Ovid's Amores

Ovid offers a concentrated-strength dose of a specific type of formal intensity that is rare in English. You would think that the place to look for it would be, say, in the showy rhetorical slipknots of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, or the tightly-knit couplets of Pope, or the crisp elegance of Tennyson's In Memoriam stanzas--and you'd be right, up to a point. But there's an I-don't-care quality running through, and maybe competing with, the metrical dressing-up, and it makes me think of O'Hara or Berrigan. Maybe Ashbery is a better example, the way he can make you half-think you're reading a polished piece of lyric seriousness just by affecting an appropriately lofty tone and inserting some judicious line breaks, etc. The hollowness that looms just behind the artifice in both cases--Ashbery's and Ovid's--doesn't deflate so much as it creates an added sense of depth, with the sense of space that word suggests.

The first four lines of Amores I:

arma graui numero uiolentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conueniente modis.
par erat inferior uersus: risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

[I was setting out to relate arms and fierce battles, in somber meter, so that the content accorded with the form. The second line would have followed suit, had Cupid not laughed, and as one might say, snatched away one foot.]

The joke here is that if the poet had followed through on his plan to write a serious epic poem, he would have continued in the six-foot heroic meter of the first line (dactylic hexameter), but when we get to the second line, we see that the poem is in elegaic couplets,* a form associated with, among other topics, erotic matters. The rest of the poem plays in this vein with the supposed indecorum of mixing amatory and martial forms. Much of the pleasure of reading these verses comes from Ovid's skill in playfully foregrounding the mechanics, materia conueniente modis, as he says. Thus the pure dactylic regularity of the first line, with its echo of the first line of the Aeneid, and then the four-word drama of the second line, where edere stands at the fore like a little professor confronting his unruly pupils materia and modis, which are in turn held at arm's length from one another by the very concept of conueniente that should unite them. It's stuff like this that has historically gotten Ovid the reputation of being a formalist goof-off, not to be taken as seriously as the Roman and Greek lyric poets who preceded him. Obvious parallels with the New York School and so forth follow.

The 30-line poem ends:

sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat;
ferrea cum uestris bella ualete modis.
cingere litorea flauentia tempora myrto,
Musa per undenos emodulanda pedes.

[Let my work swell up to six feet, then shrink to five; so long, iron war and your measure! Deck your blonde head with seaside myrtle, my Muse, who are henceforth to be sung in eleven feet.]

Great false start in the first of these four lines: it commences as a very heroic-sounding volley thumpeta thumpeta thumpeta ... then it collapses in the fourth foot with a thump || thump before resuming with a properly epic thumpeta thump thump. Nothing particularly unorthodox about this, even for a real epic, but the caesura nicely marks the division, smack in the middle of the odd spondaic foot, where the erect surging ends and the flaccid residing begins, so that the two parts of the line formally match their corresponding content--once again, materia conueniente modis. And I could go on, for instance about the way litorea myrto is split so as to frame flauentia tempora like an actual wreath, with the verb cingere overseeing the process like edere monitoring materia and modis back at the beginning of the poem.

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*One line of dactylic hexameter followed by one five-foot line scanning as two dactyls [for one or both of which a spondee may be substituted] followed by a single stressed syllable, then another two dactyls [same substitutions as above] by another single stressed syllable.

Guest Poet Dept.: Ian Wallace

Three Poems by Ian Wallace


Revision


After much midnight lucubration,
I have come to a startling syntax:

A different order until many a learned
acrobat tangled maple for waffle.

We lazed around syntax trees blessed
by Ahmad: suggesting vacation.

My equivocal expression can burn
the old mill with a bird’s eye view

Of that tempest--surely there’s variety.

Conclusion: more people gone and still
people find in a seasoning grammar.

The tide swashes in the restful decline of a
single sentence.

Funny you should say that.



Pastoral


An interesting old hippie’s
musical pipes and his high-caliber
sycadia rhythm covers hybrid
mindworks: moistened & dried.

Heidi and Alex tripping on the
town tonight: nocturnal cosmos
visuale; growing their hair long,
showing me reflection learned in
mosses, lichen, and slime moulds
(strange archive for the resistance)

Granulate morning, vibe for the decline
and fall of Scott Campbell: grocer and
groovy Space Buddha (thanks to the
ghetto mind-expander). Plantae, fungi,
Vector electronica. Galaxy sized fumes
label division and techno house scenery.

A rarefied cosmic slope controls
decadence while nearby your love
doodles seventh grade animalia.
Lots of Norwegian rabbits also
looked oriented--personalities intact
productions. Anaconda grooms and
slack algae beats, groggy of the day.



Aftermath


Ducks amidst the spray of broken glass

clutch on their naprosyn, scotch, and

vicodin: communities alone in woozy

hysteria. Thankfully the practice of taking

ducks into the mortuary confesses what

happened this evening. Ducks crowd around

skin hunting (so I have heard on BrainTalk Exchange)

leaving bribes from funeral homes, fire vehicles,

the ambulance. The nurse that was in neurology

came to give me the shot: You’re hard to just like!

(She’d have all her ducks, dump the ER). She

induces disintegration. Behold all my ducks in a row:

Doc Thursday remains alone. Old partner; my basic double

was not one to take vicodin and words another day.

Do you know what this means? In his hand the bottle and

scissors. “My Darling?” He sees and quickly burst of activity:

the ducks rode in rescuing me, going to feed incident to her.

Shelley's "West Wind"

Tim recounts an experience in college in which his liking for Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" earned him some smirks from other students and even from the teacher. Louts! That's one of my favorite poems ever. Here's the poem.

Ode to the West Wind


O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being--
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes!--O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill--
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere--
Destroyer and Preserver--hear, O hear!

Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning! they are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, ev’n from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height--
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst:--O hear!

Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear
And tremble and despoil themselves:--O hear!

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!--if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem’d a vision,--I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d
One too like thee--tameless, and swift, and proud.

Make me thy lyre, ev’n as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day!

This is one of those poems, which the Romantics could do better than anyone else, that reads as a sensitively-linked tableau of miniature set pieces. Every phrase, clause, sentence, stanza, etc. sits in relation to the others as a necessary element in the total drama of the poem's construction. The analogy that comes to mind is a storyboard for a film: moments in a diachronic temporal sequence that can be experienced as such (as they must be, for example, when a film is viewed or a poem is read aloud) but also can be experienced as a synchronic arrangement, apprehended "all at once" as a kinetically integrated cluster of units (visual images, aural and syntactic effects, etc.). Or, rather, the synchronic arrangement supplements and reinforces the larger diachronic effect, allowing you, on successive re-readings, to process the poem at each point as a finely calibrated nexus of anticipations and recollections. A near-perfect balance between naturalistic expressivism and conspicuous artifice.

Social?

David writes:

Why this sudden adverse reaction to categories and judgment, Kasey? Why this fear of my desire to explore the applications of this term?

David, did you misread "category-mistaking" as "category-making"? Just a guess. At any rate, I have no objection per se to categories and/or judgment, only to confused categories and judgments arrived at accordingly.

You write, David, that "the theoretical discourse produced by the language poets has tended to conflate the two terms 'social' and 'political.'" I don't see a problem with this, as long as the conflation is conscious and articulate (which, I'll grant, it may not always be). What I don't think is reasonable is to have it both ways, to have "social" serve at the same time as synonym for "political" and for the other things it can mean, such as "friendly," "(merely) social," etc. At least not in every case. I think you come close to doing this, for example, when you say that the voices in Andrews' poems are "anti-social," though this may just be a punning flourish. I'm not sure, because I'm also not sure what you mean when you say that "Andrews is a better political poet than O'Hara since his texts are riddled with a certain trauma we can only attribute to contemporary political, supra-personal conditions." I mean, I have a vague idea, but your meaning seems to be pitched at an absolute, abstract level that doesn't admit easily of being put to the test. You then say that "The political is always there in Andrews." Do you mean to suggest that it is there as an obstacle to the social, because it is imagined as an implacably hostile, anti-human force? That Andrews refuses to imagine solutions? If so, can't this very refusal be read as a social gesture, one that asks us to reject imagined solutions in favor of real ones?

Back to the topic of category mistakes. You write:

Is O'Hara a better poet than Andrews? I think it would not be difficult to argue that O'Hara's poetry comes much closer to achieving his ideals, as particularly expressed in "Personism: A Manifesto," than Andrews's work has in accomplishing his own project of producing a radical politics or praxis through disruptions of normative syntax, imagery and so forth.

Here's the problem I have with this: I don't believe that O'Hara's ideals are anywhere programmatically stated. "Personism" is so laden with irony and flirty non sequitur that it is difficult to extract anything other than the most general sincere statements of belief out of it (e.g., if people don't need poetry, "bully for them"). Most of the manifesto (maybe even that part) is gleefully self-contradictory. So it's not really fair or coherent to compare it to a poetics such as Andrews's that, however elliptical and disjunctive it may be in its written form, seems pretty clearly to be attached to a full-fledged agenda (or, even if turned out not to be, the conditions of its deceptiveness would still be different in quality from those of O'Hara). It's like saying that Rod McKuen is a better poet than John Milton because McKuen comes closer to succeeding in his goal of getting his readers to listen to the warm than Milton does in his goal of justifying the ways of God to men.

Antisocial Poetry

I don't know that I can add anything to this ongoing discussion between Tim and David, but at the risk of repeating points already made, making others that are too obvious, and ignoring others that need to be made, I'll offer a few thoughts.

First of all, the ambiguity of the term allows for several different definitions of "social poetry." Some possibilities:

1. Poetry pursued as a "social activity," as in "socializing" or going to a "church social." This could include anything from getting drunk at a party with friends and composing a group sestina to organizing a multi-authored, multi-national poem as a statement of celebration or protest.
2. Poetry that thematizes recognized "social issues" such as racism, pollution, war, etc.
3. Poetry that is deemed "social" by virtue of the conditions of its circulation and reception: it is written and read by a communal cross-section of persons who are conscious of their positions within particular social categories, such as liberal, conservative, anarchist, feminist, vegetarian, fascist, etc. The thematic content of the poetry itself may or not directly reflect these social orientations.
4. Poetry that is deemed "social" (or not) by virtue of some formal or theoretical principle applied in its composition: for example, a poem composed via chance operations, or in an asyntactic or otherwise disjunctive mode, might, on that basis, be considered to bear a certain symbolic or semiotic relation to certain conditions of social production, economic operations, political consciousness, etc. By an extension of this way of thinking, forms of poetry that do not engage such principles might be considered "naive," "retrograde," or "conservative" in a socio-political sense as well as a formal sense.

I have problems with that last part, but it does seem to be the case that one of the reasons for discussing social poetry in the first place must be the implication that there is this other, antisocial mode of poetry against which to position it. To me it seems beyond question that both Frank O'Hara and Bruce Andrews fit at least two of the definitions of "social" I've listed above. Neither one strikes me as in immediate danger of being labeled antisocial, and arguing which is more social feels like a perverse exercise in category-mistaking. So who are these really antisocial poets?

When in doubt, reach for a New Yorker. The April 16, 2001 issue (the one that happened to be in a nearby recycling bin in the Kresge College offices, where I'm writing) features the following poem by Robin Robertson on page 80:

Thermal


The side of the house came away
like a glacier calving,
opening up four floors
in a suck of vertigo:
staircases walking nowhere,
doors going into the air—
the bedroom wallpaper
now clashing with the lawn,
the full-length mirror
mirroring the sky.

The shell is broken
and the building's heat is streaming out;
my camera sees it as a white cloud.
I pick up residuals from the wiring
and the hearth, faint glows
from a sofa and the fogged-up
roll-top bath. It's like cracking open
logs to find fireflies.

I move around the city
looking for hotspots:
the heat signatures of love,
of too much blood;
one hundred watts at rest, rising
to a thousand in extremis.
Blackbodies, glowworms,
ghosts of radiation:
I track and root out heat,
its absorption and emission,
the white bed's infra-red, the bright
spoor of the soul's transmission.

Let's get it out of the way: it's hard to imagine a more thoroughly professionalized and typical piece of mainstream writing. Prop this poem up in a chair and it will teach an MFA workshop all by itself. It seems at first to be shapeless, but each area of surface is polished to a gleaming photo finish. The first stanza glides smoothly from metaphor ("a glacier calving") to metonymy ("staircases walking") to polite catachresis ("wallpaper / ... clashing with the lawn") to a simple image that gives the effect of commenting somehow on all that has previously been described ("the full-length mirror / mirroring the sky"). A deft little anadiplosis—the repetition of "mirror" at the hinge between the two lines—is all it takes to make the lines seem formally self-reflexive. And in the rest of the poem as well, all the lyric commonplaces are present: the seeing "I," doubled in this case by the speaker's camera, which also "sees"; the homey simile ("like cracking open / logs to find fireflies"); the extended conceit (of the thermal camera), especially in the final stanza; the infamous "lyric close," in which the material is fused with the spiritual in a moment of epiphanic transcendence ("the bright / spoor of the soul's transmission"). The poem is bookended by images of extreme cold ("glacier") and extreme heat. And so on.

My intention here is not just to rehearse yet another attack on Official Verse Culture using this easy target (but it is fun); rather, I want to ask whether there is any justification for enlisting the notion of the social, or its absence, in such an attack. Is this notion relevant, for example, on a thematic level? You might say that it is conspicuous by its absence, or by its conscious disruption: the fractured house with its unpeopled stairs and doorways, heated now only by traces of the bodies that once inhabited it. In the third stanza, however, it is human heat that the camera registers, and in an emphatically social context: "the city," "hotspots," "love," "too much blood." It's that "too much" that sets off alarms: the judgment implied, the distaste for biological activity. Even more troubling is the sour note struck by the proximity of "Blackbodies"* to this citing of excess. Robertson obviously has a sensitive ear for poetic nuance and connotation, so it's interesting that he should be deaf to this one very resonant area of semantic reverberation, in which a neutral scientific term threatens to evoke a recommendation for eugenics. This is made even more striking by the relatively positive mention of the "white bed" near the end of the poem. I'm not accusing Robertson of being racist. Let me make that clear. I'm just saying that a more "social" poet, according to some of the accounts that have been ventured by me and others, would be more likely to be alert to such loaded overdetermination. Another possible example of such social obliviousness might be the phrase "I pick up residuals," which I couldn't help reading at first as someone gloating about royalties. I could go on, but the point should be made by now: perhaps the social is something that is impossible not to include, but it can be acknowledged (or not) with varying degrees of consciousness.

I'll add that nothing I've just written seems to me to suggest any direct connection between the formal devices (some would call them cliches) I outlined in the poem and the moments of social cluelessness I went on to point out, except perhaps to the extent that one might become so intent on hunting down the perfect metaphor or symbol or other conventionally rhetorical means of rendering affect, that one misses other socially important stuff that is going on in the poem. And one of the reasons that that stuff might be considered socially important could be precisely that you didn't put it there on purpose like that other stuff. It showed up on its own, as it always will. You can pretend it's not there, but only up to a point. You want to talk about your glacier calving—that's when it really has a cow.


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*I didn't know exactly what a blackbody was, so I Googled it, and found the following definition: "A blackbody is an object that emits a well defined spectrum of radiation solely based on its temperature. [T]he hotter the blackbody, the more intense it is, and the shorter the peak wavelength. The picture does not say anything about what the object is made of, or how heavy it is, etc. It doesn't matter!"