Showing posts with label Elizabeth Bishop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Bishop. Show all posts

Sunday 19 March 2017

‘Did someone call for a recitation?’ Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 5)

All poets, whatever they
may seem to others, die young. 
Tennessee Williams
Suddenly Last Summer.

You might say of certain literary outpourings refined by a classical education that there’s a recognisable constant observable in the writer’s cleverly wrought symmetry where a drama features the explication of a verse to parallel the plot or, correspondingly, the gestation of a poem provides impetus to the action.  

The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan springs to mind. And let us not forget Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, One Artwhen stumblingly reciting by Cameron Diaz in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005); or even those memorable WW2 epigraphs, Johnny-head-in-air by John Pudney (heard in the film, The Way To The Stars) and The Life That I Have by Leo Marks (issued as a code-mnemonic for SOE secret agent heroine Violette Szabo and recited in the movie, Carve Her Name with Pride). 

In this overcrowded genre, the masterly poet Roy Fuller’s novel The Carnal Island (1970) should not be forgotten. I suspect Robert Graves is the model for Fuller’s fictional poet and the poetry pastiched in this (I assume) reworking of The Aspen Papers by Henry James (a doomed visit to the shrine of  venerated poet) leads me to this view. (A specimen poem, entitled In a Barn near Beugny, adds substance to this conjecture and the birth year of the poet, 1890, makes him, like Graves, a member of the Lost Generation who came of age during WWI).

The instances of this literary form are legion . . .

Poetry as a Propellant of Plot:
Deborah Kerr as Hannah and Cyril Delevanti as Nonno
in The Night of the Iguana.

Echoes of the absurd . . . The Night of the Iguana.

Take, for instance, The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. A highly suspenseful device in the drama is the unfinished poem by Nonno, the elderly poet grandfather of Hannah, an itinerant artist, who like the washed-up Episcopal priest, the Reverend Shannon, finds herself stranded as a guest in a seedy hotel on a remote Mexican beach, where this introduction is made:

                    Revd Shannon: ‘And Gramps?’
                    Hannah: ‘He’s the world’s oldest living and practising poet . . . Do you 
                    know, he’s started a new poem. For the first time in twenty years he’s 
                    started another poem.’
                    Revd Shannon: ‘He hasn’t finished it yet?’
                    Nonno: ‘Did someone call for a recitation?’
                    Hannah: ‘No, Nonno . . . Just rest for a few moments, Nonno.’
                    Nonno‘How calmly does the olive branch* observe the sky begin to 
                    blanch, without a cry, without a prayer, with no betrayal of despair.’ 
                    (The tremulous speech trails off.)

What immediately strikes the discerning listener, however, in appreciation of Nonno’s verses, is how risibly their iambic quadrimeter resembles Lewis Carroll’s How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, itself a parody of Isaac Watts’s didactic poems for children, How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. 

Did Tennessee Williams nod, we wonder, when putting Nonno’s words on the ancient poet’s lips, or was the triumph of Nonno’s completion of his poem moments before his death an ironic hollow victory (by the playwright) over the pathetic fallacy? 

How differently, though, these absurd echoes of the pedagogic homily could have been resolved with the merest tweaks.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch
                    observes the sky begin to blanch
                    without a cry, without a prayer
                    with no betrayal of despair.

                    Some time while light obscures the tree
                    the zenith of its life will be
                    gone past forever and from thence
                    a second history will commence . . .



A Metrical Duel . . . Cyrano de Bergerac.

Of course, this lietmotif of the genesis of a poem emergent from dramatic action has a recognised precursor in Cyrano de Bergerac and his celebrated metrical duel :

                    Cyrano: ‘While we fence, presto! all extempore I will compose a 
                    ballade . . . Three eight-versed couplets. . . And an envoi of four lines . . . 
                    I'll make one while we fight; and touch you at the final line . . . 
                    (the refrain) . . .  À la fin de l’envoi, je touche!


Elegiac verses evoking Nabokov’s lost homeland.


To my mind, however (within, of course, the delimited horizons of my own reading), only one poet – an incomparable master of two languages – has evoked with nigh sorcerous alchemy the process of a poem’s gestation as a parable of the eternal émigré’s homesickness of the dispossessed. 

Many critics consider Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1935-1937) as the masterpiece most faithful to the ‘local consciousness’ of his genius as a young man in exile on the brink of world recognition. It is also regarded as the crowning achievement of the first phase of his literary career and the virtuoso swansong of those novels he wrote in Russian.

A reimagining of Nabokov’s own life in Berlin (1922-1937), The Gift tells of a young Russian poet, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and of his growth as an exiled writer following his family’s flight from the Bolshevik Revolution. 

I will conclude, with veneration, by quoting those supersensory passages that chart with astonishing clear-sightedness the evolution of his elegiac verses evoking his lost homeland . . . and that movingly convey the paradoxically ineffable rapture of a writer in the moment of triumphant expression.

Early Snow by
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kryzhitsky (1858-1911) 

. . . Fyodor began pacing the side-walk to the corner and back. The street was echoic and completely empty. High above it milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its own transverse wire; beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and close by, rang out ‘Thank you, my land, for your remotest . . .’ and immediately, on a returning wave, ‘most cruel mist my thanks are due. . . .’ And again, flying off in search of an answer: ‘. . . by you unnoticed. . . .’ He was somnambulistically talking to himself as he paced a nonexistent sidewalk; his feet were guided by local consciousness, while the principal Fyodor Konstantinovich, and in fact the only Fyodor Konstantinovich that mattered, was already peering into the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging some yards away and which was destined to resolve itself in a yet-unknown but specifically promised harmony. ‘Thank you, my land . . .’ he began again, aloud, gathering momentum afresh, but suddenly the sidewalk turned back to stone under his feet, everything around him began speaking at once, and, instantly sobered, he hurried to the door of his house, for now there was a light behind it. 
. . . 
A moment later, in bed, just as his thoughts had begun to settle down for the night and his heart to sink in the snow of slumber (he always had palpitations when falling asleep), Fyodor ventured imprudently to repeat to himself the unfinished poem—simply to enjoy it once more before the separation by sleep; but he was weak, and it was strong, twitching with avid life, so that in a moment it had conquered him, covered his skin with goose pimples, filled his head with a heavenly buzz, and so he again turned on the light, lit a cigarette, and lying supine, the sheet pulled up to his chin and his feet protruding, like Antokolski's Socrates (one toe lost to Lugano’s damp), abandoned himself to all the demands of inspiration. This was a conversation with a thousand interlocutors, only one of whom was genuine, and this genuine one must be caught and kept within hearing distance. How difficult this is, and how wonderful. . . . And in these talks between tamtambles, tamtam my spirit hardly knows. . . .             After some three hours of concentration and ardour dangerous to life, he finally cleared up the whole thing, to the last word, and decided that tomorrow he would write it down. In parting with it he tried reciting softly the good, warm, farm-fresh lines: 

                                             Thank you, my land; for your remotest 
                                             Most cruel mist my thanks are due. 
                                             By you possessed, by you unnoticed, 
                                             Unto myself I speak of you. 
                                             And in these talks between somnambules 
                                             My inmost being hardly knows 
                                             If it’s my demency that rambles 
                                             Or your own melody that grows. 

                                             Благодарю тебя, отчизна,
                                             за злую даль благодарю!
                                             Тобою полн, тобой не признан,
                                             я сам с собою говорю.
                                             И в разговоре каждой ночи
                                             сама душа не разберет,
                                             мое ль безумие бормочет,
                                             твоя ли музыка растет . . .


According to a number of critics, this poem expresses Nabokov’s own yearning for wider cultural recognition while appreciating the inestimable ‘gift’ bestowed on him by his homeland; that is: his phenomenal memory of the lost domain that was imperial Russia as refashioned and restored by the unique perceptions granted him by his native Russian identity.

*Apparently, the written version of this poem in the original play used an ‘Orange Branch’ rather than the ‘Olive Branch’ included in the movie version; thus: ‘How Calmly Does the Orange Branch’.



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Friday 30 December 2016

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3) In the bleak midwinter.

Listening once more – as is traditional with us – to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast on Christmas Eve from King’s College, Cambridge, I was forcibly struck by the bathos of the penultimate line of Christina Rossetti’s celebrated verse, In the bleak midwinter.

It was a jolt.
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) 
English poet, in a chalk drawing by her brother, 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866.

Principally, I am disturbed by the rôle of the Wise Men and the ‘part’ they play in the drama of the nativity, which for Christina Rossetti remains unstated other than that their presence at the stable was requested only to poorly serve the demands of her rhyme.

                                  If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part*;

Agreed, the effect of utter simplicity in choice of imagery makes this poem a favourite of children, yet, all the same, I genuinely believe our inner child feels seriously let down by the poetess’s failure to tell us what a Wise Man actually does.  I mean, of course, that the poetess’s explanation, so far as it goes, is entirely self-referential . . . like that wretched new secular Girl Guides Pledge, which instead of exacting from the novitiate the promise to ‘do my best, to love my God,’ the oath now asks no more than ‘I will do my best to be true to myself and develop my beliefs . . .’

No. I think rather more pastoral direction is due in Christina Rossetti’s peroratory exhortation to the poor that they should bring before the Christ Child their gift of Belief, when her Wise Men seem to be entirely content with poetical circumlocutions.


Penultimate Line Re-evaluated in Accordance with Christian Equitability. 

[ The entire poem, intact, save for the re-evaluated penultimate line . . . ]

                                  In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
                                  Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
                                  Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
                                  In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

                                  Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
                                  Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
                                  In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
                                  The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

                                  Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
                                  Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
                                  Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
                                  The ox and ass and camel which adore.

                                  Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
                                  Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
                                  But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
                                  Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

                                  What can I give Him, poor as I am?                       
                                  If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
                                  If I were a Wise Man, I would faith impart;
                                  Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

HRH Princess Margaret
President of the Girl Guide Movement
1965-2002 
 
*Note also: Simon and Garfunkel ‘I will comfort you / I'll take your part’ (Bridge Over Troubled Water).  

See also Re-evaluated Elizabeth Bishop:
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)

Saturday 6 December 2014

No Poetic Makeweights, Thank You, Pastry Cooks Excepted . . . . . . . or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2).

When is a metrical makeweight ever acceptable to a poet?

Padding? Never!

Tennyson’s Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, for example, is not by the merest jot weighted with such dud ballast.

Tennyson does not stumble at his envoi by interpolating a school-marmish stage direction:

            So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
            Into my bosom (Write it!) lost in me. 

I ask this question because for some time now I have striven to reconcile my admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s much-lauded villanelle, One Art, with certain misgivings, which I expressed in an earlier post: ‘Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?’

           the art of losing’s not too hard to master
           though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even the charm of Cameron Diaz when stumblingly reciting the piece in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005), cannot redeem the parenthetical padding of that clumsy antepenultimate metrical foot, which to me always seems as though it’s been desperately shoe-horned into a fit unsuited to it. Metrically, it seems like – as we English say in the demotic – like a cop out. 


Pastry wrappers. ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

I can think of only one poet whose makeweights have been indulged by his followers. I am thinking of ‘the pastry-cook of poets,’ Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, whose brioche pastries were shaped as lyres since they additionally gained worth by the burden of his verses. You may remember that those who consumed his confections (bardic cavaliers who numbered Cyrano in their company), whose poems were regarded as currency, saw their screeds cut up for paper bags by Ragueneau’s wife in her perpetual war to defeat Orpheus by punishing the Bacchantes. 

As Mme Ragueneau says, ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

Yes. It’s one of the very few cases of utilitarianism in the history of poetry, apart from that other witty confection, Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis (Fence/Gate/Stile), created by Britain’s supreme exponent of la poésie concrète, the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, for his garden of contemplation in South Lanarkshire. 


The Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.

But, you know, it is my belief that the stumbling closing line that so vexes the reader of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art could have been fixed so very easily because the secret mechanism for perfecting the verse was hidden from her all along in her antepenultimate line:
I shan't have lied. It’s evident
Since the structure of a villanelle is surely to reconfigure the poem’s principle elements to extract new and surprising nuances (from such words as ‘evident’ and ‘intent’, say, which provide the secondary rhyme), then it should follow that, when the poetic metre is implacably trochee and suggestive of a revaluation of evidential experience viewed in maturity, the perfect trochaic component – far from being a superfluous padding out (Write it!) – should noticeably possess for the final inevitable clincher the inherent potential to practically write itself

In short, it is possible that a poet can be blind to the compelling dynamics of her own invention even while those dynamics are seen to operate with an irresistible momentum within the closed system that is a poem’s argument.  

As a gifted cryptologist declares in my recent post of November 16: ‘The correct solution can often be found hidden in plain sight . . . in this kind of business, we learn to recognise the Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.’  

In other words, even the most proficient magician can miss a trick.

So, in my view, the answer to the One Art problem has been embedded in the verses all the time, intrinsic to the text. And, therefore, the poem’s conclusion – defined by its own special impetus –  should/could more directly read:

            Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 
            I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
            the art of losing’s not too hard to master
            though it may look like evident disaster.

Well. Free of independent thought, driven only by the propulsive energy of the unique devices the poet had set in motion in her masterly verses, that’s what I would have done . . . had I been in her shoes.

Cameron Diaz
In Her Shoes

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Catechisms and Cliché : Fatuous Minds Think Alike or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)

I’m ashamed to admit I’ve taken agin a number of writers simply because, unknown to me, like Amundsen at the South Pole, they’ve trumped me by reaching the goal of our mutually contemplated journey first.

The harmless object of my ire is the poetess, Elizabeth Bishop, whose poem, First Lessons in Geography, reduced to ashes the bright ambitions I had when decades ago, at great personal cost, I first started to collect Pinnock’s early 19th Century Catechisms. If you are not familiar with Bishop’s ‘found poem’, then I should explain it’s practically a verbatim rendering of a page from Monteith’s Geographical Series, 1884, which as a pirated publication must have been a direct steal from Pinnock’s earlier works.

My purpose in pursuing Pinnock? Well, it was no different from Bishop’s in her pursuit of Monteith ... a love of a clarity of diction and directness in explaining the phenomena of this planet and our existence to a child. The page from my own collection reflects closely the language of Bishop’s Lesson VI and Lesson X, which I commend since my own efforts are now redundant.


Of course, this reduplicative thought calls into question the vaunted originality of acclaimed writers. Take Jane Austen’s most famous axiom. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’

My contention is that, like Pinnock’s prose, Austen’s structure follows the formulaic assertion favoured by late 18th Century expositors. The Universal English Dictionary of 1792 contains any number of constructions precisely like this: ‘... universally acknowledged to have been the author of the Gospel ...’; ‘... universally allowed to be the best Harbour in Great Britain ...’ etc. In my Pinnock's Catechism of Poetry, a volume in his standard series of primers, you may read a truth ‘universally allowed’ that Milton excels all others.  No Janeite scholar, as far as I know, has yet suggested that the aphoristic cadences of Miss Austen's prose owe much to schoolroom textbooks.

So like Miss Bishop, Miss Austen stirs doubts as to the nature of true originality, and prompts the inner questioning that should torment any self-respecting writer who shrinks from short-changing readers with banalities.

And before I leave the subject of Miss Bishop, I cannot escape commenting on perhaps her most famous work, her villanelle, One Art.

Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?


                              the art of losing’s not too hard to master
                              though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even the charm of Cameron Diaz when stumblingly reciting the piece in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005), cannot redeem the parenthetical padding of that clumsy antepenultimate metrical foot, which to me always seems as though it’s been desperately shoe-horned into a fit unsuited to it. Metrically, it seems like – as we English say in the demotic – like a cop out.


Postscript on Poetic Makeweights (December 6 2015)

For one solution to the One Art puzzle see my later post . . . .
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/no-poetic-makeweights-thank-you-pastry.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-3.html