Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote a lot of minor work. O’Hara’s minor work is usually more fun, to me, than Dickinson’s, but either way, they are poets whose lesser poems are an integral part of their overall body of work. Everybody needs to write minor work. I read somewhere that the filthiest limericks were probably written by anthology-rank Victorian poets keeping their hand in for when the big stuff arrived. T.S. Eliot kept his hand in by writing Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His separation of light verse from the rest of his poetry makes major work like Four Quartets seem all the more oppressively sober. (As a semi-aside, imagine the glummest passages of “The Wasteland” without the tragicomic pub scene.) It’s hard to keep Cats in mind when reading “The Dry Salvages” but Emily Dickinson’s outhouse poem, #1167 (“Alone and in a Circumstance/Reluctant to be told/A spider on my reticence/Assiduously Crawled…”) seems of a piece with the lifework of the Amherst recluse. Same with O’Hara: His chat matters. Sure, the greatest hits are capital-G great—Dickinson’s #27 (“Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me”), O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.
>But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on March 6, 2008 at 3:52 pmAha! My vote here for the two most elegantly perceptive sentences written at Harriet in 2008!
Kent
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George Steiner (horribly pretentious, even for me, but even so) had a wise remark about the importance of reading an author’s lesser works — the trivial ones, the failed ones — in order to really understand the great. To me, that minor work is often more of an open conduit to an author’s mind (to jump on the authorial fallacy train), and I find that reading it can make the great poems more human and accessible because you’ve seen the fault-lines and joinery in the rest.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on March 6, 2008 at 4:59 pmReport this comment
A while back I made a similar point on my blog, with the help of the Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey (see http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2008/02/astonishing-sinad-morrissey.html ). One aspect of a poet’s greatness is range, after all. Yes?
Posted By: Joseph Hutchison on March 6, 2008 at 5:44 pmCheers!
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Trouble is: who decides which poems are “lesser” or “minor” in Dickinson’s and O’Hara’s work? Or anybody’s? I spy a slippery slope!!
Posted By: Don Share on March 6, 2008 at 9:14 pmReport this comment
I’m with Don on the silliness of weighing poems for major-ness or minor-ness — doesn’t Aristophanes’s “The Frogs” have a scale in which Euripides and Aeschylus drop their lines to determine whose are weightier?
Posted By: john on March 7, 2008 at 1:15 amBUT, I do thank you, Daisy, for pointing me to that Outhouse poem! I wouldn’t have figured out that that’s what she’s talking about, and your reading is plausible.
(Dickinson & O’Hara both in my Top Fave list.)
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Don–Well, who decides is whoever edits the anthology, or Selected. Everybody decides for themselves what’s important. But that’s beside the point with regard to thinking of poems of larger and lesser ambition as being of a piece–in contrast to the later-Eliot model of separating the serious poems from the cat poems.
Posted By: Daisy on March 7, 2008 at 5:52 amSimon–I agree with your approach to small-ambition work. But there’s that word, “fault,” that’s difficult. It implies there’s One Great Poem out there that we’re all trying to reach, and all of us failing in small or big ways. That’s treason to how we should think about O’Hara–and maybe about all poetry. What would O’Hara be without his faulrs?
Daisy
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OK, well, I still don’t understand the standard for judging “larger” and “lesser” ambition. Sorry to sound so dense!
Posted By: Don Share on March 7, 2008 at 9:30 amReport this comment
John says: “I’m with Don on the silliness of weighing poems for major-ness or minor-ness.”
Posted By: Daisy on March 7, 2008 at 12:37 pmYes, so am I. That’s actually my point.
Don–As far as standards go–not my job. I like some poems better and some less, and many people disagree with me (I love “Why I Am Not a Painter”; Simon DeDeo loves it not so much.) Again, I’m not talking about scoring poems like ice skating.
Yrs.,
Daisy
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I’m not sure fault implies a “one true work” — interestingly, I think art historians are most comfortable with this concept, far more than poets. When I read discussions of paintings I love, there is often reference to fault. Enabled in part (in the past) because many great artists had understudies who “did the tree bits”, and in part because there are far more technical constraints (either of the representational or craft kind) that one can be unambiguous about.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on March 9, 2008 at 4:36 amReport this comment