For the Tempus-Fugitives

by Christopher Norris

  For the Tempus-Fugitives

  General Editor: David Jonathan Y. Bayot

  For Val

  CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

  For the Tempus-Fugitives

  Poems and Verse-Essays

  Copyright © Christopher Norris, 2017.

  The right of Christopher Norris to be identified as Author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 978-1-78284-432-7 (PDF)

  ISBN 978-1-78284-430-3 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-78284-431-0 (Kindle)

  Published and distributed in the Philippines under ISBN 978-971-555-644-6 by

  De La Salle University Publishing House

  2401 Taft Avenue, 0922 Manila, Philippines

  This edition published and distributed under ISBN 978-1-84519-867-1 in

  Great Britain in 2017 by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS

  PO Box 139, Eastbourne BN24 9BP

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  All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of

  criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of the publisher.

  Cover Design: John David Roasa.

  Cover Image: Bernie Lira.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Norris, Christopher

  For the tempus-fugitives : poems and verse-essays / Christopher Norris

  — [Manila] :

  De La Salle University Publishing House, 2017.

  2017 254 pages ; 23 cm. — (Critical Voices)

  ISBN: 978-971-555-644-6 (pbk), in the Critical Voices series

  1. English literature—History and criticism. I. Title.

  Typeset & designed by De La Salle University Publishing House.

  Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall, UK.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  For the Tempus-Fugitives

  Diabolus in Musica

  Weather

  Lost Souls

  A Word Child

  A Family Business

  Naught for Your Desire

  Scissorhand (Matisse)

  An Epistle to Mr. Philip Glass

  A Moral Vacuum

  The Line of Duty (Sestinas)

  An Intermittence

  Epithalamion: For Jenny and Dave

  The Beauty of It

  A Difference of Views

  Neobule and Archilochus: An Exchange

  Budget Day, July 8th, 2015

  Strict-form Sestina for the Marquis de Sade

  Wife to Mr. Haydn

  Wavelengths

  Dylanelle: The Groucho View

  An Ancient Quarrel

  A Broken Music

  Days

  Hysteron-Proteron (Double Sonnet)

  Terza Rima for Terry (Meaning by Hawkes)

  On the Plurality of Worlds

  Beach Scene: Médusé

  Preface

  I

  It is not hard to find plausible reasons for the decline in popularity of the verse-essay, along with its (slightly) less formal sibling the verse-epistle, over the past century and more. The genre had its heyday in the eighteenth century among poets like Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Swift, and many nowadays less-known figures who used it to discuss all sorts of topics from politics and history to philosophy, religion, morals, literature, science, and their own day-to-day lives. This they did for the most part in rhymed and metrically regular verse with iambic pentameter very much the norm. There was also a strong preference for rhyming couplets with frequent use of end-stopping, i.e., with a more or less emphatic end-of-line metrical halt to the couplet just where the sentence or grammatical construction likewise concludes. The manner was thus highly formal, at least to present-day tastes, though in the right hands capable of great tonal, rhythmic, and stylistic variety, as will soon strike any responsive reader of a well-edited selection. Above all it was capable of doing things—arguing, reasoning, debating, controverting, reflecting on matters particular and general—in a way that very largely disappeared from English poetry with the advent of Romanticism and later movements of thought, whether post-, neo-, or (like mainstream literary modernism) officially anti-Romantic.

  I think that those things are still worth doing and that it is only through tunnel-vision or the set of generic filters imposed by the Romantic-to-Modernist viewpoint that readers now tend to think of poetry—“real” poetry—as simply or properly not in that line of business. William Empson, one of its finest practitioners, coined the word argufying to describe what he thought of as the right way to carry this off without sacrificing vigorous argument to the requirements of disciplined yet lively versification or (just as important) the demands of verse to those of argumentative relevance or point. His own verse-practice offered the best working definition: a mode (something more than “style”) of reasoning that doesn’t try for anything like deductive or strict demonstrative rigor but which none the less seeks the reader’s assent on broadly rational, reasonable, or common-sense terms. At the same time—and quite compatibly with that—the verse should have enough formal structure to carry on some fairly lengthy trains of thought without sagging or losing impetus while also having sufficient rhythmic variety and unexpected or striking turns of rhyme to keep the reader actively engaged. As hardly needs saying there has to be a constant interplay or tension between meter and natural speech-rhythms such that the two never perfectly coincide but set up an asynchronous counterpoint that again helps to stimulate ear and mind.

  Empson managed all this to marvelous effect, though perhaps the best examples are to be found in his later, more relaxed or conversational poems. His better-known early pieces—written while still an undergraduate at Cambridge and very consciously imitating Donne—are often so intellectually taxing or wiredrawn (so “conceited,” as Johnson said of the metaphysical poets) that they don’t fully meet the above (albeit rough) specifications. What is crucial is that the verse should carry the argument along in a natural-sounding way while also pointing up salient details, introducing nuances of tone or implication, and sometimes (especially through inventive or unusual rhyme-words) sending thought off in a new direction that very likely wouldn’t have occurred to a prose writer. This is how it works in the best eighteenth-century instances and how I have tried to make it work here, although with how much success of course only the reader can say. One thing that definitely won’t work for contemporary poets or readers is that heavily end-stopped line so characteristic of Pope and Dryden when delivering some weighty generalization, drawing some sententious moral conclusion, or skewering some literary rival. To modern ears it has an insufferable air of arrogance or assumed superior wisdom, as well as an artificial elegance all too redolent of social-cultural privilege. My poems depart so far from that style as to take enjambment as the norm along with a high proportion of lengthy sentences, complex syntactic structures, multiple subordinate clauses, and a liberal use of devices—such as extended analogy—that likewise hold out against any sense of premature or forceful closure.

  Giorgio Agamben has raised this—or something like it—to a high point of poetic-philosophical principle by maintaining (with reference
to Dante) that poetry just is, or is most essentially, language of the kind where syntax and meter fail to coincide. So if closure, or bringing poems to an end, has often been a problem for poets it is because the final word or syllable of a poem’s last line is the place where that enlivening tension, thus far sustained by enjambment, is itself of necessity brought to an end with syntax and meter more or less forcibly synchronized. I wouldn’t go so far as Agamben in making their disjunction the sine qua non of authentic poetry and their convergence a source of inevitable crisis or breakdown. All the same I would accept the more moderate claim that such effects of formal non-synchrony or irresolution play a large role in distinguishing poetic from prose discourse. One way of looking at modernism in English poetry is to trace it back to the Romantic revolt—most vehemently expressed by Wordsworth—against “poetic diction” of the kind (especially the eighteenth-century kind) that foregrounded that distinction. From there the story goes, in very rough outline, via the French Symbolists (who famously thought that poetry should aspire to the condition of music and hence seek to minimize its rational-discursive and referential aspects) to arch-modernists like Pound, Eliot, and the later Yeats along with those movements in literary criticism that turned their ideas to doctrinal and pedagogical use.

  Thus the modernists—albeit in their different ways—espoused a poetics of spatial form, made image and symbol the cornerstones of their aesthetic creed, and thereby managed—ironically enough—to place a maximal distance between poetry and that “ordinary language of men” that Wordsworth championed against the artifice of “poetic diction.” What helps to explain this odd turn-around is, I think, the growing prevalence of an anti-formalism that started out by identifying “artifice” with one particular, historically located set of verse-conventions and then extended the veto more broadly so that it amounted to a deep suspicion of any poetry that seemed to “argufy”—to reason its way or have designs on the reader—in Empson’s sense. This reactive tendency finished by creating a neo-symbolist mystique around the very conception of poetry that was shared—as Frank Kermode shrewdly remarked in his book Romantic Image—by Romantics and modernists, despite the markedly anti-Romantic bent of classicizing poet-critics like Eliot and Pound. These issues are raised, if obliquely, in the short poem here about Henri Matisse and the late series of cut-out colored paper-based works that were brought together in a highly acclaimed exhibition at the Tate Modern Gallery in April 2014. The epigraphs make a few relevant points concerning the aesthetics of this art-form, its relation to practical constraints imposed by the artist’s advanced age and failing state of health, and the whole question of how the art-world copes with such challenges to its normative or instituted values. But in the background of the poem there is that question of the vexed though at times creatively productive relation between image and discourse, symbol and statement, picture and verbal description, or artwork (poetry included) and commentary. These are dualisms—latent polarities, even antagonisms—that seem to emerge repeatedly in my poems and no doubt convey a certain defensive edge in the face of that romantic-modernist bias toward the first term in each of the above pairs.

  The epigraph from poet Fleur Adcock was included as a bit of self-irony or self-admonition on my part since she is saying that it took enormous courage for Matisse to break with every last formal convention of existing art-practice, and that this came with the kind of supreme though unassuming self-confidence that only true genius in a state of ultimate maturity can possibly bring. I’m not at all sure—defensiveness here no doubt kicking in—that getting beyond formalism is quite such a nonpareil artistic virtue, or that it has to go along with quite such a dead-set devaluation of other poetic virtues or claims on our interest like those I’ve been canvassing here. Besides, there is a strong formal component to the Matisse cut-outs without which their perhaps more obvious coloristic and sensuous elements would have no lasting appeal. Still the reader will have twigged by now that these poems of mine are not the productions of someone with a refined or highly developed visual-pictorial imagination. The truth is I don’t get “mental pictures” of the kind most readers describe themselves as getting even when I read what are commonly taken to be vividly descriptive or visually evocative poems. No doubt this aspect of (as the current wisdom has it) left-hemisphere cerebral dominance is reflected in the character of these verse-essays with their prevailingly philosophical, argumentative, conceptual, discursive, and theoretically informed character.

  If we’re to go along with Roman Jakobson’s bipolar taxonomy then this means that they belong very much on the metonymic as opposed to the metaphoric axis of his structural-linguistic grid. They tend to line up with such associated terms as prose, realism, classicism, allegory, metonymic displacement, and documentary writing rather than such presumptively antithetical terms as poetry, surrealism (or anti-realism), modernism, symbol, metaphorical condensation or substitution, and Barthesian écriture. Needless to say I don’t think it works out anything like as neatly as that. Indeed I should want to make the case that my verse-essays don’t so much fall short of poetry—or elect to do something altogether different—as take the alternative, predominantly metonymic path to ends or effects that, as Jakobson allows, are just as structurally complex and no less “poetic” once properly understood. There is also the point that this comparative scarcity or perceptible downplaying of devices like metaphor and symbol creates an implicit stylistic norm, and a background of readerly expectations, against which those figures stand out the more strikingly when they do turn up. It is a source of some powerful and haunting lines in poets like Auden and Larkin, so if I have brought off a similar effect on occasion then that’s a not exactly unlooked-for bonus.

  All of which suggests that the rejection of verse-forms such as those practiced by the eighteenth-century masters of formal prosody—or their few and most often marginalized successors—is apt in the long run to produce a poetry deficient in some of the attributes that have kept English poetry alive over the centuries. Basically they are those of formal structure and discursive or argumentative content, thought of as possessing an equal claim to good poetic standing alongside the other sorts of symbolist-formalist creed—those involving the notion of aesthetic autonomy in one or another guise—that have been more prominent over the past two centuries. So I would endorse some of Agamben’s ideas about poetry—not least because they fit in rather well with my own practice here—but dissent when it comes to erecting them, as he does, into a full-scale doctrine endorsing, in effect, only poetry that satisfies his own criteria as regards the essential (poetry-constitutive) role of devices like enjambment and caesura. After all, quite simply, poems have to stop somewhere and it is far from clear that their stopping (or occasionally end-stopping) with at least a modicum of decently earned assurance is something inherently fated to compromise their distinctiveness or quality as poems. My own practice tends toward lengthy run-on constructions—encouraged (or pretty much required) by the train of thought underway—so would seem to make at least a fair shot at satisfying Agamben’s formal demand. On the other hand when writing these poems, and even more when reading and revising them, I was very aware of the need to hold that tendency in check and sometimes introduce a few more places where meter and syntax conspired to offer an at any rate temporary resting-point linked to a moment of at any rate provisional stasis (or statement) in thematic-discursive terms.

  II

  Of course it would be absurd to reject the poetic credentials of a romantic-symbolist-modernist program that has plainly produced some magnificent poetry and done so, moreover, entirely in keeping with its own precepts. Still one may argue that when those precepts hardened—and especially when they became the basis of a full-scale program in literary criticism with doctrinal sanctions attached—then the outcome was a drastically narrowed conception of what poetry could and should achieve. What dropped out completely on that conception was the idea of it as doing some of the things that “ordinary langua
ge” does—like arguing, reasoning, putting a case, advancing a viewpoint, trying out alternative viewpoints, and so forth—but doing those things with an added cogency resulting from its various formal, structural, and stylistic attributes. Moreover it could do them without any loss of the qualities extolled by critics trained up on Eliot’s idea of what constituted English poetic tradition and its high-point in the early seventeenth-century poets and verse-dramatists. For as Empson showed, in his poetry and criticism alike, those qualities—wit, paradox, verbal ingenuity, multiplied metaphor, intellectual range, the unity of thought and feeling—could perfectly well go together with a poetry that didn’t shy away from rational argument or the business of actually stating a case.

  It was the US New Criticism, at its academic high point in the 1950s and 60s, that took the basic tenets of literary modernism and deployed them as the basis for devising yet further methodological, doctrinal, and (ultimately) ideological restrictions on what poems—good poems—ought to be and what critics were allowed to say about them. In the latter aspect this had the effect, and purposely so, of increasing the distance between poetry and everyday discourse by erecting various rules for the conduct of good interpretative practice. They involved the orthodox New Critical veto on a number of so-called “fallacies” or “heresies,” among them the recourse to authorial intention (poems were supposedly autotelic and hence quite beyond the author’s power to fix their meaning just by intending it) and the appeal to biography, history, or cultural background (poems possessed meaning in and of themselves—through “the words on the page”—quite aside from such presumptively extraneous information-sources). Here again I would adduce Empson’s largely neglected but utterly compelling demonstration, in The Structure of Complex Words, that both things can be had at once, and indeed that neither can be had in isolation. That is, a sufficiently acute close-reading will always lead us into issues of authorial intention along with biographical and socio-cultural-historical questions, while those issues and questions will always take us back—if we’re to have any hope of resolving them in the only way that counts—to an ever more attentive and close-focused reading of the text.