trains, rhythm, and poetry

I read poetry on the L train most mornings. It’s easier on my shoulder than carrying around a novel, and when you think about it, it's really the most appropriate thing to do. Crammed uncomfortably close or not, simply being on trains produces what Hungarian-French theorists Abraham and Torok call a “rhythmizing consciousness”: 

In the compartment of a train, distractedly contemplating the receding landscape, I feel myself surrounded by a whole world of presences: my fellow passengers, the windowpane, the rumbling of the wheels, the continually changing panorama. But for a little while now I have been nodding my head and tapping my foot, my whole body animated by movements and tensions. What has happened? A radical change of attitude must have taken place within me. A moment ago, too, I was perceiving the monotonous sound of the wheels, and my body was receiving the same periodic jolts; but in the interval between the sounds, I was taken hold of by a tension, an expectation, which the next shock would either fulfill or disappoint. And so the jolts, which were merely endured before, are now expected; my whole body prepares to receive them. (Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis, p. 70)

The passenger stops noticing the rhythm of the train and only becomes aware of it when the train’s jolts either fulfill or disappoint an unconscious expectation. What a useful description of the experience of reading poetry.  

The train tracks’ clackety-clack in Auden’s "Night Mail" comes to mind ("Fact: Rap was made by English white railroad documentary narrators over 70 years ago," says a commenter).

There's also this delightful excerpt from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, posted recently on the NYRB blog. And since there's always room for a poem by Kenneth Koch, how about "One Train May Hide Another".

Reminder: Larkin event tonight (and two poems for those who can't make it)

Everyone here at FSG is pretty jazzed up about the incredible Philip Larkin tribute planned for tonight to celebrate the publication of his collected poems.

Readings will be given by Billy Collins, J.D. McClatchy, Zadie Smith, Andrew Sullivan and our very own Jonathan Galassi, among others. The Queens College jazz band will be performing some of Larkin's favorite jazz by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Sidney Bechet, and Duke Ellington live.

Best of all? Admission is free.

April 24 / 7:00 p.m. / The Great Hall at Cooper Union 7 E. 7th St., at Third Ave., New York, N.Y. / 212-353-4100 / cooper.edu

 

For those who can't make the event, feel free to get your Larkin fix from David Orr, over at NPR Books. He wrote up a lovely piece entitled "Grief in Greenness" last week, featuring the two spring-themed poems from Larkin below.

"Coming"

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

 

"The Trees"

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin Event Tomorrow

The Poetry Society of America presents: A Tribute to Philip Larkin on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Poems, edited by Archie Burnett and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

with special guests:

Meena Alexander, Martin Amis, Billy Collins, Deborah Garrison, Adam Gopnik, Eamon Grennan, Saskia Hamilton, Mary Karr, Nick Laird, Katha Pollitt, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Vijay Seshadri, Paul Simon, Zadie Smith, and Andrew Sullivan

and live musical performances of some of Larkin's favorite jazz songs by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Sidney Bechet.

Tuesday, April 24th, 7 p.m.

The Great Hall at Cooper Union

7 East 7th Street, New York City

Admission is free.

"variations on a theme by william carlos williams"

"There may be a perfectly serious poem, a good poem . . . and some other person writes a parody of it and one line of the parody may have more truth than the whole original poem, or at least be freer to reach the intoxicating heights that sometimes seem where truth is from."—Kenneth Koch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

—Kenneth Koch

FSG & Mad Men

On the most recent episode of Mad Men, Ken Cosgrove sits down to lunch with an editor from FSG (yes, we blushed). Cosgrove calls the publishing house “Farrar, Straus,” though by 1967 it had been “Farrar, Straus and Giroux” for nearly two years. But hey, old names die hard—our receptionist still answers the phone with “Farrar, Straus.”

So, what was FSG publishing in the late 1960s? I dug up an old catalogue to find out.

Apparently, the late Sixties at FSG were all about Lowell, Berryman, Sontag, and Wolfe. The trends were New Journalism and New Criticism: 1966 brought the debut book of essays from the “brilliant young social critic…Tom Wolfe," Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, Lowell’s Near the Ocean, and A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot.

Some of the highlights from 1967 include Berryman’s sonnets, Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu, a collection of essays about Randall Jarrell (who had died two years earlier), and a centennial edition of The Golden Key with illustrations by Maurice Sendak and an afterword by W.H. Auden (pictured below).

Also, more New Criticism (Six Metaphysical Poets: A Reader’s Guide) and an adaption of Prometheus Bound by Lowell. In the introduction to the translation, Lowell's conservatism and the war really come through: “Half my lines are not in the original. But nothing is modernized," he writes. "There are no tanks or cigarette lighters. No contemporary statesman is parodied. Yet I think my own concerns and worries and those of the times seep in.”

By 1968, many of these writers were at the height of their careers: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet were all in the catalogue, though Berryman's long poem appears to have been published only reluctantly...and only in paperback.

Read more about the writerly Ken Cosgrove

And the Pulitzer Prize goes to...

Yesterday was a very good day for Brooklyn-based poet Tracy K. Smith. It was her birthday and, around 3pm, she got the news her third collection of poetry, "Life on Mars," won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The prize committee lauded "Life on Mars," calling the volume "a collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain." Congrats to Tracy and our friends at Graywolf Press!

You can watch Smith, an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University, read from her collections online, thanks to PBS's Newshour.

a lunch poem

This summery weather calls for a Frank O'Hara lunch poem. During his lunch breaks at The Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara would walk around Times Square eating lunch, smoking Gauloises, and dodging "hum-colored" cabs. I love the line "Everything / suddenly honks..."

"A Step Away from Them"

Read more: Groundbreaking Book: The Lunch Poems

On Larkin's Doggerel

Nearly everyone who has reviewed the new Complete Poems of Philip Larkin has commented on Philip Larkin’s doggerel—the “frequently scatological, often crudely misogynistic” poems, the “disposable juvenilia, unpublished verses…oddments salvaged from letters and Christmas cards.”

Does it really enrich our knowledge of Larkin to learn that the man who wrote “Church Going” (a poem about church in iambic pentameter) also wrote this untitled poem by “Shaggerybox McPhallus…the brilliant new Post-Masturbationist poet”:                                   

O what ails thee, bloody sod,
Alone and palely loitering,
The leaves are blowing in the quad
           And no birds sing:

 Along the lines of windows spring
The orange lights of cosy fun
The radiogram is whispering
            The day is done.
[…]

And this is why I shag alone
Ere half my creeping days are done
The wind coughs sharply in the stone,
            There is no sun.
[...]                                                                                                                                                                                       

I feel enriched, and here’s why. In his collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, Auden compares doggerel to “found art”:

If formal verse can be likened to carving, free verse to modeling, then one might say that doggerel verse is like objet trouvés — the piece of driftwood that looks like a witch, the stone that has a profile. The writer of doggerel, as it were, takes any old words, rhythms and rhymes that come into his head, gives them a good shake and then throws them onto the page like dice where, lo and behold, contrary to all probability they make sense, not by law but by chance. Since the words appear to have no will of their own, but to be the puppets of chance, so will the things or persons to which they refer; hence the value of doggerel for a certain kind of satire.(pp. 294-295)

Auden’s sense that doggerel verse rids the poem of its sense of having been intended seriously seems right to me. Maybe that’s one reason Larkin chose it—because it registers his discomfort with the serious tradition he was writing himself into. Pretending to be a “puppet of chance,” Larkin could release himself from the more serious act of putting pen to paper, while still allowing himself to write. How characteristic it is for the many-minded poet to step hesitantly into the most serious of houses.

Poetry out loud from Paul Muldoon and Bill Murray

In honor of National Poetry Month, a pair of FSG's wonderful interns—Angela, a contributor to this blog, and Aurora—have been helping us procure examples of verse on video.

Today's first clip is a heartwarmer featuring actor and comedian Bill Murray reading to construction workers finishing the Poets House back in 2009. "I agree with the top comment," Angela writes. "If this weren't on video, no one would believe it!"

  

In this second clip, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (and poetry editor for The New Yorker) Paul Muldoon reads "A Hummingbird," a selection from his collection published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010. As Muldoon explains, in his delightfully rich Northern Irish accent, the poem is based on snatches of conversation overheard at a garden party.

 

 

poetry & autobiography

NPR recently aired a 1989 interview with Adrienne Rich in which the poet discussed the role of autobiography in her poetry. Here's a highlight: 

I'm very much interested in the place of biography in poetry and in fiction, but I'm also interested in the place of fiction in poetry, and I think that there's a tendency, at present, to read poems as autobiographical statements, documents, narratives — and to miss therefore a great deal that's going on in them. If you ascribe each event to some actual event, if you ascribe each image, each relationship to some literal occasion, it seems to me that you run the risk of missing not only the poetry, but the fuller, richer, deeper aspects of the poems, which come not necessarily from the poet's biography, but from what the poet has seen, heard, drawn into herself or himself from other lives.

On the way to work, pressed against other riders of the L train, I started thinking about autobiography and poetry. When I used to teach poetry, I'd spend a week on the "confessional" poets. The unit inevitably expanded because my students loved them. It was partly my fault—I loved telling stories about some of the more colorful poets' lives. And yet, teaching the poems, I was always trying to drive a wedge between the poet and the poem, clearing a space at least for the recognition of fiction.

A few poems came to mind on the train.

Frederick Seidel's "Frederick Seidel":

 

There's the open honesty of "Meditations in an Emergency" ("Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.")

And Berryman, Henry, and Mr. Bones in any of The Dream Songs, but here's a favorite. About The Dream Songs, Berryman has said: "Henry is accused of being me and I am accused of being Henry and I deny it and nobody believes me" (excerpts from interview*)

Everything the man says is suspect. If I ever teach confessional poetry again, I'll start with this quote.  

*from "An Interview with John Berryman" conducted by John Plotz of the Harvard Advocate on Oct. 27, 1968. In Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Ed. Harry Thomas. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. Copyright © Harvard Advocate