… dogmatists. Hence:
The creamy nymphs are singing: Tra la la.
Their secrets whirl like microscopic jewels
‘Round troglodytes whose Hee hee, ha ha ha’s
Mean: Sugared words are sweet but we want food. …
(”Sea Things Sonnet”)
Sonnets by Elizabeth Marie Young are actually patterned after Shakespearean sonnets (in iambic pentameter, even!), but their mocking, lascivious mix of dictions makes them, well, perverse, especially in their final “couplets:”
Fuck hard, omnivorous and out of breath.
Outlandishly, we’ll knife the kiss of death.
(”XXX Sonnet”)
That last little phrase is delightful Elizabethan pastiche. Elsewhere she’ll reference “algorithmic suburbs” and microorganisms, smilax and ocelot, Goya and Aristotle, Thebes and the Macarena (she is a Greek and Latin scholar, besides being young and impertinent). I haven’t seen iambics treated with such irreverence since the Sonnets of Bernadette Mayer, ca. 1985 (well, I read them in ‘95). It’s clear Young has read Mayer — the chapbook recalls not only that earlier book of erotic sonnets, but seems to reference Mayer’s “Eve of Easter” and “Utopia” as well. With the final couplet of the book, Young suggests that sex and utopia are incompatible. How can love be democratic? At the first sign of love’s asymmetry, equality goes out the window. Take that, revolutionary boyfriends.
Eros is also foregrounded in Simone dos Anjos’s Comedies:
I play Colombina, poor enough to learn early.
A story so slight we must refer to impressions,
Pavlova as Le Cygne, or what we know at birth
of time. Though the main task is to find a plot
that suits music, then wish for others to read it.
To be unreal is to concentrate solely on the literal.
Rex plays Rex. Innamorati say yes. The swan dies.
And I am cast in the role of rarely-staged facts,
type of understudy, a chorus man or waiting lady.
They kiss me in the name of comedy. En travesti,
a boy in dress. By day with breasts, en travesti.
I’ve learnt enough to come early, play as softly
as I’m cast. The main task is to suit the music.
(”Common Dice”)
Sadder and more enigmatic than Young, dos Anjos doesn’t write epigrammatic bouquets. Where Young displays forward gusto, dos Anjos casts a sideways glance. But at root, their strategies are intertwined: both use language as mask; both don mythic personae, en travesti. Both work the language into brazenly beautiful — epicene — phrases. Both strive for disorienting effects, as in dos Anjos’s:
Sitting as though she is elsewhere a picture
misplaced as the sound in a seashell she’s found in
(”Before a Statue in the Sea”)
Why, you might wonder, should we be interested in these retro stylings and iambics? I myself fell to wondering if this is not only the work of women, but women’s work, and why. There are similarities with Barbara Guest’s poetry, for instance. For so long, Guest fell between the cracks — friends with the New York School poets, but never part of their branding. Too abstract? Too feminine? It’s worth mentioning that the newest issue of The Chicago Review features Barbara Guest, and in a truly splendid format: poets and critics choose one poem and write a brief commentary on it. My favorite may be Donald Revell on “Roses.” He writes: “‘Roses’ breathes new air — air that, only a moment before, simply wasn’t there. A little gasp of surprise liberates both poet and reader from prior circumstance.” He goes on to say, “As in Fairfield Porter’s gestural realism, ‘Roses’ finds its figures hovering in free space among other figures equally free. The boat and shoe are here together, each on a line of its own.”
The Fairfield Porter reference is telling. Porter resisted the overwhelming interdictions against realism in the midst of the ab-ex revolution. He won himself a little bit of freedom, as Barbara Guest did, as Elizabeth Marie Young and Simone dos Anjos do. I can’t claim to have a unified theory as to why some women poets (also Mayer; also Jennifer Moxley; also Andrea Brady) slip into period dress and speak through Victorian and Elizabethan gestures, but I’d venture it has something to do with regimes, and lack of change, and throwing into relief the possibility that dogmatic, booming pronouncements (like “make it new” and its avatars) are themselves a mask for power.
Sonnets
Elizabeth Marie Young
Omahrahu, 2008
(c/o Ryan Murphy, 121 LaSalle St. #6
NY, NY 10027)
Comedies
Simone dos Anjos
Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008
(c/o 1158 Hotz Ave, Iowa City, IA 52245)

“Creepily misty morning, dank, dark, disheveled and rather ominous, like a destroyer just gone into dry dock. But how beautiful it was at the first light to hear the repetitious song of a cardinal—my pleasure in it is more than just that I can recognize it: it is not unlike that which someone who doesn’t ‘know’ music takes in the songs he does know. Simple and right from the heart to the heart—or perhaps from the throat to the ear is enough, but in that way in which hearing is itself suddenly a kind of singing.” — James Schuyler

“Art forces a sense to touch itself.” — Jean-Luc Nancy

“For our time (age) it seems preferable to dress the dryad in a camoflage smock.” — Ian Hamilton Finlay

“Wallace Stevens is as susceptible to sound as objects were to Midas’s golden touch. But he does not sophisticate his music. He listens to that of the bumblebee and the sea. Reverie is not a diplomatic occasion in Liberia.”—Marianne Moore

“He that is Weak-legg’d must not be in Love with Rome, nor an infirm Head with Venice or Paris” — Sir Thomas Browne

“The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page so that we are aware of another aspect of the art.” — Barbara Guest

“ … an almost pathetic homestead upon the marches of relentless power.” — Robert Duncan

I’ve written about Christopher Middleton several times during my tenure on Harriet, and you may surmise that I find him a compelling poet in the tradition of Modernism, albeit one who eschews the formal stylization of some of my other models (Ashbery, et al.) “Reflections on a Viking Prow,” an essay written in 1978-79 (I blogged about it when I first read it, here ), anticipated Pinsky:

Horrendously rugged proto-Germans may have had some such word as “dinc.” By “dinc” their successors meant “assembly,” possibly too the common concern, focusing event or crisis, which might occasion the elders of a group to reason together. The Latin “res” had originally the same sense.

Pinsky registers awe that a word should travel so far from its meaning that it ends up on the shore of opposite sense, for now “thing” means “a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing.” But Middleton offered a plausible, if pessimistic explanation. “Perhaps there was no non-specific word,” he says, for prehistoric speakers.

Only, perhaps, with the accumulation of spare things, in a world that had marched away from subsistence economy, a world with power-centralization and property, a world that had shifted from right hemisphere to left hemisphere thinking, a world with a grammar that arose with the neural shift away from magical thinking toward cortical or subjective thinking, did a term as non-specific as “thing” in our sense enter ancient man’s vocabulary.

In other words, “one might speculate, the concept ‘thing’ is already to be linked with diversification, economics, alienation, and finally reification.”
Thanks to Jeremy Green who commented on this post , I was turned onto the Stan Smith essay “Pregnant Carrots: The Poetry of Christopher Middleton.” It explores the ways in which Middleton’s 1969 book Our Flowers & Nice Bones disinters the buried relations of our ordinary commercial, industrial things and their origins, their makers. In effect, by bringing these relations to light, Middleton reverses the process by which the “thing” hardened into its current meaning. And Middleton does the same for the concept of self: the self is not an object, he avers. It is a nexus of relations.
Compared to Middleton, Pinsky just doesn’t go far enough. He might well believe in the account Middleton offers—tinged as it is with Marx and shamanism—but at this late date may think it seems wacky, or tedious, or impolite, to muck around in those 20th-century rhetorics. But Middleton’s wide-ranging essay goes deeper into the concept of “thing” than Pinsky does. And the poetry that springs from it is more difficult, but also more joyful: what I say about delight vis-à-vis Kinzie’s book was inspired by this passage in “Reflections on a Viking Prow:”

Perhaps a text in all its singularity, as a dematerialization of thing into sign, as a structured but not rigid event in consciousness, with a design as fine as that of an artifact, but not identical with any artifact or thing, might show you a way toward an otherwise shuttered world of infinite delight that you carry around with you, gnash your teeth as you may. … I have proposed that you can talk back to a text which you have experienced with delight.

So you see there’s an underlying debt to Middleton in my forthcoming Poetry essay. My thinking on Our Flowers and Nice Bones owes a debt to Stan Smith’s essay, and Jeremy Green who sent it to me. I can hardly discharge my debt to my all readers who commented and backchanneled, aided and abetted me, for the past six months. You kept me sane when I was jolting awake in the middle of the night trying to remember if I had written something utterly foolish on Harriet. Thank you, thank you.

The many thirty-six-word poems scattered throughout this volume springs from an attempt to write a large work under rigorous constraints. … When I realized that the centrifugal forces had overpowered my original intentions for overall coherence, I published some more under the title “Ana” (as in Shakespeareana, Joyceana, etc.). Here I’ve allowed the princple of dispersal to overcome completely my initial nostalgia for order.

Not rage for order, as in Stevens, but nostalgia for order! I was reading Trevor Joyce concurrently with Laura Riding Jackson (did anyone have a greater rage for order?) and felt as though I were taking the measure of the gulf between my own attraction to (her) purity and my delight in the fallen state of poetry as it is. What’s in Store takes advantage of so many different forms and methods, trusting sheer accumulation to ward off the failure of coherence, that finally you really do get a clear picture of what Ben Friedlander in this comment thread called “quality of mind.” What else matters in the end? That Riding’s quality of mind shines through the failure of poetry to achieve her impossible standards—this is the miracle available to us, even though she was shockingly ungenerous about it.
*
Here’s another little miracle: language acquisition at its most banal. First, we sing before we can speak. This I learned from my first child, and now my second sings himself to sleep at night with (literally) la-la-las and yeah-yeah-yeahs. At seventeen months, he really doesn’t have any words. Or he didn’t, until last week he effectively made a musical request:
“Doe a deer. A deer.”
—the song “Do Re Mi.” It’s all he asks for; he can see from our bursts of laughter that we’re pleased with him. As I am with the notion that we don’t need language for basic necessities. We need it to ask for extras; for felicities. Like music. Or your mind: show me your mind.
Two more posts, and I am going emeritus on Harriet.
Doe, a deer!

Ordinarily I like a wildness of form; reading Edwin Denby, though, makes me wonder if the reason I dislike sonnets is that, far from being rigid, most of them are not rigid enough. I was shocked, perusing these poems, to discover a kind of cruelty there that must have escaped me on earlier readings. The cruelty and rigidity may have something to do with the orthographic grid of Denby’s beloved Manhattan streets; it may have to do with his affinity with ballet. In any event. nobody quite writes lines as ruthless as:
The shoulder of a man is shaped like a baby pig.
It terrifies and bores the observer, the shoulder.
The Greeks, who had slaves, were able to hitch back and rig
The shoulder, so the eye is flattered and feels bolder.
But that’s not the case in New York, where a roomer
Stands around day and night stupified with his clothes on
The shoulder, hung from his neck (half orchid, half tumor)
Hangs publicly with a metabolism of its own.
…
(“The Shoulder”)
I thought of copying out one of Denby’s Christmas poems, then thought better of it. The poem is studded with malice, but isn’t to be trivialized; its subject—the persistence of Hell even after Christ’s birth—is about our own indelible malice.
Coincidentally, I finally cracked open that Chicago Review essay by Allan Grossman on Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower.” Steve originally recommended it, piquing our interest in Hesiod’s description of the Muses as “mean girls.” Signifying what? Grossman explains:

Let’s remember: the muses (the archetypal cruel girls, as in Hesiod) are never kind. Why? Because of the violence inherent in the “making” (poesis) which they sponsor and the entailed equivocality of their truth-promises. I have already given a name, in this talk about “making,” to the violence inherent in making (the breaking required to turn the unmade into the made) which even the god fears. (It’s the second commandment: Thou shalt not make unto me…)

Again, Denby was both an aficionado of Manhattan and a devotee of ballet; the sonnets that erupted from this sensibility have a cruelty analogous to those other architectonic wonders. I myself have felt suffocatingly oppressed by the Manhattan street grid; I have also thrilled to the rigid pliancy of ballet, which must remain faithful to a set of positions and steps that have descended to us from court dances, and which have all the limits and freedom of an alphabet. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Denby’s most generous sonnets—Mediterranean Cities—shed the iciness and suavity of his Manhattan sonnets as the grid gives way to the labyrinthine medieval and ancient plans…
RAVENNA
A governing and rouged nun, she lifts the cubed
Jewels, garlanded heavy on hair, shoulders
Breasts, on hands and feet, the drak-blue the cell-roomed
Splendor’s fountain lifts sunken to Him Who holds her;
But the emperor is running to his pet hens
Cackling like a hermit, and his foolish smile
Alone on the vacancy of noon-glazed fens
Haunts a blossoming water-capital’s guile;
Holy placidity of lilylike throats
Ravenna of fleets, silent above the cows
A turnip plain and stagnant houses floats
Exultance of sailor hymns, virginal vows;
In a church’s tiered and April-green alcoves
Joy rises laughing at ease to love God’s loves
I don’t know about that one—individual phrases leap out but Denby seems better served by the marriage of sonnet and Manhattan. Few poets feel comfortable shedding the social niceties that make us, well, nice, even in the imaginative space of the poem, where anything goes. The cruelty of making, in Grossman’s concept, is beautifully encoded in the sonnet. Denby makes full use of it. And maybe what impresses me most is his clarity. Clarity, as actresses and ballerinas know from their intimacy with lighting and mirrors, is cruel.
(More on Denby here.)

Then, too, I rather resent professional modernism the way one resents an excessively fashionable woman. At the Museum of Modern Art they cultivate the idea that everything is the nuts: the stairs, the plants on the landings, the curtains in the windows, where there are any windows, the arrangement of the walls. After about an hour of it you say the hell with it.

Wallace Stevens usually takes a beating for his tastes—the teas he imported through the Depression, the manse in Connecticut—but the totalizing grip of fashion on art seems to have made him surly. If I’m reading his sentences above correctly, he’s going off on the hyper-aestheticization we associate with high-end design culture (”professional modernism”), which in the 00’s, and for all I know, forever, overlaps completely with high-end consumer culture. After a decade in New York’s orbit, I’m surly about it too, just as T.J. Clark is squeamish (if not surly) about that photo above, from Cecil Beaton’s spread in the March, 1951 issue of Vogue. Is Modernism just for the rich? Are sculptures by Black Mountain artists best viewed from the interior lobbies of corporate Class-A buildings? “Is all this really high thinking?” [Harrumph] O Jane, what do you have against train rides? I might trade a month of anything for a week on the Transiberian with Blaise, wouldn’t you?
Funny to think of Wallace Stevens and his reaction to MoMA’s totalizing aestheticization. At the beginning of his essay on Jackson Pollock, “Unhappy Consciousness,” Clark observes that haute bourgeois artists craved the qualities of aristocratic art—“rage for order,” he says (hm!), or “coldness, brightness, lordliness, and nonchalance.” That it is almost impossible for bourgeois artists to sustain that nonchalance is interesting. Hence trains: we have a hard time falling asleep on horseback.
… when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

(Kasimir Malevich, with Eleusinian lilies)

In painting, as in poetry, theory moves very rapidly and things that are revelations today are obsolete tomorrow, like the things on one’s plate at dinner. Then, too, I rather resent professional modernism the way one resents an excessively fashionable woman. At the Museum of Modern Art they cultivate the idea that everything is the nuts: the stairs, the windows, the arrangement of the walls. After about an hour of it you say the hell with it. Is all this really hard thinking, really high feeling or is it a lot of nobodies running after a few somebodies? … But on the whole New York was a lemon. Instead of staying for dinner, I took an early train and got as much out of the ride home as out of anything. It made a long pleasant evening and, as I was tired and satisfied to sit and look out, it was as agreeable as anything that had happened to me all summer. (September 9, 1949)

And this, written a couple of weeks prior to the letter Steve quoted from:

Let me wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year even though it is difficult under the heavy weight of contemporary politics to feel very merry or very happy about anything. But I suppose that what Christmas really means, morally, is that we have to take hold of ourselves when things are at their worst and at least pretend that they are as good as they are ever going to be which, after all, may be true. (December 15, 1950)

Which brings me back to “O Holy Night.” It’s the music that makes the carol (like Alicia, I prefer modal and minor-key tunes) but within this passage is a particularly good conjunction of mood and music, the enactment of an awakening (funny how badly this scans without the music!):
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appear’d and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
What does it mean that “the soul felt its worth?” What’s the “it” here—the world or the soul? Does it matter?
It’s a constant, this sentiment of a “weary world” (and here I think of Hopkins’s and Wordsworth’s sonnets, with their emphases on “spent” and “spending”—like Christmas). Stevens felt it; I feel it; the carol speaks to it, though it is not easy to accept even a holiday from it.
I don’t know if “O Holy Night” was one of the songs odiously spun into electronica for us mall-shoppers—I think I deliberately blocked the memory of that epiphany—but after half a lifetime of hearing this carol in the background of countless Christmas situations, I only heard it—heard “and the soul felt its worth”—when I sang it. I don’t usually sing. But to be social, I can fake it (e.g., innumerable “Happy Birthdays”). So, I sang. The physical act of singing through a musical enactment of weariness and awakening had a profound effect, for that moment. Song lyrics can be instrumental. (Pun notwithstanding.) In their self-sufficiency, poems must work much harder to dissolve much weariness.

When I looked at my shelf of Koch books, I realize that everything published since One Train is in hardcover, meaning that’s when I really fell for his work. Straits is another favorite: the title poem, incorporating lines from Viktor Shklovsky, is the apotheosis of flow. So much so, that it’s hard to quote:
Music was defined by Tchaikowsky as “disappearing youth.” When he wrote music, it stopped disappearing.
The ocean is a source of elegies and a popular location for casinos.
There wasn’t money for people to spend on taking taxis. The taxi drivers didn’t blame them.
They felt, correctly, that they were stuck in a proletarian society
With providing an aristocratic mode of transportation. They took their plight with some humor.
Occasionally a banker took a cab and spent a lot of money. He was paying not for the ride he got
But for the availability of the service. What if the revolution were like a taxi
And couldn’t be afforded? We say that life is beautiful
Not only to pay a compliment to something in which we are already included
But to separate inside and outside, if only for a moment.
Those last three lines! When Koch generalizes, he sounds like a 20th-century Montaigne, and it’s that quality throughout One Train and Straits that grew on me. We think of wit as being “cutting” or “mere” but we don’t think of how often it serves poignancy as the flip side of stoicism. Have we forgotten the humanism of wit? I’ve always loved the easy philosophy of One Train May Hide Another:
In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, ifyou are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading.
Just so, you may start off the poem thinking “This is mere whimsy,” “This is just a gimmick,” but if you take Koch’s advice and wait til you have read the next line, you’ll encounter some striking imagery—
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb
—or a strange sensation—
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
And just when you think this is all a neat trick and has “no emotional center,” you’ll read
… We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another. And now she is gone and I am here.
While a lesser poet would have ended there, delivered the emotional payload, etc., he hurtles relentlessly forward.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
In other words, Koch tells us: “It can be important/To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.”
I’m not normally attracted to elegy, but Koch does it differently; in his hands elegy is both tender and debonair, as in “A New Guide:”
Look at this bannister.
People put their hands on it as they went down.
Many many many many hands. Many many many many times.
It became known as the “Bannister of Ladies’ Hands.” It was said one could feel the smoothness of their hands when one touched it oneself.
Actually what one felt was the smoothness of the marble
That had been worn down by so many touching hands.
Look at the sign that is on it now: The Bannister of Ladies’ Hands. To Preserve This Monument Each Person Is Requested to Touch It Only Once.
Look at the young boy there touching it twice, then a third time.
What if a guard catches him.
The fear is that if the bannister is touched too much it may completely wear away—the illusion of touching the soft hands of women in low-cut red dresses, going down to their friends and lovers, will exist no more.
The sensation will have vanished from the world.
I wish I had gotten to know Koch when I came to New York ten years ago; but I was barely there long enough to settle in when I left for a year to live in Morocco. When I returned I think he was already sick and I was troubled and reticent. Why reticent? There was a queasy sense that ulterior motives lurked in any interaction between older and younger poets. The pure delight of reading poems is the larger part of my experience in this biz, but it is just about impossible to impart that sense with any urgency to its object. I miss Kenneth Koch. I wish I could tell him what a humane, friendly pleasure it is to read his later poems.
From “My Olivetti Speaks”—Would that he had blotted a thousand! “Perfection” is wonderful in poetry but Shakespeare is good enough—one reads on!

SAUL PINKARD ON THE FORTUNE OF MUSICIANS
Did Samuel Scheidt hit the bottle once too often?
Or did his patrons in the Dutch Baroque decide
That Tafelmusik troubled their digestion?
Since 1610 his music had been popular.
In 1625, whatever might have been the cause,
Scheidt had a fracas with the aldermen.
In 1633, the plague. Forwarned
and holding herbal bags to nervous noses,
The bigwigs in their wagons quit the city.
Humble Scheidt was not forewarned. His wife
And all his offspring perished in the plague.
All his offspring, and his wife, they died.
The boil in the armpit. Sudden agonizing fever.
An old enchanter crazed with helplessness.
And the fresh dead, the handbell, the pushcart.
Scheidt in his compositions could of course
Not tell of this. Music is discreet.
To the smiler Boccherini, to Berwald the Bore
Patrons tender envelopes. However jealous
Syndicated cynics and the gods may be,
While fishier troopers oftentimes cry havoc,
The artist hides underneath his wings
What follies of his own or busy interlopers
Have scored across his back: the stripes.
(Christopher Middleton)
Of course, some might say there is a paradox here. The poem tells outright what music cannot: the terrible story. And it’s true, poetry can tell, can narrate. However, it’s possible that it loses something by doing so. This poem moves me, but it is also pathetic and constrained by its moral. I treasure it for its final three lines, which point elsewhere: they point toward the music that results from those secret stripes. I trust secret stripes. They’re honest.