The Larger Light Show

Jason Guriel gives Clive James props for focusing on the "counterintuitive" aspects of poetic technique:

At bottom, James is loyal to poems, not poets. He’s concerned with the question of why some stretches of verse stick with the reader and why others don’t. It’s clear he has spent years white-boarding problems that contemporary poets no longer give much countenance. For example, most of us dabblers would delight to be able to manage a brilliant line or two of poetry per poem. But James is preoccupied with not just how to generate brilliance—feat enough—but how to muffle it slightly so that it serves a larger light show. As he says of Frost: “His easy-seeming, usually iambic, conversational forward flow is a deception, a way of not just bringing show-stopping moments to your attention but of moving them past your attention, so that you will form the correct impression that he has wealth to spare and does not want the show stopped for such a secondary consideration as brilliance.” Brilliance as a “secondary consideration” is, well, brilliant—a counterintuitive point at a time when the practitioners who tend to trend, like Frederick Seidel and Patricia Lockwood, specialize in show-stopping lines. Elsewhere, James reminds us that poets once taught readers how to pronounce a word simply by its placement in a pattern of stresses. He can talk couplets, alliteration, nuts, bolts. It’s not that Poetry Notebook is perversely arcane; it’s rather as if a ballet textbook had readmitted to its pages, after years of doing without, the pirouette.

Deadly Serious

Two weeks ago, a terminally ill Clive James published a poem in The New Yorker called "Japanese Maple." The devastating valedictory, which confronts his impending death, quickly went viral. Here are a sampling of the responses.

George Szirtes:

It is of a piece with the other productions of Clive James, intelligent, witty, skilful, highly crafted and, under the lightness, serious: deadly serious in fact.

Katy Waldman

What gives “Japanese Maple” so much of its throat-catching grace are its gentleness, resignation, and images that somehow achieve the emotional resonance of hard-earned wisdom.

Clive James http://t.co/2hk1Y7yK6v Would have been my entry in Poems that Make Grown Men Cry if it had been written when I had to choose.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 16, 2014

The Negative Accentuates The Positive

Declaring the American literary world a place where "consensus is considered normal and controversy is confusing," Clive James mourns the good hatchet job:

There was a time when the American literary world grew its own hatchet persons, and could rejoice in the thoroughness with which Mary McCarthy dismembered the reputation of Lillian Hellman. But among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners. Why this should be so is a bit of a mystery. It could be that the typical established publication has become too impressed with its own self-imposed status as a journal of record, which must confine itself to the facts; and that a complex, nuanced statement sounds not enough like a fact, and hence must be confined to the blogs, where nobody has any manners anyway.

What Did Dante Invent?

Michael Lista tallies it up:

He invented conceptualism; the idea of his book, and how it’s executed, is so brilliant that it predates by some 700 years Kenneth Goldsmith’s formulation that the best books are so good you don’t need to read them. The Divine Comedy is unlike any other poem in that its architecture alone is enough to make it famous; three books, or canticles, in the three realms of the afterlife, each containing 33 poems, each poem of which is composed of interlocking three-line stanzas, all pointing to the perfection of the triune god’s design. He prefigures the defining feature of post-modernism, the comingling of the high and low. For centuries scandalized commentators didn’t know what to do with Dante, who could marry the classical and the contemporary, who would dare debase the epic form by writing it in a vulgar vernacular, and pay equal attention to the afterlives of both the Virgin Mary and his political enemies. He revels in gossip, the come-back imagined too late, High Fidelity curatorial taste-making, and the essential, divine judgment of The Voice and The Bachelorette.

Verbatim

"Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It’s got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side."

Clive James describes his own relationship to bad reviews.

Sunday Poem

THE BOOK OF MY ENEMY HAS BEEN REMAINDERED

By Clive James

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I am pleased.

In vast quantities it has been remaindered

Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

And sits in piles in a police warehouse,

My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles

In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.

Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles

One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,

Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews

Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book—

For behold, here is that book

Among these ranks and banks of duds,

These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns

Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I rejoice.

It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion

Beneath the yoke.

What avail him now his awards and prizes,

The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,

His individual new voice?

Knocked into the middle of next week

His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys

The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,

The Edsels of the world of moveable type,

The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,

The unbudgeable turkeys.

The poem continues.