under

I pitched in to thunderclap!'s Poem-a-Day-April today in honor of the final hours of National Poetry Month. Amanda Deo has muscles.

another

Ryan Bradley gives a sweet review of my Don't Go Fish at Cow Heavy.

On Larkin, Later

Unbearable, no, and Seamus Heaney was wrong. Give me anti-Romantic Larkin any day, and don't tell me the Romantic jazz is necessary to make Larkin palatable. I refuse to believe that "bad" Larkin must be balanced by "good" Larkin -- or that "good" Larkin is anything more than real-life Larkin's attempt to thwart potential criticism or to simply appease audiences. "Bad" Larkin cannot be overcome by "good" Larkin; "good" Larkin, I think, works to reinforce the badness.

(Bad in this instance refers to the cranky, thinking, uneasy, misanthropic Larkin that appears in some poems, and Good refers to the lilting sort of Romantic Larkin that exists in other poems.)

What does rescue "bad" Larkin from ultimate gloom is not "good" Larkin but the form in which "bad" Larkin is presented. Form - the careful rhymes and meter - prevents (okay what may possibly be construed as) the more negative sides of Larkin's literary persona (for those that can't stomach a little dourness) from becoming just too negative.

Take for example, "Talking in Bed:"

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this care for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Though thematically dreary, this poem's precise attention to form and the lovely linguistic turns that result - and not the existence of other, more Romantic poems - makes this poem palatably dreary (if still dreary).

Form also serves to create finer nuances in the darker Larkin. In a poem like "An Arundel Tomb," form subverts Romantic interpretations:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

The slight deviation from the rhyme pattern in this final stanza - the off-rhyme "prove" and "love" - reinforces the imposed artificiality of love suggested in the entirety of the poem and perhaps also jabs at the artificiality of his own Romanticism presented in other poems.

Whatever it is, leave Larkin to his stewing and keep your Romanticism to yourself.

Later, on Schuyler

Il va neiger dans quelques jours
FRANCIS JAMMES

The giant Norway spruce from Podunk, its lower branches bound,
this morning was reared into place at Rockefeller Center.
I thought I saw a cold blue dusty light sough in its boughs
the way other years the wind thrashing at the giant ornaments
recalled other years and Christmas trees more homey.
Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event”
and then bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance
to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all
the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops
and how can I help falling in love? A calm secret exultation
of the spirit that tastes like Sealtest eggnog, made from milk solids,
Vanillin, artificial rum flavoring; a milky impulse to kiss and be friends
It’s like what George and I were talking about, the East West
Coast divide: Californians need to do a thing to enjoy it.
A smile in the street may be loads! you don’t have to undress everybody.
“You didn’t visit the Alps?”
“No, but I saw from the train they were black
and streaked with snow.”
Having and giving but also catching glimpses
hints that are revelations: to have been so happy is a promise
and if it isn’t kept that doesn’t matter. It may snow
falling softly on lashes of eyes you love and a cold cheek
grow warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.


The formatting, of course, is off, but here we have James Schuyler's "December" front and center. (I am eating corn on the cob. Rather: peeling wayward kernels from the page.) Several classmates have touched on Schuyler's month poems ("February," "October"). They're all lovely, but now that it's April, "December" seems the most appropriate.

We talked about Schuyler in terms of windows and painting, and I think this poem nicely reflects this kind of discussion. With Schuyler there is always a distancing of experience - images caught through glass or emotion wrangled from art. In "December" there is a constant contrast between seeing and experiencing. "Il va neiger dans quelques jours," French for "It will snow in a few days," precedes the poem and starts the trend: snow is coming but isn't happening, isn't something to be presently experienced.

But that's exactly how Schuyler seems to like things. The poem reads very much like a defense of this sort of lifestyle - what he thinks he sees. Christmas happens as objects, as memories, as Katherine looking through shop windows. There is no Frank O'Hara-esque direct experience, yet even so the speaker cannot help falling in love. He isn't a Californian; he's a man learning the alps through a window in winter.

where we've gone

Perrin Carrell and company have electrocuted this new poetry roundup they're calling allwritethen. Sounds pretty nifty to me, so I promised a shout out. You can also find me in there somewhere.