Untitled - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
January 2012
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONRO E
volume cxcix t number 4
CONTENTS
January 2012
POEMS
the editors
279
100 Years
stephen dunn
281
In Love, His Grammar Grew
joseph spece
282
Queen, you are fathomed
michelle boisseau
284
Among the Gorgons
Death Gets into the Suburbs
david ferry
286
Co≠ee Lips
Incubus
Ancestral Lines
Catullus i
Virgil, “Aeneid,” ii, ii. 250–267
Martial 1.101
C.P. Cavafy, Thermopylae
amy beeder
293
Dear Drought
Lithium Dreams (White Sea)
michael ryan
296
Hard Times
a.e. stallings
297
Epic Simile
First Miracle
After a Greek Proverb
stephen edgar
300
Lost to View
louise glück
301
A Summer Garden
Afterword
kathryn starbuck
308
Convinced, 1957
COMMENT
eliza griswold
311
Everyone Is an Immigrant
clive james
326
Technique’s Marginal Centrality
adam kirsch
336
Infallible Pope of Letters
P OT S H E R D S & A R R OW H E A D S
v. penelope pelizzon
349
contributors
372
back page
383
Editor
Senior Editor
Associate Editor
Managing Editor
Editorial Assistant
Reader
Art Direction
christian wiman
don share
fred sasaki
valerie jean johnson
lindsay garbutt
christina pugh
winterhouse studio
cover art by cathie bleck
“Pegasus,” 2011
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POEMS
editors’ note
100 Years
It’s now been a full century since that intrepid and ingenious woman,
Harriet Monroe, founded a small but seismic magazine for modern
poetry. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore: the
story is well-known by this point. Much has changed in a hundred
years, though Monroe’s commitment to eclecticism (“The Open
Door,” as she called it), critical rigor, and general decency have been
bedrock principles even for the editors who sometimes fell short
of them. In the next twelve months we’ll look back at some of the
highlights and lowlights of these hundred years, though it won’t be
a primary focus. Centenary celebrations can be a lot of bother and
blather for those outside the institutions having them, so our goal is
to mark the occasion with a few well-chosen pieces and portfolios
that we think our readers will find interesting, and to get on with
our main business of discovery. Thus, in this issue, V. Penelope
Pelizzon’s essay on lost but worthy poems from the early years of
Poetry is paired with Eliza Grizwold’s timely dispatch from the
overrun and politicized island of Lampedusa. Alert readers will
recognize the brand new Pegasus on the cover this month, which is
the first of twelve we have commissioned from some of our favorite
contemporary illustrators. And be sure not to overlook the first of
our “Back Page” features, which all year will present curious (and
various) artifacts from the magazine’s history.
stephen dunn
In Love, His Grammar Grew
In love, his grammar grew
rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell
madly from the sky like pheasants
for the peasantry, and he, as sated
as they were, lolled under shade trees
until roused by moonlight
and the beautiful fraternal twins
and and but. Oh that was when
he knew he couldn’t resist
a conjunction of any kind.
One said accumulate, the other
was a doubter who loved the wind
and the mind that cleans up after it.
For love
he wanted to break all the rules,
light a candle behind a sentence
named Sheila, always running on
and wishing to be stopped
by the hard button of a period.
Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look
toward a mannequin or a window dresser
with a penchant for parsing.
But mostly he wanted you, Sheila,
and the adjectives that could precede
and change you: bluesy, fly-by-night,
queen of all that is and might be.
S T EPH EN DU N N
2 81
joseph spece
Queen, you are fathomed
Exalted life
this
not because you know
slavish attention
or sit
bathed in the royal jellies
and rarer distillates
nor because it commences
backlit all
by droning buzz and the mellow
scent of lilac
but for your ignorance of desire
for your cloistering, Liege
Never wondering
what tastes abound
in distant clusters
so rich is your interior
your fecundity
your multiple dark imaginings
Never saying
Why
28 2
P O E T RY
as I do
and again
Why
Never saying
as I do
to the world of surrounding combs
Do you think I may someday escape
JOS EPH S PEC E
2 83
michelle boisseau
Among the Gorgons
For Eleanor
For seventeen years I was caught in the surf.
Drubbed and scoured, I’d snatch a breath
and be jerked down again, dragged across
broken shells and shingle. I loved it,
mostly, the need, how I fed the frantic.
I’d skipped into that sea. Certainly not
a girl, but I could still turn a head as I took
the foam between my thighs.
Then it was over.
Hiss of a match
snu≠ed with spit. The sea had trotted o≠.
I stood in the stink of flapping fish.
At first it stung. A galaxy of dimes
eyed my sag and crinkles and dismissed
me like a canceled stamp,
but something tugged at me, silver braids
weaving and unweaving themselves
and either the path was shrinking
or I was getting bigger, for soon the way
was just a hair, the extra bit of wit
a grandma leaves on her chin
to scare the boys, and it led me
into a cave crackling like a woodstove
with laughter.
A landslide opened
a seam of rubies and we stepped inside.
28 4
P O E T RY
Death Gets into the Suburbs
It sweats into the tongue and groove
of redwood decks with a Tahoe view.
It slides under the truck where some knuckles
are getting banged up on a stuck nut.
It whirls in the egg whites. Among blacks
and whites spread evenly. Inside the chicken
factory, the Falcon 7x, and under the bridge.
There’s death by taxi, by blood clot, by slippery rug.
Death by oops and flood, by drone and gun.
Death with honor derides death without.
Realpolitik and o≠shore accounts
are erased like a thumb drive lost in a fire.
And the friendly crow sets out walnuts to pop under tires.
So let’s walk the ruins, let’s walk along the ocean
and listen to death’s undying devotion.
M ICH ELL E B OI S S EAU
2 85
david ferry
Co≠ee Lips
The guest who came in to the street people’s suppers last night,
An elderly man with a lost smart little boy’s face and a look
As if he might turn against you anytime soon,
As if he’d just come into this world and he was extremely
Wary about what the world was going to be, and he said,
“If I ask you a question will you give me a truthful answer?”
And I said, “That depends on what the question is,”
Thinking the little elderly boy looked sophisticated and
As if he’d in fact been a long time in the world
And would get the tone right, and maybe he did, or maybe he didn’t;
At any rate he went on to ask the question,
“When I come into places like this and there are people holding
Co≠ee cups to their lips and they look at me,
Are they about to drink the co≠ee or not to drink the co≠ee?”
He was balancing the world on the tip of his witty unknowing nose.
I felt like I was falling down someplace else than anywhere there.
28 6
P O E T RY
Incubus
At the supper for street people
The young man who goes about all mu±ed up from harm,
With whatever he has found, newspaper pages
Carefully folded to make a weirdly festive
Hat or hood, down almost over his eyes.
Everything carefully arranged to make him other.
The paper-covered razor blade in his mouth,
Or the bit of wood, like carrying a message.
A fantasy so clever, outwitting itself,
That it became what it was he was, and so
He was what it was. The long loose shirt too big
For him, the pantaloons too big for him
Loose like the pantaloons of the circus clown,
Some kind of jacket too big, he got it somewhere.
His burden slept dreaming everywhere upon him.
As if his whole body and the clothes he wore dreamed
Of his condition and the dream came true.
His clothes slept on him as if they were his lover.
DAV I D FERRY
2 87
Ancestral Lines
It’s as when following the others’ lines,
Which are the tracks of somebody gone before,
Leaving me mischievous clues, telling me who
They were and who it was they weren’t,
And who it is I am because of them,
Or, just for the moment, reading them, I am,
Although the next moment I’m back in myself, and lost.
My father at the piano saying to me,
“Listen to this, he called the piece Warum?”
And the nearest my father could come to saying what
He made of that was lamely to say he didn’t,
Schumann didn’t, my father didn’t, know why.
“What’s in a dog’s heart”? I once asked in a poem,
And Christopher Ricks when he read it said, “Search me.”
He wasn’t just being funny, he was right.
You can’t tell anything much about who you are
By exercising on the Romantic bars.
What are the wild waves saying? I don’t know.
And Shelley didn’t know, and knew he didn’t.
In his great poem, “Ode to the West Wind,” he
Said that the leaves of his pages were blowing away,
Dead leaves, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
28 8
P O E T RY
Catullus i
To Cornelius Nepos
Who is it I should give my little book to,
So pretty in its pumice-polished covers?
Cornelius, I’ll give my book to you:
Because you used to think my nothings somethings,
At the time when you were the first in Italy
To dare to write our whole long history,
Three volumes, under the sign of Jupiter,
Heroically achieved; so take this little
Book of mine for what it’s worth; whatever;
And oh, patroness Virgin, grant that it shall
Live and survive beyond the century.
DAV I D F ERRY
2 89
Virgil, “Aeneid,” ii, ii. 250–267
And now the heavens shift and the night comes in,
And covers with its darkness earth and sky
And the tricks of the Myrmidons. Throughout the city
The Trojans, wearied by joy, lie fast asleep.
And now the Greeks set out from Tenedos,
Their ships proceeding in an ordered line,
Under the friendly light of the silent moon,
Making their way toward the shore they know so well,
And when the royal galley’s beacon light
Is lighted, Sinon sees it, and quietly goes,
Protected by malign complicit fates,
And furtively opens up the Horse’s flank
And frees the Argive warriors from its womb.
The Horse releases them to the open air
And joyfully they come out: first come the captains
Thessander, and Sthenelus, and dire Ulysses,
Lowering themselves to the ground by means of a rope,
And Acamas and Thoas, and Pyrrhus, Achilles’ son,
And Machaon the prince, and Menelaus,
And Epeus, he, who contrived the Wooden Horse
That fooled us so. And then they enter the city,
That’s deep submerged in wine and unknowing sleep;
They surprise and kill the watch, and open the gates
To welcome in their comrades from the fleet,
Letting them in for what they are going to do.
290
P O E T RY
Martial 1.101
He, who had been the one to whom I had
Recited my poems and then he wrote them down
With his faithful scribal hand for which already
He was well known and had been justly praised,
Demetrius has died. He lived to be
Fifteen years old, and after that four summers.
Even the Caesars had heard how good he was.
When he fell sick and I knew he was going to die,
I didn’t want him to descend to where
The Stygian shades are, still a slave, and so
I relinquished my ownership of him to his sickness.
Deserving by my deed to have gotten well,
He knew what I had done and was grateful for it,
Calling me his patron, falling free,
Down to those waters that are waiting there.
DAV I D FERRY
291
C.P. Cavafy, Thermopylae
Honor is due to those who are keeping watch,
Sentinels guarding their own Thermopylae;
Never distracted from what is right to do,
And right to be; in all things virtuous,
But never so hardened by virtue as not to be
Compassionate, available to pity;
Generous if they’re rich, but generous too,
Doing whatever they can, if they are poor;
Always true to the truth, no matter what,
But never scornful of those who have to lie.
Even more honor is due when, keeping watch,
They see that the time will come when Ephialtes
Will tell the secret to the Medes and they
Will know the way to get in through the goat-path.
292
P O E T RY
amy beeder
Dear Drought
O≠er your usual posy of goatheads. Pro≠er
sharp garlands of thistle & Incas’ thin down;
of squash bugs strung on blighted stems; send
back necklaced every reeking pearl I crushed,
each egg cluster that I scraped away with knife
or twig or thumbnail. Wake me sweat-laced
from a dream of hidden stables: the gentle foals
atremble, stem-legged, long-neglected. Dear
drought our summer’s corn was overrun again
with weed & cheat; the bitter zinnias fell to bits.
Dear yearlings our harvest is lattice & husk.
AMY B EEDER
293
Lithium Dreams (White Sea)
The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia holds the world’s largest lithium reserves.
“As remote and unlikely a place as can be imagined for the world to seek its
salvation.” — Matthew Power
Once, volcanoes walked & talked like humans. Married.
Quarreled & gave birth. When the beautiful Tunupa’s
husband ran away & took their only child she mourned:
she cried & stormed, her full breasts spilled until she made
this sunken bed, a dry & ragged ice-white sea. Tears
& milk. Salt. Silver liquor of the spirits, the winter tuber’s pulp.
§
Buzz Aldrin spied a plain from space: twice Rhode Island-sized,
not a glacier but this vast evaporation, a place so flat we use its plane
to calibrate the altitude of satellites, measure the retreat of polar ice.
A dry lagoon of element. Energy. Winking like a coin in a well.
§
In bare Salar the tourists bottle sand & salt: mug & pirouette
across this lithic sink of drought, empty leagues of sky & light,
slight mist of silt. We dream our dreams of clean — or cleaner —
means to drive and speak — o Li, atomic number three, be
our Miracle element!
Prehistoric smelt, simmered & distilled
294
P O E T RY
in Altiplano climes, your samite matter known to quiet, after all,
the manic brain, the urge to suicide; proven to dispel the voice
that whispers fire from the gods is never free —
Lithium chloride
& plain table salt under ancient ocean crust; fossils & algae;
a bird so bright & blackly drowned, pickled in the salt brine pool:
the desert is generous.
The desert is a pot boiled dry. This road
will turn to dirt and then to salt, to the workers in jumpsuits,
veiled & covered from the brutal sun; but we’re not here, not here —
what matters are the distant cities: Chongquing, Phoenix, Quebec,
Lagos, far & star-chalked: splitting at the seams. Now
§
the shrouded workers wait for sunset. The desert is patient.
They see the bed plowed under: slapdash trenches in the legend,
in the hasty furrows raked. With eyes narrowed from the endless
light. See Litio. Wages in the veins laid open; see paid the lush
reduction of her ditches’ spill. This new abyss to feed our tra∞c.
AMY B EEDER
295
michael ryan
Hard Times
The lousy job my father lands
I’m tickled pink to celebrate.
My mother’s rosary-pinching hands
stack pigs in blankets on a plate.
Teeny uncircumcised Buddha penises
(cocktail hot dogs in strips of dough):
I gobble these pu≠ed-up weenie geniuses
as if they’d tell me what I need to know
to get the fuck out of here.
They don’t only stink of fear.
They’re doom and shame and dumb pig fate.
I tell my mom I think they’re great.
Dad chews his slowly with a pint of gin,
and says he eats a whole shit deal
because of us. My mom’s in tears again.
I don’t know who to hate or how to feel.
296
P O E T RY
a.e. stallings
Epic Simile
For Rachel
Right shoulder aching with day-long butchery,
Left shoulder numb with dints clanged on the shield,
The hero is fouled with blood, his own and others’,
First slick, then sticky, then caked, starting to mat
His beard — the armor deadweight all around him;
His teeth grit and rattle with every jolt
Of bronze-rimmed wheels behind the shit-flecked horses.
But when he glimpses the mountains, the distant snow,
A blankness swoons upon him, and he hears
Nothing but the white vowels of the wind
Brushing through stands of spears like conifers
While a banner slips its sta≠ and hangs in the blue
Like a kestrel or a contrail. The hero’s death,
The prize, elusive quarry of his life,
Stands stock-still in her cloven tracks in snow
And turns, one ear tuned to the creek’s far bank,
One dished towards him. Her unstartled gaze
Beads on him like a sniper’s sites, until
At the clean report of a cracking poplar branch,
She leaps away like luck, over rapid water,
And snowfall scrims the scene like a mist of tears,
Like a migraine, like sweat or blood streaming into your eyes.
A .E . S TALLI N G S
297
First Miracle
Her body like a pomegranate torn
Wide open, somehow bears what must be born,
The irony where a stranger small enough
To bed down in the ox-tongue-polished trough
Erupts into the world and breaks the spell
Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell.
Now her breasts ache and weep and soak her shirt
Whenever she hears his hunger or his hurt;
She can’t change water into wine; instead
She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.
298
P O E T RY
After a Greek Proverb
ȅȣįȑȞȝȠȞȚȝȩIJİȡȠȞIJȠȣʌȡȠıȦȡȚȞȠȪ
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query —
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
We dine sitting on folding chairs — they were cheap but cheery.
We’ve taped the broken window pane. tv’s still out of whack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.
When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query —
We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,
Stu≠ receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Twelve years now and we’re still eating o≠ the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
A .E . S TALL I N G S
299
stephen edgar
Lost to View
A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’s receding wall
A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape
In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.
No one. No human presence has been known,
Surely, to venture here.
It takes one blackbird to disown
That vagary
And, whistling just a few feet from his ear,
To call him back again and make him be
The subject in this scene,
The one who is required to see.
Another day,
No blackbird with its song will intervene.
The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway.
300
P O E T RY
louise glück
A Summer Garden
1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and
shrubbery.
The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and
darkened.
The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew.
Summer arrived. The children
leaned over the rose border, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the roses.
A word came into my head, referring
to this shifting and changing, these erasures
that were now obvious —
it appeared, and as quickly vanished.
Was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?
Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna.
LOU I S E G LÜ CK
301
2
When I had recovered somewhat from these events,
I replaced the photograph as I had found it
between the pages of an ancient paperback,
many parts of which had been
annotated in the margins, sometimes in words but more often
in spirited questions and exclamations
meaning “I agree” or “I’m unsure, puzzled —”
The ink was faded. Here and there I couldn’t tell
what thoughts occurred to the reader
but through the bruise-like blotches I could sense
urgency, as though tears had fallen.
I held the book awhile.
It was Death in Venice (in translation);
I had noted the page in case, as Freud believed,
nothing is an accident.
Thus the little photograph
was buried again, as the past is buried in the future.
In the margin there were two words,
linked by an arrow: “sterility” and, down the page, “oblivion” —
“And it seemed to him the pale and lovely
summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned ... ”
302
P O E T RY
3
How quiet the garden is;
no breeze ru±es the Cornelian cherry.
Summer has come.
How quiet it is
now that life has triumphed. The rough
pillars of the sycamores
support the immobile
shelves of the foliage,
the lawn beneath
lush, iridescent —
And in the middle of the sky,
the immodest god.
Things are, he says. They are, they do not change;
response does not change.
How hushed it is, the stage
as well as the audience; it seems
breathing is an intrusion.
He must be very close,
the grass is shadowless.
How quiet it is, how silent,
like an afternoon in Pompeii.
LOU I S E G LÜ CK
303
4
Beatrice took the children to the park in Cedarhurst.
The sun was shining. Airplanes
passed back and forth overhead, peaceful because the war was over.
It was the world of her imagination:
true and false were of no importance.
Freshly polished and glittering —
that was the world. Dust
had not yet erupted on the surface of things.
The planes passed back and forth, bound
for Rome and Paris — you couldn’t get there
unless you flew over the park. Everything
must pass through, nothing can stop —
The children held hands, leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and seven.
Infinite, infinite — that
was her perception of time.
She sat on a bench, somewhat hidden by oak trees.
Far away, fear approached and departed;
from the train station came the sound it made.
The sky was pink and orange, older because the day was over.
There was no wind. The summer day
cast oak-shaped shadows on the green grass.
304
P O E T RY
Afterword
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for di∞cult set changes.
Why did I stop? Did some instinct
discern a shape, the artist in me
intervening to stop tra∞c, as it were?
A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,
intuited in those few long ago hours —
I must have thought so once.
And yet I dislike the term
which seems to me a crutch, a phase,
the adolescence of the mind, perhaps —
Still, it was a term I used myself,
frequently to explain my failures.
Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings
now seem to me simply
local symmetries, metonymic
baubles within immense confusion —
Chaos was what I saw.
My brush froze — I could not paint it.
Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.
What did we call it then?
A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,
to the tree that confronted my parents,
but whereas they were forced
LOU I S E G LÜ CK
305
forward into the obstacle,
I retreated or fled —
Mist covered the stage (my life).
Characters came and went, costumes were changed,
my brush hand moved side to side
far from the canvas,
side to side, like a windshield wiper.
Surely this was the desert, the dark night.
(In reality, a crowded street in London,
the tourists waving their colored maps.)
One speaks a word: I.
Out of this stream
the great forms —
I took a deep breath. And it came to me
the person who drew that breath
was not the person in my story, his childish hand
confidently wielding the crayon —
Had I been that person? A child but also
an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom
the vegetation parts —
And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted
solitude Kant perhaps experienced
on his way to the bridges —
(We share a birthday.)
Outside, the festive streets
were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.
A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder
singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano —
306
P O E T RY
Bravo! the door is shut.
Now nothing escapes, nothing enters —
I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert
stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)
on all sides, shifting as I speak,
so that I was constantly
face to face with blankness, that
stepchild of the sublime,
which, it turns out,
has been both my subject and my medium.
What would my twin have said, had my thoughts
reached him?
Perhaps he would have said
in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)
after which I would have been
referred to religion, the cemetery where
questions of faith are answered.
The mist had cleared. The empty canvases
were turned inward against the wall.
The little cat is dead (so the song went).
Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.
And the sun says yes.
And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.
LOU I S E G LÜ CK
307
kathryn starbuck
Convinced, 1957
At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented
a huge error in the evolution of my family a≠airs. Riven with a
savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two
minders — one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with
arms — I armed myself with myself and threw o≠ the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my
mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that
I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not. And
I did not.
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CO M M E N T
eliza griswold
Everyone Is an Immigrant
Two paramedics, a man and a woman wearing green and blue scrubs,
toss biscotti to seagulls. They glance out at the open ocean. Behind
them, at the old port, their empty ambulance waits. A lone jogger,
wearing a sweaty knee brace, runs around the parking lot. He, too,
keeps his eyes on the Mediterranean Sea. Although he looks like a
tourist, he’s probably a policeman.
The island of Lampedusa is overrun with law enforcement types
and immigration agents. Along with relief workers and journalists,
leery policemen fill the tourist hotels, restaurants, and beaches. The
town is a town of well-muscled men, impeccably tanned. They aren’t
my type, frankly. Clad in their tiny white spandex banana hangers,
some even brought their girlfriends along on this phony business
trip. Their job is supposed to be to police the thirty-seven thousand
African refugees who’ve arrived on this island of five thousand.
Later, that number will spike to fifty thousand. This massive diaspora is just one side e≠ect of the Arab Spring; it’s also a business. To
keep this refugee crisis under control — and to monitor who heads
north — Italy collects money from the rest of the European Union.
It’s a spectacular show when the open, wooden boats come in, people huddled against the gunwales. In this human drama, the police
are the supporting actors. So are the journalists like me, struggling
against the cordon to talk to arrivals. So are the paramedics. We are
all waiting for refugees.
š
For thousands of years, Lampedusa has served as a garrison for
empires — including, for a time during the 1980s, America’s. On this
island, the Romans made garum, a rancid fish sauce. Third-century
Christians left a cemetery here. Thanks to other old bones, it’s possible to trace the island’s passage between Christian and Muslim hands
until the 1840s, when Tomasi di Lampedusa — ancestor to Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote The Leopard — sold the island to
the Kingdom of Naples.
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311
The island is politically Europe, but geographically Africa. This is
the problem.
š
What am I doing here?
š
Reaching the island isn’t simple. I began this notebook in late June
on a train traveling south from the Umbrian town of Perugia to
Rome. From Rome I traveled to Sicily, and then on to Lampedusa.
As a companion, I took along my friend and colleague, Eileen Ryan,
who’s writing her dissertation at Columbia University on Libya. She
lives between New York and Rome and speaks fluent Italian. My
capacity for the language could be described as remedial restaurant,
lots of grand gestures and foul-mouthed nouns to compensate for all
I can’t say.
On the train, it strikes me that I’ve done a very stupid thing. I’ve
left the castle and fifteenth-century farmhouse belonging to Civitella
Ranieri, a tiny artists’ colony near the town of Gubbio, where my
only job was to read the poet Propertius, or whoever I chose, and
maybe to write some poems. Propertius was born in Assisi during the first century bce. He seems to have been a bit of a recluse.
A poet’s poet, he was Elizabeth Bishop in a toga. And he didn’t seem
to be constantly kissing imperial ass like some of his contemporaries.
His humor allowed him to see himself. “Where are you rushing to,
Propertius, wandering rashly, babbling on about Fate?” Clad in a
bathrobe, I read this and waded into warm, morning dirt and to zucchini flowers o≠ the vine for tru±e frittatas.
So, what, I wonder, on this train to Rome, am I doing leaving that
paradise for the coming chaos of refugees? I need a break from silence
and a hit of the world. Also, it’s my responsibility. Having reported
in Africa for more than a decade, it’s my job to pay attention when
Africa washes up on the shores of Europe. So as the crisis struck,
I sent a note to one of my magazine editors (not the editor of this
one), asking if I could go cover the story.
Also, I write better poems on the move and in odd landscapes.
Being in unusual places allows me to feel that I have both an authority
to speak and something to say. I can imagine myself as having a frank,
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P O E T RY
fierce encounter with what’s real, even if this has nothing to do with
the external world. It is easier to believe the poems are necessary.
Others before me have done the same double work, including
James Fenton and Ryszard Kapuscinski, to name the two best. In
both, a rage crops up in the poems that is fed by the reportage.
We talk about survivor’s guilt, but not about observer’s guilt. For
journalists this is particularly acute, as we are paid to watch su≠ering
and paid more during war. For poets, it’s even worse. It’s Adorno for
the twenty-first century. The incomparable horror of Auschwitz has
given way to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.
And with any luck oblivion should discover a ritual.
From “A German Requiem,” by James Fenton
I wrote stone
I wrote house
I wrote town
I shattered the stone
I demolished the house
I obliterated the town
From “I Wrote Stone,” by Ryszard Kapuscinski
š
The Africans arriving from Libya aren’t Libyans. They’re citizens
of Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, among other
nations. Many are refugees who fled to Libya from their home countries. For years they’ve been trying to outrun Muammar el-Qaddafi,
who, in turn, has been blocking their passage to Europe. Along with
Libyan oil, Qaddafi’s horrific immigration prisons guaranteed him
friends in Europe.
EL I Z A G RI S WOL D
313
Two months after I visited Lampedusa, twenty-five Africans
arrived dead in one boat. Five months later, a stunned Qaddafi was
murdered by a Libyan mob.
At the time of my visit, however, such events were beyond imagining. Qaddafi was carrying out his threat to swamp Europe with
Africans in a kind of human body warfare reminiscent of Fidel
Castro’s 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when Castro allowed 124,000 Cubans
to flee by boat and overwhelm south Florida. The Libyan ambassador in Italy, Hafez Qaddour, said that Qaddafi “wanted to turn
Lampedusa black with Africans.”
It’s impossible to ask new arrivals questions about any of this — or
about anything else. As soon as they arrive on, or even near, the
island, Italian coast guard ships approach most of the vessels, load
the refugees up by the hundreds, ship them into port and deliver
them to shore, where they are numbered before being run through
a waiting line of police, Red Cross, and other emergency workers,
and boarded onto repurposed tourist buses. The buses take them to
“centers,” which are immigration prisons, surrounded by barbed wire.
Filo spinato sounds less punative in Italian.
The refugees arriving from Libya spend between a few days and a
few weeks on the island until their numbers swell to two thousand.
At that point, they are loaded onto a ferry and taken to the island of
Sicily and to the Italian mainland to yet another center, and another,
until eventually, they are granted asylum and allowed to stay in Italy
or travel north to other European countries.
The refugees arriving from Tunisia are a di≠erent case. Because
their lives aren’t at risk if they’re returned to their country, Tunisians
are regularly sent home against their will. This is one reason why
they’re generally more unruly than the newly arrived sub-Saharan
Africans: they have nothing to gain by being cooperative. Two years
ago on Lampedusa, someone set fire to the Tunisian immigration
prison. I hear di≠erent things about who started the blaze. First, it
was lit by very pissed-o≠ Tunisians. Second, it was lit by very pissedo≠ locals, who didn’t want their island, which survives on tourism, to
become a safe haven for African refugees, especially Tunisians. Four
months later, hundreds escaped from a center and marched around
calling for freedom.
š
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P O E T RY
“Tunisians are like extreme Sicilians,” Francesco Luciforo says. “Put
them on the surface of the moon, they will survive.”
I meet Luciforo, forty-five, whose last name means what it looks
like, among the crowd at the dock awaiting the arriving sinking boats.
Behind the wheel of the tourist bus-cum-refugee transport, which he
drives, he’s wearing a yellow hazmat suit. It’s not in my notes, but
I remember him smoking.
The Africans arriving from Libya have been so poorly treated under
Qaddafi that they are terrified. They do what they’re told. Luciforo
says: “Poor things, if you tell them to stay somewhere, they’ll stay
there. Even if the end of the world comes, they won’t move.”
Luciforo has been driving this bus for more than a year. Before
that, he worked for a Christian volunteer group called Misericordia.
Workers collected on the dock during refugee season. The name
Misericordia is familiar. I realize I heard it last week when I was with
fellow Civitella artists touring the Umbrian town of Sansepolcro.
There, in the famous Piero della Francesca triptych, a hooded man
kneels at the base of the cross. He looks like a hangman, but in fact
he’s a member of this group, Misericordia. While they were doing
charity work among the sick and dying, they wore black masks to
protect against disease, and to protect their identity so they couldn’t
be thanked. I imagine Luciforo in his yellow hazmat suit and a hood.
“Luciforo, what have you seen that you can’t forget?” I ask.
“One night, I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea.
They popped up like corks,” he says.
š
Midway down the island’s main drag, Via Roma, I find the American
Bazaar. The gift shop’s shelves are lined with sleazy seashell ashtrays,
canvas bags, pastel sea turtle T-shirts. Owning the American Bazaar
is Luciforo’s far less lucrative job. These days no one comes in. His
Sicilian grandfather sold American goods, garters. And that’s where
he got his nickname. Now Omericano is Luciforo’s nickname also. It
sounds like half Homer, half American.
Across Via Roma, there’s another shop called Pakistani Bazaar:
a successful street corner of globalization. I stop in. The owner, a rich
man from Lahore, sells high-end shalwar kameez as beach cover-ups.
Business is terrible. “I tell other Pakistanis not to come to Europe now,”
he says. “But they think I’m trying to keep something good for myself.”
E LI Z A G RI SWOL D
315
š
Hoping for refugees. Rough winds. No one comes.
š
We are always watching the sea.
š
The first sign of their arrival is a disappearance. The hulking gray coast
guard boats that wait in the harbor cast o≠ from their moorings. They
head out to sea to escort the wooden refugee boats in to shore. I am
growing desperate. To try to speak to the refugees, I rent a boat. It’s
an unusual measure and has to be handled with some tact at the dock.
“We’d like to rent a boat,” my friend Eileen tells the man at the
boat stand.
“That’s fifty Euros plus a captain — you need a captain,” he says,
looking us up and down. We don’t look like journalists, partly because
Eileen has insisted we pull ourselves together.
“The captain will cost you nothing — a regalo — a gift,” a man
behind him in the shack says.
Pino, our captain, is a laconic fisherman who would be shuttling
tourists, but none are coming thanks to the news, broadcast by journalists like us, that the island is overrun with refugees.
He asks us where we want to go and I lay it out straight: we want to
go close to the coast guard boats of refugees. We want to talk to them.
He’s disappointed. He’d hoped we were tourists. We compromise.
First, he takes us swimming in caves the ocean has scoured out of
the base of white, limestone cli≠s on Isola dei Conigli, Rabbit Island.
Where the water meets the rock, the cli≠s are the color of sulfur. The
salt must create this hideous color in reaction to limestone.
“Ci sono medusas?” Are there jellyfish? I am petrified of being
stung after an incident on the Aeolian island Stromboli.
Pino peers over the gunwale and sees none. “If you’re going in,
go in,” he says. We dive in the cold water. Back on the boat, he talks
politics with Eileen.
“Since there are no tourists, maybe I should advertise trips to see
the immigrants,” he says in dark Sicilian humor. “I’m just joking.
Don’t write that down.” I smile and write it down. “The refugee
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problem isn’t only Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fault,” he says. “Qaddafi
is just one crazy man. This government is shit.”
Berlusconi’s government is failing. To shore up its base, the prime
minister came to Lampedusa a few months ago and promised to
bring the situation under control. Keeping refugees o≠ the streets is a
political necessity. Apparently, Berlusconi said he’d buy a house here
on the island, too, as if that would be any solution. That promise
hasn’t materialized.
Refugees are just living widgets in this human commerce that surrounds us. We are part of it. Italy gets cash from the European Union.
The private company that runs the centers is paid well per head. The
people (like Luciforo) who work in the centers are paid well, too.
Everyone knows this.
“The refugees are a business,” Pino says, echoing my thoughts.
Beyond the basics of his conversation, I can’t catch his dark jokes.
Eileen laughs and translates what’s especially telling. Their conversation becomes a backdrop, impersonal as the sound of waves. I have
no responsibility to it. Sometimes I love not speaking a language.
I find conversation exhausting much of the time, and the excuse not
to participate can be a relief.
I pick up my notebook:
Garrison island, let me find
in your deprivation, my love
of deprivation, in your bleakness,
my bleakness, in your frank cli≠s
the same. Teach me to align
my will with what is.
š
They’re coming. Crammed onto the foredeck of a gunmetal coast
guard boat, around three hundred men and a handful of women from
Ghana, Sudan, Somalia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Eritrea and Ethiopia,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh grin and wave. They wear fake fur-trimmed
ski parkas, woolen hats, backpacks, bandanas, the silver and gold
mylar blankets given to marathon runners and hypothermia victims.
“Where are we?” a man shouts down to us on the deck of our rented
boat. He, too, is wearing a cap and ski parka to ward o≠ the brutal
blue sky.
E LI Z A G RI SWOL D
317
“Lampedusa! You’re safe!” I shout back. “Where are you from?”
“Sudan!”
I try to shout more questions as a coast guard shoos our gnat of
a white boat away. Pino complies. I watch the boat dock, and the
arrivals file quietly one by one from the vessel. They drag wheelie
suitcases, carry white plastic bags and babies in snowsuits. A Red
Cross worker shouts out their number as they step onto firm earth:
“Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven.”
š
Immigranti is the polite term. It’s the one islanders use when speaking to outsiders. Turki is the actual name for the arrivals. It’s slang for
invaders. The Turks captured the island so many times throughout history that the harbor is named for them: Baia Turkia — Bay
of Turks. This is another invasion. A huge yellow sign atop a hotel,
Hotel Baia Turchese, dominates the harbor and serves as the proscenium for arriving refugees.
š
A leather-hued man wearing a sea turtle T-shirt marches down the
bobbing dock toward the Sky tv News crew. He’s upset. Their ninety
seconds of stand-up over, they’re shutting down their cameras. The
reporter replaces her baseball cap. The man she’s just interviewed,
the head of the coast guard wearing a dress-white uniform and RayBans, relights his cigarillo as he walks down the dock toward a green
convertible.
The man in the turtle T-shirt begins to shout, although he’s clearly
trying to restrain himself. “It’s right that you are filming them,” he
says, pointing to the departing buses of refugees in the background.
“Now turn your cameras around and film them, too.” On the Hotel
Baia Turchese beach behind our small crowd of reporters, scantily
clad sunbathers dip their Mediterranean toes in the Mediterranean
Sea. They’re policemen, of course, but that’s not his point. From this
distance, they appear to be tourists. “This is not a crisis!” he continues.
The Sky tv reporter called the refugee situation just that — a crisis —
about an hour ago. All of us now on the dock watched her broadcast at the port’s nearby cafe while we stood at the bar drinking our
morning co≠ee.
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Tan turtle T-shirt goes on: “While you’re paying attention to all
of these immigrants, we’re getting into debt. No one is coming to
Lampedusa. When this situation ends, and you go away, we’re going to end up in prison.” He thrusts his wrists towards the reporters,
gesturing as if wearing the manacles of debtors’ prison. The summer
season begins within days. The arrival of good weather is supposed to
mean the arrival of tourists. Instead it means safe passage for refugees.
š
Among the chocolate-haired Italians still on the dock, one sprightly
red-bearded man stands out. He squints from beneath a floppy
farmer’s hat as if the sun was an assault. Andrew is a forty-oneyear-old New Zealander who won’t give his last name or his phone
number. “This work is too controversial.” It’s not like he’s working
undercover: he’s wearing a bright yellow crossing guard vest that
reads “Christian Century.” He’s a missionary here to preach to
African Muslims. Still, Andrew’s irritated at being approached by a
reporter. I couldn’t help but spot him. I’ve spent so much time in
places where missionaries are the only white faces other than mine,
I’ve developed a kind of ecclesiastical radar.
š
Before several months ago, I knew of Lampedusa only as the ancestral home of the charismatic aristocrat who wrote The Leopard. I once
stayed with his elegant nephew in Sicily, where he runs a hotel with
his wife. Here I learn that it was Qaddafi who put Lampedusa on the
contemporary world map. In 1986, to challenge the United States,
Qaddafi lobbed missiles at the Loran Base, a us military listening
post. Suddenly, the world turned its attention to this tiny imperiled
island.
Looking more closely at the coastline, I notice it’s littered with
wwii bunkers. Unlike most of the beautiful, clean lines of fascist
architecture of that period, these bunkers are right o≠ the set of Dr.
Who: the concrete imaginings of someone who designed modern
warfare to look forbidding. The military ruins are impossible to
enter; their broken steps steeped in pee and human shit. I wonder
whose — maybe refugees on the lam? Who else would hike out to
these desolate trenches to micturate?
E LI Z A G RI SWOL D
319
š
There’s a sign in the new port addressed to journalists like me. A
lefty youth organization posted it a couple of years ago. Eileen and
I translate aloud:
A smile for the press: While you follow aid and immigrants,
Lampedusa runs the risk of discounting this emergency, which
you compose of summary information that’s reductive and
sometimes false. You present the immigrants’ arrival as an
aggression, a threat we should fear. Furthermore, you have no
respect for those who arrive in inhuman conditions, and suffer in vain. This includes the economic/touristic e≠ects on the
inhabitants of Lampedusa, despite their tireless work. Stop the
reality show.
š
Everyone here is an immigrant. Everyone came from somewhere
else.
š
The man-made cave is a hollowed-out boulder scorched by centuries
of fire. Fig and olive trees, papery bougainvillea blossoms line the
walkway between the grotto and a nearby church. From Christian
to Muslim to Christian again, this island has changed its religion as
empires have risen and fallen since the third century.
At the grotto, our unlikely tour guide is Jaafar Kriden, a Tunisian
refugee who has just been granted political asylum in Italy. Eileen
and I meet him by accident in front of a hair salon near the old port
when we stop to ask him directions. He proposes a tour of the island,
and we accept.
He describes his plight as a political refugee, assuming that we
will find him sympathetic. He sees himself as a victim of history. If
he goes home to Tunisia, he might be targeted as a former lackey of
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s recently overthrown dictator,
who held power for more than twenty years. Jaafar Kriden served as
the party’s treasurer in his town. To save his skin, once revolution
broke out on January 14, 2011, Jaafar Kriden asked his parents for a
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P O E T RY
few thousand dollars and hopped the next boat out of the country.
As we walk the mile up and back from town to the grotto, Kriden
tries to convince us that single party rule — dictatorship — is the best
system for Tunisia. He says eyebrow-raising things like: “Arab countries aren’t ready for democracy.”
I’ve noticed that tyrants the world over love that line; it transforms
their repression into benevolence, caretaking. I’ve also noticed that
in the soporific heat of many such equatorial nations, I find myself
nodding along to such statements, lulled by seeming common sense
until I remember to whom I’m listening.
š
There are three boat graveyards on Lampedusa: one inland at the
town dump, one by the harbor, another in the water. The wheelhouses of wrecked vessels poke out of the water. The refugee boats
could belong to Lampedusa’s fishermen, except for the Arabic names
scrawled on their blue hulls and the green dates spray-painted on
each, the dates of their landing. The boat graveyards are so rife with
facile poetry that I avoid visiting them until the very end of my visit.
When I do, I attempt to record the physical details, the tinsel of used
Mylar blankets, the names — Hajji Hassan, Basam — and none of the
wistfulness the ruined boats imply.
š
While the refugees are hidden away, there are two black faces visible
on Lampedusa. One belongs to the woman on the napkin dispenser at the port cafe. She smiles from every table, her face emerging
from a sea of co≠ee beans: “The Pleasure of Black” reads the slogan beneath her disembodied head. The other face belongs to Father
Vincent Mwagala, a Catholic priest and very di≠erent kind of missionary who has come from Tanzania to work among the refugees
and islanders here.
Above his desk there’s a cross made of two ribs of sunk refugee
boats. Orange crosses blue. The priest is as frustrated as I am about
the impossibility of speaking to arriving refugees. “We know they’ve
arrived but we don’t have contact with them,” he says. On rare
occasions he talks to arriving sub-Saharan Africans coming from
Libya. “Life is di∞cult for them there. They are poorly treated in
E LI Z A G RI SWOL D
321
di≠erent ways. Their labor is unpaid and when they go to report it,
the police pay no attention to them. It’s worse if you don’t speak
Arabic.” I ask him if he’s su≠ering here, and he says something odd.
It’s in English, so I’m sure I’ve heard it right:
“I’m su≠ering like a woman who is bearing a child.”
I ask him to repeat it.
“I’m su≠ering like a woman who is bearing a child.”
I ask him to elaborate.
“Look at the faces of those arriving. The world has to change. It’s
time to look in the face of one another and learn the needs of one
another. Poor people in this world don’t even have a blade of grass.”
His boss enters: Father Stefano Nastas — portly, smoking. Around
him swirls a ponytailed, self-styled manservant who makes a steady
stream of espressos in tiny plastic cups that remind me of the dentist’s rinse-and-spit variety. Nastas seems irritated by this Italian
gadfly. He’s as down to earth as they come. He’s a Franciscan, and
I notice a replica of the San Damiano Cross of St. Francis on the wall,
the one that spoke to the saint centuries ago.
I ask him if, in his opinion, Lampedusa is more Europe or Africa.
“Geographically this is Africa but politically this is Europe.”
“What side of the story is the press missing?” I ask.
“The human side,” he says.
He allowed five thousand Tunisians to sleep in the church when
the boats didn’t stop a few months ago. Although they were Muslims,
they came to Mass and made their own gestures in front of the cross
when it passed before them.
š
In the foyer of the ugly church, there’s a bit of an ancient gravestone.
It says, “Here lies someone who died of the plague.”
š
Across the piazza, there’s a little museum for the found leavings
of refugees. Here are the things that wash up: plates, water bottles,
prayer books in every imaginable language. Its curator is Giacomo
Sferlazzo, in dreadlocks, who is a painter and musician (he gives me
a cd). These few photographs, the odd shoe, and water-warped id
cards are most of what he sees of the refugees.
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“The refugees are like ghosts,” he says, “you don’t see them on
Lampedusa. You see them in Rome, in Milan. This island is a frontier — a bridge between Africa and Europe.”
Immigration is a kind of sham, he thinks.
“We’re the ones who arm dictators and terr0rists in Libya and
Eritrea, so we’re the ones at fault. All of this is a consequence of
post-colonialism. No one cares about Africa. They follow their own
interests in maintaining control to exploit resources.”
š
I am not going to write an article about this trip. I am going to write
only this notebook, because I don’t think that what I’ve seen here,
the story I’ve been able to gather with the refugees at such a distance,
is a matter of news. What I’ve seen is a complicated set piece, a drama,
which I’ve watched only as a member of the audience sat before the
false proscenium. I’ve experienced violence firsthand that far outstrips what I’ve encountered here on Lampedusa. But this violence
is equally sinister — it’s aboard the ships, it’s in the prisons, it’s in
Tripoli. I think of what Wallace Stevens says in The Necessary Angel.
A poet has no moral role. A poet has to use imagination to press back
against the violence of reality. I don’t agree. He also wrote that reality
was growing more insistent, more violent. I agree with that.
š
From the farmhouse porch, I read his poem “Farewell to Florida”:
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
š
High ships. High ships. High ships.
š
EL I Z A G RI S WO LD
323
High ships come in bearing black strangers
who call over the harbor, Where are we?
Arrivals, it will get worse.
The island is running out of water.
Prison awaits. From some distance,
you saw the steel lintel of Europe’s doorway
standing open. There is no door —
a yellow hello hung with your forefather’s shoes,
a cross nailed from the ribs of your sunk ships,
paper prayer scraps, one million calls
to the wrong God. Be grateful
you wear that fake-fur parka,
the violet, pompomed hat; you drag
that odd wheelie bag, the snow-suited baby.
Among defunct bunkers on this tropical rock
it’s di∞cult to conceive of winter.
And you, giddy with surviving war elsewhere,
unsure of who you should please,
grin at every white face
and wave wildly down to me
as I shout welcome from a rental ski≠.
My job is to learn where you’re from.
I’ve come by water to reach you
before the police. We have seconds.
Ignore my pleasantries.
Demand what my straw hat costs,
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how much I pay for my skin.
I don’t say go north. Stay o≠ the train.
Lampedusa II
EL I Z A G RI S WO LD
325
clive james
Technique’s Marginal Centrality
At the court of the Shogun Iyenari, it was a tense moment. Hokusai,
already well established as a prodigiously gifted artist, was competing with a conventional brush-stroke painter in a face-o≠ judged by
the shogun personally. Hokusai painted a blue curve on a big piece
of paper, chased a chicken across it whose feet had been dipped in
red paint, and explained the result to the shogun: it was a landscape
showing the Tatsuta River with floating red maple leaves. Hokusai
won the competition. The story is well known but the reaction of the
conventional brush-stroke artist was not recorded. It’s quite likely
that he thought Hokusai had done not much more than register an
idea, or, as we would say today, a concept. A loser’s view, perhaps;
though not without substance. If Hokusai had spent his career dipping chickens in red paint, he would have been Yoko Ono.
But Hokusai did a lot more, and the same applies to every artist we
respect, in any field: sometimes they delight us with absurdly simple
things, but we expect them to back it up with plenty of evidence
that they can do complicated things as well. And anyway, on close
examination the absurdly simple thing might turn out to be achieved
not entirely without technique. Late in his career Picasso would take
ten seconds to turn a bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars into a
bull’s head and expect to charge you a fortune for it, but when he
was sixteen he could paint a cardinal’s full-length portrait that looked
better than anything ever signed by Velázquez. You can’t tell, just
from looking at the bull’s head, that it was assembled by a hand commanding infinities of know-how, but you would have been able to
tell, from looking at Hokusai’s prize-winning picture, that a lot of
assurance lay behind the sweep of blue paint, and that he had professionally observed floating red maple leaves long enough to know
that the prints of a chicken’s red-painted feet would resemble them,
as long as the chicken could be induced to move briskly and not just
hang about making puddles.
When we switch this test apparatus to poetry, we arrive quickly
at a clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other poets
who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any.
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R.F. Langley, one of the school of poets around Jeremy Prynne, died
recently. As an adept of that school, he had put many dedicated years
into perfecting the kind of poem whose integrity depends on its
avoiding any hint of superficial attraction. Part of one of his poems
was quoted in tribute by the Guardian obituarist, himself an a∞liate
of the Prynne cenacle. It was instantly apparent that the poet had
succeeded in all his aims:
We leave unachieved in the
summer dusk. There are no
maps of moonlight. We find
peace in the room and don’t
ask what won’t be answered.
Impeccably bland, resolutely combed for any hint of the conventionally poetic, its lack of melody exactly matched by its lack of rhythm,
Langley’s poem had shaken o≠ all trace of the technical heritage,
leaving only the question of whether to be thus unencumbered is a
guarantee of novelty. Hard not to think of how far modern poetry
has come since T.S. Eliot continually improved his technical command in order to make his e≠ects by leaving it unemphasized, a vastly
di≠erent approach to the question:
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
— From Morning at the Window
To write a stanza like that, with no end-rhymes but with a subtle
interplay of interior echoes, we tend to assume that the poet needed
to be able to write the rhymed stanzas of “Sweeney Among the
Nightingales,” and then sit on the knowledge. At the time it was
written, even the most absolute of enthusiasts for modern poetry
would have hesitated to point out the truth — that the stanza was held
together by its rhythmic drive — unless he further pointed out that
it was also held together by the sophisticated assiduity with which
it didn’t rhyme. In other words, the whole of English poetry’s technical heritage was present in Eliot’s work, and never more so than
when it seemed free in form.
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But since that time, there has been a big shift in belief, and we are
living with the consequences now. Ezra Pound might have insisted
that only a genius should excuse himself from traditional measures,
but he soon decided that he was a genius, and several generations
of his spiritual descendants either felt the same about themselves
or — much more likely — took the new liberties more and more for
granted as time went on. The moderns not only conquered the fields
of art, they conquered the fields in which art is thought about. The
idea that form can be perfectly free has had so great a victory, everywhere in the English-speaking world, that the belief in its hidden
technical support no longer holds up. Or rather, and more simply,
the idea of technique has changed. It is no longer pinned to forms.
If few territories go quite so far as Australia, where it is generally
held to be unlikely that a poem can be formally structured and still
be modern, nevertheless the general assumption that beginning
poets had to put in their time with technical training, like musicians
learning their scales, is everywhere regarded as out of date. This nearconsensus is wrong, in my view, but you can see why it prevails.
And it does have one big advantage. Though a poet who can’t count
stresses and syllables might write mediocre poetry, there is a certain
kind of bad poetry that he won’t write.
Every editor in the world knows what kind of bad poetry I am
talking about. It arrives by the sheaf, by the bundle, by the bale. The
poet, usually young, but sometimes in his old age, has discovered his
power to rhyme, and what he thinks is rhythm. The editor, in his
turn, discovers over and over that the more a poet’s creativity might
be lacking, the more his productivity will be torrential. The trouble
with a really awful poem is not that its author lacks technique, but
that his technique is fully expressed: whatever he can do, he does,
especially if he has got past the early, drunken stages of finding
rhymes and has entered the determined stage of making lists. Whole
careers have been ruined by virtuoso exuberance, as when a tenor
who can sing a clean top C spends all day singing nothing else, and
leaves his chest voice in rags.
In the first half of the twentieth century, there was an accomplished poet in just that condition. He was the Australian émigré
man of letters W. J. Turner. Having based himself in London, he had
built up an enviable reputation as an expert on music: he was a valued friend of the great pianist Artur Schnabel, and his book about
Mozart, still read today, was held to be in a class with the monograph
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by Alfred Einstein. But Turner was also a prolific Georgian poet, and
in his prolificity lay his ticket to oblivion. His work might have survived being wildly overpraised by Yeats, but it could not survive its
own fluency. He had a certain success with a poem about the Aztecs.
Studded with catchy pre-Colombian names, it was the sort of thing
that could be recited after dinner in a drawing room. (On YouTube
he can be seen reciting the poem himself, in an over-enunciated voice
weirdly suggesting ectoplasm and planchette.) But in masses of other
poems he overdid the catchiness, and everything in the poem was so
attention-getting there was no way to recall it: the purposeless glitter
was packed tight like a second-hand furniture dealer’s storeroom full
of chandeliers:
In a sea Cytherean
Billows are rolling, rolling, rolling
Over stillness molybdenean
Hung with the scrolling
Abyss-plants whose fingers Chaldean
Rock slumber under foam-froth where lumber ...
Threatening always to give birth to Edith Sitwell like Venus in a seashell, even in its heyday such billowing foam-froth counted as high
spirits at best, and in the long term a whole tradition was doomed by
wordplay: you can hear why, a few decades down the line, the danger
of making so much vapid noise should have driven the Prynne people
to a Trappist vow of making no noise at all.
But on at least one occasion Turner wrote di≠erently, and it was
probably because he was in the grip of a real emotion. It was a case
of the visione amorosa, in that especially painful version when the
aging man finds himself suddenly longing for the unattainable young
woman. His title, “Hymn to Her Unknown,” betrays all his usual
deafness (Hymn to Her Unknown What?), but the text itself, from
the first line to the last, is fully judged, with no sign of automatism.
He starts by setting the scene of a memory:
In despair at not being able to rival the creations of God
I thought on her
Whom I saw on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen thirty-four
Having tea in the fifth story of Swan and Edgar’s
In Piccadilly Circus.
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From then on, throughout the barely fifty lines of his tiny epic, his
sole apparent trick is to go on raising the level of the diction, from
the Biblical through the heroic to the ecstatic. The unapparent tricks
are many — he really did know how to balance a line — but they are
all camouflaged in support of this main strategy, which he sensibly
doesn’t vary until the last stanza, when a few rhymes are allowed in
as evidence of the e≠ort it has taken to keep them out. The young
lady is married, she has her child with her, and clearly, though she
knows the poet is watching her, nothing he could do would alter her
life as she might alter his if she so chose. Such is the powerful combination of her beauty and moral character than he can’t describe her
adequately, even with his language at full stretch:
What is the use of being a poet?
Is it not a farce to call an artist a creator,
Who can create nothing, not even re-present what his eyes
have seen?
But of course in calling her indescribable he has described her, and
has defined a moment that we will all grow better at recognizing as
we grow older. The poet will be born again, and so will the young
woman that he adores. It is a stunning poem to have been almost
entirely forgotten.
One of the questions the poem raises, however, is whether Turner
really had to learn all that tricky stu≠ he did elsewhere just to increase
the e≠ect of leaving it out here. With T.S. Eliot the results of his
formal work are so sharp that we can take it for granted that the
acquired skill helped to make his informal work even sharper,
although really we are betting on a case of correlation as causation.
But by now we have seen so many successful informal poems that
we must contemplate the possibility that there is such a thing as an
informal technique, in which it is no longer necessary to count
stresses or master any regular stanza. Most poets now will never feel
called upon to make a poem look organized. Those who do feel the call
often produce results so clumsy that we are tempted to conclude that
the thing can’t be done without practice. But this again might be an
unwarranted assumption: maybe those particular poets just haven’t
got the knack. This concession would leave room for the further
possibility that some poets do have the knack but it hasn’t shown up
because they haven’t felt called upon to exploit it.
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Here we are perilously close to the pestiferous Lucy, the Peanuts
character who thought she could play the piano like her little friend
Schroeder if she just knew which keys to press down. Unfortunately
for any dreams of critical simplicity, such a fantasy is not empty.
There are some who are ignorant yet can perform prodigies, educating themselves with frightening speed as they go. Nobody devoid of
a proper musical education is ever going to saw away in a scratch
orchestra and produce a theme from Bach. Performance skill is too
great a factor. But in poetry, the performance skills for organizing
chains of words into forms seem often to be lying around piecemeal
in the linguistic attainments of tyros who have never learned to count
a stress. In a phrase that we tend to avoid because it doesn’t sound
precise enough, they have a feel for it.
In the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue you can see a nightclub scene by Picasso that proves he mastered the whole heritage of
the Impressionist painters in about a month. The important thing
here is not to belittle an intrinsically complex process just because
it betrays less overt e≠ort than we think appropriate. Take one of
the smallest and apparently most elementary of the standard poetic
forms, the couplet. For the poet, the heroic couplet is a wickedly
di∞cult frame in which to narrate. This being known to be true, a
whole critical mythology has built up about what Dryden did to
develop the trick that Pope perfected. But really, as a form, the couplet
was perfected long before, and almost overnight, by Robert Herrick:
Come, my Corinna, come; and, coming, mark
How each field turns a street, each street a park.
When Pope, in The Rape of the Lock, turned couplets as light and neat
as that, he got famous for it. Nobody remembers Herrick for inventing the possibilities because he never exploited them. His favored
form, even in the most frivolous lyric, was an argued paragraph rather
than a ladder of couplets: in that respect he was strangely like the
much more serious, much more holy George Herbert, who would
invent some shapely little edifice of words in order to fit the structure of a thought, and then move on. For Herbert, the thought was
the poetic substance. Unlike Donne, he wasn’t distracted even by
imagery. Herbert could do images, but they had to fit the argument.
This purity of purpose makes Herbert the most metaphysical of all
the poets we give that name. The name has been prominent since the
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331
first appearance of Grierson’s anthology in 1921, and famous since
Eliot sought amongst metaphysical poetry the hard antidote for flummery. But what Eliot learned best from Herbert, what we all learn, is
how to argue; or rather, we learn that the argument is the action.
The contemporary American poet Daniel Brown writes as if he
were taking classes from Herbert once a week. Throughout his slim
but weighty collection Taking the Occasion, Brown proves that for
him the reasoning is in command of the imagery and not vice versa.
Since practically the whole of the modern movement in poetry, as
we have come to recognize it, was based on the notion that imagery
ruled, Brown’s priorities would seem willfully archaic if not for the
functionality of his neatness, which reminds us that his hero Herbert,
thinking as he went, necessarily operated in the here and now.
Reasoning is as contemporary an activity as you can get. In his
poem “On Being Asked by Our Receptionist If I Liked the Flowers,”
Brown makes capital out of explaining, for himself and us, the mental
process by which the vase of lilies she was referring to had been condemned by her existence to the status of “A splendor I’d have seen for
sure, / If less employed in seeing her.” Herbert would have approved
of how the image arose from the idea, and of the compactness of the
wrapping: a couplet hard at work through making itself look easy.
Contrary to more than a hundred years of steadily accumulating
scholarly opinion, Pope never made the couplet look easy, even at
his most frolicsome. His social poems fit into a plaster and glass pavilion as though part of the furniture, but they are under a greater
strain than their surroundings: an internal strain. Heroic couplets are
closed, and the closure exerts pressure even when nothing much is
being conveyed except atmosphere. When a reasoned argument is
being conveyed, the pressure can split the pipes. It was recognized
even at the time that the vaunted logical progression of “Essay on
Man” was a succession of limps and stumbles in mechanical shoes.
By his very diligence, Pope proved that his favored form’s selfcontained refinement was a clumsy vehicle for argument. Except
when expressible in an individual aperçu, thought is seldom selfcontained. Probably for that reason, the mature Shakespeare usually
confined his use of the couplet to clinching a scene. The couplet stops
the action. Pope never took the hint.
Just before wwi, George Saintsbury, in his little book The Peace of
the Augustans, found the right language for disliking “Essay on Man”
and also went deeper to spot something inflexible about the heroic
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couplet in itself: Pope’s rigorously observed caesura, the central pause
of the line, formed a “crease down the page.” But really the heroic
couplet had already been practically, if not critically, undone in the
day of its domination, by poets who wished to keep the rhyme of the
couplet but not its self-containment. Charles Churchill is not much
thought of now, but his popularity at the time depended on his knack
for making the couplet spring along instead of hanging about. Instead
of being buttoned up at the end of the second line, the syntax of
a so-called “romance” couplet ran on into the couplet that came next.
Samuel Johnson, rigorously formal author of “The Vanity of Human
Wishes,” would have been horrified at the thought of letting a couplet
do that; and Oliver Goldsmith, whose accomplishments as a poet
Johnson rightly revered, wrote his masterpiece The Deserted Village
without slipping out of the heroic frame even once. (At the author’s
invitation, Johnson even contributed a few couplets to Goldsmith’s
poem, and they fit right in: you can hardly see the join.)
But the new possibilities provided by the romance couplet were
now there, and in the nineteenth century Browning made authoritative use of them to create the proudly demented narrative fluency
deployed by the narrator of “My Last Duchess.” Unimpeded by
enforced caesura or end-stopped second line, the Duke’s suavely
heightened conversational virtuosity, as if emanating from the carefully trimmed beard of Vincent Price by firelight, doubles the impact
when we realize that he is as nutty as a fruitcake. He killed her. Stop
him before he kills again.
It is an open question which form of the couplet demands the more
technique, heroic or romance. All we can be sure of is that each version demands plenty. Perhaps the romance couplet always demanded
most, as it headed towards the freedom we enjoy now, in which we
persuade ourselves that freedom from all predictability equals the
perfectly expressive. Whether they stop and start or flow forward
in a paragraph, couplets require their author to put his syllables and
stresses in all the right places. Rhyming is the easy part of the job, and
even that turns out to be devilishly hard after the initial spasm of euphoria. A first-timer is likely to go back to his opening night’s work
and despair of life, let alone of his poetic hopes. But here as always
we must be careful not to underestimate the speed of assimilation
that can be induced by the urgency of an idea. After wwii there was
a show-stopping example of instantaneously acquired mastery when
Vladimir Nabokov published Pale Fire, a work which revolves around
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333
a thousand-line poem composed in couplets. A tour de force of fake
history and pseudo-scholarship, the book would have been daunting
enough had the poem been clumsy. But it was perfect.
Perfect, or nearly so. A professional might have niggled that in line
497 (“In the wet starlight and on the wet ground”) the second “the,”
which ought to be stressed but can’t be, dictates a needlessly attention-getting departure from strict rhythm; but otherwise scarcely a
foot had been wrongly placed. The sweetly flowing tide of romance
couplets even had fully formed heroic couplets occasionally decorating them, like candles floating on the water:
The little scissors I am holding are
A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.
There could be no objecting to that. Here was the occasion for the
astonished reader to remember that Nabokov was a neophyte poet
only in English. In Russian he had been an expert, and all the Russian
expert poets are expert technicians, because Pushkin, the supreme
technician, sets the historic pace. Nevertheless, Nabokov had pulled
this marvel out of his hat the first time, a rabbit as big as a freight train.
How was it possible?
The only answer is that he did it because he wanted to. He had
had an idea about a prominent American poet being stalked by a
conceited scholar who was really a wacko European monarch on
the run, and for the screwball plot to work he needed a poem: so he
wrote one. The urge had preceded the accomplishment, as it always
must. If Nabokov had been writing a treatise on English prosody, it
would not have led him to write the poem in Pale Fire. Technique is a
subservient impulse. One of the ways we know this to be true is the
mess that ensues when fashion makes it a dominant one, and artists
in all fields start shoving stu≠ in just because they can do it. Critics
become more useful when they learn to appreciate that the creative
urge leading to a work of art may be a complex, irreducible compound of the impulse to get something new said and the impulse to
get a new technique into action. But the second component should
always attend upon the first, even when, as so often happens with
a poem, a technical possibility is the first thing to hit the page. The
possibility won’t go far unless the constructive urgency takes over.
The point is proved, rather than otherwise, by the poets who gush
technique but hardly ever write a poem.
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Turner’s “Hymn” was, and is, a unicorn raised among a herd of
horses. Since the poem is impossible to find even on Google, I am
very conscious at this point that I should get ahead with my longcherished project to edit an anthology of one-o≠ poems, by poets
who wrote only one hit among their many duds, or never wrote anything except the hit. I have several titles for the book — “They Never
Had a Chance” and “Poems of the Doomed” are two of them — but
publishers want names, and names are usually what such poets don’t
have, even the productive ones, buried while they breathed under
the tumulus of their own output.
It can take a long time for a poet to build a name, but once the
name is built it a≠ects everything, like gravity. Just recently on the
secondhand book market, Elizabeth Bishop’s copy of Jude the Obscure,
in the Modern Library edition, came up for sale. The mere presence
of her ownership signature on the flyleaf would already have put the
price up, but putting the price through the roof was the presence in
one of the endpapers of the draft for a poem. Never mind for the
moment what such a rare occurrence says about the confluence of
art and commerce. Let’s just marvel at what it says about poetry and
criticism. Here, we may be sure, is the clearest proof that we are dealing, down there at bedrock level, with an urge as strong as life, if no
more simple. She was out somewhere without her notebook, and she
had an idea. It couldn’t wait, so she started writing it down on the
only blank paper available. Any poet will read about this, scan his
crowded bookshelves with a sad eye, remember the number of times
he was caught by the same fever, and wonder if some book he once
owned will ever be news because he scribbled in it. The chances are
that it won’t. But that’s the chance that makes the whole deal more
exciting than Grand Slam tennis. Unless you can get beyond yourself,
you were never there.
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adam kirsch
Infallible Pope of Letters
The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1989–1922, Revised Edition, ed. by
Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. Yale University Press. $45.00.
The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, ed. by Valerie Eliot and
Hugh Haughton. Yale University Press. $45.00.
In the summer of 1918, T.S. Eliot was alarmed by the news that the
American armed forces in Europe, then engaged in the final campaign against Germany, would begin to conscript American citizens
living in England. Eliot had arrived in England at the beginning of
wwi, four years earlier, and had sunk deep roots in his new country:
he was already well known in advanced literary circles, had taken a
full-time job as a clerk in Lloyds Bank, and, most important, had married an English woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. But he was still an
American — he would not adopt British citizenship until 1927 — and
he was worried that if he did not secure an o∞cer’s commission, he
would end up as a grunt in the American army.
The first volume of the new edition of Eliot’s Letters shows how
quickly he went into action, trying to get a suitable post in the Naval
Intelligence Division. He worked his society contacts and he asked all
his prominent literary acquaintances for letters of recommendation.
One writer who came through for the twenty-nine-year-old poet
was Arnold Bennett, then the dean of English novelists. As it turned
out, the war ended before Eliot could enlist, but that December he
wrote to Bennett thanking him for his recommendation. “Happily,”
Eliot wrote, “the letter remains in my possession, to be realised upon
by my heirs at Sothebys.”
This was a piece of flattery, suggesting that Bennett’s signature
would make the letter valuable. The irony, of course, is that what
would bring a high price today is not Bennett’s name, but Eliot’s. The
senior writer and his whole generation of Edwardian realists — Shaw,
Galsworthy, Wells — now occupy a distinctly minor place in English
literary history; and it was Eliot and his generation, the Modernists,
who secured their elders’ demotion. To many readers today, Bennett
is known only as the target of Virginia Woolf ’s Modernist manifesto
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“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” — which was published in T.S. Eliot’s
magazine, the Criterion, in 1924. In volume two of the Letters of T.S.
Eliot, which is dominated by correspondence related to the Criterion,
we see Eliot thanking Woolf for this contribution: “with your paper
and unpublished manuscripts of Marcel Proust and W.B. Yeats, the
July number will be the most brilliant in [the magazine’s] history.”
One wonders if Eliot would have been surprised, even in 1918,
to learn that his reputation would one day eclipse Bennett’s. At the
time, he was not yet the author of “Gerontion” or The Waste Land
or “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and the best testimony of
his genius, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” had been written
eight long years before. “I often feel that ‘J.A.P.’ is a swan song,” he
wrote his brother Henry in 1916, “but I never mention the fact because Vivien is so exceedingly anxious that I shall equal it, and would
be bitterly disappointed if I do not.”
Yet there is no doubt that Eliot was already aiming for the highest
heights — or that he felt he was well on his way to achieving them.
“There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living
critic, as well as the best living poet, in England,” he told his mother
in 1919. “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James.”
This was partly bravado for the benefit of his family back in St. Louis,
who had never truly come to terms with Tom’s triple defection — his
decision to give up his career as an academic philosopher, move to
London, and marry Vivien, all in the summer of 1915.
Eliot was sure enough of himself to defy his parents’ wishes, but
the letters show him still touchingly eager to win their approval.
Looking forward to the publication of his first American book, in
1919, Eliot explained to his patron John Quinn,
You see I settled over here in the face of strong family opposition,
on the claim that I found the environment more favorable to
the production of literature. This book is all I have to show for
my claim — it would go toward making my parents contented
with conditions — and towards satisfying them that I have not
made a mess of my life, as they are inclined to believe.
Telling his mother that he was the best poet in England was an ideal
way to “satisfy” her, given her own thwarted literary longings. One of
the best decisions made by the editors of the correspondence — Eliot’s
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337
widow, Valerie, along with Hugh Haughton and John Ha≠enden — is
to include selected letters by people close to Eliot, along with his
own. This allows us to hear, in their own words, some of the people
who shaped Eliot’s life most intimately — above all, his wife and his
mother, Charlotte. “I hope in your literary work you will receive
early the recognition I strove for and failed,” Charlotte told Tom in
1910, when he was a senior at Harvard. “I should so have loved a
college course, but was obliged to teach before I was nineteen.”
Such letters are an economical way of showing how early Eliot was
burdened by parental expectations, and how much nourishment his
superego received. Volume one includes a series of letters written by
Charlotte to the headmaster of Milton Academy, where Eliot was to
spend a year preparing to enter Harvard. “Tom desires companionship of which he has been ... deprived,” she confides in 1905. “I talk
with him as I would with a man, which perhaps is not so good for him
as if he had young people about him.”
The dire finishing touch to this indirect portrait is provided by a
letter from Eliot’s father, Henry Sr.:
I hope that a cure for Syphilis will never be discovered. It is
God’s punishment for nastiness. Take it away and there will be
more nastiness, and it will be necessary to emasculate our children to keep them clean. So there!
Eliot himself would never have seen this letter, which was addressed
to his uncle, but the editors have cleverly included it as a brief
suggestion of the atmosphere in which he was raised. An ambitious, expectant, highly protective mother, a puritanical, prudish
father — and always in the background, the caste pride and intellectual
traditions of the Eliot clan. (“If I can write English prose,” he told a
friend in 1924, it was thanks to “an inherited disposition to rhetoric,
from innumerable ancestors who occupied themselves with the
church, the law, or politics!”)
It sounds like a perfect recipe for a familiar type of American
writer — genteel, cultivated, rather bloodless, what the critic Philip
Rahv named the “paleface.” In 1919, the president of Harvard,
Charles W. Eliot, wrote his distant cousin the poet, reproving him
for having chosen to live in England:
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I have never been able to understand how any American man
of letters can forego the privilege of being of use primarily to
Americans of the present and future generations, as Emerson,
Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were.
The president did not realize that this kind of respectable New
England “usefulness” was exactly the fate the poet was fleeing. He
had mocked it in an early poem, “Cousin Nancy”:
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.
Yet the “unalterable law” of Eliot’s background, personality, and
literary inheritance — those volumes of Arnold and Emerson — was
not easily cast o≠. Indeed, his first masterpiece, “Prufrock,” is a document of the young writer’s fear that he would not be able to avoid it,
that he would be doomed to civilized impotence:
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.
Another poem of the same period is titled “Portrait of a Lady,” and
it has often been noted how much Eliot had in common with Henry
James — he noted it himself in his self-justifying letter to his mother.
Prufrock, one might say, is a younger version of Lambert Strether,
the protagonist of James’s novel The Ambassadors — a sexless man
of letters, the editor of a mild New England literary magazine, who
comes to Europe in late middle age and realizes that he has wasted
his life. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” Strether famously
exhorts, and it is a mistake that Prufrock fears he cannot avoid:
“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the
moment to its crisis?”
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What made Eliot a great poet was the fact that in the crucial
moment, he did find the strength to force a crisis. One of the most
valuable and exciting achievements of the Letters is to document that
moment, which came in the summer of 1915. After studying at Oxford,
Eliot was expected to return to Harvard and finish his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. But as he wrote to his college friend, the poet
Conrad Aiken, the prospect weighed on him like spiritual death:
I dread returning to Cambridge ... and the people in Cambridge
whom one fights against and who absorb one all the same. The
great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that:
whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in
America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions
and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s
future; or save my money and retire at fifty to a table on the
boulevard, regarding the world placidly through the fumes of
an aperitif at 5 pm — How thin either life seems!
He was willing to do anything, even wreck his life, in order to save it,
as he hinted to Aiken in an earlier letter:
Does anything kill as petty worries do? And in America we worry
all the time. That, in fact, is I think the great use of su≠ering, if
it’s tragic su≠ering — it takes you away from yourself — and petty
su≠ering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration.
Eliot preserved his inspiration and found tragic su≠ering in the
same rash decision: to marry Vivien Haigh-Wood, after three months’
acquaintance, in June 1915. Vivien, the daughter of a painter, was
ra∞sh, witty, adventurous, sexy — the perfect medicine, it must have
seemed, for a twenty-six-year-old su≠ering from “virginity and shyness.” “Now that we have been married a month, I am convinced that
she has been the one person for me,” Eliot wrote his father that summer. “She has everything to give that I want, and she gives it. I owe
her everything.” Above all, she gave him an anchor in England and
literature, which made it possible for him to resist the strong tides
pulling him back to America and academia.
Yet if there is one theme that dominates these two volumes of
letters, it is the growing horror of this marriage. Cannily, the editors follow Eliot’s grateful letter to his father with a letter of Vivien’s,
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written while the new groom was making a flying visit to America to
explain himself to his family. Left on her own, Vivien wrote to Eliot’s
friend, and her old admirer, Scofield Thayer:
I was at the Savoy the other night, with two male friends who
are consoling the grass widow, and I thought of you, Scofield ...
You ought really to be over now, just to think of the dinners in
Soho we could do — and grass widows do seem, I find, to be so
very very attractive, much more than spinsters!
How could the owner of this voice, so worldly and coquettish, possibly marry the author of “Prufrock”? It does not take long
for the letters to register the dissonance. Writing to his brother in
September 1916, Eliot reports that “the present year” — the first
year of his marriage — “has been, in some respects, the most awful
nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive, but at least
it is not dull, and it has its compensations.” A year later he is writing
to an American friend, “I have been living in one of Dostoevsky’s
novels, you see, not in one of Jane Austen’s.” Marrying Vivien saved
Eliot, but also damned him: it was his fullest experience of the kind
of existential risk he evoked in The Waste Land:
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, have we existed ...
Already in these early years, the arcane power of his verse and the
magisterial judgments of his criticism were turning Eliot into a literary figure of unique authority. In 1919, the writer Richard Aldington,
who would become a close friend and collaborator, wrote to Eliot for
the first time, ending with an apology: “Excuse the impertinence of
all this and its rather heavy style, due to a sort of pious terror.”
This is the reverential awe that would become, for the next fifty
years, the standard readerly response to Eliot, turning him into an
infallible pope of letters. To read the American New Critics of the
thirties — Ransom, Tate, Warren — is to hear Eliot’s voice in a dozen
echoes. Thanks to Eliot’s 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” John
Donne went from minor figure to the center of the English canon —
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341
virtually displacing Milton, whom Eliot disdained. Poets who were
out of sympathy with Eliot’s pessimism, conservatism, and vatic formality felt themselves simply su≠ocated by his influence. To William
Carlos Williams, The Waste Land was like an atom bomb that wiped
out the natural growth of American Modernism.
It is strange to read the Letters, then, and realize that even as he
consolidated this superb image, Eliot was not ashamed to parade his
woes before his friends in a way that many a lesser person would find
undignified. For months at a time, hardly a letter goes by without a
complaint about overwork, flu, exhaustion, nerves, money troubles.
One of the running dramas of the letters is Eliot’s attempt to escape
from Lloyds Bank, where he worked eight hours a day, leaving only
his evenings for writing. Eliot the banker is frequently cited, along
with Stevens the insurance man and Williams the doctor, as a reproach
to today’s poets, proving that a poet benefits from being immersed
in the real world. That bracing view is hard to maintain after reading the Letters: while Eliot was grateful to the bank for hiring and
promoting him in hard times, he desperately wanted more congenial
work, and he had to stage periodic nervous breakdowns in order to
get time to write. (The Waste Land was written in part at a sanatorium — his version of Yaddo.)
Starting in 1922, when he began to edit the Criterion, Eliot didn’t
even have his evenings for poetry. The majority of letters in volume
two deal with Criterion business, and are less than revealing about
Eliot as a man or a poet. But they suggest the sheer amount of work
Eliot put into the magazine — a second full-time job on top of the
bank. As he explained to his brother:
the Criterion has to compete with reviews which have an editor
and a sub-editor devoting all their time to it, a business manager,
an o∞ce and a secretarial sta≠. The Criterion is run without
an o∞ce, without any sta≠ or business manager, by a sickly
bank clerk and his wife.... When I finally add that I have not
only taken no salary but have actually been considerably out of
pocket for payment of a secretary ... it is enough to make any
outsider believe that I ought to be certified a lunatic.
Yet when better opportunities did present themselves — a scheme
by Ezra Pound to collect subsidies from patrons, a job o≠er at a magazine owned by John Maynard Keynes — Eliot always found reasons
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to turn them down. Writing to Keynes declining the literary editorship of the Nation, Eliot signs o≠ with a masterstroke of self-pity:
Realising perfectly that my behaviour in this matter will always
be incomprehensible to those of my friends who have worked
so hard on my behalf, and that it can have no other e≠ect than
to forfeit your good will and that of many others.
By the time Eliot starts complaining to Aiken about his hurt
finger — “I have been having a great deal of trouble with my hand
getting an abscess under the finger nail which became infected and I
am not out of trouble yet” — the reader can deduce that this parading
of his troubles must have served a deep psychological need. Not for
nothing did Eliot write a “Love Song of St. Sebastian,” which didn’t
make it into his Collected Poems but is reproduced in volume one of
the Letters:
I would flog myself until I bled
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light.
In fact, to read Eliot’s poems in the light of the letters is to realize
how deeply he is a poet of complaint — from Prufrock’s “I grow old,
I grow old” to the majestic lament of “Ash-Wednesday”:
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there
is nothing again.
Above all, Eliot’s complaints in the Letters have to do with Vivien:
ADAM KI RSC H
343
For the last four days Vivien has been lying in the most dreadful
agony with neuritis in every nerve, increasingly — arms, hands,
legs, feet, back. Have you ever been in such incessant and
extreme pain that you felt your sanity going, and that you no
longer knew reality from delusion? That’s the way she is.
This is from 1921, and it only gets worse from there. By 1925, when
the second volume of the letters ends, Vivien’s physical and mental
health has su≠ered total collapse, after years of drug addiction and
quack diets left her weighing just eighty pounds. Eliot’s hopelessness in the face of his wife’s illness is nowhere clearer than in a series
of letters to John Middleton Murry — a prominent critic and editor,
and the widower of Katherine Mansfield. These letters are almost
too piteous to read:
In the last ten years — gradually, but deliberately — I have made
myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately — in order to
endure, in order not to feel — but it has killed V. In leaving the
bank I hope to become less a machine — but yet I am frightened —
because I don’t know what it will do to me — and to V. — should
I come alive again.... But the dilemma — to kill another person
by being dead, or to kill them by being alive? Is it best to make
oneself a machine, and kill them by not giving nourishment, or
to be alive, and kill them by wanting something that one cannot
get from that person? Does it happen that two persons’ lives are
absolutely hostile? Is it true that sometimes one can only live by
another’s dying?
Eight years later Eliot would leave Vivien, and eventually have her
committed to an asylum. The poet’s treatment of his wife has become, in the last few decades, one of the major grounds for posterity’s
overturning of his legend. Michael Hastings’s play Tom & Viv and
the biography of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour-Jones, among
other works, helped to advance a view of Eliot as a heartless misogynist who trampled on his gifted, misunderstood wife. Another kind
of indictment focuses on Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which was never hidden, but which has been center stage ever since Anthony Julius’s 1995
book T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Naturally, once he
is seen as a reactionary, misogynist anti-Semite, Eliot rather forfeits
his claim to moral authority.
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The editors of the Letters are quite aware of the biographical and
critical context in which they appear. In fact, this new edition is
actually a relaunching of an aborted series that began in 1988 and
ground to a halt after one volume. It’s impossible to say how much
the decision to postpone the Letters reflects Valerie Eliot’s desire to
protect her late husband’s reputation, and how much her desire to
collect as much material as possible. But it is to her credit that she
does not suppress the ample evidence in the Letters that Eliot was,
indeed, a reactionary, misogynist anti-Semite.
Indeed, he says as much himself. In 1924, he tells his mother that
my political and social views are so reactionary and ultra-conservative. They have become gradually more so and I am losing
the approval of the moderate and tepid whigs and Liberals who
have most of the literary power.
And his feelings about Jews are about what you would expect from
the author of “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”:
“I am sick of doing business with Jew publishers who will not carry
out their part of the contract unless they are forced to.... I wish
I could find a decent Christian publisher in New York,” he writes
to John Quinn, the New York lawyer who acted as his agent. The
editors include a letter from his mother showing that this was an
inherited prejudice: “It is very bad in me, but I have an instinctive
antipathy to Jews, just as I have to certain animals,” Charlotte Eliot
wrote.
Yet even as they document everything objectionable about T.S.
Eliot, these new volumes of Letters also succeed in making him more
interesting and even more sympathetic. That is because they are so
evidently the products of a flawed human being, and not of a pope
or demigod. In these early letters — the volumes to come may not
be nearly so revealing — Eliot is a young man in a frenzy of selfinvention, driven by guilt, fear, egotism, sexual confusion, and
spiritual yearning. He is often unlikeable, above all for his pride,
which led him to conceal his actual, fallible self in the armor of an
illegitimate authority. (“Perhaps all I have to say is that one must
develop a hard exterior in order to be spontaneous — one cannot be
that unless nothing can touch what is inside,” he told one friend.)
But no writer deserves that kind of authority, and in claiming it,
Eliot invited and deserved posterity’s retribution. In the end, a poet
ADAM KI RSC H
345
endures not as a critical or political lawgiver, but for his ability to
express what we all feel and su≠er; and Eliot endures because his
poetry has that power in such great measure. Now that we no longer
have to rebel against T.S. Eliot, perhaps we can move on to the more
di∞cult and rewarding task of trying to understand him.
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P OT S H E R D S & AR ROWHE ADS
Vachel Lindsay, from the Poetry magazine archives
v. penelope pelizzon
Potsherds & Arrowheads
A year ago I proposed to the editor of this magazine that, in honor of
its centennial, I do some archeological digging through Poetry’s first
three decades. Joseph Parisi’s and Stephen Young’s Poetry Anthology
1912–2002 collects work first published here, but most of their
selections are by known poets. I sought truly obscure yet glittering
potsherds. Armed with tissues and eye drops and call slips, I entered
the Dodd Research Center archive and opened the brittle Pegasusfledged pages of 1912.
For several months I sifted. There were pleasures that could come
only from reading poems in this context. Above the faintly floralscented verses of the early years, regionalists like Carl Sandburg and
Vachel Lindsay tower. (If you need a jolt of madcap kookiness, I suggest reciting aloud Lindsay’s “The Firemen’s Ball” from July 1914,
in which “the ding-dong doom-bells” ring with a “Clangaranga,
clangaranga / Clang, clang, clang” to imitate “the burning of a great
building”) Then, if I did not already suspect that Pound’s early
Cantos dropped from another planet, their extraterrestriality was
confirmed by seeing them in situ in the June 1917 issue. And the
shock of coming upon Louise Bogan or Langston Hughes or Weldon
Kees amidst thirties period bric-a-brac — thrilling!
Yet so much was numbingly forgettable. Really, what keeps any
poem from sinking into the midden? Obviously it’s not just formal
facility. It’s heartbreaking to hear how much of the early detritus is
tightly-rhymed verse: I could feel the hours that went into these finicky clockworks bearing down on me; I aged. Nor does a poet’s spurt
of establishment fame keep her work alive. I was excited to see how
many female Pulitzer-winners had published here. Sadly, the o≠erings
by Leonora Speyer and Audrey Wurdemann and Marya Zaturenska
are all fossils of the dustiest kind. A poet’s experimental stance is
no insurance that his poems will speak to a later age. Oddballs like
Harry Crosby, Emanuel Carnevali, and Alfred Kreymborg appeared
in these pages, and while I loved the idea of salvaging one of their
pieces — Carnevali’s serio-comic “His Majesty the Letter-Carrier,”
say— its drollery didn’t quite carry the poem. Meanwhile, any number of forgotten Poetry house favorites over the years illustrate that
V. PEN E LOPE PE LI Z Z ON
349
being prolific is not the sole key to longevity.
Poetic fashion is fickle, of course. It was a surprise, then, that reading decades of back issues suggests that there is a sort of historical
poetic justice; the epoch-making poems that first appeared here are
still staggering. And other voices that have been recovered already —
Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Elinor Wylie — don’t sound quite
like anyone else in the magazine. That they’ve been sifted out of
the strata is understandable. What rule of lasting does this suggest?
Enough of the recovered poems (what is minimally “enough”? Five?
Ten? Twenty?) sound distinctive enough (ditto uncertainty on quantifier) to make them register in the collective ear as a singular voice.
But what about the flints and chips left behind? The fugitive poems that never quite added up to “a voice”? In the April 1916 issue,
Pound issued one of his cranktankerous edicts:
As for the sickly multitude pouring out mediocre and submediocre work ... in the first place, they don’t count, and, in
the second place, if any among them do turn out a good scrap
of work these scraps neutralize.
Pace E.P., I’m not ready to believe that there’s nothing worth salvaging from the scraps. Let me show you a handful of obsidian points
that can still draw blood.
š
Here is a startling ballad variation from April 1915. This is twentyone years before Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” made famous by
Billie Holiday:
Blackbird, blackbird in the cage,
There’s something wrong tonight.
Far o≠ the sheri≠’s footfall dies,
The minutes crawl like last year’s flies
Between the bars, and like an age
The hours are long tonight.
The sky is like a heavy lid
Out here beyond the door tonight.
What’s that? A mutter down the street.
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What’s that? The sound of yells and feet.
For what you didn’t do or did
You’ll pay the score tonight.
No use to reek with reddened sweat,
No use to whimper and to sweat.
They’ve got the rope; they’ve got the guns,
They’ve got the courage and the guns;
And that’s the reason why tonight
No use to ask them any more.
They’ll fire the answer through the door —
You’re out to die tonight.
There where the lonely cross-road lies,
There is no place to make replies;
But silence, inch by inch, is there,
And the right limb for a lynch is there;
And a lean daw waits for both your eyes,
Blackbird.
Perhaps you’ll meet again some place.
Look for the mask upon the face:
That’s the way you’ll know them there —
A white mask to hide the face.
And you can halt and show them there
The things that they are deaf to now,
And they can tell you what they meant —
To wash the blood with blood. But how
If you are innocent?
Blackbird singer, blackbird mute,
They choked the seed you might have found.
Out of a thorny field you go —
For you it may be better so —
And leave the sowers of the ground
To eat the harvest of the fruit,
Blackbird.
— The Bird and the Tree
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3 51
Lynching: like jazz, an American invention. If you followed poetry
between the wars, you might recognize this as an anthology piece by
Ridgely Torrence, a bright light of the twenties. Today Torrence is
remembered mainly as a playwright, editor, and friend of the more
famous. His Three Plays for a Negro Theatre were a hit in 1917, where
they were the first dramas to run on Broadway with all-black casts.
Though their wince-inducing dialect and Christian moralizing date
them, the plays are a serious attempt by a white author to represent
the e≠ects of violence on the black community. Meanwhile, as poetry
editor of the New Republic from 1920–1933, Torrence championed emerging poets including Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and
Elinor Wylie. His own 1925 collection, Hesperides, was lauded. But
Torrence published no further poetry books until 1941; after that,
only a volume reprinting much earlier work appeared. And though
he was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award in 1942, by his death
eight years later he had slipped into what The Dictionary of Literary
Biography acknowledges “must charitably be called a minor position
in American literature.”
Admiration for Torrence’s good citizenship doesn’t make it easier
to slog through most of his writing today, sadly. But “The Bird and
the Tree”? I left the archive haunted. The poem’s unsettling, irregular
rhyme is accented by moments that seem hyper-modern. The abrupt,
twice-recurring drop of “Blackbird” feels like the fall of a body. And
the metaphor tying the black man who will swing from the tree with
a bird that could fly to safety from its boughs is queasily ambiguous.
Is this a redemptive image of freedom? I have no idea if Torrence ever
witnessed a lynching; certainly even in his native Ohio, mobs were a
threat. Photographs of hangings circulated widely in postcard form,
as the Without Sanctuary project makes clear (withoutsanctuary.org.)
I began to wonder if Torrence arrived at his blackbird image because
of how a bound body looks from below, silhouetted against a cage
of branches. (If that seems like a stretch, go look at the pictures.) As
I read with this awful counter-image in mind, the poem’s resigned,
too-cool, too-controlled voice began to sound like a whisper from
the grave. This is a revenant speaker, knowing exactly what will happen because he has seen it all before.
š
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Race is also an issue in the work of an English poet using the pen
name “Cecil John,” who published thirty-four poems here between
October 1922 and March 1932. The editor’s notes on his entries are
intriguingly sparse:
[ John] seems to have been attached ... to the colonial service in
Central Africa. His first poems ... were extensively copied, and
later groups increased his reputation as the voice of a minority
in Africa who resent the advance of civilization and the white
man’s treatment of the natives. His name and residence are
unknown to the editors.
John’s narratives are packed with local detail and the jaded voice of
the old Africa hand. They’d be a treasure trove for scholars studying
the last gasp of colonial writing from the continent.
Conradian unease at empire dominates John’s writing. His poem
“In Africa” urges
Be glad, Africa, for that sun
Which strikes the white man down —
The white man with his sample bag,
His railroad, his tin town,
since without disease and heat, the continent would be overrun.
There are no illusions here about the nobility of British expansion.
And while John is impressed by the Africans’ frankness toward sex,
he’s blunt about the di∞culties attendant on mixed race children. In
“The First-Born,” his speaker runs into a native woman with whom
he’s passed a night. After some grandiose expostulation about how
an Englishman’s first son is the “heir of all his race, his dream made
manifest,” the speaker sees the woman’s child. Manifest destiny
dreams have gone awry, for here is the “café au lait” baby. “That’s my
first-born!” the speaker flatly acknowledges. Another poem, “The
Doctor,” depicts a man who is a respected member of the colonial post,
although “a negress keeps his house, / And those mulatto youngsters
in white suits / Are something puzzling on his hands.” This wasn’t the
sort of souvenir you could take back to England in 1926. Instead, the
doctor “shut himself away, / And drank himself, not quite, to death.”
Why are John’s characters o≠ toting White Man’s Burden in the
first place? Heartbreak, of course. Going through a dead man’s e≠ects
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 53
in a poem called “The Old-Timer,” the speaker finds clothes, kudu
hides, guns, and then, “wrapped in a torn linen, almost clean, / Of
all fool things — a white-lace, spangled fan.” Noting that women
“haven’t used those now for thirty years,” the speaker realizes that
the dead man “must have trekked it round the hemispheres!” And in
some poems, like “Finis,” John seems to exorcise a specific romance:
You bade me “understand” and “wait,”
You bade me not forget the past.
In brutal English I may state
You mean — when he is dead at last
(His liver’s bad, I understand)
And you have mourned in fitting black,
And the world’s pacified and bland
Your girlhood’s lover may come back.
Imagine a progressive, bitter Kipling, and you get the idea.
John’s poems run long and don’t quite earn the space needed to reprint them here, though one from March 1932 is worth presenting in
its entirety. It encapsulates John’s cynicism and typical setting, and it
goes down like a little quinine pill for those su≠ering passion’s fevers:
Try six months flat upon your back
Ripped with a rotten festering wound;
A cot, unyielding as a rack;
A blanket sti≠ with blood and black
With dirt; try the incessant sound
Of beating drums and jigging feet;
Try goat’s milk in a dung-lined pot
And morsels of charred monkey-meat;
Try village smells; try flies; try heat
And manioc roots grown green with rot.
Then, when you totter to the sun,
You’ll waste no sighs on hearts undone!
— The Love Cure
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I assume that the poet’s pen name is a sardonic jab at De Beers
mogul and supreme colonist, Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes died in
1902. In his will he asserted that the British “are the first race in the
world.... If there be a God, I think that what He would like me to do
is to paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible.” The
poet “Cecil John,” whoever he was, had a di≠erent view of the map.
š
From a review of a first book, circa 1938:
Being a woman and a mother, as well as a chemist and star-gazer,
[the author] makes a unique mixture of her poetry....[But the
book’s middle section about a child has] at best a limited interest
as poetry or even as record; this is even truer of the following
section, which is … that sort of poetry most amazing and distasteful to men.
Here is one of those amazing and distasteful poems, first published in
the November 1935 issue:
i
For this
The body was knit,
The thigh bones riveted
Deep in the side;
Dark roadways of all love
Converged to this,
Passion and kiss
Bride-bed and death;
So to bequeath
Bone upon bone
The skeleton.
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 55
ii
Now you may go
Empty of import; you
With lustral service done.
Nor moon, nor sun,
Concerns itself again
With your
Bright lips and hands,
Breast-bone and thigh.
What circumstance and height you bore
Is yours no more;
Now go
Anonymous as snow,
Empty of import; go.
— Genetrix, by Kathryn Worth
Worth published nearly a score of poems here during the thirties.
Her Signs of Capricornus (Knopf, 1937) was reviewed favorably
in these pages by Janet Lewis. (The piece quoted above, by John
Holmes, appeared in vqr.) Today’s reader can only be amazed by
Holmes’s squeamishness; this poem is about as physical as Worth ever
gets. What she does get is metaphysical. Like Bogan’s, Worth’s poems
have a tight seventeenth-century snap. She’s often religious in ways
interesting to the non-believer; she o≠ers few platitudes. Rather, her
maternal poems present the existential drama of giving birth to a creature that must in its turn su≠er and die. While her weaker pieces wear
their Donne and Herbert galligaskins too obviously, I find Worth’s
bleak directive to maternal flesh in “Genetrix” striking. The speaker
doesn’t balk at the mechanistic notion that a particular body, having
reproduced, has served the species’ purpose. Countless generations
have led to this birth. Bone upon bone the babe has solidified inside
its mother’s own skeleton. Bequeathed here is the infant’s mortality
along with its life. And mother, that singular woman, is now empty,
without consequence and void of living cargo. Womb to tomb has
rarely been so sternly etched.
Worth was in her late thirties when this poem appeared. She had
one daughter. It’s easy to imagine her hammering these tight stanzas
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out of the pronouncements a woman of her era might fear as her fertility ebbed and her beauty began to fade. Yet the poem insists that its
subject has something larger than singular passion and circumstance.
While its lines dismiss her individuality, its Latin title bestows archetypal power. Like Venus Genetrix, she’s incorporated into an ancient
lineage and in turn becomes its embodier. Via birth — and this poem
about birth — Worth makes herself primal maker.
We have the term “elegy” for poems of mourning, yet we still have
no generic name for those that represent childbearing. The Academy
of American Poets website states that poems dealing with reproduction are “about creation, or beginning, or nurturing, or innocence,”
but that’s hardly descriptive of Worth’s work. Despite pioneers like
Rukeyser and Ostriker and Rich, as well as the recent anthology Not
for Mothers Only and collectives such as vida, we’re still a long way
from what Peter Sacks and Jahan Ramazani have done to illuminate
the elegiac tradition. Maybe it’s finally time to christen the genre
and anatomize its history and tropes? We’re gifted with a luxury of
younger writers who have taken the mommy poem to wild, thorny
places: Beth Ann Fennelly, Danielle Pafunda, and Rachel Zucker
come immediately to mind. Worth’s “Genetrix” is a memorable earlier expression of this yet-to-be historicized genre’s darker roadways.
š
When we tire of poking pins in our Alan Greenspan voodoo dolls,
when our hopes are dulled by systemic greed and inept leadership
and growing environmental catastrophe, it’s tonic to look back at
the late thirties. They had the Dust Bowl; we’ve got the 2011 Global
Food Crisis. They had the Munich Pact; we have Obama’s re-signed
Patriot Act. And if some better recent American poetry is what we
might broadly define as “socially engaged,” it’s certainly true that
long-simmering tensions throughout the thirties produced key works
from writers across the political spectrum. It’s not surprising, then,
that several sharper poems from the archive appear in 1939, even
before German troops invaded Poland that September.
Among the most rhetorically ambitious is “Yesterday, to Us,” from
May 1939. Harold Rosenberg, its author, will be familiar to many
as a Himalaya of mid-twentieth-century art criticism. His essay
“American Action Painters” appeared in Art News in 1952 and became a defining text of Abstract Expressionism. Through the thirties,
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 57
Joan Mitchell, August 1935
Alfred Kreymborg
Emanuel Carnevali, “Feb. 1918 — sent by Louis Grudin”
“To Miss Harriet Monroe very admiringly — Marya Zarturenska”
Rosenberg’s early attachment to Marxism had dimmed as his aesthetic stance distanced him from doctrinaire colleagues in the wpa
Federal Arts Project. By the time he published his canonical essay, he
could praise the canvas as an “arena” and painting as an epic “event”
in which a solitary maker struggles with his materials and himself.
But in 1939, Rosenberg still seems to be railing against the failure of
articulate collective response:
With dignity of gongs
towards a vanishingpoint of flags
the political prisoner
is led — Yesterday to
us, unquiet priests of silence, the
hypnotic
doze of power was a
quality of atmosphere
peculiar to
tides columns
seals and famous
boulevards; and the commonplace (without gongs) the only
but not the
reality. The remoteness
of life is usurped now.
The distracted odds and
ends of high
authority have put braid and
uniforms on all the
corner-boys; and the decadent,
the guy who
tried to make the waitress,
had cats and velvet in
his bedroom, he rules now
in stadia
and public squares. And where that happens
the Aristotelians
362
P O E T RY
hold foot-races with the
Platonists
and other connoisseurs
of naves and holy thought
to mop the vomit from
the superintellectual shirt. Thus
power and gongs, become
the sole reality, lead us
prisoner
between the flags ... Oh now
silence comes to us no
more with blooms and carvèd
seas. It brings
no smiling inhalations of
deep music, no crystal
joy. No. It holds terror clawing
at the cables
of man’s uneven rise; it
whizzes in our ears
like a jungle taut with
shiverings;
it is dense with unbelievable
cries ... We have therefore gone
out to stand watch on the crossings
yesterday
so commonplace and strange.
“About the e≠ects of large issues upon their emotions, Americans
tend to be either reticent or unconscious. The French artist thinks of
himself as a battleground of history; here one hears only of private
Dark Nights,” wrote Rosenberg in 1952. This frustration girds the
poem. What can the isolated priests of silence do now that power no
longer dozes in nature, history, or symbol, but wakes in the hands of
hooligans and creeps? When philosophy and theology run to serve
intellectual posers? Finally the collective “we” bands together to keep
watch ... but it’s too late. The nuances of political chagrin are hard
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 63
to voice. Rosenberg creates a linguistic Möbius strip along which the
reader moves from witnessing a distant execution into becoming the
political prisoner, enacting the maxim that one can’t escape history.
The poem’s method is so unlike anything else in the magazine during
these years that it jumps o≠ the page.
Rosenberg released one book of poetry, Trance Above the Streets
(Gotham Bookmart Press, 1942). In an unpublished preface, William
Carlos Williams contextualized its prosody, arguing that a poet’s job
is to make the line fit the language ... and to discover there
the new structural integer ... forged under the hammering of
contemporary necessity.... [Rosenberg’s] broken line, I begin
to think, is the most a poet can do with the exigencies which
bedevil him today.
Ultimately Williams didn’t finish the introduction; Rosenberg’s
abstractions and unthingy ideas seem to have alienated him. Today,
though, after Language and Procedural and Disjunctive poetries
have canonized the super-intellectual, the poem reads like its own
relatively coherent arena of action. Its jangly rhythms discomfit; each
staggery octave collapses on us just as we figure out where we are. It’s
a political poem of its moment that may actually be more resonant
for post-avant readers.
š
A few years earlier, a New York poet named Beatrice Goldsmith
debuted in Trial Balances, the 1935 anthology of emerging writers
made famous in retrospect for its inclusion of Elizabeth Bishop.
Introducing Goldsmith, Babette Deutsch critiqued her juvenilia as
coming from “the heart unlearned in loss”; she seemed to be “looking out of a strangely sheltered nook.” As a corrective, Deutsche advised the young writer to “strike roots into deeper soil.”
The end of the decade gave Goldsmith a rock to sink her roots
around. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. November brought
Kristallnacht, followed by Hitler’s January 1939 Reichstag speech
threatening the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. By the time Goldsmith
published this poem in the June 1939 issue, it was clear that the situation was perilous:
364
P O E T RY
Under the bed the shoes
Wait for the morning. Heat
Curls the newspapers and bends
The midnight street, the moon
Burns, the stone
Library lions sit and sweat
Falls from their sculptured eyes.
Together they lie
Upon the empty pillow, arms
Unlaced by heat but hair
Mingling like moss together.
Uneasily
He turns. They have sewn up his heart
By flashlight, there is pain, he will convalesce
In a garden bounded by bombs. A neon
Newspaper takes fire before his eyes, the words
Grow red and ghastly JEW His mind
Is raked with light He cries,
There is a blowtorch in his head, his bones
Begin to burn, the cannibals
Dismember him.
Aware —
He cannot wake, under the sleeping lid
The eye grows great and glazed
He calls,
He finds her lying dead
Upon a park bench (yellow, marked for Jews)
It’s Union Square he says, but she is dead
The stars fall hot as ashes and he cries
With shut and slumbering eyes.
She feels
No danger. Thirst
Sleeps on her face, she dreams
Of snow, her mouth
Is full of snow her tongue
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 65
Is spiced with frost she walks
In a gown of leaf-green glass
(With a blue bolero) smoking
An icy cigarette. Somnambulant
She walks her hands
Colder than milk. She smiles
And tilts her cellophane umbrella
O this snow!
It fills and girdles the still moon
And sleeps in the armpits of trees
this snow
Drops cool as butterflies
Upon her lips and eyes.
Undone
By dreams they lie, the heat
Prisons their arms, the milk
Sours on the sill. Distraught
He turns and cannot wake. She
Smiles. But from the street
There comes the midnight speech
Of feet, and where the tower stands
Electric over the square the clock
moves incandescent hands.
— Nocturne
The contemporary reader shudders at this poem’s foresight. Those
heat-wave-turned-holocaust images are shockingly, weirdly prescient.
Finding the poem in a 1939 issue gave me a sense of temporal disjunction; it was like waking in D.M. Thomas’s White Hotel to find that a
past trauma actually presages the future.
Like “Yesterday, To Us,” “Nocturne” closes with an image of
awful expectancy. But unlike Rosenberg, Goldsmith has clear activist
intent. This poem wants to terrify us into alertness. It’s melodramatic
in the textbook literary sense. That is, pathos, moral polarization,
and sensationalism come together to perform what Peter Brooks calls
“an intense emotional and ethical drama based on the manichaeistic
struggle of good and evil.” Like classic melodrama, “Nocturne” works
to galvanize readers against a perceived wrong. Today, Nazis in New
366
P O E T RY
York may seem like material for a dystopic Roth novel. But anyone
paying attention in 1938 while Roosevelt and thirty other world leaders at the Evian conference failed to develop a viable plan to receive
the expected flood of Jewish refugees might well have felt there was
no safe harbor anywhere. Stars hot as ashes could fall on Union Square.
Do we always dislike poetry that has too palpable a design on us?
Is there a place for propaganda in a poem? (Isn’t every poem a manifesto for its own aesthetic?) I’ve recovered “Nocturne,” so clearly
I think it’s worth saving. Its most sensational passages are balanced by
formal e≠ects: the breathless line break-deferred verbs and unpunctuated fluidity of the middle stanzas; the image of the beloved with
her deathly glass dress and ice cigarette; the unpredictable rhymes
that freeze in the last strophe into a concussive sequence.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Goldsmith turned to activist
songwriting for children. Her Win-the-War Ballads, accompanied
by Sam Morgenstern’s music, appeared in 1942. With titles like
“Blackout” and “My Ration Book,” the songs became part of the
wartime didactic arsenal. Children across country had their spirits
bolstered with choruses such as “A bomb can make an awful noise /
And raise a lot of fuss / But here in school we won’t be scared, / If one
should fall near us.” The World Grows Smaller (Grenich Printing
Corp., 1953), a bilingual Yiddish-English collection published after
Goldsmith’s early death, includes “Nocturne” and the Trial Balance
poems, but suggests that the poet spent the post-war years writing for
young readers. (It makes perfect sense to me that, after learning how
predictive “Nocturne” actually was, an author might seek respite in a
world of friendly animals and gentle foreign children.)
š
Even poems from 1939 that eschew experimental prosody and
overtly political content seem to be holding their breath. Here’s one
from the January issue that, in its formal regularity, lies at the other
end of the spectrum from Rosenberg and Goldsmith:
The mouths of cannon turn a silent “O”
Up to this miracle of snow.
Our hands are idle, our commander mute,
The trigger is not cocked to shoot.
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 67
This manifesto that no man can make,
This lazy flake on falling flake
Withholds our orders and the cannon’s speech:
The snow smokes on the pin and breech.
— Snow, by Marion Strobel
Like cherubim in a Renaissance nativity, those awe-stricken cannon.
Yet the metal is hot enough to make snowflakes smoke. It will not be
cool for long, no matter how delicately the moment balances in its
couplets.
Strobel served for many years as Poetry’s associate editor under
Harriet Monroe, through the transition after Monroe’s death in
1936, and into the war years, where she stepped in as co-editor after
George Dillon was called up. A new biography of Strobel’s daughter, painter Joan Mitchell, details how Strobel’s fund-raising e≠orts
helped keep the magazine afloat during its penurious stretches.
Strobel’s own poems appeared here regularly (and Mitchell’s once).
She was one of the writers Monroe surveyed in her “A Few Women
Poets” comment in September 1925, alongside Bogan, Wylie, Taggard,
and Ridge. After reading Monroe’s praise of her as a “modern
young woman [with] ... a technique audaciously personal,” I grew
optimistic whenever I saw Strobel’s name in the table of contents.
Alas, most of her wistful verses melt into the period’s white noise.
In her criticism, too, Strobel was largely resistant to innovation.
For a symposium published here in January 1922, for example, she
remarked that Marianne Moore’s work is “inevitably dry; the
manner of expression pedantic. She shouts at our stupidity....and we
yawn back at Miss Moore’s omniscience.”
Still, “Snow” caught my ear and I kept returning to it. It’s illustrative of how e≠ective heterometric lines in a closely-rhymed poem
can be. Think about sitting in an archive for days ... weeks ... months,
chipping through nine thousand or so pages of metrically regular
verse. Till then, I’d never actually felt in my own anvil bone what
Pound was getting at in his invective against the metronome. Glib
glassy iamb after iamb ... I began to wonder why anyone ever wrote
poems, or why I thought I liked to read them, or what sort of moron
I was to suggest sifting through this stu≠ in the first place. Then I’d
come across a piece willing to use irregularity as a sonic device, and
blood would start to flow back into my cochlea. “Snow” is the most
368
P O E T RY
conventional poem here, yet Strobel’s simple tactic of shortening
each second line to a tetrameter undercuts her couplets. That image
of snow on hot metal closes the poem with a mood of unsettling calm
largely because of the downshift to the tighter line.
Strobel has crafted this poem to feel timeless. Along with the
traditional form, she’s withheld any identifying details. Is this the
weather-stalled Battle of Tereul in 1937? Or the 1916 Siege of Verdun,
postponed for nine days due to a blizzard? It could be a lull in any
northern conflict during the last century. Ironically, then, it’s the
poem’s year of publication that gives it much of its pathos now.
Readers know what’s going to come soon after this; that extratextual information shapes our reception. The e≠ect is like viewing
an August Sander photo without noting its caption, and only afterwards seeing the descriptive text. Sander’s well-known trio of young
dandies on a country road, for instance, is first a delicious study in
character. But once we read that it’s a picture of “Three Farmers on
the Way to a Dance, Westerwald, 1914,” everything changes. The
same thing happens when we attach “1939” to Strobel’s poem. Stasis
moves into something wrenchingly temporal.
š
“Recovery” is our moment’s trendiest word. Economically, environmentally, politically, culturally, we all seem steeped in the rhetoric of
regaining something. It’s a nostalgic impulse, this feeling that looking
backwards will prepare us for the future. With luck, poetic recovery
might unearth a Mina Loy or a Lorine Niedecker in whose overlooked voice we now hear prophesy. But the dirty truth is that anyone
engaged in recovery work will bring something to light; you’re not
going to spend three months digging and return empty handed. This
imperative drives countless works of forgettable scholarship and, on
hair-pullingly fruitless days, made me consider fabricating my own
Rowley poems.
In the end, I was happy to uncover the handful here. Admittedly,
I’m surprised by how topical some of these pieces are: subject isn’t
usually what keeps me coming back to a poem, and I’m suspicious of
“message.” Nonetheless, after reading through thirty years of poems
mostly constructed from a limited thematic template (I love you and
spring rain is fresh on the grass / flowers / trees; I’m lonely as the autumn leaves are falling / wind is sighing / moon is setting; life is short
V. PEN EL OPE PE L I Z Z ON
3 69
as a breaking wave / a bird’s flight / the echo of a distant bell), any work
that spoke to the day’s di∞cult issues grabbed my notice.
Yes, the depressing part is handling the bits and shreds, then shoveling almost all of them back into the midden. A poet reading through
archival work is bound to obsess: Are my poems the rubble of my era?
Every page illustrates how nearly impossible it is to make something
that’s not simply your age’s typical flaked point. Recent studies of
Neanderthal dna show how closely modern humans are related to
the kin we appear to have exterminated, and scientists speculate
about what gave us the edge. Neanderthals were terrific tool makers.
Their limitation seems to have been that they spent tens of thousands
of years making the same great tool over and over.
370
P O E T RY
Associate editor Marion Strobel at a “Pegasus Party,” January 1, 1947
C O N T R I BU TO R S
amy beeder is the author of Now Make An Altar (2012) and Burn
the Field (2006), both published by Carnegie Mellon University
Press. She teaches at the University of New Mexico.
cathie bleck works in scratchboard and kaolin clay board. Her
artwork has appeared in over fifty exhibitions internationally; in
the New York Times, Esquire, and other newspapers, magazines, and
books; and on us postage stamps. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
michelle boisseau’s most recent book of poetry is A Sunday in
God-Years (University of Arkansas Press, 2009). She is a professor
of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
stephen dunn is the author of sixteen books of poetry, including Here and Now (W. W. Norton, 2011). His Di≠erent Hours was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He lives in Frostburg, Maryland.
paul durica* is a graduate student at the University of Chicago
and the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and Reenactments.
stephen edgar’s most recent book is History of the Day (Black Pepper, 2009). An American edition of his selected poems will appear
this year from Baskerville Publishers. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
david ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations is forthcoming in September. He was awarded the 2011 Ruth Lilly Prize by
the Poetry Foundation.
louise glück lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her collected
poems will be published this year.
eliza griswold is a poet and journalist based in New York City.
clive james’s latest books are a selected poems, Opal Sunset (W. W.
Norton, 2008); a collection of essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum (Picador, 2010); and a fifth volume of memoirs, The Blaze of
Obscurity (Picador, 2009).
adam kirsch is a senior editor at the New Republic. He is the author
of Invasions: Poems (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) and, most recently, Why
Trilling Matters (Yale University Press, 2011).
372
P O E T RY
v. penelope pelizzon’s Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000)
won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.
She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives
(Ohio State University Press, 2010).
michael ryan is director of the mfa program in poetry at the
University of California, Irvine. His new book of poems, This
Morning, will be published by Houghton Mi±in Harcourt in March.
joseph spece lectures on literature and the humanities at Newbury
College, and maintains a weblog on verse at sharkpackpoetry.com.
a.e. stallings’s most recent book is a verse translation of Lucretius,
The Nature of Things (Penguin, 2007). Stallings is a 2011 Guggenheim fellow and recently received a MacArthur Fellowship. She is
currently at work on a new Hesiod translation for Penguin Classics.
kathryn starbuck’s two books of poems are Griefmania (2006)
and Sex Perhaps, forthcoming fall 2012, both from Sheep Meadow
Press. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
* First appearance in Poetry.
C ON T RI BU TORS
3 73
“If Anton Chekhov returned as a modern
day poet, Richard Hoffman would be his
name. His poems reverberate with the same
lucid witness and precision....Emblem is a
marvelous new book.”—Terrance Hayes
BARROW STREET PRESS
www.barrowstreet.org
“...the very title of this fourth volume
of Hightower’s verse, we are told, is Ben
Self–Evident
Franklin’s revision of Jefferson’s proposed
Scott Hightower
opening of a famous document which
originally characterized “these truths” as
sacred, but which cool-headed Ben changed to self-evident. Perhaps there is some savor of Jesus in these breathtaking poems
after all. Read ’em and wipe away your tears.”—Richard Howard
$3,000 PRIZE
PUBLICATION
The Prairie Schooner Book
Prize Series, an annual competition for a book of short fiction and
a book of poetry, will be published
by the University of Nebraska Press.
¶ Winning authors will receive $3,000
(including a $500 advance from UNP).
The competition is open to those
who have previously published books,
as well as new writers. ¶ Selection
process: The pool of finalist manuscripts will be read by Editor-inChief Kwame Dawes, who will make
the final selection of two winning
manuscripts. ¶ New in 2012: We will
be accepting electronic submissions
alongside hard copy submissions.
Manuscripts with a $25 entry fee
should be submitted between January 15 and March 15, 2012 (for hard
copy submissions, postmark must be
no later than March 15) to:
Prairie Schooner Prize Series in
poetry/short fiction [pick category]
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
123 Andrews Hall
PO Box 880334
Lincoln NE 68588-0334
http://prairieschooner.unl.edu
Read annual subscription: $35.00
poetry, po box 421141
palm coast, fl 32142-1141
1.800.327.6976
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG
$ "
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BELLDAY BOOKS ANNOUNCES
THE 2012 BELLDAY POETRY PRIZE
Bellday Books will publish the winning book
and award $2,000 and 25 copies to the author.
CONTEST FINAL JUDGE: Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout has published 10 books of poetry,
including her most recent book, Money Shot (2011), and
Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her
work is widely anthologized and appears in Postmodern
American Poetry, several editions of Best American Poetry,
and The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). She is
professor of poetry and poetics at the University of
California, San Diego.
Submission Deadline: Postmarked March 15, 2012
x Submit manuscript of 60-­90 pages of original poetry
in English. The manuscript must not have been
published in book or chapbook, but may contain
poems that have appeared in print or on the
Internet.
x Manuscript must contain 2 title pages: Name and
contact information should appear on first title page
only. Name should not appear anywhere else in
manuscript. Manuscript should be typed, single-­
spaced, paginated, and bound with spring clip.
x Include a table of contents page.
x Enclose SASE for announcement of the winner.
x Manuscripts cannot be returned. Complete rules:
belldaybooks.com
x Check or money order for $25 reading fee, payable
to Bellday Books.
x Mail entries: Bellday Books, Inc., P.O. Box 3687,
Pittsburgh, PA 15230.
The Robinson
Jeffers Tor House
2012 Prize for Poetry
$1,000 for an original,
unpublished poem
not to exceed three
pages. $200 for
Honorable Mention
Final Judge
Cornelius Eady
Open to poetry in all styles,
ranging from experimental
to traditional forms,
including short narrative
poems. Each poem should
be typed on 8 1/2" by 11"
paper, no longer than three
pages. On a cover sheet
only, include name,
address, telephone number,
email, titles of poems; bio
optional. Multiple and
simultaneous submissions
welcome. There is a
reading fee of $10 for the
first three poems; $15 for
up to six poems; and $2.50
for each additional poem.
Make checks or money
orders payable to Tor
House Foundation.
The Prize winner will be
announced by May 15.
Include an SASE for
announcement of the Prize
winner. Poems will not be
returned. For more
information, visit our web
site or contact us by email.
The Prize for Poetry is a
living memorial to
American poet Robinson
Jeffers (1887-1962)
Postmark Deadline
for submissions is
March 15, 2012. Mail
poems, check or money
order, and SASE to:
Coordinator
2012 Poetry Prize
Tor House Foundation
Box 223240
Carmel, CA 93922
Phone: 831-624-1813
Fax: 831-624-3696
www.torhouse.org
Email: thf@torhouse.org
3ULQWRI-HIIHUVE\%DUEDUD:KLSSOH
The Foundation is a sponsor of National Poetry
Month
UPCOMING EVENTS
Beautiful Outsiders
This gallery exhibition features legendary independent
presses Black Sparrow, Burning Deck, and Fulcrum, all
noted for the diversity of their publication history and their
striking, immediately recognizable visual aesthetic. Beautiful
Outsiders showcases titles from the Poetry Foundation
Library collection through Wednesday, January 11.
exhibit open monday – friday, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
The Day Carl Sandburg Died
A dynamic film about the life and work of the iconic
American poet. Join director Paul Bonesteel for the Chicago
premiere, followed by a talk with poet Marc Smith.
friday, january 6, 7:00 pm
saturday, january 7, 3:00 pm
Pegasus Party
Join Poetry editors for January’s magazine release party,
featuring journalist and poet Eliza Griswold. She will
discuss her essay in the current issue, her life as a journalist
and poet, and read her own poems. A reception follows.
thursday, january 19, 6:00 pm
ALL EVENTS ARE FREE
a 61 WEST SUPERIOR STREET a CHICAGO
POETRYFOUNDATION . ORG / EVENTS
back page
January 1928
As the fine art critic for the Chicago Tribune, Harriet Monroe had this
to say about the International Exposition of Modern Art, the famous
“Armory Show,” when it opened at the Art Institute of Chicago
on March 24, 1913: “Their art, if it is art, would seem to be in an
experimental stage, and time alone can determine whether it will
lead to anything.” Chicago lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy took a chance
and purchased several of the show’s pieces. Not long after, he took
another chance, becoming one of the benefactors of an upstart literary magazine, Poetry, which also enjoyed the support of fellow Art
Institute donors Charles Hutchinson, Martin Ryerson, and Frederic
Clay and Helen Birch Bartlett.
The following subscription pitch invited less a±uent people to
become “spectators” of Poetry, and a printed handbill that contained
additional text reveals its pragmatic purpose: a subscription “does not
equal the actual cost of producing any single monthly show which the
poetry spectator views; but whatever small amounts we take in at the
door help to determine how long we shall keep the magazine-gallery
going.” With the support of donors and subscribers, the “magazinegallery” has been “going” for a hundred years. — Paul Durica
“Back Page” is a monthly feature of artifacts from the last one hundred years of Poetry.