New Poetry

Some of the most criminally unappealing sentences have been written in the service of talking about poetry. Poems are like wine in the way they can lead their enthusiasts astray in language, and before you know where you are, poetry is reclaiming personal experience, or putting us in touch with the cosmos or singing the universal or celebrating the elemental or goodness only knows what. Which is ironic, given that poetry is there to make us think harder about language and what it can do. The older I get and the more poetry I read, the less I know what to say about it – which is a shortcoming on my part. However, I’ll do what I can for two first collections of poetry by a couple of intriguing poets, Kaddy Benyon and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, which is at least give you a generous offering of their poetry.

 

When the Title Took Its Life

 

My saddest lines

wish to know how they left

this pen

 

and why I imprison them

in corridors

along margins. Abbreviated

 

but exhausted from labor.

 

Tonight they wreak revenge

On my mortal hand –

 

Erase me.

 

Write “I don’t know

why I am sad.

Night is long. Like an empty house

with annexes of silence.”

 

Or bar with a slash

words like “bleeding”

“persecution,” “exile,” and “loneliness.”

 

Like a blind judge, these lines

doubt my sincerity.

Here is not life.

 

The sickle moon looks down.

 

What does it know? The storm

I heard when I meant

to be writing.

 

This comes from Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s collection, My Funeral Gondola. These are cool, spacious poems, often with a lot of white space to do your thinking in. Elegant or evocative sentences feel like they’ve been plucked by tweezers and laid on a white cloth for inspection. But there’s also a stark drama to many of her lines, and a little capsule of enigma left rolling about in them, too.  One of my favourites is entitled ‘Digesting an Academic Symposium, Some Months Back’ and it was a delightful mixture of the wry, the ironic and the observational. Here’s an excerpt:

 

To conceal jealousy, he wore dark glasses, took

pictures with a pen camera. To be posted

on a blog, in a third-person account.

 

Is Foucault in season?

 

The most interesting lectures, from those who

chose to stay the peripheral sort.

 

For instance, an American who studied nature.

 

Or the Irish dramaturge in awe of Brecht

and Buddhist grottoes.

 

A professor emerita

trying to seduce with her foxy hairstyle

 

a clique of amis

who could handle theoretical smiles.

 

By contrast, Kaddy Benyon’s poems are darker, earthier, more sensual and much more tightly packed:

 

Strange Fruit

 

Sometimes I have an urge to slip

my hands inside the soiled, wilting

necks of your gardening gloves;

to let my fingers fill each dusty

burrow, then close my eyes and feel

a blush of nurture upon my skin.

 

Sometimes I am so afraid my hurt

will hack at your figs, strawberries,

or full-bellied beans, I dig my fists

in my pockets and nip myself. Sometimes

I imagine the man who belongs to

the hat hanging on the bright-angled

 

nail in your shed. I think about you

toiling and sweating with him;

coaxing growth from warm earth;

pushing life into furrows. I am curious

about what cultivates and blooms

there in your enclosed, raised bed –

 

yet I want no tithe of it for myself.

Sometimes I just want to show

you the places I’m mottled, rotten

and bruised; I want you to lean close

enough to hold the strange fruit

of me and tell me I may yet thrive.

 

This comes from the collection Milk Fever, where there is a clear preoccupation with close relationships, unusually tight and mysterious ones like mother and child and lovers, who are bound together by tangled strings of emotion. This is an altogether more intimate voice, more insistent on the mind, recklessly pushing fragments of images onto the reader, bringing us up closer than is comfortable to the bodies, scents, experiences and perceptions in the poems. Where Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s poems are gently cloaked in spiritual ideas, Kaddy Benyon’s are grasping at disquieting feelings. I loved the start of ‘Undone’:

 

We had to run for the bus after confession,

where waiting for Mother’s silence

I’d made imaginary idols of saints, illuminated

 

by twenty votives I paid for with flickers

of prayer. We’d no time for my litany

of lies and spite and rage so the priest winked

 

and told me Next time. I reached for Mother’s

hand, already crammed with beads

clacking together: a metronome for OCD.

 

I wish I could recall where I read an explanation of the literary as being ‘the place where the material is filled up with the ineffable’. For that seemed to me the perfect description of all poetry. I found so much to enjoy in both these collections and particularly those moments of reading poetry where you pounce on a line as if it were an especially gorgeous shell on the beach. ‘My skin takes thoughts/away from light’ stayed with me for a long time from My Funeral Gondola. And in Milk Fever, of a baby’s cradle cap: ‘I want to pick him clean: to preserve/him protected/from the ravenous urge to love.’ Gorgeous stuff.

A Family Affair

After the Impressionists, I should think that the Pre-Raphaelites are some of the best-known artists in the Western world. With their sumptuous use of colour and detail, and religious or medieval subjects featuring ivory-cheeked models with abundant tresses of crinkly hair, you really can’t mistake them for the work of any one else. In my college days I went through a Pre-Raphaelite phase and covered my walls with posters by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although we might keep this just to ourselves, and not mention it to the artist husband of a good friend of mine, who would cut me dead if he knew. Then as now, the paintings caused endless dissent over their artistic merit. The Pre-Raphaelites were also a literary movement, with both Dante Gabriel and his sister, Christina Rossetti producing poetry. Now this was as much as I knew about them, until I read Dinah Roe’s excellent biography of their family, The Rossettis in Wonderland.

The Rossetti patriarch, Gabriele, was an Italian poet and Dante scholar who was obliged to live in exile in London due to his political beliefs. A cheerful, sociable soul who became melancholy and paranoid in old age and illness, he married a young woman from another Italian family, Frances Polidore. Frances was one of a batch of fairly formidable sisters. Most were very successful governesses, apart from the youngest, Eliza, who stayed home to nurse elderly parents until they died and she became Florence Nightingale’s right-hand woman in the Crimean wars. Gabriele and Frances quickly had four children – Maria, Dante Gabriel (known as Gabriel) William and Christina. These children were ‘the calms and the storms’, Gabriel and Christina having inherited the passionate temperament of their father, Maria and William the more serene, sensible character of their mother. Frances had particular ideas about child-rearing, and unusual ones for the time. She brought them up in a fiercely intellectual and artistic environment, encouraging them towards achievement and borrowing the talents of her sisters to teach a wide range of subjects. In later years she was to lament this choice: ‘I now wish there was a little less intellect in the family, so as to allow for a little more common sense,’ she wrote. But their education was uneven in ways Frances would not have realised; as the eldest male child and the most obviously gifted, Gabriel was indulged by everyone. Christina, equally talented, was subject to the policed repression that was considered necessary for a young, Christian woman. Frances was very religious, in an era that naturally required self-effacement from what it insisted must be a gentler sex. In consequence, Gabriel grew up wild and unreliable, even if generous and sociable, whereas Christina was obliged to implode in a series of breakdowns. For both of them, art provided the answer and the solace to their difficult temperaments.

All the children were extremely competitive with one another, which must have made life awkward at times for the less

Dante Gabriel's illustration for his sister's Goblin Market

obviously talented Maria and William. Inevitably, they became the mainstays of the family and the source of its financial salvation. As Gabriele sunk into a deluded old age, writing fervent but crazy tracts about Dante, the family fell into poverty. Maria was sent out as a governess and William became a civil servant, and their salaries kept them all afloat, just about. This was a loving and tight-knit family, despite the sibling rivalry, and when Gabriel found fellow feeling with some of his artist friends from the Royal Academy and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded (down the pub, more or less), he involved his brothers and sisters as much as he – and they – were able. William adored being part of an artistic movement and would provide loyal support throughout his life. But he was not particularly gifted as an artist. In the end, he began to be known as a reviewer, and eventually as a literary critic. The group was a godsend for Christina, who would probably never have been allowed an outlet for her talent otherwise. Her poetry was the first serious success the movement had, and her reputation was to grow steadily throughout her life.

Gabriel’s paintings were struggling with the usual reaction against the disturbingly new. He had been inspired by Keats, and his doctrine of intensity and thrilling to beauty. Furthermore, Keats had fought to become a poet despite the insignificance of his birth, a noble battle that Gabriel Rossetti, poor first generation Italian immigrant would be thankful for. Rossetti wanted to see a return to realism in art, particularly in nature, but there was no great agenda for the PRB, even if the paintings bear a close family resemblance. One of his early works, The Annunciation that graces the cover, was considered to be blasphemous and ugly, as the thin, red-haired Virgin Mary conformed to the stereotypes of the Victorian working class, and was by no means a suitable image for the mother of God. An intriguing response, when you think that the charge levelled against the Pre-Raphaelites these days is that they are pretty paintings but substance-less. However, what Gabriel could do, every bit as well as paint, was network and self-publicise. He managed to find himself rich patrons and promoted the group at every opportunity, making friends over time with critics like John Ruskin, whose spirited defence of the PRB marked a turning point for the group’s reputation.

Bower Meadow by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

What I found so intriguing about the biography, and part of the reason it works so well, is the strength of family feeling that kept the Rossettis together. The siblings spent their lives mostly in each other’s pockets, and relationships were hard to have because no outsider really met their lovingly jealous standards. Gabriel was the one to break away most (although he lived in London all his life) and the family never properly took to Lizzie Siddal, his model turned companion. Gabriel tried to fix up a husband for Christina, who was good at having furtive relationships of the mind with shy, retiring men, but always backed out of marriage. William married, but very late in life, and Maria became a nun. In the closing chapters of the book, as the siblings begin to die off, you can feel the grief and desperation that grips the remaining family members. Maria died first, suddenly and painfully from cancer, Gabriel followed with a good Victorian death from chloral abuse, then Christina, another cancer victim who succumbed to a hideous, drawn-out, screaming death. William, however, had inherited his longevity from his mother’s side, and lived on for another 25 years. Left the sole remaining member of the family, he poured his energy into promoting the paintings and poetry of his siblings. As a cautious, reserved man with an accountant’s temperament and a natural desire to canonise his family and sanitise their history, his avalanche of publications did as much harm as good to the memory of the Rossettis. Their star had risen high during their lifetimes, but afterwards, William’s hagiographic writings led others to wonder whether Gabriel’s paintings, in particular, were as great as all that. But William wrote to keep his family alive, not to deliver an objective account of their art.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable biography that manages to keep vast quantities of material under gentle control. It is elegantly written with a faintly scholarly air but genuine warmth towards its subjects. It gives a vivid account of a family whose bonds prevented its members from really turning outwards into the world, but which equally gave the siblings the love, support and artistic opportunity they might never have found without one another. A definite must for anyone interested in the art of this era.

Attunement

Yesterday in the bookstore, I witnessed an exchange that stuck with me.  I was just about to leave the shop, having finished my hours for the day, and the next volunteer had already arrived.

Two girls walked into the shop together, full of the joys of the new summer, just excited about nothing much at all. One went over to the poetry shelves and called out ‘Oh I love poetry! I should read more of it!’ She browsed for a few moments and then came over with an old hardback volume, no dust cover, rather shabby and brown and asked the price from the other volunteer. It must have been a rare copy because it turned out to be quite expensive and her face fell.

‘Do you have any books of poetry that are cheaper than this?’ she asked. ‘Can you help me decide what to read?’

So the volunteer went back to the shelves with her and started pulling books out and offering them. I was picking up my stuff and not paying so much attention, until I began to feel a sort of cloud of creeping unease travelling over towards me. Something wasn’t going so well.

‘How about Auden?’ the volunteer was saying. ‘Do you know him? What about this by Shelley?’

‘Who’s Shelley?’ the girl asked, in a tone that suggested this sort of thing had been going on fruitlessly for some time.

‘Only one of the most important poets who ever wrote!’ the volunteer replied.

‘Well, I’d better read that one then, hadn’t I?’ the girl asked cheerily, clearly trying to retain a bit of dignity.

But by now the volunteer was leafing through the book. ‘Oh you don’t want this,’ she said. ‘It’s some sort of commentary on the poems, not the actual poems.’

The girl had had enough by now, and I didn’t blame her one bit. ‘I can’t see my friend,’ she said. ‘I think she must have left the shop. I really ought to go after her and come back when I know a bit more what I want.’

‘Yes, you do that,’ said the volunteer, completely unperturbed. I knew the friend was still in the store, only hidden out of sight around the little corner at the back. The volunteer stalked straight over to where I was standing. ‘Did you see that girl?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t know what she wanted. She said she loved poetry and wanted to buy a book but she hadn’t heard of any of the poets! Then I had to stop her from buying some book of literary analysis!’

Just to finish off the embarrassment of the encounter, the friend had realised that she had been abandoned and was heading out of the store towards our ex-customer who stood hovering on the threshold, beckoning her, and in perfect earshot of the volunteer’s unjust remarks. The two girls rushed away.

‘I think she just didn’t know very much about poetry and wanted to learn,’ I said.

‘She knew nothing about poetry!’ said the volunteer still outraged. ‘Why did she say she did?’

This exchange made me wince. It filled me with dismay, and not least because I hadn’t been able to find a way to intervene helpfully. I hadn’t realised the exchange was going so badly until too late, and to tell the volunteer now that she had been insensitive would have caused nothing but more wounded feelings. She is a much older woman than me, and someone who has worked in a lot of arts administration. I’d been warned before I met her that she could be disconcertingly brusque, although I hadn’t had any difficulty with her myself. But oh how I felt for that poor young girl, who had been made to feel so stupid. She had been a very pretty girl, elaborately made up, with her eyeliner making little hooked apostrophes around the outer corners of her eyes; she was dressed up in summer finery and in full flight of enthusiastic youth, in love with her own possibilities and all the other ones in the world that had yet to be revealed to her. If only she had been able to say, look, I’ve hardly read any poetry and I want to know where to start. But that would have been hard for her, to alter the stance she had taken and which, after all, must have felt so deliciously grown-up and serious and romantic. Who among us, at any age, could give up such a position in exchange for genuine, dull ignorance?

Over the past couple of years I’ve become very interested in dialogue, in what people can hear when they talk to one another, and the kind of miraculous exchanges that can really take people somewhere or effect meaningful change. I suppose this has grown out of my interest in teaching, and from the experience of trying to explain chronic fatigue to people who can’t or won’t understand what it is. It seems to me that the basis of any successful conversation is attunement. The ability of one or other party to get themselves in line, mentally and emotionally, with their interlocutor. When conversation breaks down in conflict or disagreement, you can really see that absence of attunement, the unwillingness to understand where the other person is coming from. The volunteer in the shop couldn’t attune to the customer; she believed that the young girl’s mind was a copy of her own, that a professed love of poetry equated to her own love of poetry. It was such a missed opportunity. But this is difficult, too, conversation happens so fast, it can be very confusing, it is inevitable that our own position dominates our focus. So often we just don’t want to get in line with someone else’s insecurities, their fears, their inchoate desires. And so most conversations snarl and snag up, or end in their participants repeating their own lines over and over, without ever feeling heard.

Well, I can’t fix conversation, but I know that for my own peace of mind, I’ve got to find a way to get in there quicker, should there be a next time. It makes me feel all funny inside to think that someone didn’t get the reading they wanted.

In Which Critics Annoy Me

I wonder if there is any nicer experience than picking up a book that you have no great expectations for and finding that you have a little jewel in your hands? That’s what happened to me with Nicholson Baker’s latest book, The Anthologist. The story is simplicity itself: it’s about Paul Chowder, a middle-aged, mildly successful poet who is struggling (and mostly failing) to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. He spends his days tidying up the barn in which he is not working, helping his neighbours put down a pine floor and missing his girlfriend, Roz, who moved out because she couldn’t stand his procrastination. But most of what he does is think about poetry, and specifically, how it works. His anthology is entitled Only Rhyme, and the gentle, amusing stream of Paul’s narrative chat is cunningly put to the service of reminding us why meter and rhyme can be so delightfully effective in poetry, in an era in which free verse seems to have come to dominate.

If that sounds in any way elitist or dull, think twice; what makes this book a real winner is the presence of the most endearing narrative voice I have read in a long, long time. Paul brings poetry to life by all kinds of means, brief, funny, anecdotal biographies of poets, typographical quirks to help us read and hear the beats in a line, his own stories of happy or unhappy creativity, moments of being crystallized around some of his favourite lines. The voice (and it really is a voice, like the most charming, relaxed conversation) rambles and topics succeed one another sometimes with logic and sometimes without. But it all holds together like a spider’s web, or even like a poem, where the gaps and gestures contain us just as much as the words.

I was particularly impressed because I have never been a big poetry reader, and on the whole had remained unconvinced about the beauty of rhyme. I avoided having to teach all that kind of thing at university because I’d never really understood meter or mastered even a third of the terms that seem necessary to describe it. By the end of the book, I really grasped what the narrator was saying and had some genuine insight into how rhyme works. Here’s a bit I liked:

‘Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping – there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you’re an adult, you don’t sob quite that way. But when you’re a little kid, you go, “Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih.” You actually cry in duple meter.

‘Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We’ve got to face that. And if that’s trye, do we want to give drugs so that people won’t weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It’s like chain-smoking – you light one line with the glowing ember of the last.’

So what grabs us in poetry, the musicality of it, the rhythm of it, is something that corresponds to the natural rhythms that we experience in the body. We respond to poetry with parts of us that are primitive and innate – and that’s a nice thought when for most people poetry looks too ‘intellectually hard’ to speak to them.  Paul Chowder wants us to feel the way that poetry can be a full body experience, rhymed poetry most obviously so.

Having finished the book, I decided to go online and check out some of the reviews of it, and I was surprised to find that while most were complimentary, the reviewers in every case could not help but quibble with the account of poetry that the narrator puts forward. Now bear in mind that this is a first-person narrative and Nicholson Baker could not possibly have done more to make it evidently subjective. The New York Times was probably the best review, as did love the book and pointed out that you didn’t have to agree with all of the narrator’s opinions, they were there to be enjoyed and considered. But the writer could not help but emphasize his superior knowledge of the poetry world by complaining that Baker had only mentioned The New Yorker when there were all kinds of other literary journals that were more important for poetry. The Washington Post whined that ‘Chowder focuses on the mechanics of poetry and neglects what Emerson called “lustres,” sparky images and aphorisms that pierce the seal set on the human spirit by time and care. “A snowflake will go through a pine board, if projected with force enough,” Emerson wrote, and while meter may account for the force in much poetry, the snowflake is just as necessary.’ At which point I began to feel a bit annoyed. On the contrary, Chowder does pick out lines that he loves, but the POINT of his anthology is to champion rhyme, when it has recently been neglected, so that’s what he spends most of his time talking about. Then our dear old Telegraph really tipped me over the edge by niggling with the account of iambic pentameter (which the narrator tells us is a contentious subject). ‘Chowder ignores dramatic verse completely and only mentions Milton once, without considering what that king of enjambement was up to.’ And then drops into horrible patronizing: ‘But you do commit that most forgivable of crimes, which is to let the music of the language get in the way of what that language is actually saying. You even have a fetishistic way of dwelling on syllables.’ At which point I nearly fell off my chair with irritation and started yelling in my head IT’S A WORK OF FICTION, NOT AN ACADEMIC TREATISE! THE NARRATOR IS NOT INTENDING TO COVER THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF POETRY!!

It seemed to me that these reviewers, (who clearly fancied themselves as experts on poetry one and all) were entirely missing the point of The Anthologist. I thought it had performed a minor miracle of writing about poetry, even about technical aspects of poetry, in a way that was deeply compelling, engaging, accessible and fun. It had made me want to rush out and buy a ton of poetry anthologies. And it occurred to me that if poetry is a diminishing speck on the literary horizon these days, if few people read it and think about it, it’s because critics have failed to do their job of providing a sufficiently interesting and engaging conversation about poetry. The artwork is only half of the equation, always. The other half, just as important, is the reception, the way we respond to it and talk about it and thereby stitch it into our world. If poetry critics can only quibble over the complexities of iambic pentameters, if they cannot resist being picky and superior, then what is the average reader to think? Two things: 1) I’m not intellectual enough for this conversation and 2) I don’t see how this relates to my life. Whereas what Baker’s novel does brilliantly is show how poetry is an extension of some of the most profound, most moving, moments of existence. And that really is a conversation worth having.