A Timothy Steele poem

Starr Farm Beach

Although the beach, with its adjacent r's,
Alluded to a dairy farm nearby,
We liked to think that, on the shoreline, stars
Were sown and grown and gathered for the sky.
Along the cliffs that led there, we would try
To find good foot- and handholds, and would weigh
The merits of the low road and the high
Or scan the waters north towards Malletts Bay.

Some evenings, from the cliff face, we'd review
The early piercing stars above the lake
And disregard their long-ago debut
To guess which were of recent, local make.
And we imagined if we stayed awake
All through the night, we'd see ghost gleaners, bent
Over the shallows, choosing stars to take
At dawn back with them to the firmament.

We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.

Timothy Steele
Toward the Winter Solstice


Steele has been classified as one of the "New Formalists" -- indeed he seems to wear that classification quite proudly.

This poem is braced in fixed form to the britches -- three eight-line stanzas, all lines iambic pentameter (four exceptions, two with clearly an extra stressed syllables, two with extra unstressed syllables), rhyme scheme ababbcbc. Not exactly an ottava rima, it's definitely octastiched together. (Thanks to my dictionary for that.) The tight construction lends the poem not just a pleasing concentration of language but a kind of delicate musicality... the only line that sticks out as flat-footed, rhythmically speaking, is the final line of the first stanza, one stressed syllable too long. After so many regular iambic lines, I don't see the advantage of lengthening the line with "towards", rather than simply "to". The distance to Mallet's Bay is pretty incidental. Oh well. Quibble quibble, you might say.

What I like about this poem is it's particularly clear evocation of the setting -- the beach by the dairy farm, the "r's" of the rolling waves, the cliffs with their foot- and handholds, the piercing stars, etc. I like poems that create a mind map of a place, with long views, short views, etc. It's rather cinematic. And a scene like this is relaxing to contemplate. It's like a guided meditation.

What I don't like, though, are a number things. Who is (are) this "we" that the poet presumes to speak from and for? This "we" meme -- I could call it the "floating", or "indeterminate we" -- I encounter quite a lot among contemporary poets. It's always annoying. Poets who speak out of contented, stable relationships, family, can speak perhaps of such perfectly shared experience -- but is it two people here, or five thousand? (Presumably not the latter, or the beach would suffer environmental damage.) OK, I imagine maybe two, three, four boys who played together. I often feel when poets use this meme that -- like the "royal we" -- they are lending a false authority to what is actually singularly felt and lived experience. It's complacent. Did they all (or both) imagine the ghost gleaners? And proclaiming how they "loved" the wild swoops and swings of the swifts, etc. -- assuming a shared ranking between them, with the stars they "loved the best" -- isn't it more effective to evoke the experience itself, rather than constantly impose the supposed attitude of the supposed onlookers?

"Alluded" to a dairy farm gave me pause (how does a beach do that?) -- it's a peculiar kind of pathetic fallacy -- but after considering that line, I gave it to the writer as more lively than lead to, or blended with, or whatever. (I actually give it credit: straining to imagine what it meant made me imagine more vividly the scene.) But I find, in that whole introductory sentence, the connection strained, and in a particularly unadvantageous way, as this is what the whole poem hangs on. Although there's this dairy farm, we "like to think" the stars are gethered for the sky... hmmm.. why would the presumed "we" like to think the stars were "gathered for the sky"? Why "gathered"? By whom? For what? Why "for"? (Unless it's all to fit that rhyme scheme... when my attention is drawn to that, we're in trouble here) Further down, would people on a beach really guess which stars are of "recent, local" make? (That "local" I also find dubious -- what stars are of "local make"?) Finally there are a number of really conventional (let's say hackneyed) notions at play here -- the division of "low road" and "high", or "lofty" and "low". At first it's quite literal, then, figurative, with a number of unexplored moral and aesthetic presumptions that go with. Although narrator claims it's a lonely impulse to connect the lofty and the low -- a questionable claim at that -- I'm not particularly made to feel that loneliness, especially if it is that damned "we" who are supposedly experiencing it in the poem.

All to say that there's a lot of interpreting -- commentary -- going on in the poem that "obstructs the air" and makes it downright stuffy, even tho we're by a lake, with birds, fish, stars, firmament (don't you love that old "firmly limiting" word!) and all.

It has been said that the obsessive reliance on fixed forms in earlier centuries reflected a fixed, finite universe, with God in his heaven ordering all, and everything linked on a golden chaine of concorde (from "lofty" to "low"). It would seem some semblance of that is in operation here. But it's not convincing. Let's just say that for me, at least, that necessary sympathetic contract between reader and poet only works for a few clauses... then breaks down among the moreovers and heretofores and in consideration of the foregoings that follow.

Thanks, Andrew, for pointing me to this poem...

SYMPATHETIC CONTRACT

John Ciardi in his anthology/critique/contemporary apology for poetry How Does a Poem Mean, describes a the sympathetic contract, the necessary bond of sympathy that must take place between poet and reader if a poem is to succeed:

"Every poem makes some demand upon the reader's sympathies. In addressing his subject, the poet takes an attitude toward it and adopts a tone he believes to be appropriate. His sense of what is appropriate, either in tone or in attitude, is of course a question of values. As such, it is obviously basic to the effect of the poem upon the reader. The reader may be right or wrong in disagreeing with the poet's values, but once such disagreement has occurred, that poem has failed for that reader. It is a question, as Robert Frost once put it, of "the way the poet takes himself and the way the poet takes his subject."

That demand upon the reader's sympathies may be made implicitly or explicitly, but there can be no poem without some sort of sympathetic contract between poet and reader."

After continuing in this vein with several pages of quotation and discussion, he challenges the reader to determine for him/herself how some 24 love poems, ranging from renaissance (Donne, Marvell, Lovelace, Herrick, Thomas Randolph) to restoration (John Dryden) to romantic + their contemporaries (Shelley, Byron, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt) to modern (Roethke, Nikki Giovanni, George Garrett, Diane Wakoski, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Edna St-Vincent Millay), more or less randomly juxtaposed, "ring true" … whether their tone and attitude are exactly what they profess to be. It's a hell of an interesting reading experience… one reason why, for those who haven't had the chance to peruse this book, I strongly recommend doing so. (How lucky for me the day I picked my copy off the shelves of a second hand bookstore here in Montreal…) In this selection, Shelley (in The Indian Serenade) fares pretty badly, as perhaps he was meant to with lines like

Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!

Donne (The Good-Morrow, Song) is so focussed on the rigours of his wit that I hope for his sake he had at least one good lay --
Dryden (Ah, How Sweet It Is to Love!), hopelessly dry, all talk talk talk, I think he badly needed good a roll in the hay --
Snyder (After Work) had obviously rolled, but could have benefited from a good four-poster bed with a canopy--
Theodore Roethke (I knew a woman) - he's a marvellous fellow, I wonder though: did he really know that woman?
etc.

Richard Lovelace's poem To Amarantha, that She Would Dishevel Her Hair, conventional as it is with "Amarantha, sweet and fair/Ah braid no more that shining hair!" wins me over with a spectacular ending:

Do not then wind up that light
In ribbands, and o'ercloud in night,
Like the Sun in's early ray;
But shake your head, and scatter day!

Amarantha must have been a catch. But so, too, must have Richard.

Seems I'm focussing a lot on lays here.... My actual feelings are too complex to set down quickly , so I resort to tongue in cheek, cheek to cheek, etc.… as far as sincerity goes, however, two poems struck me as sincere to depths of their words. And these are actually, in a way, dirges:

For Jane

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.

I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

That's by Charles Bukowski. Here, by the way, is another one by him that I very much liked:

Style

Style is the answer to everything -
a fresh way to approach a dull or
a dangerous thing.
To do a dull thing with style
is preferable to doing a dangerous thing
without it.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Christ
Socrates
Caesar,
García Lorca.

Style is a difference,
a way of doing,
a way of being done.

6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water
or you, walking out of the bathroom naked
without seeing
me.

The one that affected me most deeply, however, was the last selection in the group, perhaps placed by John Ciardi as a kind of last word on the subject… as I'm getting tired (it's past 2 in the morning as I write this) I'll leave it to speak for itself…

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED
Edna St-Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

PAPA WALT

What I'm saying here has been remarked plenty of times before, but maybe because some recent reading has smacked it once again into my face, it seems to bear repeating: if there's anything that is truly distinctive about American poetry as compared to that of other nations, if there is anything that truly distinguishes it, it can be summed up in one word: Whitman. (If you feel you've heard and read just about enough about Papa Walt, please feel free to click on to something else…) Sure, there are other currents- even at his time Dickinson and Poe provided very different poetics - but these seem like little eddies compared to the grand stream that followed Whitman's wake ("wake", by the way, in any sense you like it). Think of the poets who bear his mark, that expanded line, that relaxed diction, that joyful (even if anguished) cataloguing of everything: Pound ("Let there be commerce between us" - A Pact), Hart Crane (well, quite different in language sensibility, but yes--), Sandburg, the Beats (I think particularly of Ginsburg), Frank O'Hara, Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, Olson, Duncan, the langpo people like Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman… am I missing anybody important?

John Ciardi had some perceptive things to say, in the 1987 edition of How Does a Poem Mean, which I've been reading with great delight these last few weeks. After citing Song of Myself, #26, he writes,

Whitman fathered a large pretence that his catalogues were all inclusive, that every sort of detail was equally welcome to his mind. Obviously, however, certain kinds of images were more welcome to his sensibilities than were others. Whitman tended to welcome without reserve, all images of industrial expansion, of fruitful nature, of the brotherhood of man, of astronomy, of the bustle of urban life, and of physical strength, for example, but one will not find anywhere in his catalogues such satanic images as one may find in Poe or in Baudelaire. One only has to turn to "Prufrock" or to "Dirge" (Kenneth Fearing) to see two categories of properties that would never occur in Whitman, despite his pretence to all-inclusiveness.

There is, that is to say, some principle of selection at work. One can see certain kinds of images that occurred readily to Whitman's mind and were welcomed into his poems. And one can locate other sorts of images that not only were pushed away from the poems, but that probably never occurred to the poet's mind. (p. 245)

Only America could have fathered Whitman (and it's funny how the word father keeps coming up in reference to Whitman… Pound again: "I come to you as a grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father"), and only at the time it did. Now as America sullies itself, the world, and indeed the planet, poets who follow his lead have been forced to admit images into their oeuvre that Whitman was able to happily screen out. The challenge for those poets is to catalogue everything and still maintain that feisty affirmativeness - in other words, to throw away the pretence, and still celebrate - or at least not throw themselves off a boat or bridge as Hart Crane or Berryman did. A tall order.

Of course, we Canadians have no Whitman, nor anyone who occupies such a central place in our poetry. What I'm doing here is what most Canadians do: live as far south as our citizenship permits, and observe from the sidelines. That 49th parallel cuts us out of that enterprising American spirit as conclusively as any Berlin Wall. What I observe is that the out-and-out materialism/imperialism of America, which created Whitman, now produces a series of hollow political parodies, the latest and most egregious being George W. Bush. Culturally speaking, Bush is to Whitman what Hitler was to Beethoven. And what I do as a writer is what many of the powerless do in America: absorb influences from everywhere I can, and out of my limitations, speak anguish, speak joy, speak out of a kind of loneliness.