Poetry Notebook (15 page)

Blah blah blah, and bling bling bling. Even then, none of the exclusive stuff excluded anybody who could afford the tab, and it’s all terribly familiar to us now; but it
was quite exciting at the time. Just not quite exciting enough. In prose, social notation through the listing of products had been taken a long way by John O’Hara, and J. D. Salinger had
already pushed it to its limit. (The limit is reached when anybody can successfully parody the style except the author himself.) In poetry, Sissman was already mining the depths even while he was
getting famous for it. There is a big hint here that vocabulary isn’t enough: there has to be a phrase, and quite commonly to be too fascinated with words is a bad preparation for the forming
of phrases. When not banging away with a stack of names out of showcase magazines, Sissman could use words from other sources – restaurant menus were a favourite – which told you all
too well that he had no real notion of connecting with his readers, except, perhaps, for the purpose of leaving them with the nagging sense that they should get out more:

Not only does it sound indigestible, the sound is indigestible. Sissman had all kinds of gifts – including the rare one of cramming a socially complex narrative into a
small space – but he lacked the crucial one that makes you remember a poem. He could place a word so that it stopped you cold, wondering why you were bothering to read him at all. Since his
vocabulary was so desperately modern – modern beyond now, more modern than tomorrow – we are forced to deduce that the crucial gift has something to do with establishing an impetus
which draws the reader in, and along.

The most spectacular American poet at the moment for his use of blue-chip commercial properties is Frederick Seidel. One of those poets who get discovered late in life, he made things hard for
himself by neglecting to write separately memorable poems. Instead he wrote, and still writes, poetry: poetry notable chiefly for its rich incidence of branded products so relentlessly top of the
range that you and I could never reach them with all our credit cards combined. Now of advanced years, Seidel makes it clear that the writer behind the work still shares the same expensive tastes
as the persona within it: like Malcolm Forbes in his dotage, Seidel goes everywhere by motorcycle, but the motorcycles in Seidel’s case are masterpieces by Ducati, built like jewellery and
described that way.

Eerily unruffled by the raging slipstream, his suits, when he arrives at his appointment with some young countess who leaves Sissman’s Honor looking like a waitress, are from a firm of
Italian tailors you won’t have heard of. The same goes for his shoes: John Lobb of London produces work boots compared with the things on Seidel’s feet. None of this, alas, sounds very
far from product placement: for all the undoubted vigour of his urge to register the minutiae of the privileged life – like Cummings he started off with the support of money from home –
there is a stickily over-made-up heaviness to the pictures he paints, rather like the sumptuous yet depressing visual odour that assails you when you flick through an issue of
Vanity Fair
in
search of the articles among the glamour spreads: and somehow the articles, supposedly factual, seem less so in a context where not even Kate Winslet or Anne Hathaway is deemed quite perfect
enough, and needs to have her waist trimmed and her legs lengthened. Photoshopping and airbrushing reduce things to an essence, but it is the essence of falsity.

The overload of high-society notation in Seidel’s verse, however, would be less onerous if he could more often develop his phrases into lines. Despite his unfortunate propensity for kiddie
rhymes, he can do phrases that pull you in like an Inuit fisherman whose hook is suddenly taken by a killer whale, but only very seldom do you find complete lines forming, and hardly ever does one
line generate another, as it once did in an early poem called ‘Morphine’:

Seidel, if he had wanted to, could have done that in every poem; have made whole poems instead of piles of glittering fragments; and have never needed to regret being
‘late for a fitting at Caraceni’, whose
bottega
– but of course you knew – is situated in Milan. Reading Seidel now, in my own old age, it saddens me that I have
spent my long life dressing like a student: like a slob, in fact. I should have put more art into the everyday. Seidel would have given us the makers of Auden’s tigerish blazer and dove-like
shoe. But he was never impressed enough that Auden didn’t. Auden didn’t need to give us the names, because he could give us the rhythm. In his greatest single short poem after the
Second World War, ‘The Fall of Rome’, Auden carved one line after another that was as contemporary as a Boeing Stratocruiser yet as classical as the tomb of Augustus. The poem concluded
with one of his most beautiful quatrains:

He didn’t even say where the reindeer were: they were just elsewhere. The rhythm welded the now and the then together. Evocation needs more than notation: it needs
impetus. You can’t Just Add Hot Water And Serve. Looking back with as much penetration as I can now achieve with tired eyes, I think I must have guessed that already, during those days in
Sydney when I walked around reciting E. E. Cummings to an audience of trees, traffic, and puzzled pedestrians. I didn’t just go for the bric-a-brac satires and the crazily lush love lyrics, I
went for lines that verged on nonsense. ‘To eat flowers and not be afraid.’ Not good advice in Australia, which has flowers you should be very afraid of indeed. But whatever he was
talking about, even if it was nothing, his phonetic force drove whole poems into my head like golden nails. Fifty years later I’m still trying to figure out just how the propulsive energy
that drives a line of poetry joins up with the binding energy that holds a poem together.

Held together, if at all, by not much more than kiddie-rhymes, the poems of Frederick Seidel, though often fascinating from point to point, are mainly not poems at all, but
instalments of a bulkier thing that we might call his poetry. I would call it a larger thing except that there is really nothing larger in the taxonomy of poetry than the poem. Though Seidel
obviously doesn’t think so, the ideal ought to be the separate artefact that the reader can take home. Seidel has a right to dissent from that ideal. After all, Wordsworth did. Wordsworth
wrote ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, which we can all memorize in its entirety, but he also wrote the ‘Immortality Ode’, which we couldn’t memorize in its
entirety even if we tried. I personally know a poet who did memorize it, when he was young, but later on he forgot almost all of it except the bits that you and I remember too. Those memorable bits
are surely the nub of the matter. It’s about them that our judgements are made: we rate a poet by the brightness of a glimpse. It might be thought at first that the Odes of Keats make a
nonsense of that idea. At one time or another I knew each of them by heart. But now, with age, I can risk confessing that I readily remember only the moments that excited my attention in the first
place. If I want to join those moments up, I have to look at the text. The moments, it need hardly be said, beg for such treatment. When I first realized that the title of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel
Tender Is the Night
was drawn from the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, I went back to the text and learned everything else that gave a context to the phrases and
lines I had remembered. In another Keatsian Ode, the ‘Ode on Melancholy’, the same thing happened because of the tenaciously memorable phonetic force of a single idea: ‘Then glut
thy sorrow on the salt-sand wave.’ The three stresses for the three syllables of ‘salt-sand wave’ worked like drumbeats around the tempo. And so on with the other Odes, with all
of which I have always been familiar. But I am always forgetting them as well as remembering. This might have something to do with a protective mechanism, a mental machine to ward off the
inhibiting effect of having a head full of too much perfect poetry by other people. Leaving aside the question of whether it might not be even worse to remember too little, it still might be best
to accept that you won’t get much of your own done if your memory is overstocked, and it might therefore be desirable to maintain your store of remembered poetry in the form of fragments, a
set of potentialities, splinters from a surface that imply a form. Memorizing a poem is a form of hero worship, to which there has to be a limit. Maria Sharapova, to help perfect her service
action, watched videos of Pete Sampras over and over. But not forever. Eventually she had to try it for herself.

At the court of the Shogun Iyenari, it was a tense moment. Hokusai, already well established as a prodigiously gifted artist, was competing with a conventional brush-stroke
painter in a face-off judged by the shogun personally. Hokusai painted a blue curve on a big piece of paper, chased a chicken across it whose feet had been dipped in red paint, and explained the
result to the shogun: it was a landscape showing the Tatsuta River with floating red maple leaves. Hokusai won the competition. The story is well known but the reaction of the conventional
brush-stroke artist was not recorded. It’s quite likely that he thought Hokusai had done not much more than register an idea, or, as we would say today, a concept. A loser’s view,
perhaps; though not without substance. If Hokusai had spent his career dipping chickens in red paint, he would have been Yoko Ono. But Hokusai did a lot more, and the same applies to every artist
we respect, in any field: sometimes they delight us with absurdly simple things, but we expect them to back it up with plenty of evidence that they can do complicated things as well. And anyway, on
close examination the absurdly simple thing might turn out to be achieved not entirely without technique. Late in his career Picasso would take ten seconds to turn a bicycle saddle and a pair of
handlebars into a bull’s head and expect to charge you a fortune for it, but when he was sixteen he could paint a cardinal’s full-length portrait that looked better than anything ever
signed by Velázquez. You can’t tell, just from looking at the bull’s head, that it was assembled by a hand commanding infinities of know-how, but you would have been able to
tell, from looking at Hokusai’s prize-winning picture, that a lot of assurance lay behind the sweep of blue paint, and that he had professionally observed floating red maple leaves long
enough to know that the prints of a chicken’s red-painted feet would resemble them, as long as the chicken could be induced to move briskly and not just hang about making puddles.

When we switch this test apparatus to poetry, we arrive quickly at a clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other
poets who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any. R. F. Langley, one of the school of poets around Jeremy Prynne, died in 2011. As an adept of that school, he had put
many dedicated years into perfecting the kind of poem whose integrity depends on its avoiding any hint of superficial attraction. Part of one of his poems was quoted in tribute by the
Guardian
obituarist, himself an affiliate of the Prynne cenacle. It was instantly apparent that the poet had succeeded in all his aims:

Impeccably bland, resolutely combed for any hint of the conventionally poetic, its lack of melody exactly matched by its lack of rhythm, Langley’s poem had shaken off all
trace of the technical heritage, leaving only the question of whether to be thus unencumbered is a guarantee of novelty. Hard not to think of how far modern poetry has come since T. S. Eliot
continually improved his technical command in order to make his effects by leaving it unemphasized, a vastly different approach to the question:

To write a stanza like that, with no end-rhymes but with a subtle interplay of interior echoes, the poet, we tend to assume, needed to be able to write the rhymed stanzas of
‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, and then sit on the knowledge. At the time it was written, even the most absolute of enthusiasts for modern poetry would have hesitated to point out
the truth – that the stanza was held together by its rhythmic drive – unless he further pointed out that it was also held together by the sophisticated assiduity with which it
didn’t rhyme. In other words, the whole of English poetry’s technical heritage was present in Eliot’s work, and never more so than when it seemed free in form. But since that
time, there has been a big shift in belief, and we are living with the consequences now. Ezra Pound might have insisted that only a genius should excuse himself from traditional measures, but he
soon decided that he himself was a genius, and several generations of his spiritual descendants either felt the same about themselves or – much more likely – took the new liberties more
and more for granted as time went on. The moderns not only conquered the fields of art, they conquered the fields in which art is thought about. The idea that form can be perfectly free has had so
great a victory, everywhere in the English-speaking world, that the belief in its hidden technical support no longer holds up. Or rather, and more simply, the idea of technique has changed. It is
no longer pinned to forms. If few territories go quite so far as Australia, where it is generally held to be unlikely that a poem can be formally structured and still be modern, nevertheless the
general assumption that beginning poets had to put in their time with technical training, like musicians learning their scales, is everywhere regarded as out of date. This near-consensus is wrong,
in my view, but you can see why it prevails. And it does have one big advantage. Though a poet who can’t count stresses and syllables might write mediocre poetry, there is a certain kind of
bad poetry that he won’t write.