Written in Blood

M. Travis Lane fires the inaugural salvo in Anstruther Press's new Manifesto Series. Her pamphlet, Truth or Beauty, is, among other things, a call for poetry that can give us "the truth about what it is to be human."

Recently a new literary magazine, whose name I omitted to write down, declared that it would “eschew” publishing the “overly personal.” But the personal is where all poetry begins. There are, I agree, some subjects not suitable for public chatter, but poetry and prose fiction, demanding as artworks more of our private attention, should not be so confined. Should we censor the musings of Leopold Bloom? (Perhaps what the magazine meant by “overly personal” were feminist subjects like menstruation?) There are no subjects and no emotions unsuitable for poetry. There are only two kinds of poetry: poetry that seems to have been written with ink, and can be intelligent, charming, serious or cosy—but always cool, and poetry which seems to have been written in blood: passionate, personal, and sometimes uncomfortable. As Walt Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “Who touches this, touches a man.”

Matador of Art

Daryl Hine's poetry is often praised for its brio. James Pollock—whose "essential" selection of the late poet's work just been released—reminds us that there's much more to Hine's style:

The struggle of art against death is Hine’s great subject. As Edward Hirsch puts it in his book The Demon and the Angel, "highly formal and traditional work deepens immeasurably when one feels the primal murkiness threatening to swell up underneath the geometric clarity, the verbal concision and the ironic wit," and this is precisely true of Hine’s best poems. It is not so much that they "have duende" as the Spanish say; they are not inspired by death, exactly. Rather, they are engaged in what Hirsch calls "a hard-fought battle with the duende through formal means, in a formal arena ." In this sense Hine is like Horace and Paul Valery and Anthony Hecht: a matador of art, fighting the toro of death with consummate style.

Pollock also corrects other misconceptions about those "formal means."

Hine’s poems are almost always written in some exact meter, and very frequently in rhyme, and they tend to favour a fairly complex syntax and erudite choice of diction, though the variety of his meters, stanzas, rhyme schemes, forms, sub-genres and verbal registers is spectacular. Precisely because of their prosodic formality and grammatical complexity, they should be read naturally, conversationally, and aloud. The mistake readers not used to this kind of verse often make is to overemphasize the regularity of the meter; in fact, Hine’s lines are full of metrical substitutions, enjambments and syntactical cadences that play against the meter in a counterpoint that Robert Frost called ‘the sound of sense’. It is not at all that Hine "composed in the sequence of the metronome", to borrow Pound’s phrase, but rather that readers raised on a steady monodiet of free verse sometimes mistakenly read him that way, if only at first. The pleasures of reading Hine well are so great that it is more than worth the effort to learn how. And the more one reads his best poems, the greater the pleasure.

Bold Prose

Chigozie Obioma contends that the "literary humility" many writing workshops enforce is killing our prose. His message? Be audacious.

It is not that the “less is more” nugget is wrong, it is that it makes a blanket pronouncement on any writing that tends to make its language artful as taboo. When sentences must be only a few words long, it becomes increasingly difficult to execute the kind of flowery prose that can establish a piece of writing as art. It also establishes a sandcastle logic, which, if prodded, should crash in the face of even the lightest scrutiny. For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less. What writers must be conscious of, then, is not long sentences, but the control of flowery prose. As with anything in this world, excess is excess, but inadequate is inadequate. A writer must know when the weight of the words used to describe a scene is bearing down on the scene itself. A writer should develop the measuring tape to know when to describe characters’ thoughts in long sentences and when not to. But a writer, above all, should aim to achieve artistry with language which, like the painter, is the only canvas we have. Writers should realize that the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the side of audacious prose, that occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story—no matter how affecting—in inadequate prose.

He continues:

Our prose should be the Noah’s ark that preserves language in a world that is being apocalyptically flooded with trite and weightless words. “The truest writers,” Derek Walcott said, “are those who see language not as a linguistic process, but as a living element.” By undermining the strongest element of our art, we are becoming unconscious participants in the gradual choking of this “living element,” the life blood of which is language. This we must not do. Rather, we must take a stand in confirmation of the one incontestable truth: that great works of fiction should not only succeed on the strength of their plots or dialogue or character development, but also by the audacity of their prose.

Gunn Fail

Andrew McMillan believes Thom Gunn still hasn't been given his full due:

It would be easy to imagine that a combination of Gunn’s craft and depth of subject, his radiant handsomeness and his magnetism, would put him at the head of any table where the poets of the latter half of the 20th century were gathered. Yet he is oddly forgotten, half-forgotten at least; too American in style for the English establishment, too English and reserved for the American tradition. There is no full-length biography of Gunn, nor a full critical appraisal of his work; his legacy has not sunk, but seems to flounder somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Creative Activism

Stephen Collis—who last year was one of two protesting SFU professors hit with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit by energy company Kinder Morgan—talks about the "nexus" between poetry and politics in his own literary practice.

I have, slowly, come to think of this nexus as less about the content of poetry—not even a matter of the form of poetry—so much as it is a question of distribution and reception. Poetry’s political function has more to do with the contexts in which it is performed, heard, and read. My work as both a poet and political activist/organizer has come to be one in which I imagine myself as an embedded poet: I write and perform poetry, yes, but I do so increasingly within the context of an active social movement (a grassroots climate justice movement, organized alongside and in collaboration with Indigenous land defenders attempting to stop new fossil fuel extraction on and infrastructure crossing their traditional lands). I am a “poet,” but that is inseparable from the work I do as an “activist,” and when I am writing and performing poetry I am doing so as part of an active social movement. My commitments, in writing, are less and less, specifically, to a community of poets and a literary history than they are to a community of resistance and a history of social struggles.

Tart Words

Mark Levine recalls his first experience reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The spirit of the poem is punky and irreverent, spot-on in its mockery of the starched language of authority and smeared with the grime of its churned-up dream life. I don’t know a thing about Eliot, but I know a teenage wasteland. This poem feels like home: Not the one I live in, but the one that lives in me.

‘‘Prufrock’’ would become the poem that lent my adolescent self protection from the wounds of chronic alienation and gave me tart words to wield against the insipidness of the world. Eliot himself was barely out of his teens when he wrote it, uncannily in touch with the exquisite torments of hypersensitive youth, and with the peculiar burden of seeing through everything without having experienced much of anything. This was a different species of verse. It exuded cinematic urgency rather than exam-ready ‘‘messages’’ and ‘‘themes.’’ It was full of sudden rhythmic jolts and colliding tones, and could make emotional pirouettes on a vowel. Unapologetic, brash, discontinuous, ‘‘Prufrock’’ taught me the thrill of disorientation in language. No matter how often I returned, it was never tamped down by classroom-style explanations. It grew. It seemed to understand me more than I understood it.

Sunday Poem

GROUND TEMPERATURES 

My dream began in a park near a lake
that was fed and drained by culverts under
the fields depressed to gullies where willows
that had been pruned to stumps were beginning
to sprout again. The barn swallows circled
dogs who gave idle chase and who wagged
their frothed-out joy nonetheless. A man
who untangled a fishing line pressed a cell
to his ear with his free hand. Two women
in visors walked backwards. A deflated ball
bobbed on the yellow reeds. It was the one
frozen onto the lake in December. A shepherd
broke through the ice trying to get it. Gone. 

Then late in the summer as a stretch of heat
drove me into the basement. I behaved
as predictably as another argument ending
nothing inside our little house of mirrors.
I unrolled the mattress and a sleeping bag
onto the floor. I opened all the windows
and the door. I had finally reached the point
where I was willing to risk burglary, even
a personal injury to get some kind of breeze
into the house. And sure enough, sometime
during my sauna of sleep came the mercy
of pressure falling and of clouds gathering
into the glory of rain's hush onto the trees. 

After many days, the little lake spilled over
willow roots, gravel paths, knolls. The old
streams thought of salmon, the deft swipe
of a bear's claw. An eagle's ink-tipped talons
stretched for you—for me. Still our fierce selves
and still together in the fading light of dusk,
we stepped from the shore into the dark water,
but we knew that everyone must swim and dream
alone. Summer's bare sun returned; it heated,
simmered and stayed. People were begging—
some of us on our knees—for a good hard rain,
so we pleased each other like a deep blown
breath, because everyone feels better after that.

From Foreign Park (Anvil, 2015) by Jeff Steudal

(Painting by Mandy Budan)