Lost and Found: A Reading of a Poem I Like

In the audio commentary for his film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Monte Hellman notes the great advantage of working with “non-actors” like James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, innocent amateurs who don’t try to act. The great advantage of the speaker in Canadian poet Brian Bartlett’s recent poem “Dear Georgie” is the fact that he doesn’t know he’s in a poem. If only more poems’ speakers sounded like him, a natural who’s not angling for Academy recognition. Poems’ speakers usually sound like poets.

To be fair to these more consciously lyrical speakers (surrogates for the poets who made them) Bartlett’s guy probably never expected to be heard by the likes of us. In this sense, he’s less heard than overheard, less addressing a world than working out a worldview, his only audience his sister, Georgie, even if his questions lack question marks and the ‘dialogue’ between the two looks like it's one-way – his way. He’s no narcissist, though. He is (or was) a very real person, named Hermon Lawrence, and “Dear Georgie” is a found poem, made up of sentences recovered from his equally real letters to Georgie. We don’t have her responses; not here, anyway. But let’s listen in to the half we do have – one lovely side of a once-lost exchange, which is now left-justified:
Dear Georgie
Extracted from letters written in October 1918 by Hermon Lawrence of Bayside, New Brunswick, to his older sister, my grandmother, Georgie Bartlett. She was then a 22-year-old with a year-old son; he was a 20-year-old enlisted in the Canadian Army and training – as he detailed at the end of each letter – in “the 3rd Heavy Canadian Battery, Composite Bridge, Witley Camp, Surrey, Eng.” The Dwight mentioned below was their brother.
The war news have been good for quite awhile
but I dont think it can be fought
to a finish this fall.
I havent yet got that box you mailed Aug 10
and was about giving it up until today
when Tom Walker told me he just received
a box mailed July 7th, a jar of strawberries in it.
They hadnt put the wire clip over the cover –
well the strawberries had run all through
and spoiled it. A shame to throw it all away.
The first of the week I saw a play,
“Lucky Durham.” The main thing is to have
the parts well acted. I suppose I wont
be satisfied to see moving pictures.
Plays will be apt to spoil me.
I heard a fine illustrated lecture on Pompeii,
Rome and Naples. The lecturer had a lantern
with slides, views all down the west coast of Italy,
Vesuvius. Nearly all the beauty of Europe
isnt natural, but the work of man. Very different
from the beauty of America. I want to see
more of America, if I can arrange to
without too much trouble.
The Hotels Cecil and Savoy on the Strand
are the best hotels in London. I wasnt in them
but on the grounds around them.
I would like to spend about 24 hours
in one. When we get to our new camp
we will all have heavy horses.
The worst part is cleaning the harness,
all the steel will have to be kept shining.
One is apt to have a few tumbles at first
over the jumps. The weather changes very quick –
one can never tell in the morning what kind of day
it will be. Oh how are the apples this year.
Have they had a very large crop.
Sometimes I sit in one of the chairs
in front of the fireplace – they have been keeping
a fire lately – and go over the times we had
in my mind. I would like to farm just as we did
but there will have to be some change.
It won’t do for Dwight and I to go on working
together. That will have to be settled later.
The first thing for me to take a hand in settling
is this business over here.
It would be nice to think we’ve tuned in to some pure signal here. But Bartlett’s speaker – let’s call him, but not confuse him too much with, Hermon – is a composite, edited together by Bartlett from different letters. But edited with masterful care. Too often, found poetry functions like a forwarded E-mail, which foists some bit of text upon us as if the mere fact of the foisting is reason enough to read the text. The ‘finding’ of a successful found poem, however, is comparable to the writing of a more traditional lyric – it takes serious effort since the poet, in seeing poetry where no one else does, is essentially creating, is freeing a shape from its shaggy, obscuring context (as sculptors do; as Yeats, lining Pater’s prose, did).
This takes taste, and Bartlett, a born sampler, has done us a favour by identifying and salvaging only the choicest bits in Hermon’s letters. In the process, he has hit upon a winning mix: for example, the alliteration of “fought,” “finish,” and “fall” in the first tercet. But it’s not just about finding the words that go together. Bartlett calls "Dear Georgie" a “found-reconstructed” poem, which means he has made interventions. His well-judged lining in the first tercet enacts a cascade of ever shorter lines, as well as a quiet tension: the tercet manages the “finish” the War can’t seem to. Further, the choice of “fought” anticipates the choice of other, upcoming words, including “got,” “box,” “Aug,” and “Tom,” giving Hermon’s voice some assonance, some coherence. Good choices gird this poem.
But Bartlett’s to be commended for his apparent restraint, too, for not touching up lines like:
I havent yet got that box you mailed Aug 10
and was about giving it up until today
when Tom Walker told me he just received
a box mailed July 7th, a jar of strawberries in it.
It would be hard for someone who is consciously after a poem to come up with constructions as subtly disruptive as Hermon’s. Even the conventional language poet, in disrupting the conventional sentence, probably goes further than necessary. In the above example, the word “giving” (replacing some more appropriate choice like “to give”) is snag enough, and Bartlett lets it do its estranging work on us. Consider, too, the awkward but natural beauty of lines like: “Nearly all the beauty of Europe / isnt natural, but the work of man.” As Two-Lane Blacktop’s director says of one of his non-actor’s improvisations, “You can’t write dialogue like this.” You can’t write dialogue like Hermon’s, either, or at least, as already suggested, it would be hard. Bartlett, I’m guessing, knows the gift he’s got in these letters.
What’s telling (and maybe alarming) about Hermon’s European travelogue is how seemingly unconcerned it is with the political theatre of its day, preferring instead a more escapist theatre. The War is hinted at, and cleanly contained, in ominous phrases like “this business over here,” which Bartlett cleverly withholds until the very end where it casts its shade backward, dimming the more trivial moments, including the theatre criticism, the lecturer’s talk. Also, a less bloody blood-drama (a drama for bit players, brothers on farms the world over) is buried between lines like “It won’t do for Dwight and I to go on working // together. That will have to be settled later.”
But Hermon isn’t Stevens, the butler-let-out-on-a-road-trip in The Remains of the Day, oblivious to the news of his day. (He’s not even Two-Lane Blacktop’s drag racers, Taylor and Wilson, motoring across an America to which they remain unconnected.) Hermon wants to see America. He’s a sensitive, curious young man, the sort who sits by fires and goes over the times he has had in his already-nostalgic mind. “I suppose I wont / be satisfied to see moving pictures,” he writes, resigned to the only culture he has known – the only culture he may know if he doesn’t make it through the last October (not to mention November) of the War. Or maybe he’s just a vinyl man with slight pretensions – as young men can be – and has no time for the new-fangled. He’s certainly painstaking as he puts his life in order. Consider the laboured repetition in the lines “I wasnt in them / but on the grounds around them,” which emphasizes a touching struggle for inconsequential precision.
I like him – Bartlett’s composite, anyway – and I hope you like him, as well. And I hope Bartlett doesn’t reveal too much more about the real Hermon, who, I can’t resist telling you, is Bartlett’s great uncle. “Dear Georgie” is no mere stunt; it’s fully realized poetry. It’s worth considering outside of Bartlett’s context and this context, too, if for no other reason than to see what you might find in it. As for Hermon, he ought to be left in peace for the poem he didn’t write, and, paradoxically, praised for the one he did. Consider him both lost and found.
“Dear Georgie” originally appeared in The Malahat Review and was reprinted in The Watchmaker’s Table (Goose Lane, 2008). I found it in The Best Canadian Poetry 2008 (Tightrope), edited by Stephanie Bolster. Reprinted with the author’s permission.