The Best American Poetry

Two Byrons (by David Yezzi)

OK, it has been a day from hell--two days from hell, in fact. I don't know about you, but taxes were completely brutal this year. I envy you, if you are one of those fortunate people who actually gets money back! I more than envy you; I want to come stay with you and eat food out of your refrigerator. I'm also exhausted this morning. I was up until 2:30 finishing a review, for which I will receive a small amount of money that will then be reported to the IRS so that I will owe taxes on it next year.

I thought I might write about the blues today. I'm in the mood. I was planning to expatiate on the pleasures of Mississippi John Hurt's alternating-thumb base line on the acoustic guitbox, and how his treble-line melodies infuse traditional songs like "Stack O'Lee Blues," "Casey Jones," and "Frankie and Albert" with his singnature sound. Then there's "Candy Man." "Candy Man"!: "He's got stick candy that's nine inches long, / He sells it faster than a hog can chew his corn / Candyman, candyman!" But I think I'll do that tomorrow . . .

Instead, I want to quote from a book of Macaulay's essays that I picked up on the giveaway shelf at the library this morning. A free book! Things are looking up. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an English poet, reviewer, essayist, historian, and MP for Edinburgh. Here's a bit from his essay on Lord Byron, which I read on the subway on my way to work (I want to quote a bunch of it because, a) it's a great portrait of Byron and B) the prose rocks):

In the rank of Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others was mingled something of misery ans debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which he had attained a scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had a naturally generous and feeling heart: but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and most judicious training.

Macaulay goes on in this vein for quite a while. It's pretty good stuff, and wonderfully sympathetic to Byron, though not nearly as sympathetic as Auden's tribute to him in "Letter to Lord Byron." Auden doesn't name Macaulay, but it's critics of his ilk that he is skewering. In fact, there are enough correspondences between the essay and Auden 's poem that I can't help wondering if Auden had it partly in mind:

I like your muse because she's gay and witty,
       Because she's neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European city,
       And country houses long before the slump;
       I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
--It beats Roy Campell's record by a mile--
You offer every possible attraction.
      By looking into your poetic style
      And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You've had your packet from the critics, though:
      They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
      A "vulgar genius" so George Eliot said,
      Which doesn't matter as George Eliot's dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: "an uninteresting mind".

--DY

Modernist Mag (by David Yezzi)

I realize it’s cheeky of me to kick off my first day of guest-blogging on the BAP site not with a look at a best American literary journal but with one of the coolest poetry magazines from the U.K.: Agenda. I’ve followed Agenda for years, beginning with my time at Parnassus: Poetry in Review--more about the new issue of that estimable doorstop later in the week!--when it would show up in Parnassus's dilapidated one-room office on Union Square in New York crammed with news of that vital tradition of innovation and experiment called modernism.

Is it strange to think that there should be a magazine devoted to modernist poets coming out of England? Only last week, someone suggested to me that modernism had to a great extent bypassed Britain. True, the poems of Hardy, Edward Thomas, Betjeman, and Larkin might lead one to think this, but what of David Jones, Basil Bunting, and, more recently, Geoffrey Hill, who strikes me in many ways as the last of the modernists? Several years ago, Agenda put together a splendid special issue on Hill. (Others special issues have focused on: Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kathleen Raine, David Jones, R.S. Thomas, Thom Gunn, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Dale, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott.)

In fact, the modernist slant of the journal is not strange at all: it was founded by Ezra Pound and William Cookson in 1959. Agenda is currently edited by Patricia McCarthy, who co-edited the magazine with Cookson for several years before his death in January 2003. As Cookson tells it: "Pound liked the first issue and wrote, 'Pleased with Agenda. It don’t look too Poundista. At lease not too unadulteratedly.' "

The current issue is titled "Lauds," after Auden's poem from Horae Canonicae. I love the photo on the cover of young Wystan reading with his mother sometime around 1912. The little sailor suit just kills me. The issue includes tributes to Auden and to Louis MacNeice, both of whom had their centenaries last year. Peter Mumford, at the time married to Auden's niece Rita (whose sister Anita was a long-time editor at Agenda!), recounts family dinners in the Sixties and early Seventies with Auden in his essay "The Memorableness of W. H. Auden":

These dinners were very much family occasions; and as with all family reunions not without their tensions. Wystan enjoyed them because of his affection for a family he did not have, and because this was a place where the public figure, his face recognized wherever he went, could become entirely the private man. . . .

. . . Wystan, who always arrived promptly at six for his martinis, brought with him laughter, with irritation at times, concerning every-day things, and gossip about mutual friends. The local and the particular sometimes ranged into the universal. On one occasion, he was especially delighted by Martin Gardner's The Ambidextrous Universe (1964) which provided the scientific evidence for Nature having a "left-handed twist."

That sounds like Auden down to the ground. The issue also includes a feature on Michael Hamburger and a host of fine poems, as well as poems by two "Broadsheet Poets," from the magazine's ongoing series of features on younger poets. It's well worth a look--DY

Why Auden is an Aquarius (by Jill Baron)

Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, 1905

When I read Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem he read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed.

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB

How Well Do You Know Auden?

Find out here.

-- sdh

Wind Makes Weather

   Winds make weather; weather
Is what nasty people are
  Nasty about and the nice
Show a common joy in observing. . . 

Guess the title of this poem and series of which it is part.

-- sdh

Gastronomical Perfection

   I feel now that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.
   Three or four people sometimes attain perfection either in public or in private, but they must be very congenial, else the conversation, both spoken and unsaid, which is so essential a counterpoint to the meal's harmony, will turn dull and forced. Usually six people act as whets, or goads, in this byplay and make the whole more casual, if, perhaps, less significant.
   The six should be capable of decent social behavior: that is, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison on the plates all must eat from. A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better acquainted diners could sharpen their questioning wits.
-- M.F.K Fisher
   An Alphabet of Gourmets

Quiz:  Name the poem written by W. H. Auden in response to this passage.

                                                                                                             --- sdh

Stranger in a Train Station

". . .if a stranger in a train station asks me my occupation, I never answer `writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer `poetry' would embarass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry. (The most satisfactory answer I have discovered, satisfactory because it withers curiosity, is to say Medieval Historian.)"

-- Auden, "The Poet & the City"

Dear Fellow Introverts

<< All Americans are introverts. >>

-- W. H. Auden, late in 1939. He had arrived on these shores in January of that year.

-- DL

On the Difference Between Authors and Critics

<<

There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics.

>>

W. H. Auden, "Reading" (in The Dyer's Hand, 1962)

-- DL