Poetry Notebook (13 page)

Nowadays, dogged by the knowledge that ‘one day’ had better be soon, I try to follow up these mental notes if I recall them. So I searched out Koch’s
Selected Poems
of
1991 and soon found myself enjoying a passage of his ‘The Art of Love’ against my will – almost always the best way to enjoy anything. I like things kept short, and Koch, even in
a comparatively short (for him) work like ‘The Art of Love’, spread himself around as if his readers had all the time in the world. The poem is a kind of how-to handbook, telling
prospective lovers what to do in a variety of circumstances:

Whitman is somewhere behind the technique, or at any rate behind the conscious lack of it, but there is a
Tom and Jerry
cartoon behind the mental picture, and really the
vividness of the image settles the question: without the casual looseness of the construction, the gag wouldn’t work. As for whether the gag is poetic: well, how is it not? Is lovemaking ever
a dignified posture, even for Leda and the swan? It’s quite easy to imagine our learned quarrel continuing indefinitely, but the longer it does continue, the more it becomes certain that Koch
was only one of the names among the many American informal poets who achieved effects in a conversational tone which a formal structure would probably not have allowed.

My favourite post-war Americans might be strict formalists like Wilbur and Hecht, but my appreciation of them – and of semi-formalists like Lowell and Bishop – would be weaker, I
think, if I did not recognize that there were things done by ragbag technicians, or even dedicated anti-technicians, which nevertheless achieved the most concentrated possible version of an effect.
Michael Donaghy was quite right to say that Ginsberg’s
Howl
was the result of hard reworking. But the work went into making the lines sound as if they had never been worked at even
once, and the aim, surely, was to sound as if he was just saying it, without really having written it. It’s the ‘just saying’ that the reader with book learning finds hard to
accept. He should accept it, because the rewards have to be acknowledged.

In James Wright’s poem ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ we have the perfect placement of the final sentence, borrowed from Rimbaud,
‘I have wasted my life.’ We love it when Gregory Corso cries out ‘I want penguin dust.’ Few of these effects would have been brought into being by the pressure of a form.
It’s more likely that they were brought into being by the pressure of avoiding a form. (The urge goes deep, and a long way back: Ben Jonson cursed Petrarch for his Procrustean urge to shape
everything into a sonnet.) One’s chief objection, when reading such poets, should come about as a result of noting the successes; and then noting that they are few and far between. If Koch
could have put more of his best moments beside each other he would be a much brighter light now.

Whether formal or informal, the post-war Americans were blessed with a vast reservoir of colloquial language to draw upon. (Once, in conversation, the British critic Al Alvarez – who
promoted the American heavyweights to the detriment of his own countrymen, much to the annoyance of Philip Larkin – trumped my contrary argument by saying, truly, that the Americans by now
had the advantage in the spoken language: ‘Their gags are better.’) The verbal bounty was already apparent before the Second World War, in the scripts of the screwball comedies, but the
war gave it a tremendous boost. It makes some sense to contend that the informal poets deliberately broke the dam of form so as to release the flood within, but it makes at least as much sense to
say that the flood did the job all by itself. The free-form idioms got into everything. Before the war, S. J. Perelman wrote whole prose poems that consisted of nothing except showbiz jargon,
restaurant menus, and billboards. After the war, the poets could pull the gold dust out of the air.

Considering this fact, it is remarkable how John Ashbery, by now revered as the supreme American post-war poet, decided not to avail himself of the abundance. In his poem
‘Pyrography’ he wrote ‘This is America calling’ but in most of his later work the calling is not notably American, or anyway not the American of everyday flip talk. Early
on, he made full use of it: most notably in ‘Daffy Duck In Hollywood’ which I think is one of the great modern American poems. (I would mention it less often if more critics and
scholars would hail its qualities: but they seem to like him better when he says nothing that doesn’t need them to explain it.) The poem’s riches are too sumptuous to list: the brand
names and cheap objects pile up like a satirical paragraph from H. L. Mencken (‘a mint-condition can / Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy / Gonzales’) and
resonant lines of dialogue are seemingly designed to be used against the poet by a puzzled customer (‘If his / Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others, / What’s
keeping us here?’).

But nothing I have tried in any of Ashbery’s collections since the Daffy Duck poem was written has captured me in the same way. It is a bit like my failure to engage with the later Wallace
Stevens, a failure made all the more uncomfortable for me by the fact that I was so transfixed by one of the early poems from
Harmonium
(‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’) that I can
still recite it from memory. Like the later works, it too is hard to figure out, but every part of it is a flaring image; whereas later on, I find, and especially in the long poems, all the
components link together in a blur, smooth but bland: mere words, an extended flourish by Parolles, using his hat like Osric. I still haven’t given up on the mature Stevens, even though he
seems to me to have matured in reverse, but I would be grateful for a revelation, in which all the later work became, if not clear, at least vital. Nobody should mind incomprehensibility as long as
incomprehensibility is not the aim. Rimbaud didn’t set out, when he wrote
Le Bateau Ivre
, to be the subject of a thousand theses. He just had a lot to put in the one place. I would
like to think that the same is true of the later Ashbery, and that I have so far merely failed to concentrate properly. Certainly the Daffy Duck poem, which I love so much, has bits in it that I
can’t figure out. But they thrill me even as they puzzle me. There is a passage that starts:

The rhapsody goes on unbroken for a full ten lines and I still can’t understand it. But I think the world of its movement and imagery, and if I can’t find those
things in his later decades, it is always possible that I haven’t looked hard enough. I doubt, however, if I will ever now find him getting down to bedrock. For some reason he decided that
such an aim wasn’t interesting enough. Shakespeare thought it was, but perhaps he did such a good job of proving it he scared everyone else off.

And there is no doubt that poetry can spring from the way a bedrock statement is rearranged to show that the lyricism, rather than in the thought, is in the arrangement, as when Anne Sexton says
of the pheasant:

By putting ‘that’ at the end, she puts emphasis on it, as Seamus Heaney puts the emphasis on ‘it’ when he writes ‘I’ll dig with it.’
The syntactical bravura is not just catchy, it has become part of the impulse. If we are looking for characteristics that define modernism, that would surely be one of them. The urge to make the
syntax do tricks could emerge only after the long, founding age when the syntax was always a modest servant. But one of the paradoxes of Shakespeare, to get back to him, is that even his modesty
was spectacular. In
Henry V
, the young king is proud of speaking ‘plain soldier’. And indeed, talking to a few of his plain soldiers by firelight, he is trying to express himself
as simply as he can when he warns against optimism:

So there they are, the thought and the words together, and even though, to the enchanted ear, the combination is as light as pumice, still it is bedrock, the deepest of all
considerations, and as far as you can get from mere words.

Until, in modern times, the brief fad for ‘concrete poetry’ proved that any poem which made a shape on the page was unlikely to accomplish much that George Herbert
hadn’t, the idea of concreteness still seemed attractive. Concrete language supposedly entailed a use of language more specific than abstract. The result, surely, would be closer to bedrock
than any metaphysical argument could go. In actuality, there are good reasons for thinking that metaphysical poetry was more concrete than anything that happened for almost two centuries afterward,
but in the long term the wish for a hard-edged diction always lingered as something to be desired. The desire grew intense in the twentieth century, and finally reached its full crystallization in
the use of brand names. A language prevalent in newspapers and magazines, on the walls of buildings, and finally on a shining screen, could be relied on, it was thought, to register the tone of the
age like nothing else. We already lived in a manufactured world. After poetry began using the names of the manufactured goods, industry was accepted into poetry, and might even, it was fondly
hoped, have been civilized by the process. The use of brand names, however, if too emphatic, could easily look like a complicit submission to capitalism. It was less reprehensible to just place the
product: a casual mention, as if the artefact was an occurrence in the natural world. By now we have been taught by the young and alert, who live and breathe these developments, that the movies are
full of placed products: nothing with a name shows up by accident. There is even a reverse language, by which a corporation of sufficient power forbids the sight of its name without payment, even
when its name is part of the landscape: hence the absence of Coca-Cola signs in the otherwise authentic sets of
Boardwalk Empire.
Things haven’t reached that stage in poetry yet and
probably never will, because the audience is too small, too poor and – let’s be proud of it – too bright. All that has happened is that there has been an increase in the
vocabulary of reality: the words and phrases that were in the language already have been augmented by the words and phrases dreamed up by advertising copywriters, some of them with every poetic
gift except the ability to live on a pittance.

Early in the twentieth century, E. E. Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be. Along with his love lyrics that achieved
notoriety by fragmenting all over the page like sexy grenades, he wrote poems that were meant to be satires. In his 1926 collection,
is 5
, the star among the would-be satirical poems was
‘POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR. VINAL’. (Always playing tricks with typography, Cummings might have put the title in capitals specifically so that later editors of anthologies, when they
cited it accurately in the contents list, would look as if they had made a mistake.) In the poem’s opening stanzas, capitalist America is mockingly addressed:

All those brand names were fresh contemporary references at the time. Any American reader would have spotted them with ease. Later on, it would have taken consultation with an
old-timer or several trips to the library. Reading the poem for the first time in Australia in the late fifties, I committed the lines to memory without having a clue what the proper names referred
to, except perhaps for Abraham Lincoln and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, which had been handed out by American troops all over the Pacific area with such liberality that it was a byword even in
Japan. Nowadays we can all look up the names on a machine. The reader will come away from an hour of googling with a lot of information. In 1929, a few years after the poem was written, Cluett
Peabody, makers of shirts, took over the Arrow brand, and in 1985 the remnants of Cluett Peabody were absorbed into the GTB (Gold Toe Brands) Holding Corp, which today still holds the licensing
rights to the ‘Sanforized’ process of pre-shrinking fabric, originally devised by Sanford L. Cluett himself. In the advertising for Arrow shirts, the Arrow man, a predecessor of the
Marlboro man but dressed up for an elegant evening out instead of being dressed down for the West, was a painted fantasy by the eminent commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker.

Though he didn’t exist, the Arrow man drew up to 17,000 fan letters a day: a fact worth filing away if you are trying to convince yourself that there will never be enough American voters
to put Sarah Palin in the White House. Securing an immortality somewhat more certain than the one conferred by Cummings’s poem, the Arrow man can also be encountered in chapter seven of
The Great Gatsby.
Ide collars were manufactured by George P. Ide & Co. and had nothing to do with today’s Integrated Drive Electronics. Lydia E. Pinkham’s highly successful
herbal medicine might have owed some of its popularity among women to an impressive ethanol content. The standard treatment for acute menstrual pains at the time was to remove the ovaries, so
getting slightly blotto was no doubt an attractive alternative. The poem was a few years too early to record that the firm of Bradley, Voorhees & Day hired Johnny Weissmuller to be the face, as
we would now say, of their product, BVD men’s underwear, but their advertising already carried the slogan ‘Next to Myself I Like BVD Best.’ Since BVD was purchased in 1976 by
Fruit of the Loom, and since, in 2002, Fruit of the Loom was in turn purchased by Berkshire Hathaway, the original acronym is currently under the control of none other than Warren Buffett, one of
the richest men in the world. Buffett, judging from his parsimonious ways, probably wears the product under his business suit. But in a sense he would be wearing it even if he dressed more
expensively, because BVD has entered the American version of the English language as a general term for any brand of men’s underwear.