Sunday Poem

PROCEDURES FOR ESCAPE 

The train hovers along the track
somewhere between Oshawa and Belleville
and I sit in seat 14
in the aisle across from the emergency window
with a little red hammer
in a small gray box—
the one which every kid, including me
would give up their seat
just to smash 

The attendant explains the procedures of escape
to the family of five sitting ahead of me
She’s a cute brunette with high cheekbones
and low lips and probably close to my age
and she asks me if in the event of an emergency
would I be willing to climb out the window with her first
to help her assist all the women and children off the train 

I tell her yes, and stare back out the window
at the blurred trees and old telephone wires
listening to the sounds the train wheels make
across the rails
which always sound a bit like thunder
and a bit like a steel mill in full work-day swing
and I imagine the two of us, hand in hand
leaping out the shattered window
looking like two children jumping off a small cliff
into blue water on a sun-blind afternoon
using their fear of heights
as a meager excuse to hold hands 

I look back at the tiny red hammer
in the little gray box
displayed like a javelin
and repeat her question over again in my head
thinking, yes I would be willing to do that
you’re just the first person
to have asked

By Blair Trewartha, from Easy Fix (Palimpsest, 2014)

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?

The Bumptious American

Patrick McGuinness looks back at Ezra Pound:

He was the bumptious American who arrived in England and modernised its poetry and buttonholed its poets, dead or alive, as if they were tweedy laggards in need of a bracing lecture. The early cantos are full of humour and zesty New World egalitarianism. They are exuberant, learned, modern, funny, and also, in narrative terms, followable, though already starting to strain at the joins. In the later cantos, with their great collages of economics, statistics, social and political theory, unglossed segments of Chinese, French, Greek and Latin, Pound obscured the connections that might help us make sense of his project. Like a map with destinations but no roads, the cantos appear frightening, fascinating, rebarbative and barely navigable.

(Not So) Famous Seamus

In his recent broadside, The Whitsun Wedding Video: A Journey into British Poetry, Jeremy Noel-Tod wonders what will happen to Seamus Heaney when his fifteen minutes are up:

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), the favourite contemporary poet of passionate young Marianne Dashwood is William Cowper. His ‘beautiful lines’, she declares, have ‘frequently almost driven me wild’. Readers who are led to Cowper by Marianne will, however, be surprised to find him a moderate sort on the whole, relishing picturesque pleasures but always returning home for afternoon tea—a poet, in fact, who speaks to the more sensible woman Austen’s heroine will become.

Future generations may think of the present era’s passion for the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney as akin to Marianne’s for Cowper. Like Cowper, Heaney is a reflective, rural poet, moving easily between man and landscape, and finding a moral in humble objects evoked with a sumptuous accuracy of phrase (the ‘small jittery promise’ of seed packets, for example). Like Cowper, he ironises poetry’s grand manner with conversational self-consciousness and modest domesticity. Sonorous and memorable as many of Heaney’s lines are, it is hard to imagine anyone being driven wild by their carefully measured pleasures.

Both Cowper and Heaney are also ethically scrupulous writers who address the wider, darker world in poems that will endure among their most profound. But they are temperamentally poets who ‘cheer but not inebriate’, as Cowper said of his cup of tea—an important kind, but not the only kind. In a hundred years, the canon of our times will include stronger, stranger drink.

Alexander Hutchison 1943-2015

Metaphor in the Moment

Robyn Sarah explains how poetry gives form to insignificant moments or details:

People often say my poems trigger memories of things they had long forgotten, but that isn’t what I think of myself as doing when I write. I do recognize that as a poet, I’m (among other things) a documenter of detail and a documenter of moments, whether I’m writing about the present or the past remembered—but the mere giving form to “what might otherwise be lost or forgotten”, no matter how beautifully one records or describes it, is not enough to make a poem. The real question is why do these “seemingly insignificant” moments or details from the past come back to us? Or, if we are talking about present time, why do we notice the particular little things we do? I believe the details that catch our attention, or the moments that come back to us unbidden and insistently, do so because they are not insignificant. They have a metaphoric weight for us. They signify, in a language that the unconscious knows, though the conscious mind may not. What haunts us is not the moment but the metaphor in the moment.

Christopher Middleton 1926-2015: Reax

Carcanet website:

Christopher, born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926, grew up in Cambridge, served in the Royal Air Force, and studied at Merton College, Oxford. He taught at the University of Zurich, at King’s College, London, and was Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. Geoffrey Hill described him yesterday as ‘a major poet of our times’.

John Yau:

Middleton has gained a small though loyal public, which is the case with many poets whose work I care about, but, for reasons I find perplexing, he has never crossed the line into the realm of wider recognition—Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Louise Glück, Paul Muldoon, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, and his friends Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop are practically famous compared to him. Outside his books, you are not likely to come across his name; he isn’t mentioned on literary blogs; year after year, he isn’t listed among the nominees for prizes; and he isn’t a past winner of an award or fellowship we immediately recognize; he isn’t talked about as a teacher of creative writing—all those measures we use to determine a poet’s importance. As far as I know, he has never received a Guggenheim Fellowship or, perhaps better yet, if he has received one, he has chosen not to list it among his achievements.

Aside from these mainstream markers, you don’t hear him being mentioned as an example of some tendency, good or bad. Certainly, no ready profile, however misinformed and generalizing it might be, comes to mind when we think of him, which isn’t the case with his peers: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, andW.S. Merwin. In fact, I can think of many slightly celebrated poets whose work I don’t ever want to read again—even if I am stuck in a dentist’s waiting room, sitting next to the latest issues of the New Yorker—being embraced far more often, and tendentiously, in literary and semi-literary periodicals. And it is certainly easy enough to think of figures whose very names are mentioned in a hushed voice befitting a martyred saint—a status that Middleton has clearly shunned. What I am lamenting, however, is his absence from every list that I can think of, except neglected poets.

Michael Glover:

His poetry, which was rooted in a scholarship very lightly worn, drew its sources from whatever happened to be preoccupying him at the moment of its creation, be it Roman numismatics, a Cretan deity or the proud grace of a passing feline. He could be very fastidious about small things. He wrote well, and with a good-humoured, impassioned eloquence, about the animals and birds with which we are fortunate to share this planet. The word "creation" was one that he loved.

Middleton hated the ego-boosting reportage that often passes for poetry in our time, and what he dismissively described as "prosing". Art was too serious for such casualness, he believed. He believed in the power of the Muse to seize hold of and direct the powers of the imagination. Poems, which issued from a kind of elsewhere, were acts of creation themselves, not drearily dutiful acts of recording. "Language," he once said, "functions to create experience anew."

A poem by the late Christopher Middleton admired by RF Langley and JH Prynne pic.twitter.com/4VKSHK2oxK

— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) December 1, 2015

Susan Bernofsky:

I’ll never forget sitting as a teenager on the hot pavement of the tiny enclosed patio at 6744 Milne Blvd. in New Orleans—now a vacant lot thanks to Hurricane Katrina—reading Middleton’s translations of stories by Robert Walser and trying to figure out how he did it. My own first attempts at turning sentences written in German (a language I was just learning) into English prose were not going well. “The songbird songs heard already such a long, long time ago by human beings!” I wrote, trying clumsily to approximate the flourish with which Walser ended his “Biedermeier Story”: “Die Singvögellieder, die vor schon so langer, langer Zeit von Menschen vernommen worden sind!” Middleton’s version of this sentence was lyrical, offhandedly elegant: “All the songs of singing birds heard by people such a long, long time ago!” Check out the assonance of “birds” and “heard” that gives this line its artful caesura, rhythmically setting up the reader to place another well-timed (if more muted) caesura after “people.” The line sings, it’s translation-by-poet.

Christopher Middleton (1926 - 2015), from *Collected Poems* (Carcanet 2008) pic.twitter.com/h6RzpExjyE

— LRB Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) December 2, 2015

rainydaysunshinegirl:

I had him for a Comp Lit poetry seminar when I was a grad student in Slavic Lit at Univ. of Texas in the 1990's. He was droll and irritable. Loved Georg Trakl, I remember that. Had us over to his little house near campus to listen to Spanish classical music and drink wine. I'll never forget him talking about how his students were always trying to get out of exams: "Always some dead grandmother in the mix". Quite a character. Rest in Peace.