STRANDED

When I heard Mark Strand read at Yale the end of spring semester from his New Selected (2009), I resolved to get a copy and read through it. The only previous volume of his I’d read in its entirety was Dark Harbor (1993), but I dipped into his earlier Selected (1980) sometime between Dark Harbor and the end of the ‘90s, and read a selection from Man and Camel (2006) shortly after it came out. The impression I’d had that Strand’s work inhabits a certain constant place is sustained by this reading, and it’s fitting that the New Selected should emerge after Man and Camel. There is a wryness in the latter volume that creates a tone that, I realize now, inhabits much of Strand’s verse from the earliest, but which wasn’t quite so forcefully apparent before, to me, at least. His reading was so affable, jocose even, that the sense of the poems as austere imaginative landscapes into which one peers with metaphysical intent collapsed somewhat, leaving a stronger sense of a playfulness I associate with French poetry derived from the symbolistes.

Certainly, that’s no surprising identification. Strand’s poems have always been inflected by a sense of words as symbolic more than descriptive. He’s about as far from being a nature poet, who yet describes a natural world, as one could be. He’s also rather far removed from confessional verse, even though he does at times clearly write about himself, or as himself. And that, to me, is where the lesson of symbolist poetry comes into play: it allows one to write in a voice that treats the natural world, and oneself as a member of the natural world, as an occasion for certain kinds of lingusitic organization. In other words, such poems are not meant to create a scene to contemplate, or to reveal the dramatic movement of events, but are aimed to make a statement. To create a poem is to offer a kind of précis that renders the state of consciousness, that articulates a grasp of lyric presence, or rather articulates the lyric presence that we might spend our whole lives trying to grasp.

This makes Strand sound rather abstract and the odd thing is that he really doesn’t seem to be, even though he often is. The trick of Strand’s verse is to appear completely 'natural' while talking in the most indirect way possible. The reader is almost fooled by the directness of his language, and by the fact that nothing so very different from how prose works is happening, into thinking that the poems are simple, direct statements. It’s only when one tries to parse what a poem is saying, when one tries to place interpretive weight on this or that word or phrase, that one realizes that an odd sleight-of-hand takes place: it’s almost impossible to find the load-bearing supports, as it were. Strand’s poems tell us everything we need to know at once, but almost invariably leave us wondering what they’ve said.

Sometimes, as with 'Man and Camel,' the sense of parabolic meaning is so deliberate its effect becomes quite funny. For Strand has a very dry sense of humor and he knows how to use it. He’s able to make us feel in on a joke that may very well be played on us nevertheless. And that ‘joke,’ in all its wry charm, is that saying something profound, in poetry, is a kind of ‘kidding.’ It’s as if we say, upon reading the poem, ‘you must be joking,’ uncertain whether we mean: the joke is the point of the poem, or the joke is that we accept the poem as a poem.

That may sound like I’m saying that the poems are funny, or that’s it’s funny to call them poems, but that really isn’t what I mean. The poems are often quite solemn, and they are indeed ‘austere’ in the sense that they don’t seek out fun and music and sensuous detail, very little in the way of sound effects or vivid impressions. 'I walk / into what light / there is.' This, we can say, is so pared down as to be almost minimalist. The ability to be so toneless is not easy, and its goal seems to be to be read as if the page itself speaks. There are a lot of imperative sentences, words that simply surface and command our hearing. And the actions are generally simple too: walking, looking, speaking, writing, sitting, thinking; sometimes there are dreams. Nothing very much happens, but everything is poised to happen because each poem is running a course, moving to an end that will clarify its intention, its statement. As with this poem, from Darker, way back in 1970:

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

It seems to me that this poem is in someways the start of Strand’s poetic project; it pretty much contains everything his poems will do as he matures. The fact that this is offered as ‘remains’ lets us know something: what remains after the essential paring down is what the poetry consists of: a series of statements. Sometimes the statement -- the actual breath and sentence of the poem -- will be the entire poem, one flowing thought. But more often the movement of the thought will be cut up, either by short sentences, as here, or by very short line breaks. In either case, the pacing is very deliberate, and is necessary for the effect achieved, an effect suggested in this poem by the line 'The hours have done their job.' For this definite pacing is a matter of time, or, as with jokes, timing. We have to arrive at completion, at what remains, by very deliberate steps: names, pockets, shoes, road, clocks, photos, boy.

The nouns are so precise and yet so generic; we could almost accuse Strand of seeking out a poetry of the generic. If that were all he were doing, it might be interesting enough for a volume or two, but there is always more at stake because the generic always becomes the allegorical: 'The words follow each other downwind'; and the metaphysical: 'Time tells me what I am.' But there are other registers Strand exploits that are here too: the familial thread is alive in each stanza, from ‘family album’ to ‘my wife’ to ‘my parents,’ so that affective relations, the human community, is always ready to burst into Strand’s meditation (as ‘the man’ that appears in a number of signal poems). And the gesture toward nature or to metaphor (both of which are sometimes greater than here): ‘the milky rooms of clouds,’ can bring a clear, unforced lyricism to bear at any moment.

So what is the poem’s statement? Much depends on whether you view the final verse as illustrating futility (‘What good does it do?’) or whether it has managed -- the very ideal of sleight-of-hand -- to slyly change the terms while we were looking. ‘How can I sing? / Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.’ We are bordering on ‘I am that I am’; could God sing a song of praise? Or, what would God praise other than himself? The parents off their thrones and in their clouds is a joke image; the wife is sent away from this paradise of self-knowing, self-perpetuating Godhead. All the other names are vacated. Only the one remains. The poem is stuck constantly in the groove of its own making, like a needle stuck on a record. Empty/remain; empty/remain, ad infinitum.

And that is Strand’s characteristic jest, to start singing just when about to be cut-off, to point the way out as he leads us back to the start. In 'The Monument,' a long poem, written in prose as responses to quotations primarily from other poets, Strand says: 'my voice is sufficient to make The Monument out of this moment.' To make a monument of any moment, one need only write a poem, but it will be a poem which conceives of each moment, any moment, as monumental.

Reading through the 267 pages of poetry in this volume, covering forty-two years of publication, one is struck again and again by Strand’s fidelity to that task. His ability to bring it off is based upon that keen sense of emptying and grasping what remains, but it’s also based on what I take to be the jest of originary utterance. God, the Hebrew scriptures tell us, spoke first and created everything. After that, there can be no originary utterance. The poet, in enunciating his poem, speaks in an ancillary manner that purports to begin things again, to empty, or to praise, but there is always the remainder of that pre-existing world. Strand is far too canny to take that as a point of despair or of futility if only because the mind allows words to happen to it, and when they do, there is no telling what possibilities for speech might also remain, or, as I like to say, surface.

Here’s Strand, in 2006, evoking the magic of one of his favorite natural objects, the moon. We can easily read the moon’s symbolic meaning of satellite, of heavenly object visible only by virtue of the great shining of the sun, and yet, for all that, visibly reigning in the sky when the sun is invisible, but Strand is able to invest the moon with all meaning we find in mirrors, in indirect figures for our dependent and never quite transcendent condition, and to make it finally a figure for the truth, maybe even the joy, of that condition, though it remains as a memory of something we have to try to experience (or grasp, or understand) again:

Moon

Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon, appears

between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page

where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known

into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised

at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page

and close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

Here the moon is closely identified with the page, the path, ‘those places where what you had wished for happens’ (baldly stated wish-fulfillment!), and name. Appropriately enough, after the above, the ‘name’ is something still to come rather than something ‘emptied,’ as in ‘The Remains,’ and its arrival -- our glimpse of the originary utterance -- comes to us as a memory which we would return to: ‘what it was like’ in ‘that sudden paradise of sound’ that is the name. But the name does not appear here, and only when we reach the word ‘sound’ do we know that it was uttered -- ‘moon,’ ostensibly, but the word that said ‘let there be light and there was light’ certainly lurks in (or shines forth from) that utterance, which we can only see ‘reflected’ by the moon, afloat on the book of evening, which we have just closed but which our memory of ‘that light’ will cause us to open again, and again, and again. World without end. Where we remain . . . stranded.

LYRIC OCCASIONS

‘We can put up with someone’s narcissism providing it makes interesting reading and it doesn’t run on too long.’–Charles Simic, ‘The Power of Ruins’ (review of Louise Glück’s Averno in NYRB)

Lyric poetry is an acquired taste, and I wonder sometimes why I’ve acquired it, or to what extent I have. Song lyrics are easier to remember and more ubiquitous. Fully realized depictions of the life of any era can be found in novels, in films. The quirks of individual character are more fully realized in those narrative forms as well. To say that lyric poetry is ‘about language,’ in a way that no other form of writing is, does make a case for it, but it’s a claim that is reductive rather than expansive -- unless, that is, you happen to think like a lyric poet and believe that ‘language’ includes everything. And that’s the jist of it all, I’d say: ‘thinking like a lyric poet.’ That’s the knack that must be acquired; so let’s say lyric poetry is an acquired knack, and that, once you’ve got the knack of believing language is everything, then you can develop a taste for it.

But what will your taste in lyric poetry be determined by? Your ear, certainly. Your sense of rhythm, yes. But also your sense of the possibility that language can represent something, make perceptible something, that otherwise could not be apprehended, that is simply not available in any other use of language. And, it seems to me, that that ‘something’ depends upon a lyrical self, an understood, implied enunciator of the poem. Even if we trust that the poem simply consists of words arranged strategically on a page, we accept a phenomenological given that the words did not appear there by chance. Someone arranged them that way, and that ‘someone’ remains present, inferred as what we sometimes call ‘the voice’ of the poem, sometimes ‘the speaker’ of the poem, sometimes, ‘the poet.’ But whatever we call this entity, we understand that we mean that part of us that sounds the words of the poem internally, that responds to a previous shaping of language and a transmission of content, and that our grasp of that -- the shaping and the transmission and the sounding -- constitutes an experience of the poem and, if we can focus, a performance of the lyrical self the poem manifests. And if the poem was created ‘by chance’ by a machine or logarithm? Then the lyrical self we infer is the ‘ghost in the machine,’ that part of consciousness which simply inhabits language, or, if you like, is forever ‘haunted’ or ‘possessed’ by language, for no use of language is ever ‘innocent’ of complicity with human utterance, or denuded of the power of speech as we first experienced it in some daze-shattering moment when words were addressed to any one of us, and there was no escape, nor any denial of the fact that we heard and understood.

And ‘taste’ comes in as the extent to which we feel ourselves addressed by the kind of utterance we find in the poem, and whether or not we feel ourselves -- our lyrical selves -- to be stimulated or challenged or upbraided or intoxicated or mystified or whatever state you desire (for your desire, as reader, is always at stake). In my own case, ‘thinking like a lyric poet,’ when it happens, bypasses ‘thinking like a literary critic,’ which is to say that those lyric poets who ‘score’ most with me make me forget my own taste, my own intentions for language, my own limited grasp of myself. They remake my relation to language; they add to what I can imagine words doing. And when this doesn’t happen, then all I can see is how someone has willfully distorted the perfectly suitable relation I had to language and to lyricism and to beauty and to all those other things I assume to be the aesthetic occasion of the lyric poem, or, worse, how someone has tried to approximate something I’ve already experienced, processed, understood, and has not done it well enough for me to recognize it, or has done it so poorly or erratically that I don’t want to recognize it. There are so many ways that language -- as rhetoric -- fails to achieve its intentions, it’s a wonder any poems succeed at all. But that precisely is the tightrope walk, the difficult task of trying to speak in an unprecedented way, and of trying to convey an originary idea, a shaping occasion for a definitive performance.

What Charles Simic suggests in the line I’ve quoted as epigram is something I do indeed recognize, for I’d say that, deep down, I concur with this view. My critical cavil at any particular lyrical poem will have to do, ultimately, with the degree to which I find it narcissistic, which is to say, fixated upon the lyric self to such an extent that it forecloses my participation. To read the poem, I have to believe emphatically in the self that the poet displays, and my skepticism will keep rising accordingly. One could say such a poet, like Whitman, says ‘what I assume you shall assume,’ and I’ll admit that Whitman’s presumption of my interest and pre-emption of my own fledgling narcissism made me keep a distance from him for quite some time. It was only when I recognized that what Whitman was defining was the necessary act of ‘thinking like a lyric poet,’ that I ‘signed on’ as it were, boarded ship and took to the high seas with him. But that’s a big step, a leap as existential as any one can make, because it happens at the level of one’s individualized grasp of language as, whatever else it may be, one’s own tool for making oneself understood. If I have to assume what Whitman assumes, then I have to accept that his language is my language.

That kind of concession is not easily given, and that’s why I agree with Simic here: if I’m going to concede at all -- if I’m going to accept the willful narcissism of self-display in language -- then the self on display in the poems better be interesting, and not wear out its welcome. Or, as Simic says in his review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems: ‘there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading.’ I like that phrase ‘worth reading,’ for the minute one thinks, when reading a poem, ‘why am I reading this?,’ it’s all over. The spell is broken. The difficult attention will not come back. The pleasure in the liberties taken turn to irritation or boredom. The great affair is over. All one sees is a showy bravado; at best one is grudgingly entertained at the notion of the poem as an experience -- as for instance in that smile of embarrassed refusal that can be seen on the face of a young weaned child at the notion of suckling the maternal breast. As if!

All of this is preamble to talking about a book of poems I read this summer -- Mark Strand’s New Selected Poems (2009) -- but I’ll get to that next time.

(The quotations from Simic are taken from a collection of his reviews: The Renegade. Writings on poetry and a few other things, George Braziller, NY, 2009)

AT FIFTY

I’m turning 50 next week, and I have to say it’s one of those milestones of aging that actually feels like one. Of course, one of the interesting things about being born in a year that ends in ‘9,’ is that you always hit a round number as a decade comes to its end. It was particularly notable to be turning 40 in 1999, as the twentieth century ended; if one lives to be 80, one will have lived 40 years in each century, a neat divide that is appealing for some reason.

But, as a milestone age, turning 50 immediately caused me to wonder what works were also hitting that half-century mark. Here are a few notables I don’t mind sharing the milestone with:

The 400 Blows (Les quatre cent coups): François Truffaut’s debut film which helped to establish “Nouvelle Vague” cinema, following on the heels of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless of the previous year. When I finally got around to seeing this film, in my 30s, I was delighted by the character of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), to some extent Truffaut’s alter-ego, in his hapless efforts to get along in a school system and in a family situation where he feels alienated for no particular reason. Or rather the reasons could be many, but none are needed; the film simply gets right the feeling of youth in the post-war world having to make its own way because so much is changing. Particularly memorable, to me, was the scene when Antoine becomes enamored of Balzac and writes a homage that is essentially plagiarism, and is treated as such, but which is also a naive effort to emulate a master. The effort to pawn the bulky typewriter is also a classic bit of bathetic comedy. And that final shot against the sea lives on long after the film is over: Antoine looks equal to whatever life has in store for him, but also seems conscious of himself for the first time.

‘Mack the Knife,’ by Bobby Darin. This song happened to be #1 on Billboard six weeks after I was born, won the Grammy for Record of the Year, and by coincidence has long been one of my favorite songs of the pre-Beatles era. Darin’s performance is so definitive, I’ve never been able to take seriously any other recording of the song. The horns kick and his delivery is so full of infectious energy while singing about such dastardly doings, or what my sister likes to call ‘murder and mayhem.’ Just listen to how he sings ‘spends just like a sailor.’ Five’ll getcha ten…

Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis (released the day I was born). This is an album I didn’t get to know till my 40s, but it’s one of those quintessential albums in the sense that it’s how I always thought a jazz album should sound. Bluesy, lyrical, melancholy, but with such brightness in the horns and grandeur in the piano, and with improvisatory playing that, no matter how often you play it (and I’ve put it on repeat play through a long night here and there), never quite becomes familiar. It’s simply a gorgeous record.

Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs. In fact, the version that was published in 1959, by the Olympia Press, is different from the version published by Grove in 1962, the latter being the version I read for the first time in 1980. What this novel does to the novel is unforgettable: it simply overruns notions of plot and characterization with bizarre scenes and hallucinatory prose. It’s as if all those expectations that there should arrive a fiction capable of entertaining readers who had spent time with Rimbaud and Lautréamont and Artaud, as well as Westerns and sci-fi movies, not to mention porn and sensational tales of gays, hookers, junkies and derelicts, were finally fulfilled by a writer who understood that, after Beckett, the purpose of prose was consciousness laid bare, bereft of any intellectual or moral solace. And yet funny as well, with the ghastly, mordant humor of the eternal outsider able, in the end and for no easily discernible reason, to address you, hypocrite lecteur, companionably. Wouldn’t you?

‘The Small Rain,’ Thomas Pynchon’s first published story, in a college mag The Cornell Writer. It’s not a very good story, but it is included in Slow Learner. As the work of a college student, it makes us reflect on how vulnerable all beginnings are. I mention it because TP released his seventh novel this month, fifty years after it all began. Cheers!

WHATCHA READIN?, 2

Back in June, I started a post about '15 books that left a mark on me,' from earliest reading, and covered the first five. Here's a bit on the next biggie, which I happen to be teaching a class on this summer, which ends today. So, here's to From Stately, plump to yes I will yes.

6. Ulysses (1922)--James Joyce (Irish)

My first attempt was in high school, eleventh grade. Up unto that point, modern prose was whatever I met with in the paperbacks of the day - Ray Bradbury, tales of sci-fi and the fantastic - with a more artistic version provided by translations of Hesse, by Orwell and Huxley, but with little sense of the tradition out of which Joyce’s prose came: no Flaubert, but translated glimpses of Baudelaire and the symbolistes, Fowlie’s Rimbaud. Thankfully, more than a passing notion of Ibsen.

That first time I got as far as the opening of Chapter 14: 'Oxen of the Sun.' I couldn’t have made that statement at the time. I didn’t know the Homeric titles, and the chapters were unnumbered in that old Random House edition. I only knew I'd reached the paragraph beginning, 'Universally that person’s acumen ...' and could in no wise parse it. Skipping ahead a few pages, nothing cleared up. Was I still in the same book? When comprehension flags, so does attention. Put it aside.

Still, that first foray was instructive. The first three chapters – Dedalus’s - were like nothing I’d ever read. Later, I learned to call this ‘modernist,’ but at the time all I was aware of was a command of language more immediate and notable than in poems of our century, a prose in which rhythmic units were not guided by line breaks, but by as faultless and unmatched an ear for the aural dynamics of language as could be imagined. As ‘modern’ as anything, I thought, but dated too. Stephen Dedalus was not my contemporary, but he had my interests at heart. He was bored by everything anyone told him using the old style vocabularies, using ‘everyday speech.’ He had to find his space in an alienated relation to his mother tongue -- he needed Church Latin, Scholasticism, Elizabethan English, the wit of Swift and Wilde.

Raised Catholic, educated in a parochial school for eight years, I was familiar with some of those churchy rhythms, with the innotation of King James gospels read aloud, and had already gained a love of Shakespeare through memorization of speeches in Macbeth and Hamlet. Which is to say that the spell of Dedalus was immediate enough, was -- even with that dire and debilitating sense of Dublin’s paralysis that weighed on him -- oddly comparable to the shrunken prospects for language in a middling suburb in the mid-Atlantic States in the middle of the 1970s.

And somewhere in my mind's eye, reading Ulysses, was a vision of what my unknown Irish ancestor must have left behind in coming to America, and even a sense, glimpsed in more ethnic parishes than the one I belonged to, of what part Catholicism played or could play in national identity. Joyce showed me a city, a nation, where priests set the tone.

In that first reading, there were so many glimpses of a different way of doing things, of presenting experience in such a direct and inimical way: the vigor of Malachi Mulligan’s mind in his relentless jests, so performative, so cinematic -- he enters the book as if aware a camera is on him; the touchingly private moment of Bloom’s visit to the jakes, so simple, so elemental even; Father Conmee, so reassuringly banal, an image answered by watching priests on the schoolyard; even the periods of blank confusion -- who is who in the newspaper chapter, in the cemetery chapter, in the many bar scenes -- could be offset by such striking moments: the men spying on the barmaids who spy on the street outside, the dissatisfactions of the funeral service and the ghoulish nature of burial, the hilarious leaps into verbal absurdity in 'Cyclops,' the rapid-fire witticisms and asides in 'Aeolus.'

But nothing stunned me as much as the 'dancing coins' on pious Deasy’s shoulders, and nothing captured my mind and heart like the love of language, the sheer verve of the art of discourse, as in Dedalus alone on the strand. For a would-be poet, every walk along the beach is a walk into eternity, and Joyce’s rendering of the nature of such reverie as a constant making and unmaking of thought, a search for constructions to place on reality, is an odyssey in itself, a depiction in miniature of the liberties his new stream-of-consciousness could take in its flow over objects, through time and space, arrested only by the odd intuition that words might be as palpable as shells and as scattered.

To Be Continued