The poem "Richard Noel" is Harry Thomas' slap at
obscurantist modernism in all its forms, resisting the lure of diffuse and the
oblique for the clipped, staccato version of Rudyard Kipling, although Kipling
himself would have furnished the fife and brass to accentuate and enliven the
rattatatat of the military drums. Thomas' poem is a rhythmic straight jacket,
the confined emotionalism of someone trying to keep their bleeding heart to a
steady, unexcited beat. If only if he'd actually let it all go to provide us
with something fiercer, more explosive than this soggy parody of Hemingway's
succinct, staccato effusions about a
Personal Code.
To finish the long profile
**his grade depended on,the afternoon before**the surgery, alone,he worked late in the library.**I saw him typing away.On my desk were his ten pages**the first thing the next day.Over the years I, too,**have had hard things to face.But when did I once summon**such fortitude and grace?
It is admirable, one supposes, that a student gets their
homework turned in on time despite an affliction, but this tribute, with its
hushed bathos, seems very, very silly indeed. There is something remarkable in
the attempt to overstate a point using such a crabbed rhetoric; the clichés and
the conventional wisdom toward the sick and the afflicted area boiled , chipped
and chiseled to their irreducible essences, leaving only a salty residue of
uninteresting thinking. There is ossification here, there is poet tasting, but
there is no poetry, such as we understand it. So what does one do to mend this
tendency of amateurs to compose and distribute this stanza'd insult to the
eyes? Exactly nothing. Nothing can be done to cure the lagging tastes of the
naive.
There is that large faction of the otherwise diminutive
poetry audience that likes its verse rhyming, rocking in a cadence that
suggests a three-legged clogging competition, stanzas that are morally coherent
and as comprehensible as a stack of pancakes, and the seldom discussed aspect
among the rest of us self-declared elites fighting back gag reflexes is that
this more or less a permanent state of affairs in this odd and contentious
corner of the literary world. For all the chatter some of us offer up about
being ecumenical. inclusive and appreciative of the broadness contemporary
contains with regards to style, aesthetics, and the subtly differentiated
concerns each of the coexisting schools collectively undertake to have their
respective poems achieve their results, many of us choke with contempt and
despair over the obvious if unacknowledged truth that doggerel, poesy, poet
tasting and all the loutish rest are permanent fixtures in the literary culture
that thrives beyond the ramparts.
There are no mass conversions forthcoming when it comes to
convincing the rest of the poetry world that they’d be better off reading the
stronger stuff. Consumers know what they want to read, and the amateur poet,
not beholden to particular school of poetics or allegiances formed while they
were a graduate student, will write exactly how they see fit, daring, strange
enough, to write poems that make sense.
I don't think there is anything subtle or understated about
"Richard Noël”. This set up is basically the plot line of the old ABC-TV
disease-themed "Movies of the Week", where the usual tragedy was
introduced in the first act, the resolve of the afflicted is tested as he or
she struggles to get on with their life is shown in the second, and the third
act concludes with the victim teaching a doubting observer a lesson amounting
to the life can be lived fully even with a hindering, perhaps fatal ailment.
These soapy melodramas were churned out week after week, and what their
popularity attests to is that this sort of by-the-numbers approach to conflict
and resolution is what the public accepts as the height of dramatic action.
What's off putting to me is the patronizing tone Thomas
takes toward his subject --the whole Kipling "Gunga Din" tone of
Imperialist paternalism (where there is the narrator's surprise that what he
regards as "civilized" virtues emerge from a heathen subject) weighs
this down with a sure paving of the narrative line to a limited series of genre
constrained conclusions.
It might be interesting for a writer to use this situation
as a reason for soul searching and critical self-examination, but that is a
tricky balance to achieve, the getting the details of the afflicted's situation
right with a delicately deployed tone , and having the narrator's introspection
not overwhelm the poem and make the poem a bottomless confession. And what
ought to be achieved by the third act, that final part of the dialectic, would
need to be an insight, an image, a phrase that is somewhat apart from the
previous two elements, something unique and not facile, as Thomas' finishing
stanza was in "Richard Noel".
The execution is competent enough, although there isn’t an
interesting rhythm anywhere in the poem. It’s hemmed in by its lack of
distinction or character. While I don’t the poet’s sincerity, this rhymes of
the sing-song variety; each time a line alights upon a previous line’s phonic
twin, there’s a perceptible crash, or a thud. It’s not that I’m opposed to
rhyme, but it is certain that in these days following the post modernist
insurrection a poet who rhymes should be exceptional. Thom Gunn gets the craft
write with his verse, bringing in associations that surprise the reader
expecting a vague gloss of the subject matter due to the presence of rhyme. His
work is wonderfully controlled, musical, artfully constructed without
indicating the labor it takes to compose with such a tuned ear:
The Man with Night SweatsBy Thom Gunn
I wake up cold, I whoProspered through dreams of heatWake to their residue,Sweat and a clinging sheet.My flesh was its own shield:Where it was gashed, it healed.I grew as I exploredThe body I could trustEven while I adoredThe risk that made robust,A world of wonders inEach challenge to the skin.I cannot but be sorryThe given shield was cracked,My mind reduced to hurry,My flesh reduced and wrecked.I have to change the bed,But catch myself insteadStopped upright where I amHugging my body to meAs if to shield it fromThe pains that will go through me,As if hands were enoughTo hold an avalanche off.
There are other poets who write a fine poem in more
traditional modes who haven’t sacrificed their wit; one may argue on
ideological grounds that the formalism one comes across is a reactionary
movement linked in spirit and practice to a more rigid culturally conservative
impulse, but for my part I prefer to judge the poet by the work. Eliot, Pound
and others where profoundly nasty people who did work that with stood their
propensities toward bigotry and general “A”-holism. It’s a simple matter of
judging what works in the poem, and what doesn’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated due to spam. But commentaries, opinions and other remarks about the posts are always welcome! I apologize for the inconvenience.