Comments on: Lost and Found: A Reading of a Poem I Like

By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:29:11 +0000

Brian, many thanks for your comments. I appreciate them!

By: Brian Bartlett

Brian Bartlett — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:09:50 +0000

Okay, desktop still is in limbo and I’ve got no printer attached to this defamiliarizing laptop, but I’ll write a bit more about the question of found poems and attributing sources, etc. One fact to mention is that the source note under the title of “Dear Georgie” as it appeared independently in The Malahat Review, and later in the Bolster anthology, doesn’t appear in The Watchmaker’s Table–only a shorter version of the attribution is there. The poem is one in a section of 11 “found-reconstructed” poems in the collection (with a 12th one mischievously placed in another section), and at the back of the collection there’s a fuller background provided for those found poems, including the inspriration provided by Annie Dillard’s book of such poems, Mornings Like This. When many readerrs hear “found poems,” they think of a chunk from a magazine article or an encyclopedia broken into lines and stanzas and presented as a poem, but I’ve got no interest in writing that sort of f p. Dillard provides a different example: poems that find their sentences and words scattered through dozens or hundreds of pages and require much more radical selection than the more typical f p.
Like Zach and Jason, I find that contemporary books of poems sometimes suffer from a “mania for explanation,” but in the case of my new collection the background seemed intergral with the book, which has a lot do do with community, ancestry, neighbourhood, indebtedness. Rather than Van Toorn’s bronze pope “saluting no one,” the collection found salutations and debts and gratitude to be in its nature. The section of f p’s is called “Given Words.” This all makes for a less clean and ascetic, more cluttered gathering of materials than a book coming from a more lofty sense of lone-wolfish poetics. Thus the acknolwedgments, the notes, and even the old black-and-white photos in the book (including photos of both Hermon and Georgie, and of their father, whose farming diaries provided all the material for the longest of the found poems). Zach questions the need to “telegraph the technique,” but it seems to me there’s a huge difference between poems with their occasional unacknowledged allusions and echos and found poems in which every damn sentence, phrase, and word is derived from some other source (even with taking the liberties to abbreviate and cut and rearrange, which I took liberally, while adding no words at all). Jason mentions “sportsmanship,” which is part of the reason for the acknowledgements; not to acknowledge the source with this kind of poem, at least for me, would feel like plargiarism or theft (and yes, I know the line about good poets stealing etc.), Seems to me the reader’s knowledge that the poet has made a drastic act of refusal by depending 100% on some other writer’s words adds a dimension to the poem. We do read the poem differently than if the fact of the source were hidden from us; and while certainly the poem should stand self-sufficient as a poem minus any note, I think it’s enriched rather than diminished by the attribution. The attribution acknowledges that poet isn’t always a case of the solitary ego expressing its own eloquence. The section of f p’s in The Watchmaker’s Table begins with an epigraph that sheds some light on these matters. It’s from an interview with Don Domanski: “”Each of us stands on the shoulders of thousands of men and women who have gone on before us. It isn’t just one hand holding the pen or moving across the keyboard…. The poem written has only a bit of myself in it and far more of the world.” For those of you who haven’t read it, I also recommend reading Dillard’s introduction to her book (and of course the poems themselves).
Jason, thanks for the comment on Hermon neither “angling for an epiphany” nor “aggressively rejecting epiphany,” which taught me something about the poem and about the voice in those letters. Good critics like you can enlighten the poets whose works you write on — a sort of critic not easy to find. I better send this now in case it vanishes from the screen….

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:02:13 +0000

Zach, thanks for introducing me to Trower. I’ve searched in vain for the Starnino – do you have a live link?
Jason, thanks for introducing me to the, ahh, yes, Jughead. I’m looking forward to your post on Menashe.
I’m glad to have this literary blast of fresh air from Canada.

By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:12:47 +0000

And Brian, I’m glad you found this useful. We’re all looking forward to your thoughts.

By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:08:18 +0000

Martin, many thanks for this substantial and very interesting post. I don’t want to defeat artifice, that’s for sure. How can one escape artifice when one has made the choice to pick up a pen in the first place? Artifice – if I’m understanding the word correctly, and I may not be! – is our business and Bartlett’s, too.
Still one can engineer a more seemingly ‘natural’ voice, from time to time, and if I had to expand on my earlier point, I would say that I find Bartlett’s speaker’s voice refreshing not just because it sounds (even if it isn’t purely) natural. I find the voice refreshing because it’s not angling for, say, an epiphany (as in so many conventional poems) but, at the same time, it’s not aggressively rejecting epiphany (as in so many self-consciously unconventional poems). It doesn’t ’seem to’ have designs on us, one way or the other. Even though Bartlett has fashioned an illusion, it’s an illusion I could do with more of.

By: mearl

mearl — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 15:51:34 +0000

Jason,
Thanks for leading us to Bartlett’s poem, which I have read a few times now, along side your own reading of it. The two together lead me back, rather persistently, to the question of artifice in poetry. Or rather, to wondering if poetry can ever escape the artifice (or self-consciousness) of its own production. Or, more pointedly, is the fact that the speaker doesn’t know he’s in a poem somehow more virtuous than, say Berryman’s Mr. Bones, who, while seeking another kind of colloquialism, has no doubt that he’s one of the main characters in one of America’s great long poems.
And yet the idea of defeating artifice has been, historically, one of the great tropes in the Anglo-American poetic adventure, from Wordsworth’s experiments with local idioms inLyrical Ballads and his theoretical justification in the Preface for adopting new dictions and rhythms that were closer to the spoken language, to Browning’s dramatic monologues; from Whitman’s unbounded, plain-speaking bardic yap to Frost’s deadpan recreations of Northern New England bleakness.
I wonder what the great advantage of not knowing you’re in a poem could finally be, and if it is somehow less exciting to read poem’s speakers who “sound like poets.” Valery’s Monsieur Teste comes to mind, a meditation which begins with the utterence: “Stupidity is not my strong point” and represents another failed attempt to escape the poem; a double failure actually, in that it failed to solve another typical problem of the lyric poet, the avoidance of one’s own autobiography. Teste is Valery in no uncertain terms. Of course, the double failure adds up to poetic success.
We must remember that a poem is not a novel. Cesare Pavese tried to sidestep that fact in his brilliant volume Hard Labor [Lavorare stanca] by creating a mimesis of transparency as beautiful as any. But when we compare his poem to his fiction the differences are profound.
Here (from a section of my erstwhile Cyber Rambler column) is a discussion of a much later example of this escape from artifice) in the work of Australian poet John Kinsella.
(from: C.R. No. 4: “A Habit of Mind”)
“Firebox”, one of the five poems published currently at The Richmond Review, is to my mind a minor masterpiece. The author himself (in the wonderfully intense interview with Michael Bradshaw that accompanies the selection of poems) refers to it as “a radical pastoral”. It is certainly Frost whose spirit underlines the poem’s matte lyricism. It reads like something between “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial”, the latter for its austere portrait of domestic drama, the former for its hell bent attempt to draw dialogue, like fire, out of the “other”. “Firebox” begins with that great formula of all disgruntled Romantics: anger contemplated in tranquility.
It angered him that she would call it a “firebox” -
“It’s a woodbox” he’d say, filling it with offcuts
from old railway sleepers
and fence posts, storm-felled trees
and once brilliant stands of blackbutt. He continued
to complain after she’d gone inside – “a woodbox!”
again and again – each
piece perfectly stacked, the box as full as it could be
The exquisitely calibrated flatness of this music, the dead-pan delineation of the hurt male placed outside articulation, his angers and frustrations masterfully inflected through his harping on the names of things: these aural and thematic motifs echo Frost. Indeed, the following lines from “Home Burial” would almost seem to flow right out of Kinsella’s first stanza.
A man must partly give up being a man
With women-folk. We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.
Frost’s themes will be picked up and elaborated upon in the rest of the poem. But they are all there incipiently in this first stanza: the pacing; the monotonic lines; the way the stanzaic structure is designed to encase the dialogue (which causes the prosaic immediacies of the drama to burst against the containing poetic); man and wife reduced to thrusting pronouns; and most of all the abrupt almost callous entry into the knit of the argument: “It angered him that she would call it a ‘firebox’”. Likewise are the central themes of the poem: male isolation in the misnomered world of women; male recourse to the physical world, to life and order, to obsessional repetition; the female to the spiritual, the mythical and to death. Frost’s major themes are replayed in Kinsella’s tight parable of male brutality. Somewhere Vermont, is replaced by Somewhere Outback. The child’s grave by the firebox. The only difference is that Kinsella’s disgruntled male gets away with murder, literally.
Martin

By: Brian Bartlett

Brian Bartlett — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:26:17 +0000

Thanks, one & all, for the fascinating discussion about many things, including found poems, sprung from my “Dear Georgie.” Bad timing in that my desktop computer went on the fritz a few days ago & I’m struggling away on an unfamiliar laptop with no printer. Would like to print off the comments & take some time to digest them, rather than reply too quickly. So please be patient. It may take a few more days before my desktop is back in action. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Jason for his original splendid commentary. All poets should feel lucky to get, even once in their lifetime, a reading of one of their poems that shows such acuteness of understanding. It’s refreshing to find a reader/listener who so enters so generously into the spirit of a poem cheers, Brian, who is glad to have just found out about Harriet in this new year

By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:13:27 +0000

Mary, many thanks for the great comments. They put me in mind of an old Archie strip, in which the guileless Moose commissions the craftier Jughead, by threat of violence, to ghostwrite a poem for Moose. Moose tries to pass the poem off as his own, but his girlfriend, Midge, on reading the poem -
Taller than the tallest tree is,
Wider than the widest sea is,
That’s how much in love we is!
- detects Jughead’s style. “[Jughead] tried to hide it by sounding illiterate,” she says, sensing an artfulness behind the apparent artlessness. But there’s another strip, too, in which Moose writes a poem for Midge, on his own (I can’t find the strip, but I suspect the poem’s the same as, or very similar to, the one above). Grundy, Moose’s teacher, is so taken w/ the poem, w/ Moose’s guileless, unguarded grammar, she suggests, if memory serves, that it should be published in some literary magazine.
Sounds like, Mary, you would prefer the second Moose poem to the first! Moose w/o Jughead. Hermon w/o Bartlett. (Though I don’t mean to make too close a comparison between Moose and Hermon! I hope the analogy isn’t offensive, that’s for sure.) I like this notion of the artlessly artful, too (assuming that’s what you’re getting at)…
I’m glad you like the Bartlett poem. I agree that the writing of a found poem can offer a “thrilling education,” but I think “Dear Georgie” is a razor-sharp cut above the typical found poem because it offers (to the rest of us) something more than an education. It offers entertainment!
And I, too, would like to read more poems that are crafted but not too crafty, so I’m glad Zach has offered his suggestions. There’s a US poet, Asturo Riley, who has been in Poetry and seems to be the sort of poet we’re circling around, though I haven’t read a lot of his work. I initially bristled at what I have read, but only because it seemed unpoetic but maybe, I realize now, in the best sense of the word (though I don’t mean to imply Riley’s work is naive). I would add, too, the Brazilian-Canadian Ricardo Sternberg, who writes a clean, direct poem – artful but not overloaded with effects. I first encountered Sternberg’s work through someone who knew his son, and I remember being shown Sternberg’s first book, The Invention of Honey, as a very young man, and the clarity of his work seemed so unusual to me, at the time. I didn’t think people could get away w/ poems like that. Samuel Menashe (about whom I want to blog) is another one. Let me mull this some more (and my apologies for this overly long, and maybe slightly silly, response)…
And, of course, there’s still a place, too, for artful, showy, pyrotechnic virtuosity, something my own country has sometimes been uneasy about celebrating, but maybe that’s not what we’ve been blogging about…

By: Zachariah Wells

Zachariah Wells — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:24:12 +0000

Mary Meriam,
In response to:
“Is there one poet with equal measures of artfulness and artlessness? Beautiful, crafted, guileless, unguarded.”
I’d nominate John Clare. More contemporary is a fella named Peter Trower, whose work is uneven, but remarkable at its best. His Selected is “Haunted Hill and Hanging Valleys.” Carmine Starnino has written probably the best piece of criticism on Trower.

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:16:18 +0000

Jason, what about the difference between artfulness and artlessness. Artfulness: showing creative skill or taste. Artlessness: without guile or deception, without effort or pretentiousness; natural and simple. Perhaps the poets “angling for Academy recognition” are showing off their skill and taste, rather than using their skill and taste to move the reader? Is the most popular contemporary poetic style pretentiousness itself? Are poets speaking in a collective pontificating drone? Is there one poet with equal measures of artfulness and artlessness? Beautiful, crafted, guileless, unguarded.
As for the poem under discussion, I like it, too, but I don’t love it, perhaps because the artfulness is artificially grafted onto the artlessness, instead of rising whole from one poet. As for adding notes to a poem, I’m undecided. I found a poem in one of Lavinia’s Harriet posts. The poem is posted somewhere on Harriet. Would Lavinia mind if I published the poem as my own? But I wouldn’t and couldn’t, notes or no notes. Unlike Hermon, she certainly doesn’t need my help. Rather, this was a case where I rummaged around in the language of an artist. I found a poem in a paragraph of one of Dickinson’s letters. Writing found poems is a thrilling education, but I don’t consider the poems part of my oeuvre. And that’s an artifact.