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Sunday, November 17, 2002 |
I said I'd write about reading poetry in bars. I've been living an odd life since July: working in rural southern Maryland, living in an apartment attached to a restaurant/bar, while my wife and 2 stepdaughters stay in North Carolina. I work a compressed work schedule which allows me to have 2 3-day weekends a month, which I spend with them. But for two weeks at a time, I'm on my own.
I didn't start very well. In particular, I was drinking too much. I was buying wine and whiskey, having 2 or 3 glasses of wine with dinner, and then taking 2 or 3 shots after I went to bed. I'd wake up tired and hung over, get not enough done at work, come home unable to write, start all over. So I decided not to drink alone.
I started drinking in bars, mostly the one right next door, because a DUI is not one of my goals. The expense of drinking out means I've been drinking less, and when I get home there's nothing to drink after I get to bed. I feel better in the morning and I've started to get some real work done.
When I'm not playing music (my other reason for going to bars) I usually take a book of poems with me. To my great surprise, there's almost always some more or less drunk person who wants to talk about the book, and, when he (it usually is a man--women are understandably more cautious about approaching strangers, or maybe I'm just too old and ugly) discovers it's poetry, he wants to read some of it, or tells me about some relative who reads or writes poetry, or recites some piece he has by heart: Robert Service is most common, but there's Frost and Tennyson and Keats, and, once, Homer. Maybe there'd be different poets in a city.
Two books in particular made large impressions on my new friends: Tim Murphy's
Very Far North and Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey. Here are the title poems from each:
It Is Very Far North ...
Four giddy days are all that spring allows
the drunken bumblings of our honey bees
before a south wind, stripping petalled boughs,
turns apple into ordinary trees.
Ours have weathered blizzards, freezing rain,
a record flood crest, and a May snow squall.
Now only scab, inchworms, and hail remain
to rob us of an ample apple fall,
a brief lifting of limbs before the snow
grips them with such reluctance to let go.
Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
Scrambled eggs and whiskey
in the false-dawn light. Chicago,
a sweet town, bleak, God knows,
but sweet. Sometimes. And
weren't we fine tonight?
When Hank set up that limping
treble roll behind me
my horn just growled and I
thought my heart would burst.
And Brad M. pressing with the
soft stick, and Joe-Anne
singing low. Here we are now
in the White Tower, leaning
on one another, too tired
to go home. But don't say a word,
don't tell a soul, they wouldn't
understand, they couldn't, never
in a million years, how fine,
how magnificent we were
in that old club tonight.
I'll have more to say about these poems later this week--but ain't they grand?
8:37:43 PM 
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I should have said "mostly wrong-headed" about the discussion at Silliman's Blog: Kasey Silem Mohammad's part is pretty sensible. But the whole thing began here, with a discussion of Barbara Guest, whose poems Silliman describes as being "as closed as a sonnet" and who he claims "has become the single most powerful influence on new writing by women in the U.S.":
At her best, as in the poem "Defensive Rapture," Guests paints a tonal language that tends toward aural pastels, constructed around points of contrast. Each stanza is exactly one sentence, in that it is bounded by a terminal period. Consider:
stilled grain of equinox
turbulence the domicile
host robed arm white
crackled motives.
What organizes this quatrain is how that third line deploys only one-syllable words, three of which end with a consonant of closure. It is precisely the prosodic complexity of the multi-syllabic terms elsewhere that generates the stanza's "turbulence," felt precisely because of their contrast with this penultimate line. Guest accentuates the difference with the marvelous crackled, which does in fact characterize exactly this strophe's "motives."
"Defensive Rapture" consists of 12 such quatrains, each with its own internal demands and resolution. A lot of where Guest is heading and focuses can be analyzed by counting syllables. Thus
commends internal habitude
bush the roof
day stare gliding
double measures.
could be schematized as
2-3-3
1-1-1
1-1-2
2-2
The busy-ness of that first line, accentuated visually by its length, is offset by the stillness of the second--not one single-syllable word in the stanza ends on a hard consonant--which expands in the third line with its two alternate "a" sounds in the first two words, aurally "gliding" into that last term, which returns us to two-syllable words, the last line almost physically demonstrating how strong Guest's instinct for balance & closure are.
Well. I think the only response to that may be from Auden's Letter to Lord Byron:
So started what I'll call the Poet's Party:
(Most of the guests were painters, never mind)--
The first few hours the atmosphere was hearty,
With fireworks, fun, and games of every kind;
All were enjoying it, no one was blind;
Brilliant the speeches improvised, the dances,
And brilliant, too, the technical advances.
How nice at first to watch the passers-by
Out of the upper window, and to say
'How glad I am that though I have to die
Like all those cattle, I'm less base than they!'
How we all roared when Baudelaire went fey.
'See this cigar,' he said, 'it's Baudelaire's.
What happens to perception? Ah, who cares.?"
Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and looked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in the corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.
5:32:56 PM
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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