even its utter arrow of agony is less wounding, less shattering than the you's scornful dismissive laugh. And in great bitterness I woke.

*
One night I dreamt that in a gleaming hall
You played, and overhead the air was sweet
With waving kerchiefs; then a sudden fall
Of flowers; and jewels clashed about your feet.
Around you glittering forms, a starry ring,
In echo sang of youth and golden ease:
You leant to me a moment, crying—'Sing,
If, as you say, you love me, sing with these.'—
In vain my lips were opened, for my throat
Was choked somewhence, my tongue was sore and dry,
And in my soul alone the answering note;
Till, in a piercing concord, one shrill cry,
As of a hunted creature, from me broke.
You laughed, and in great bitterness I woke.

///

3 sonnets from the heights

*

RUGGED TRIM (or WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ORPHIE?)

*
Kenneth Rexroth edited a Selected Poems of D.H. Lawrence in 1947, reprint paperback editions of which can be found cheaply . . . I remember reading it as a youth, and though I can't point to any specific instance I think it had a profound influence on my writing . . . It's certainly a book that I have purchased several times over, a book I return to and read . . .

Rexroth says many interesting things in the Introduction; looking at it recently I was struck by his comments comparing Lawrence's poems to Hardy's:

"This verse [Lawrence's early rhymed verse] is supposed to be like Hardy's. It is. But there is always something a little synthetic about Hardy's rugged verse. The smooth ones seem more natural, somehow. The full dress, Matthew Arnold sort of sonnet to Leslie Stephen is probably Hardy's best poem. It is a very great poem, but Arnold learned the trick of talking like a highly idealized Anglican archbishop and passed it on to Hardy. That is something nobody could imagine Lawrence ever learning, he just wasn't that kind of animal."

Rexroth is comparing Hardy's "rugged" style poems to Lawrence's: as he points out prior to the passage I've just quoted, Lawrence began as a sort of apparently-on-the-surface Georgian poet, though he differed from them in at least one significant way: "Some of the Georgians had a favorite literary convention. They were anti-literary. Lawrence was the real thing." Thus the Lawrence mode of writing rugged was never a conscious stylistic choice; with his background it came to him naturally (Rexroth: "I don't think he went about it deliberately.") . . .

(Haven't many other poets besides the Georgians played this anti-literary charade? Taking on the Rugged Role is always very tempting.)

Rexroth: "There is a vatic quality in Lawrence that is only in Hardy rarely. . . . Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition."

*
Well. Robert Lowell pronounced somewhere (I'm quoting from memory) that the two greatest Modern Poets were Rilke and Hardy.

Which means doesn't it that for those of us English-speakers who take Lowell's word as guide and who can read Rilke only in translation, that THE great Modern Poet to encounter in our own tongue is Hardy . . .

Hart Crane, writing to Yvor Winters in a letter dated May 29th, 1927, ventures to say that Hardy is "perhaps the greatest technician in English verse since Shakespeare."

Here's the poem Rexroth named Hardy's best . . . I've never seen it in any anthology:

The Schreckhorn

(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)

(June 1897)

Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;
Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams
Upon my nearing vision, less it seems
A looming Alp-height than a guise of him
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,
Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,
And the eternal essence of his mind
Enter this silent adamantine shape,
And his low voicing haunt its slipping shows
When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

*

Quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim: what semblance to the personality of Hardy's poetry!


Rexroth calls this a "full dress, Matthew Arnold sort of sonnet." So compare it to the one sonnet of Arnold's which is best known and most anthologized, whose subject like Hardy's is mountainous and nothing less than the Everest of us:

(there are no themes for old age, an Arab proverb says, but death and the mountain)

SHAKESPEARE

Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

*
Better so! Why better so?— maybe, because everything that wishes to remain sacred must surround itself with mystery, Mallarme's commandment: the loftiest hill of Parnassus will still maintain its cloudcover 'gainst the foil'd searchings of every mortal reader (every reader is mortal, whereas those who have learned the ropes, ie poets themselves, can perhaps manage to climb or scramble over each other to a unclouded height whereon they may glimpse a little daylight's eterne) . . .

*
(Most of us never make it up to the Base Camp. I'm still stuck in rope-tying class: Knotting 101.)

*
(I don't know if Arnold was the originator of this oeuvre-as-mountain metaphor, but surely it must have been a cliche long before boring Basil Bunting trundled it out in "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos" . . . )

*
Hardy's phrase "rugged trim" contains in itself the contention, the contradiction. Rugged is "anti-literary," plainspoken colloquial raw; trim means smooth, crafted, in Rexroth's phrases "highly idealized" and "full dress."

*
Rugged versus trim. Mayakovsky versus Mallarme. Brecht versus Benn. Enzensberger versus Celan. Prevert versus Bonnefoy. Late Neruda versus early Neruda. The Communist Quasimodo versus the Hermetic Quasimodo. Parra's Antipoem versus Stevens' metapoem.

Paz in his great book "Children of the Mire" sums up the history of Modern Poetry as an "oscillation" between "political temptation" and "religious temptation." In other words, Democratic versus Fascist.

*
The conflict ensues. Pages 320-4, Poetry Magazine, January 05, Danielle Chapman reviews Reginald Shepherd's olio of Post-Avants, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries [sic].

(By American, they mean U.S. By Poetries, they mean in the Arnoldian sense, that each poet is his or her own peakdom; like mountains each stands far enough apart from all others that borders are called for: in this theoretical distance every poet constitutes a separate realm with its own unique language and heritage, its own tradition of "poetry." So an anthology that brings together works from these loftitudinally-disparate states is per se a transnational one, a gathering of alien poetries . . . )

(by Poetries they mean Oxygen Required. Watch out for falling rocks. No climbers past this point unless accompanied by a guide.)

Chapman characterizes many of the poems here as masturbatory ("jerking off"), "narcissistic," "self-pleasuring," "enamored with [their] own sound" . . . she forgot solipsistic, apolitical, autotelic, reader-unfriendly, elitist, etcet.

Chapman gives more attention to Karen Volkman than anyone else, maybe because she senses that Volkman is so gifted that she damn well ought to be writing better than most of the others in this anthology, much of whose work, Chapman writes, "seems to have been constructed from a book of Mad Libs, where poetry-speak is randomly inserted into a poetic structure and the poem pops out like a product. Even the work of a skilled practitioner like Karen Volkman adopts such gimmickry."

What's the problem, essentially? The same enigma which ModPo since Baudelaire has faced us with, namely, WHAT is this poem about?— (Even more confusing for many readers is that some Modern poems which seem to offer a clearly ostensible subject—Williams' red wheelbarrow is a par example—still present problems in understanding what their "real subject" is . . . )

Chapman: "[P]art of the problem with the poems in the Iowa Anthology—that of obscurity and incomprehensibility—is similar to that which has always beset Language Poetry," not to mention Symbolism, Surrealism, Imagism, and so many other temptologies.—

"[T]he question of what [Volkman's] poems are about is persistent. Eventually it becomes clear that they are in fact about themselves." They disallow us to judge them, Chapman adds: "because the subject of the poem is the poet's own evasive thought process, our [potential] objections are overruled by the mind of the poet, which, by its own definition, moves faster than ours." Didn't Ashbery asset that poets should try to make their poems "critic-proof"?

*
But making it critic-proof sometimes makes it reader-proof as well. Most readers are, to use Arnold's figure, mortal and don't want to be "foil'd" by a poem, no matter how Shakespeare its author is. They want to know what a poem is about, and they want to know what it's saying about that subject.

So what IS the poem about? What's it all about, Orpheus?

Samuel French Morse in his introduction to Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens, hands this injunction down from the bench: "From the very beginning his poems were 'about' poetry; it is the one real subject of Harmonium and all the later work."

Morse then quotes from a 1940 letter by Stevens, who hands it down from his throne:

'The subject-matter of poetry is the thing to be ascertained. Offhand, the subject-matter is what says of the month of August . . . 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so.'

I think by saying "one real subject" Morse means: as opposed to the ostensible or surface subject.

. . . Either I don't understand the Stevens quote or I'm wrong to see a contradiction where he says the subject-matter has to be ascertained:

in other words, it's not a given, it has to be found and proved;

that's confusing, because he immediately follows that by the "offhand" suggestion that essentially a poem's subject-matter is always the same:

its apparent subject may be August (or whatever), but its real, its eternal subject is the poet's interminably flowing assertion of power and priority. 

So evenings die, in their green going, a wave, interminably flowing. In the beginning is the Word, and you, phenomena, are non until I utter it.

Per Mallarme, everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book; for Stevens, onhand as it were, the book exists prior to its content. What is subject, and what is the subject.

Here's an Arnoldian sonnet on the subject, by Stevens:

THE POEM THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF A MOUNTAIN

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

*
Complete in an unexplained completion. That's right: never explain. Harold Bloom's book on Stevens is almost as intimidating and daunting as Stevens himself. Early on he quotes from Emerson:

"[W]e cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humours. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks."

Private aspects, private sights, visible only from the poet's eagle-eyrie outlook: so edgy-exact this precipice of bleak rocks where the I alone is native; where no reader dare venture.  



—Whose "God" is the only native, the sole inhabitant, of those bleak rocks?


*

in defense of imitation

*
No, I'm not capable of such; I can't defend the indefensible practice of imitation.

Bad habit picked up in childhood or adolescence, wasteful act that must be outgrown.

Immature artists imitate; mature artists steal.

To paraphrase Eliot's injunction judgment.

It's not just that mature artists don't imitate, they initiate:

They create (synthesize, fashion) a mode their own—

each mature artist is unique, a continent split off from the mythical

Pangaia . . .

And those of us drowning daily in the oceans that separate the Land of Rich from the Domain of Ashbery,

salvation have we none.

*
As many Truthsayers have pointed out my poetic process seems fixated stalled at an adolescent stage . . . .

The Verdict is in. The Jury finds me immature.

If I could only learn—if I had only learned—to steal!

Thievery is the path to maturity, the road I failed to take.

*
I don't know if Charles Tomlinson is a great poet, but by Eliot's measure he is a mature one.

Or is he—?  I was going to say that he did forge a singular style, but what's more amazing to me is that he achieved mastery in more than one style,

but does his ability to be multifaceted result in works that create their own generic.

I value his verse, and,

being the stunted stripling I am, was drawn to do my doom,

i.e., ape it.

Of course I always try to dignify-deny this shameful predilection with the term, "homage" . . .

(I even vanity-published a book of such poems under that rubric).

Anyway, here's my attempt at Tomlinson,—

puerile mimickry: call it callow, juvenile,

(parodies are permissible, but not this:)

condemn me for deliberately trying to write like someone I admire:

—the worst heinous a poet can commit, the prime crime, the original sin of unoriginality—especially in the USA where poets are ruled by the cruel commandments of Emerson barking in our brains that we can follow no other guide but the one in our mirror—

:

ON A DRAWING BY CHARLES TOMLINSON

By a swath of inks the eye
thinks it sees solidities
which alter with the watercolor
way his brush washes its dye

in distance, though even this
finds a faraway fixed not
by the surveyor’s plumb but
by the action of the thumb

delaying all the fingers meant
to draw out of the paper,
splashed dry. The clean grain

catches what it should retain
if enough pressure pleasure
is applied to the stain to lie.


Note:
Tomlinson is not only a distinctive poet, but a visual artist of repute. His graphics grace the covers of many of his books. This Homage attempts to imitate his verse style, or one of his verse styles.


*

please help this worthy poet with a donation:

Please help this worthy poet:

http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/31385996913/in-which-i-shamefacedly-ask-my-fake-internet-friends

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knottbelievable

new class at St Marks Poetry Project:

Poetry Lab: What Can a Poem Be?— TODD COLBY

Saturday, October 6, 2012
2:00 pm	to	4:00 pm

Saturdays 2-4PM: 10 sessions begin October 6th
What can a poem be? We’ll attempt to answer this question while creating new modes and forms of poetry just outside the dominant culture. In this class we’ll create a safe place to take chances, to openly speculate and participate in the ongoing dialogue that ensues. There will be weekly experiments and assignments and a lot of in-class writing. We’ll tumble together through collaborations and mutual innovations. We’ll explore poetry through play, joy, openness, immediacy, profound ideologies, music, and art. We’ll take risks that allow us to reinvent ourselves as poets every time we sit down to write. We’ll create poems that don’t resemble or sound like poems; all the while being totally committed to the idea of broadening the borders of the possibilities of poetry. We’ll leap off a platform constructed by Henri Michaux, Reggie Watts, Djuna Barnes, Bill Knott, Fernando Pessoa, Hannah Weiner, E.M. Cioran, Ben Marcus, Gertrude Stein, Andy Kaufman, Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Walter Benjamin, Diane Williams, and more. Todd Colby is the author of four books of poetry published by Soft Skull Press.

...

!  Hunh?  

/// 

more of the same (a repost with a thought or two added)

*
Many anthologie­s published by Penguin in England are issued simultaneo­usly here— but the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse wasn't— why? why are there no anthologie­s of Social­ist or Commun­ist poetry published in this country? Every year USA publishers somehow find the money to issue endless anthologie­s of "spiritual­" poetry, but there is not (to my knowledge) ever an anthol of atheist verse— why? Who puts up the money for all these religious anthols? Who funds this vicious christer crapaganda?


The CIA promoted the New York School of artists in the 1950s and reportedly helped finance The Paris Review and Encounter and who knows how many other literary magazines. . . and if there is one characteristic shared by all secret intelligen­ce agencies since WWII, isn't it the imperative to expand, to increase both their budget and their number of personnel (the size of which are always classified), to grow, to gain ever greater power and prestige, and to continue to impose their ideological agendas and to spread their influence and domination into every aspect of society . . .


So why would the CIA (or the NSA or how many other acronymic bureaus of faceless conspirators) not continue funding cultural entities from the 1950s right up to the present?  I mean: Why would they stop? Have they ever stopped intervening in any other domain?  Have they ever stopped for one second their constant efforts to manipulate and control every sociopolitical / economic arena around the globe? Does anybody believe they don't expend billions to coerce every aspect of the media? And if the media, why not the arts? —Really: why wouldn't they?  What's stopping them?  Having once created an extensive program and set in motion departmental protocols to interfere in the realm of the arts, and having established significant inroads there, why on earth would they cease and desist?  Given the historical trajectories of most such clandestine bureaucracies, does that seem likely?

And, given the CIA's choice in the 1950s to promote and fund the New York School of Painters, wouldn't you expect it to continue supporting similar offshoots of the Avant-Garde?  Remember that the Agency's chief James Angleton was a disciple of Ezra Pound (and probably ran the Op that saved Pound from being prosecuted for war crimes).  Therefore, assuming the CIA had continued its involvement in the Arts (and I repeat: why wouldn't it?), wouldn't it also continue its investment in the Avant-garde?  Imagine which poets it would have favored (Pound . . . Avant-garde . . . any names come to mind?)



USA poets know that writing innocuous 'spiritual­' or 'psycholog­ical' or 'existenti­al' or 'elliptical' or 'aleatory' or 'memoiristic' or 'postmod' or 'flarf' or 'newthingist' or massmedia-dictated 'pop' verse and other inoffensive brands of poetry will be beneficial to their careers.  Out of fear of persecution or censorship, most USAPO suppress any wayward urge to write political poetry or 'protest' verse.


They know where their bread is buttered, who pays their bills, and indeed how the State sponsors and supports them with its agencies—


of which the CIA is not the least beneficial:


because not only is Langley rumored to have founded and funded litmags like the Paris Review, it also and perhaps more importantly takes on the onerous task of going into foreign countries and eliminatin­g the potential competitor­s of USA poets . . . For example: How many young Chilean poets were murdered or suicided or impoverish­ed or exiled by the CIA-instal­led Pinochet regime? Think of the chagrin and embarrassm­ent USA poets suffered some decades ago when they compared their work to the great Chilean poets like Neruda and Parra, how solipsisti­cally small and provincial and futile their poems seemed in contrast to those Latin American masters. . . but now, in the succeeding years, hasn't that situation improved thanks to the CIA?


It's not just Chile, of course.  Imagine how many other South American poets have been killed or quashed and quelled by CIA black-ops.  Not to mention Africa, Asia et al.


Think of it: all those foreign poets who right this minute might be writing better poetry than our native versifiers­: thankfully that ongoing threat is being countered daily by the CIA.


USA poets know (though they rarely if ever acknowledge it) how much the CIA and other government agencies help promote the health and prosperity of AmeriPoBiz Inc!


They know that the majority of their publications, most of the magazines and books their exciting breakthrough verse appears in, are largely funded by the CIA or, if not directly by the CIA, then through the distributive channels of other indirect pipeline organizations via the standard "cut-out" methods,

funding which then is managed and administered by the executives of AmeriPoBiz Inc—


which USA poets are for the most part devoted or subservient employees of.


And most USAPO are grateful to be subsidized and supported thus.


And to show their gratitude they write all these poems about how their mom and dad were only human but they love them anyway, or how mystically moved they are by the apparition­s of tangency as it transpires in the treetops or their laptops.


Everybody knows that USAPO who write apolitical verse are rewarded for it, they win the top prizes and grants, their books are foisted into libraries everywhere and their careers are glide-path­ed. Louise Gluck and Charles Wright are two egregious examples of what I mean, but really most of this country's "leading poets" are similarly components in the con.  The construct.


Bought-off, co-opted by endowment patronage from the state's cultural authoritie­s, USA poets know it doesn't pay to write political poems, and ergo most of them don't—


///

two very good poems—

*
—two poems by a poet I haven't read before, to me they seem very well-written, impressively imaginative, worthy of rereading:


http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Paula-Bohince-Two-Poems/


/


of course poets whose work I praise are embarrassed and hate being lauded by me—they wish I had kept my keyboard shut—no poet wants a blurb from me—a good word from me can only harm their career, not help it . . .

in fact, if I were conniving enough, if I had the guile-style to do it, I would write posts praising the poets I loathe—Charles Wright, for example—knowing that my approbation would taint and undermine their reputations—

///