[New-Poetry] Poetry--Good, Bad, & Kleinzahler
Anny Ballardini
anny.ballardini at tin.it
Sat May 17 14:29:18 EDT 2008
As you say, Portrait of My Mother in January, the sentimental it is, it anyhow sticks with you, maybe because it has some sort of essential quality to it.
The Old Poet Dying is a perfected artwork - artword:
He pauses and begins to nod off.
I remember now the name of the river
he was after, the Cherwell,
with its naked dons, The Parson's Pleasure.
There's a fiercesome catfight
on the TV, with blondie catching hell
from the chicana.
He comes round again and turns to me,
leaning close,
--Well, of course, he says,
taking my hand,
his eyes narrowing with malice and delight:
--That's not going to be just any old snowflake,
now, is it?
As you know David, everybody understands whatever they want to understand, and my understanding of this final passage is just a sublime description of how poetry works. Thank you. And all the Italics passed through.
----- Original Message -----
From: David Graham
To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views
Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2008 4:01 PM
Subject: [New-Poetry] Poetry--Good, Bad, & Kleinzahler
Well, I'm all for discussing poetry on this list, even bad poetry if need be. . . . For comic relief in a poetry workshop class I often read my students excerpts from McGonagal & others of that ilk. There are any number of Bad Poetry anthologies to choose from. My favorite is X. J. Kennedy's *Pegasus Descending: A Treasury of the Best Bad Poems in English*, probably out of print by now. McGonagal's featured, of course, along with Julia Moore & other primitives, one of the gems in that line being an ode to the I.U.D. penned by an Indian M.D. whose first language was evidently not English. An ode to a prize cheese in Toronto is close behind. . . .
But just as much fun are the nodding moments of poets like Wordsworth & even Dickinson (who despite her fearsome love of her lexicon apparently did not know the colloquial meaning of the word "balls," to hilarious effect).
Switching from Bad to Good, or at least to Seriously Mixed, has anyone else seen the just published new-and-selected from August Kleinzahler? (*Sleeping it Off in Rapid City*, from FSG). I've been a fan of Kleinzhaler since *Storm Over Hackensack*, way back when, and one thing that this new collection has reminded me is how uneven he is. Even in a selected edition he includes wonderful poems alongside incoherent blurts and tedious pretentiousness. Which is to say, on the positive side, he's a restless quester always willing, like William Carlos Williams, to try just about anything. Or, on the negative side, that he's hit-and-miss.
He's even capable of a simple lyric like the following, which you know Kleinzhaler the reviewer would have ruthlessly skewered for sentimentality had it appeared, say, under the name Kooser in one of Garrison Keillor's anthologies:
Portrait of My Mother in January
Mother dozes in her chair,
awakes a while and reads her book,
then dozes off again.
Wind makes a rush at the house
and, like a tide, recedes. The trees are sere.
Afternoons are the most difficult.
They seem to have no end,
no end and no one there.
Outside the trees do their witchy dance.
Mother grows smaller in her chair.
Personally, I like this poem all right without going into any rapture over it. But it's interesting that this comes from the same poet who writes in so many other styles & tones. And there are poems in the "new" part of the book that I do think are "bad," by my lights, including a heartfelt elegy to Thom Gunn that is rather unfortunately cast as a song lyric "after Johnny Mercer."
One streetcar, then two, disappearing from view
A tortured dream
The fog blowing in, cancelling all that had been
Going street by street
Like a cop on his beat
Over the Great Salt Lake
Yeah, I thought about you
But when I pulled down the shade
Man, I really got blue. . . .
As Williams wrote to the young Ginsberg, "in this mode perfection is basic."
Here's a poem by AK that I like, a longer narrative piece originally found in *The Strange Hours Travelers Keep*. Sorry if the italics & lineation get screwed up in transmission, but I'm too lazy to go in & put in a lot of asterisks and spaces:
The Old Poet, Dying
He looks eerily young,
what's left of him,
purged, somehow, back into boyhood.
It is difficult not to watch
the movie on TV at the foot of his bed,
40" color screen,
a jailhouse dolly psychodrama:
truncheons and dirty shower scenes.
I recognize one of the actresses,
now a famous lesbian,
clearly an early B-movie role.
The black nurse says "Oh dear"
during the beatings.
--TV in this town is crap, he says.
His voice is very faint.
He leans toward me,
sliding further and further,
until the nurse has to straighten him out,
scolding him gently.
He reaches out for my hand.
The sudden intimacy rattles me.
He is telling a story.
Two, actually,
and at some point they blend together.
There are rivers and trains,
Oxford and a town near Hamburg.
Also, the night train to Milan
and a lovely Italian breakfast.
The river in Oxford--
he can't remember the name;
but the birds and fritillaria in bloom ...
He remembers the purple flowers
and a plate of gingerbread cookies
set out at one of the colleges.
He gasps to remember those cookies.
How surprised he must have been
by the largesse,
and hungry, too.
--He's drifting in and out:
I can hear the nurse
on the phone from the other room.
He has been remembering Europe for me.
Exhausted, he lies quiet for a time.
--There's nothing better than a good pee,
he says and begins to fade.
He seems very close to death.
Perhaps in a moment, perhaps a week.
Then awakes.
Every patch of story, no matter how fuddled,
resolves into a drollery.
He will perish, I imagine,
en route to a drollery.
Although his poems,
little kinetic snapshots of trees and light,
so denuded of personality
and delicately made
that irony of any sort
would stand out
like a pile of steaming cow flop
on a parquet floor.
We are in a great metropolis
that rises heroically from the American prairie:
a baronial home,
the finest of neighborhoods,
its broad streets nearly empty
on a Saturday afternoon,
here and there a redbud in bloom.
Even in health,
a man so modest and soft-spoken
as to be invisible
among others, in a room of almost any size.
It was, I think, a kind of hardship.
--Have you met what's-his-name yet?
he asks.
You know who I mean,
the big shot.
--Yes, I tell him, I have.
--You know that poem of his?
Everyone knows that poem
where he's sitting indoors by the fire
and it's snowing outside
and he suddenly feels a snowflake
on his wrist?
He pauses and begins to nod off.
I remember now the name of the river
he was after, the Cherwell,
with its naked dons, The Parson's Pleasure.
There's a fiercesome catfight
on the TV, with blondie catching hell
from the chicana.
He comes round again and turns to me,
leaning close,
--Well, of course, he says,
taking my hand,
his eyes narrowing with malice and delight:
--That's not going to be just any old snowflake,
now, is it?
--August Kleinzahler. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.
========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz
Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
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