by Clive James
The risk for any American poet following Robert Frost into a pastoral mode is to sound the way Norman Rockwell looked. It’s not the worst fate, but the aspirant was after something less comfortable and more intense. Wiman attains intensity often enough to remind you of just how great Frost was, and often there is a touch of another of his masters, Richard Wilbur: the apple butter like edible soil might have been on the menu if Wilbur had ever written a poem about a cheap American eatery.
But the best thing to say about Wiman is not that he reminds you of previous poets: it’s that he makes you forget them. His rural landscapes might start off by sounding like Seamus Heaney with more machinery, but soon they are all his. Wiman’s poem ‘Five Houses Down’, which caused such a stir when it came out in the New Yorker last year, is a piece of American Gothic so sharply seen that it brings back, for any reader in the English-speaking world, that eccentric junk-buff who lived nearby. If he never did, he does now.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch
with its oilspill plumage, tools
cauled in oil, the dark
clockwork of disassembled engines
Wiman has retained his childhood fascination with the disassembled engines, to the point where, though well capable of strict forms, he would rather take them apart and leave the pieces in approximate touch. Though an outstanding poem, an instant classic, ‘Five Houses Down’ is only one of his many backyard masterpieces, as if the Wright Brothers were still turning out flying machines at home. Actually the brothers had a flourishing bicycle business and Wiman is the powerful editor of Poetry (Chicago), but once those wide open spaces start to work their magic it’s hard to shake the impression that every complex mechanism in America was invented in a barn, up to and including moon rockets.
Rangy and soft-spoken in real life, definitely a Sam Shepard type, Wiman seems ideal casting for a would-be rocketeer raised in the flyover (he was born in West Texas), as long as we remember that only an extreme technical sophistication can produce such simplicity. He knows all about having more. You need to know that if you are plausibly to long for less.
Welcome to the hell of having everything:
one repentant politician on sixty screens,
van-sized vats of crabgrass toxin,
a solid quarter mile of disposable diapers,
all our impossibles pluralled.
Here one of his illustrious predecessors, Randall Jarrell, would have recognized a fellow sufferer, a sad heart at the supermarket. But Wiman can go only so far towards despair, because he has God for solace. On the rare occasions that I find a Wiman poem less than profound, it’s because it claims profundity, usually by employing an ellipsis . . . those deadly three dots that indicate a thought too deep to be dealt with just now. Such gestures towards the unsayable mark his religious poetry, which he might think of as his strongest, at this time when the threat of death is so real.
But we must hope that what this fine poet faces is more life, and the obligation to go on with redoubled force. In which case, the poems he writes will be among the best written by anybody, at this favourable time for poetry, when everything is against it – in the same way that the wind, blowing against the bows of the aircraft carrier, lifts the aircraft into the air. If one so often thinks of being airborne when reading Wiman’s work, it could be because he seems to be thinking that way too.
There comes a time when time is not enough:
a hand takes hold or a hand lets go; cells swarm,
cease; high and cryless a white bird blazes beyond
itself, to be itself, burning unconsumed.
Those lines are a fragment from ‘The Reservoir’: the longest single poem in the book and an indication of where his work might go next, towards larger constructions. It would be a welcome development, although not without its dangers. Even in ‘The Reservoir’, which I find enviably fluent, the ineffable looms. It’s so hard for a poet to be clear that anyone who can manage it should embrace his duty never to be any other way. More power, less smoke! But that’s the kind of thing we shout only at the greatly gifted, as they go flashing by.
MICHAEL LONGLEY BLENDS IN
Michael Longley started out in Northern Ireland at about the same time as Seamus Heaney. But Longley, over the course of a long career, has done a steadily more effective job of not doing what Heaney did. By now, with Heaney so firmly established on the international scene that he makes the secretary general of the United Nations look like a filing clerk on a short contract, Longley remains such a local poet that one would not be surprised to hear of his beard being taken over by squatting leprechauns.
There is still a serious gift, however, lurking among the shrubbery of his localized vocabulary. His new collection, A Hundred Doors, gives us a small poem that should settle any doubts about the intensity of the lyrical talent we are dealing with. It is called ‘Twayblade’.
Twayblade. We find it together,
The two of us, inconspicuous
With greeny petals in long grass,
Lips forked like a man, two leaves
Some call sweethearts, our plant today,
Fed on snowmelt and wood shadows.
For a while there, early in the poem, the reader must wrestle with the possibility that it is not the tiny plant, but the poet and his interlocutor, who are inconspicuous with greeny petals in long grass. But the last line is delectable, written as if meant to be remembered. If, however, you take memorability as a desirable criterion for any poem, many of Longley’s later things seem designed to circumvent it by itemizing the landscape with a thoroughness which would surely bring weariness even to a naturalist. A naturalist, after all, must occasionally rest, and see what’s on television.
Longley, when naming names, is rarely off the case. The Carrigskeewaun area was already present near the end of his Collected Poems (2006). Here it is again, with all its plants and animals. ‘Otters are crossing from Dooaghtry to Corragaun.’ Do they later cross back from Corragaun to Dooaghtry? Luckily, we trust him: ‘How snugly the meadow pipit fits the merlin’s foot.’
And that’s just the first poem in the book. As we delve deeper, we approach the landscape always more closely, and find the poet tangled up in it. This was already happening in the Collected Poems but by now he blends into the shrubbery like a sniper laying up for an ambush, or Dick Cheney out hunting his friends.
Firewood for winter when
I shall not be here – wild
Fig perhaps – white sap
For curing warts, scrotum-
Concealing leaves . . .
Good to know that the scrotum is safe from detection. Pretty phrases, though, keep popping up in the seed catalogue. All the children get at least one poem each, and a girl called Catherine will now always be remembered as ‘the harbour seal’. What a sweet notion. There is an appropriately well-wrought little poem about Chidiock Tichborne (not the famous claimant) who wrote a masterpiece before he was torn apart, and very lovely it is: ‘And now I live, and now my life is done.’ One of the great lyric poems in English, it can’t, of course, be matched, but Longley sensibly makes a subject out of its deeply underlying mystery: how on earth did Tichborne concentrate on the fabrication of so exquisite a thing when he knew that he himself would soon be dismantled?
A smile on his face, surely,
As he found the syllables
And the breathing spaces.
All poets will acknowledge that Longley is on to something here. The delights of composition are indeed wonderful. If Longley has a drawback – or if he has arrived at one after decades of detour – it is that he writes poetry more often than he writes poems. The self-contained, stand-alone thing has become more and more rare in his work. Back when the Irish boys were all starting off, some of them thought they would make it as singers. They had the towering example of Yeats looming behind them, but they were more impressed by his fey gush than chastened by his sculptural
monumentality. One of the reasons that Seamus Feamus (it was my joke, so let me use it) broke into the clear was that he put the poem before poetry. James Simmons, movingly lamented by Longley, was only one of the poets who found out the hard way that a tone of voice wasn’t quite enough. The hard way tended to be spread over the long run, and that made it harder.
But Longley himself is ever cheerful, perhaps because the land of his birth, always within reach, is a natural world that will never cease to move him to a phrase. In ‘A Swan’s Egg’ he handles a ‘century-old / Alabaster emptiness’ and notes the ‘collector’s particulars’ that are written around the black hole in its surface. The display cabinet is ‘Brimming with bird silences.’ We know that the egg’s history is safe with him. He isn’t going to drop it. Here is a wealth of noticing and sympathy in one little poem, ‘A swan’s egg among wren / Pearls and kingfisher pearls.’ The tactile tact, as it were, is uniquely his: a big man with a light touch.
Spectator Diary
This month has been the launching season for my new collection of poems, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower. Not many younger people, I have been discovering, know what a flak tower is, or was. Perhaps I should have called the book something else. One of the poems in the book is called ‘Whitman and the Moth’: it might have been wiser to call the book that. Early in the launching season I was asked to read the poem aloud on that excellent radio programme Front Row. The poem is a meditation on the old poet at the point of his death and I’m afraid I found the right voice for it exactly.
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I have been exhausted for more than two years now, by illness. Leukaemia is practically the least of my ailments. In a lull between bad stretches the Saturday edition of the Telegraph kindly asked me to review television. That was about a year ago and we have now completed my first year on the case, so this month has been my first annual holiday. I tried to time it so that the book launch could fit into the slot. When you are short of energy you have to ration it. So far I have managed to look busy by doing one thing at a time. Put it all together and it’s a decent fraction of the work I did before I fell ill. I still feel guilty, however, that hours go by when I don’t touch the keyboard.
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I doubt if illness improves the concentration. Though its individual perceptions take thought, a critical column is comparatively easy to construct because it is cumulative. This column you are reading now counts as a general column and it will have to have an argument. In a general column you have to tackle a subject, and my subject, by force of circumstance, must be about how I have been so sick that almost nothing else has happened to me.
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Or not much that shows. So far I’ve been lucky that way. Various clinics stick needles in me but I look reasonably intact. The major action is going on in the soul. Everything has become personal. Famously productive until his death, my old friend Christopher Hitchens had a memorial service in New York. Almost everyone I knew was there. I would have been there too but I was not allowed to fly. I was envious of them. Even less nobly, I was envious of him. I read his obituaries: he had attracted so much love. What would be said of me when I was gone? I almost was. Why not devote myself to the form of writing that has always mattered to me most?
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But poems don’t necessarily come to you when you ask them. It is more than six months since I have had a poem in the works. I suspect the direct reason is one of the drugs I am on, but there is an equal chance that I am simply in a dry patch. I was drugged to the nines when I lay in New York’s Mount Sinai hospital last year and wrote ‘Whitman and the Moth’. I pride myself on that poem’s nifty construction. When poetry doesn’t come, the first thing that doesn’t come, as it were, is a structure. The combinative capacity isn’t there. It might be there for prose, but with prose you know what happens next. With a poem, only the poem knows what happens next, and you must wait for it to speak. It can take years.
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Near the very end of his life, Hitchens wrote a brilliant piece about Philip Larkin. Some of his recent American admirers were surprised by how literature mattered to the Hitch but those of us who had known him longer knew that his love for the language was his bedrock. I was not convinced, though, by some of those editors among his American obituarists who wrote of how he would take home a huge new book and read it and review it in a single evening. I think he probably just reviewed it in a single evening.
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The Hitch’s afflictions hurt badly and he was brave to bear them so well. Those of us less painfully stricken are obliged to be of good cheer. The whole process of being kept alive against such relentless natural forces is, after all, very interesting. It takes all the science in the world. Most writers don’t see much adventure after they become successful. Well, here is their chance. The hospital that looks after me, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, might as well be CERN. And in addition to the luxury of being the centre of so much attention, one is contributing information to the last and greatest battle, between mankind and nature. Even as we waste away, the measurements of decline go to swell the data bank. One is thus less useless than one feels. My scientist daughter caught me making a bad joke about the failure of the proposed NHS central computer. She explained that such a computer would be an essential tool for the future. So there is a politics to one’s demise, like it or not.
BUILDING THE SOUND OF SENSE
While its subject was still alive, the first two volumes of Lawrance Thompson’s relentlessly hostile biography of Robert Frost had already come out, creating a lasting image of the simple poet as a manipulator without conscience. Journalists of all altitudes loved that image because it made for easy copy: cracker-motto bard envied real poets, etc. After Frost died, a third volume of the biography finished the job. On the basis of the complete trilogy of dud scholarship, published between 1966 and 1977, the opinion formed that the gap between Frost’s achievement and his real life was too glaring to be tolerated. Helen Vendler, justifiably regarded in the US as a guru in matters of poetry, pronounced Frost to be a monster of egotism.
When I last heard of her, Helen Vendler was proclaiming the virtues of John Ashbery’s circular poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which has been published in a limited edition circular book. While she deals with the vital critical question of whether the reader should turn the book around, or take a turn around the book, we can assume that if there is any further correcting to be done to Frost’s reputation as a monstrous egotist, it probably won’t be done by Helen Vendler. Too good a critic to be completely deaf to Frost’s poetic quality, she published, in 2012, an essay that praised his lyricism, but the essay did not do much to make up for her 1996 Paris Review interview in which she lavishly name-checked dozens of her touchstone American poets while mentioning Frost exactly once, and only in passing.
Luckily not even America – still a puritan culture in which an artist’s integrity must be sufficiently unblemished to impress Oprah Winfrey – has proved entirely devoid of critics and academics who can handle the proposition that the creator of perfect art might be a less than perfect person. Though Thompson’s hostility was a powerfully attractive theme for the kind of dabblers who would always rather read blame than praise, it could not quite offset the praise from such an expert witness as, say, Randall Jarrell. In his mighty little book Poetry and the Age, Jarrell showed for all time just how Frost worked the miracle of disguising the complicated as the elementary.
But although Frost’s artistic greatness is nowadays more widely acknowledged, it is still generally thought to be the output of some kind of simpleton. There have been further, and less crass, biographies since Lawrance Thompson’s, but they have had to fight a hard battle, as for a town already reduced to rubble. The damage that was done by Thompson still lingers. Deaf to a tone that made him the living echo of Iago, Thompson wrote to Frost: ‘The simple truth is that I love you.’ God help any artist who acquires so passionate a lover. Onlookers, thirsty for gossip, will always think that
there must have been something in it. To put Frost’s proper renown back on track, what’s needed is the re-emergence of common sense.
The new collection of Frost’s letters should help. Eventually there will be three volumes, but the first volume is already enough to prove, if proof were needed, that Frost was anything but the shit-kicking fireside verse-whittler of legend. When not actually practising his art, he thought about it so long and hard that it was a wonder he had time for anything else. His detractors would like to think that he found plenty of time to suborn editors, sabotage rival poets and practise infinite cruelties on his wife and family, but even his detractors must have noticed that he got quite a lot of meticulously crafted poems written. These letters are proof that his working methods and principles were the product of a mental preoccupation that began very early. Right from the start he had an idea of what a poem should do.
He wrote his first poems at home in America, but did not get as far along towards an acknowledged status as he had a right to expect. Eventually, when he was already thirty-eight years old – a late age to become an expatriate – he sought a more hospitable literary environment in England. But before he crossed the Atlantic in 1912, he was already regaling his American editors and poetic acquaintances with his considered ideas about poetry: ideas that add up to a conception of modernism still pertinent today. He talked of ‘skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’. This was an early occurrence of a key phrase: the sounds of sense, or the sound of sense, went on cropping up in his writings, lectures, letters and conversations to the very end of his life.
It was a true idea, not just an easy motto. Implicit in the idea was that the spoken language supplies the poet with a store of rhythms which he can, and indeed must, fit in counterpoint to the set frame of the metre. A hundred years later, very few poets want to face the labour involved in doing this.
