Sunday Poem

INCLUSION 

First was the claw and the claw
clasping clay, closing in breath. 

More turns to them than to sea-snails,
brain and gut ravelled like yarn 

into clews to be threaded through.
Like Theseus, I was closed-in 

with an abomination of bestial desire:
she wanted to be nailed by a bull 

and she did a bull and bore
a bull-of-a-thing with a menacing club. 

It's with this thought that I'm locked,
throughout this maze that I travel. 

I've no key, no clue: only minatory echoes
and shadows to see it through.

By Asa Boxer, from Etymologies (with essay by David-Antoine Williams, 
Anstruther Press, 2016)

Getting it Wrong

David Williams notices that Anne Carson "com­pletely mis­read" an entry from The Amer­i­can Her­itage Dic­tio­nary of Indo-European Roots when making an etymological link in a recent poem.

If a poem made a sim­i­larly mis­in­formed claim about, say, basic math, we might be dis­posed to reject it as inco­her­ent. I’d be will­ing to bet though that most read­ers of Carson’s poem either accept the ety­mo­log­i­cal claim, or pass over it unboth­ered, pre­fer­ring to focus on the con­cep­tual con­nec­tions it cre­ates from within the pro­tec­tive shell of poetic licence. Yet should not a poem, being a thing made of con­cepts and lan­guage, and here address­ing the rela­tion­ships between con­cepts and lan­guage over time, be faith­ful to the dis­ci­pli­nary account of those rela­tion­ships, espe­cially if it invokes the dis­ci­pline as an authority? If not, is it dis­tin­guish­able from bull­shit, in the Frank­furt­ian sense?

Defiance or a Dare?

Last year, "stunned" by the amount of revision in Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, David Williams penned a fascinating post on the nightmare now facing academics who have written about Hill's work:

What is Ricks to do about this, having now written on an apparently obsolete poem (in two books—see also his chapter in Lyon & McDonald)? He can’t revise his own critical work—the object of criticism has been in some way withdrawn. And what about others who have written on the original poem: what about me, hey, and Piers Pennington, and Michael O’Neill, and Peter Pegnall, and Charles Lock, and others? And what about future writers? Are we all bound not only to acknowledge the revision, but also to acknowledge the supremacy of the revision? And will Hill criticism have to endure a long period of deadening debate over the relative authority of the different versions and editions of the poems? And is this, in fact, the last word on all the poems 1952-2012, or should we expect corrections and revisions in the next printing?

Now, the evaluative question I’m avoiding is one on which Hill himself has had some sharp things to say, in a conversation with Peter McDonald [link]about poets revising their own work in later life. He asks Hill at the outset about good poets who have been consistent or prolific self-revisers. Hill says: “I can think off the top of my head of two or three. And all of them disastrous.” J. C. Ransom, W. H. Auden, and M. Moore were all “disastrous” in their late self-revisions, and in each case the revisions were “monstrous misjudgements” borne of “entirely unnecessary guilt,” and so moral as well as aesthetic failures. W. B. Yeats, though, “can be applauded on some but not all of his rewritings,” Hill says. “Reconceived, rethought, rewritten” is how McDonald characterizes Yeats’s late changes.

Section “20″ of Comus certainly has been reconceived, rethought and rewritten in Broken Hierarchies, and my quick look through the Amazon text shows plenty of other major and minor changes in places both expected and unexpected. Is a variorum edition on the cards? Broken Hierarchies is already almost one thousand pages long. A thousand. Is this defiance or a dare?

Williams recently returned to the subject, explaining the confusion created by some altered line-breaks in a poem from Hill's Mercian Hymns.  Read it here.