Where Have You Been? (15 page)

At the latest in
The Cosmos Poems
(2000), form takes command. Form is valued in a Seidel poem for its externality, its invasive obtrusiveness. These poems are written from the outside. (Hence their nonlyrical and antilyrical quality.) Paradoxically, what one notices is the ever more amped-up content—the needle rarely leaves the red zone—but that is merely entailed and made possible by the hypertrophic form. Because Seidel's is not organic form, grown and traditional and moderated, sonnet, triolet, villanelle, it is poem DNA disassembled and put together in unpredictable and threatening ways. Form becomes a version of self-governance in the poem, of disobedience, a riot of primary instructions. Itself done to excess, it contributes to the poem's general air of excess. When a thing rhymes it doesn't get out of rhyme, it stutters in rhyme. Seidel's
bouts-rimés
jingle like a fruit machine spitting out coins. It's no surprise that Seidel has written at least one monorhymed poem, “Sii romantico, Seidel, tanto per cambiare,” thirty lines on the syllable -
ide.
An only slightly more measured rhyme scheme (for the first fourteen-line stanza of the poem, “Do You Doha?”) might go: abbbbbaaaccccc. Similarly, when a poem scans, it tramps. In trochees—no wonder “Mother Nature” segues into Longfellow—or in demented iambs (“A coconut can fall and hit you on the head, / And if it falls from high enough can kind of knock you dead”). Few poems are not built—or jerrybuilt—in stanzas, though stanzas may be four, five, six, seven, nine, ten, twelve, fourteen, or seventeen lines in length. “Everything in art is couplets” it says solemnly in one poem, but then the following line goes “Mine don't rhyme,” and the poem, in any case, is in quatrains. Most decisive of the lot, though, and all the more effective because so rarely used outside skipping rhymes and primers, is sentence length (further emphasized because it is often coterminous with line length) (“East Hampton Airport”):

I stand in the field opposite the airport.

I watch the planes flying in and the planes flying out.

My proud Irish terrier takes pills for his cardiomyopathy.

Before we bark our last,

Our hearts enlarge and burst.

George Plimpton went to bed

And woke up dead.

I write this poem thinking of the painter David Salle

Who wants to make a movie

About the poet Frank O'Hara.

A beach taxi on Fire Island hit Frank and he burst, roll credits.

The sentences are pruned back as though to prevent them from ever bursting into individual flower. (Technically speaking, it's probably the prime source of Seidel's detachment.)

Other mechanical handlings of language—interventions, one might call them—play their part: puns, repetition, word games, vocabulary stunts. Jargon and prefab phrases abound: “to die for,” “metrosexual,” “cremains,” “stem cells,” “train wreck,” “total nightmare,” the Yahoo-enabled six-day weather forecast, “this is a test.” “Happy days are gone again,” it says somewhere, crushingly, and in “A Song for Cole Porter,” “Ride around, little dogies, ride around them slow,” and “I knew a beauty named Dawn Green. / I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.” Words and lines are swapped about between poems like hot money used to be. Intensifiers are ten a penny: “literally,” “really,” “utter,” “incredible,” “pure,” “actually,” “totally.” Especially troubling is a derisory streak of aphasia in some poems: “A flavorful man can, and then he is not,” the smuttily Shakespearean “He licks to play golf,” “Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,” “Winter is wearing summer but it wants to undress for you, Fred. / Oh my God. Takes off the lovely summer frock / And lies down on the bed naked / Freezing white, so we can make death.” It is epic stuff, all bleak, jaunty, scathing, and utterly contemporary (“Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin”):

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

Outside the windows is New York.

I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

They're watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that's missing.

Thank God for Fred Seidel.

 

TED HUGHES

I have a dim sense of how Ted Hughes may be perceived here in America. (“Stare at the monster,” he wrote in the poem “Famous Poet,” from the 1950s.) I have a slightly clearer sense of how he has fared in the UK, at least over the last twenty years. Neither is the slightest use in preparing one for—a word I certifiably use for the first and last time in print!—an awesome collection of poems. Hughes is at least arguably the greatest English poet since Shakespeare; what's the competition? Milton, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, (maybe) Larkin. I think such a view can be advanced. This is indeed the man with the lifelong obsession with Beethoven. The poet whose voice Seamus Heaney described as “longer and deeper and rougher.” Of whom Gavin Ewart wrote his one-line poem, “Folk Hero”: “The one the foreign students call Ted Huge.” Unscientific though it certainly is, people who bought Ted Hughes books on Amazon UK also bought Dante, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Heaney. Match me that.

Of course, once poets die, there's some fun cutting them down to size.
Nihil de mortuis
, unless it cuts them off at the knees. British poets particularly, because what do the British know about scale? It'll fit on a postage stamp (albeit, a stamp that isn't obliged to declare its provenance). Ask Derek Walcott about the state of British poetry, he starts brabbling about Larkin (this was when Hughes was alive but Larkin already safely dead). Ask James Schuyler for the last really good British poet, he'll send you rootling back to Swinburne, or even earlier. I have a feeling, though, that Hughes will be spared this rather Australian (“tall poppy”) treatment. Not only because at above thirteen hundred pages (twelve hundred of them poems), his book handily pips even Lowell's, published just a couple of months before, but also because so many of them are wonderful, and practically unknown. And because at a time when appearance and presentation are getting to be almost everything, this onetime poet laureate (a label whose potential for comedy and obloquy has gone strangely unrecognized in the Po-Faced States) carried himself superbly. “All this, too,” it says in “October Salmon,” “is stitched into the torn richness, / The epic poise / That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient / In the machinery of heaven.”

Some of it is sheer industry. Hughes applied himself to poetry for the best part of fifty years, and with barely an intermission. The list of his poetry books alone covers a large, closely set page—p. 1238, if you must know. (I suppose there are some nonentities who manage a big product, but on such a scale, one would have to be an acute graphomaniac, not merely a persistent hack, to compete.) Beyond that, there were plays, translated from Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca, Racine, Wedekind. Poetry International at the Albert Hall in 1970, the magazine
Modern Poetry in Translation
, with his friend of fifty years, Danny Weissbort. Poetry, translated and cotranslated from János Pilinszky and Yehuda Amichai. Poetry for children, and books to stimulate children to write (a lifelong commitment). Not an exemplary editor of Plath, for the simple reason that one wouldn't wish anyone to be in that position, but I think hard to fault. Selections from Dickinson and Whitman and Keith Douglas and Coleridge and Shakespeare. Coedited two wonderful anthologies with Seamus Heaney,
The Rattle Bag
and then
The School Bag
. Work with the theater director Peter Brook as a dramaturge, and deviser of the language called Orghast. The huge experimental book on deep narrative structures in Shakespeare, called
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
, a big selection of essays and reviews called
Winter Pollen
. (When he got the cancer that killed him, he blamed it, typically, on writing too much prose.) And all this not in some dusty monkish solitude or supportive college eyrie, but from a life in which he farmed, fished, traveled very widely, to Australia, to Africa, to Alaska, was several times honored by the Queen of England, with whom he was reputed to have got along well, and further, was—you won't need me to tell you—thrice married, and (before reading Elaine Feinstein's biography, I had no inkling of this) had many affairs, and also raised two children.

Ted Hughes's absence was one of the sad givens when I was in England in the 1980s and 1990s. One knew about him, or thought one knew about him, and knew about his work, but never had any expectation of meeting him. He was both sanctioned—the schoolmaster's poet—and under sanction. He dwelled simultaneously in a higher and a lower sphere; one thought of him as serving out some kind of punishment. Devonian relegation or house arrest. It was one of a number of revelations in Feinstein's book that he was regularly in London, and lived not quite like Aung San Suu Kyi. I saw him just twice. Once at a Faber party, where our then-editor, Craig Raine, pushed us together and we shyly gulped at each other in silence like goldfish (I saw this happening with other baby poets too), and once when he agreed to read with ten others at the London Festival Hall from the book of Ovid translations that James Lasdun and I brought out in 1992, to which he contributed four sensational pieces.

A good outcome from this partly voluntary, partly imposed seeming—partly actually illusory—withdrawal was that he kept his freedom, his dignity, his time. This extended to his personal life, his illness and death, and his work. The successive poetry editors at Fabers, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, and Paul Keegan—who took the chair only after Hughes's death—were deeply impressed by their charge and grew close to him. The rest of us may have thought we had him down, but he retained the capacity to surprise us with his every utterance. Whether it was his wholly unexpected
Paris Review
interview with Drue Heinz in 1995, or
Birthday Letters
, which floored us, or uncollected poems in his
Selected
like “Remembering Teheran”—who, other than the best-informed Hughes watcher would ever have guessed he'd been to Teheran (he went with Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research in 1971)?—or the last printed communication I remember from him, a long, eloquent letter to the
Guardian
in 1997, pleading for foxhunting and stag-hunting to be allowed to continue, everything from him was considered and powerful and left field. Nothing less would have allowed him to be poet laureate without a considerable diminution of his prestige. (That's how things work in England.)

And that's how it is with his
Collected Poems
. Paul Keegan has taken Hughes's
New Selected Poems
of 1995 as his model and intercalated the expected and familiar Faber texts with uncollected or small press works like a Viennese layer cake—in astonishing quantity and quality. Most
Collected Poems
merely give us what we have already. Not this one, not unless you are a wealthy book collector with access to three continents. Hughes was assiduous in sending out individual poems all his life, and he had a lifelong affinity for small presses. He had the output, too, to command this double issue. With Hughes's Hugheses, it's a little like Picasso's Picassos. Some don't fit whatever the large-press book happens to be; a few are rejects; some anticipate or trail along after preoccupations. (There's a whole manslaughter of “Crow” poems, for instance, before and after the 1970 volume.) And some—especially late—are among his most personal. It's interesting that these were reserved for tiny, exclusive, luxurious publications, things I never suspected existed, let alone ever saw—
Capriccio
in 1990,
Cries and Whispers
of 1998, the year Hughes died.
Capriccio
was printed in an edition of fifty copies, selling at $4,000 apiece.

*   *   *

As I read through this—ha—huge book, I found all my provisional findings systematically overturned. Hughes's beginnings—half a dozen or so much-anthologized pieces aside, “Wind,” “Pike,” “Thrushes,” “View of a Pig”—were, contrary to expectation, not especially impressive. (The perceived U-shape of his career.) Most of it was ordinary poetry of its time. After that, it seemed literary, diligently, strenuously literary. Elements of Shakespeare, a lot, of Anglo-Saxon, of Donne, of Wallace Stevens, of Lawrence, of Hopkins. Of Plath. But when I got used to the literariness, and began looking for it, it lapsed. I felt—like Rimbaud alongside his river in “
Le Bateau Ivre
”—that I no longer had dependable guides.
Crow
, then, I read as an Eastern European book. Analytical, diminished, distended, caricatured. Like something by Holub or Herbert. Only for
Cogito
read Cuervo. Then a cosmic ferocity—always the least interesting part of Hughes to me. The hysterical, red-lit, gauge-busting style of “death-orgasm supernovae // Flood from the bitten-away gills.”
Prometheus on his Rock
, no great development from its premise. (Striking, though, the number of male victim figures in the poetry.) More series: birds, fish, flowers, insects, seasons, the majestic farm diary of
Moortown
(from 1979). It's as if Rilke had written not two books of
New Poems
but seven; or not one
Duino
but more than anyone cared to keep track of. Something magnificent and medieval and also workaday about these catalog-series: each one an illuminated letter, or one of the
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
. Occasional spurts of a thin but aggressive little vein of satire, like Lawrence's satire. Poems on Fay Godwin's landscape portraits of the north of England—humdrum but suddenly sensational, two or three poems in a row. Wilderness a continual preoccupation, certainly—the last chronicler of wilderness on this shrinking McPlanet. “This is the Black Rhino, the elastic boulder, coming at a gallop. / The boulder with a molten core, the animal missile, / Enlarging towards you” (“The Black Rhino”). Hughes would have known how many species and how many square miles were lost in his lifetime. He writes about things people now see on television, if at all. Things whose existence we idly assume and blithely imperil. But then the surprise of two beautiful poems on livestock auctions. Favor extended to rats. A long study, through the looking glass, of spiders mating (another male victim). A tragic view of sex (like Lawrence, the tortoise), and of poetry.