Bard of the Fallow Field

Stephen Burt traces poems by poets as diverse as John Ashbery, David Baker, Michael Dickman and David Morley back to a single progenitor: John Clare.

Almost everything that could have seemed, to a nineteenth-century reader, like a reason to count Clare as minor, or not to read him, makes him a resource for poets today. “Bard of the fallow field / And the green meadow,” as he called himself, Clare remained closely attentive to what we now call his environment, what he called “nature,” in a way that is neither touristic nor ignorant of agricultural effort. He saw tragic ironies all over the place, but he never sought verbal ironies himself: he is about as sincere (if not naive) as poets get.

Trust in the Daemon

Harriet blog invited writers to identify female poets "of intense, even transformative value." Stephen Burt picked Louise Bogan:

It seems almost incontrovertibly true that the practice of poetry requires a kind of irrational commitment, a belief that whatever you find in the language, and whatever you find in yourself, matter in ways that other people cannot or do not or do not yet understand—you can call it, if you like, a trust in the daemon, or a faith in the language, or a devotion to something no one can quite name. And it seems true as well that you can’t make good poetry—except by accident—unless you think hard and patiently, sometimes with all the learning you can find, about what you’re writing, about what you’re rewriting, and about what other people wrote before you were born. If you are looking for a poet, a critic, a writer whose lifework contains both truths—who found the hot and the cold, the knowable and the unknowable, and who respected both—you could do a lot worse than to read all the poems and at least some of the prose brought into the world by Louise Bogan, who came from a hard early life amid mill towns in Maine to become the author of several handfuls of perfect, and frightening, epigrammatic and lyric poems; she was also, for decades, the in-house poetry critic at the New Yorker, explaining as best she could the poetry that she felt was best (and was modern) to readers for whom it was all (still) new.

Nobody in the history of American poetry has come closer to the effects created by W. B. Yeats: sometimes these effects made her imitative, but sometimes they made her terrifically memorable. Some of her poems (including a self-lacerating one called “Women”) addressed gender directly; many of them addressed what she took to be a woman’s (a cisgender straight woman’s, in today’s terms) attitudes towards romantic and erotic love. Bogan brought her critical gifts to her poetry, but she knew that without passion and weirdness—without the capacity to surprise yourself—those gifts were not enough: if you want to shock your students, or your teachers, or yourself, try her four-line advice to aspiring writers, “Several Voices Out of a Cloud.”

Mary Dalton at Harvard

Sounds of St. John's: Mary Dalton's wonderful reading. @English_Harvard @VehiculePress @cstarnino @MemorialU pic.twitter.com/yqtFcuixng

— Nicholas Bradley (@uviclwc) April 22, 2015

Two poets meet: Stephen Burt and Mary Dalton. @accommodatingly @English_Harvard pic.twitter.com/OWg54AOxw8

— Nicholas Bradley (@uviclwc) April 22, 2015

Hear It Sing

Kevin McNeilly reports on Stephen Burt's recent lecture at UBC called “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Place.”

He concentrated on the work of two key poets, for him: C. D. Wright and Mary Dalton. Quoting from Wright’s “Ozark Odes”—“Maybe you have to be from here to hear it sing”—Burt developed the homonymy of here and hear to suggest that Wright’s poems generate the textures and particularities of place apophastically, allowing the reader access through lyric attention, through the melopoeic richness of her geographically precise diction, to a phenomenologically rich encounter with that particularity. You hear the place, you sense it, palpably, in Wright’s words, despite and even because of her skeptical refusal to claim communicative success. The withdrawing “melt” of her language, in other words, is also recombinant and evocative, a plenitude. Burt gestured at Elise Partridge’s poem “Dislocations” (from Chameleon Hours, 2010 version) which also presents a “hybrid” form of lyric apophasis, refusing to lay claim to any naïve or grandiose transcendence while also, at a moment of surprising intensity, discovering how poetic intelligence still fuses to its descriptive objects, as “you feel your strengths intermingling.” One of the pleasures of Elise Partridge’s poetry, Burt said, is that its “attention to place does not preclude migration from one place to another,” and that some of her best work inheres in those transitions and intermediations. He concluded his talk with an investigation of some of the poetry of Mary Dalton. He was especially taken with how human geography and dialect words, in her poems, “imply the physical geography that the words produce.” He focused on the seductive estrangements of encountering the moments when she seemed to open her Newfoundland word-hoard. “Maybe you don’t have to be from there,” he concluded, “to hear it sing.”

Elise Partridge 1958-2015

I was finishing up a short email to Elise Patridge when I was told of her death Sunday afternoon. The news wasn’t surprising—Elise was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer last February—but I had hoped to see her one final time. As her prognosis worsened, she and her husband, Steve, decided to rent an apartment in midtown Manhattan where, if her stamina from the “chemo tortures” held up, she planned receive friends and family off and on this spring. It was pilgrimage I was determined to make. But three weeks ago she sent around a message saying that circumstances had forced her to abandon that plan (with characteristic generosity, she also offered the New York apartment to whoever might like to make use of it). Clearly, things were escalating quicker than anticipated. Her email weighed heavily on my mind and I decided to send a note asking after her condition. That my email will now forever stay unsent is, frankly, intolerable. My friendship with Elise dates back to 2001, when I read two poems of hers in the summer issue of Fiddlehead and, after getting her address from Ross Leckie, invited her to submit a manuscript to Vehicule press. We published Fielder’s Choice, her spectacular debut, the following year. Ever since, not a month has gone by without a morsel of correspondence from her. She sent pep-talks, rants, reports, advice, updates and detailed responses on my reviews and poems. She inquired constantly about my job, family (and most recently mailed my 12-month-old, Matteo, a christmas package of clothes). The fact, emerging from the stories being told, that she was conducting similar exchanges with dozens of poets all over the country is staggering, and breaks my heart all over again for the tremendous loss of her passing.

I’m not sure I can add much more to the lovely testimonials that have already appeared online, and I’m going to husband whatever ideas I have about her poetry for a longer piece about her upcoming (and now posthumous) book The Exile’s Gallery. But I thought it might be helpful to collect the reactions to her death in one place and maybe provide some of them—Facebook and Twitter being notoriously ephemeral—with a slightly more permanent home.

Very sad about the passing of Elise Partridge who was kind to me during her tenure as Arc Writer in Residence. She was so lovely to many.
— Christine McNair (@christinemcnair) February 2, 2015

Elise Partridge has passed. She was a terrific poet & a sweet woman. I will remember her kindness & her bright eyes. Rest in peace, Elise.
— Eduardo C. Corral (@EduardoCCorral) February 2, 2015

Very saddened by the death of Elise Partridge, a wonderful writer and a generous, caring person: http://t.co/wGrBCWGpak
— Jared Bland (@jaredbland) February 2, 2015

2009 Best Canadian Poet, Elise Partridge, will be greatly missed.... http://t.co/e462RPYeBI
— Best Canadian Poetry (@BestCdnPoetry) February 2, 2015

Sad rower pushed from shore, I'll disappear like circles summoned By an oar's dip. Elise Partridge #todayspoem http://t.co/srV3TjiSls
— Marina Endicott (@marinaendicott) February 2, 2015

RIP Elise Partridge on writing &illness: "I.B. Singer said that anyone who talks about himself too much is a nudnik" http://t.co/CAHCJTn1O1”
— sarahmac (@sarahmac) February 2, 2015

How can this be? This is the most terrible thing. Beautiful poet Elise Partridge warmest of women taken from us I just heard. Unfathomable
— Anakana Schofield (@AnakanaSchofiel) February 2, 2015

When I think of Elise Partridge's work, I think of this poem, which has always devastated me, and now even more: https://t.co/rqxvknuCtG
— Matthew Tierney (@hayflick) February 2, 2015

I am thinking of Elise Partridge, who passed away tonight--of her poetry and all the many kindnesses she showed... http://t.co/yIwlbocz3n
— Chris Hutchinson (@CHUTCHI2) February 2, 2015

Amidst celebrations for the #Patriots win, I'm mourning Elise Partridge, one of the purest souls in Canadian letters. http://t.co/VZ9PeSarVM
— Adam Sol (@adamyael) February 2, 2015

So very saddened to hear the news of Elise Partridge's passing: a great soul. http://t.co/FlZhKL0xUA and http://t.co/sZrEyk8hXe
— Kevin McNeilly (@theRealMcNeilly) February 2, 2015

Very sad to hear about Elise Partridge's passing. She was a fabulous poet.
— Paul Vermeersch (@PaulVermeersch) February 2, 2015

The brilliant Elise Partridge has passed away. Such a horrifying loss--she was one of our great poets, and a generous and kind human being.
— Michael Lista (@michaellista) February 2, 2015

Our community has lost a great poet and friend. Our thoughts are with the friends and family of Elise Partridge. http://t.co/2ocacWH1j4
— The Walrus (@walrusmagazine) February 2, 2015

'So many small things I still want to see.' RIP Elise Partridge, wonderful Canadian poet 1958 - 2015 @EvanPJones @toddswift_dr
— Carcanet Press (@Carcanet) February 3, 2015

Very sad to lose Elise Partridge: wish I'd seen her more. Go read her poems, please. @quillandquire @UBC http://t.co/vN5MUrVgiv
— Stephen Burt (@accommodatingly) February 2, 2015

"The generosity of her spirit is palpable in her poems" -- Elise Partridge (1958-2015): http://t.co/JbWshTAGNs
— Nyla Matuk (@Kabloon) February 2, 2015

I wrote about Elise Partridge a few years ago. I wish I'd written more about her accomplished poems. http://t.co/EjjqLFKIWf @PoetryFound
— Jason Guriel (@JasonGuriel) February 2, 2015

"I'm not TRYING to dazzle – ah just DOES." RIP Elise Partridge http://t.co/Dh8in71Nie
— stevenwbeattie (@stevenwbeattie) February 2, 2015

Ken Babstock

Working with Elise Partridge reminded me what true passion, commitment, integrity, intelligence, and humility look like when combined in one massively talented artist. Reading her poems is being in the presence of a mind fully engaged. She will be missed.

Damian Rogers

Elise Partridge was the most amazing person I've ever had the privilege to know. Working with her on her book was an absolute professional highlight for me... I wish I could tell her how much she mentored me, especially in these last few months, on how to be an uncompromising artist and a beautiful, compassionate, loving person at the same time. Her integrity, her kindness, her bottomless support and enthusiasm and gratitude for the work of others, even when she was suffering... I will hold these lessons close for the rest of my life.

Zach Wells:

She would never have agreed with Larkin that "death is no different whined at than withstood." And she never succumbed to despair, facile or otherwise. Her oeuvre is full of poems about death, but they are playful, virtuosic poems, acts of resistance, testament to the size of her spirit, the defiance of her breath.

Gillian Jerome 

Elise Partridge died last night. What a talented poet she was. What a formidable person. The last time I heard from Elise was about a month ago. She wrote to apologize that she wouldn't make it to hear Helen Guri and I read. Meanwhile, she was dying. All that love.

Matt Rader

Last year, when my friend Elise Partridge knew she was dying, she asked me to keep her memory alive by teaching her poems. Which was an easy request to honour since Elise's poems are exemplars on many subjects. Elise passed away last night. On Tuesday my 3rd year poetry workshop is set to discuss the elegy. I'd planned to bring this poem which tonight seems exactly as Elise would have wanted it--an elegy for someone else as a poem to remember her by: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/248140

Rob Taylor

Looking back, I am humbled to have been included among the lucky few (or many) that Elise connected with, and in awe at the scope of her giving even in a time of great illness. Or, I should say, in awe that the illness changed nothing, that this giving out of hers was not an expendable part of her daily routine but simply was her life. What could she do but live it?

Chris Patton:

My dear dear friend Elise Partridge passed away yesterday evening. She was a marvellous poet and an even more so person. Warm loving acute witty skeptical wry and humane. I am sort of reeling with it (though her death was known to be coming for a while) and don’t have much more to offer than that right now. Here though the first lines of the first poem (“Everglades”) of her first book (Chameleon Hours) —

Nothing fled when we walked up to it,
nor did we flinch

Not a bad note on which to open a life’s work. No fear and no frightening. God I’m going to miss her.

Why People Need Poetry

Human Dissatisfied

Adam Plunkett takes issue with what he calls Stephen Burt's "blurbing good cheer":

The gnawing condescension at the heart of Burt’s essays and reviews is the premise that criticism is far less important than praise because not enough people read poetry, as though poetry were too delicate for yelling. “I have written reviews I regarded as negative,” Burt writes, but “such pieces do their work upon their first appearances, losing, often enough, what value they have after the waves that they track have hit the shore.” Burt has to know that the history of taste has worked otherwise, with negativity galvanizing preferences and poets from T. E. Hulme on Romanticism to Langston Hughes on “The Negro-Art Hokum” and Adrienne Rich on female poets’ entrapment in patriarchy, from high modernism to the Harlem Renaissance and second-wave feminist poetry. Taste has to exclude as well as include; and when it includes, it must be with reservations as well as unconditional love. It would go a long way toward Burt’s “helping you enjoy” new poetry if he were to help you to articulate why you do not enjoy some of it, rather than leaving you with the uncomfortable sense that there is something wrong with you if you do not. This kind of attitude suits pedantry more than pleasure, and better to be a human dissatisfied than a prig satisfied.

Cross-Over Boy

Stephen Burt, one of America's best poet-critics, likes to wear women's clothing:

I have no desire to write a straightforward memoir about my gender and my wardrobe. For one thing, there would not be enough to report. I want instead to find a way to think about gender and appearance that accounts for my body, my emotions, and my images of my body—as it is, as it can be, as I wish it could be.
My body feels unfinished, undeveloped, more often than it feels like a real woman or a real man. It feels, sometimes, as if it wanted to become a woman, whether or not it will get the chance. That feeling itself hasn’t changed since my teens.
What article of clothing demonstrates that feeling best? I’m afraid it’s a training bra. I may be wearing one now, as you read this.

Overloaded

American poet-critic Stephen Burt can't keep up:

"I think I can keep up with books, more or less, which are countable, finite sets of things (especially since they do come in the mail): but if the proliferating, ramifying, exciting discourse about poetry now takes place in a million web journals, at all hours of the day and night, I’m not sure I can keep up with them. I’m not sure that I could have kept up with them when I was 20, or 25, or 29, and without dependents, and eager to stay up all night."