1: The Mirrored Wedge
The popular arts possess the great advantage
of having no binding obligations
to that set of problems known as modernism.
At least, such obligations aren’t apparent
in the same way as they are for ourselves.
Sooner or later, we find we must confront them –
the Pounds, the Eliots, the Williamses, the Moores.
For there’s little indeed we ever do
that can’t already be found anticipated
in Spring and All, the Cantos, or “The Jerboa.”
So we turn to them in spite of ourselves,
while acknowledging what we find to our distaste
(the private languages, the use of foreign words
that assume an education beyond
that of our own slipshod, middle-brow pedigree,
the fetishization of archaic diction,
the linguistic inbreeding – in short, all
the ill effects of modernist cronyism).
By pretending to ignore them, at any rate.
In popular song, you have tradition
followed by the modern recording studio,
with little conscious aesthetic intervention
or transition between the handed down
on that side and whatever is newest on this –
though, to be sure, you do have “extra-aesthetic”
phenomena that interpose themselves
between Then and Now (such as consumerism,
the media, technology, the star system…)
that may serve for practitioners of song
in the same way that modernism does for us.
Invariably, however, they tread about
their own watershed far less gingerly
than we are ever likely to tread about ours.
Above all, they’re unconcerned with who did what first.
They don’t care who anticipated whom.
But at times we clothe ourselves in their unconcern,
and the mere fact that we are able to do so
provides another means of distancing
ourselves (better said: of discerning our distance)
from those whom we yet lay claim to as our forebears.
The popular serves as a mirrored wedge
via which we espy the cleft in the modern,
which is given us to occupy and maintain –
though some fools may attempt to fill it up
or daredevil Kneivals to overleap it.
Much Obliged
To you we owe the fact that we at least were clothed.
Indeed, we were enriched and treasure-troved!
You didn’t tell us how to unseam the stitches
or how to rid ourselves of unwanted riches.
But we owe it to you that we were clothed.
We’ve turned the mess you left to our best advantage,
though at times it seemed much more than we could manage.
While at first it was quite the noxious pile,
we’ve surveyed the full extent of it, mile on mile.
Yes, the dump you left behind is now our vantage.
And despite the trouble we’re still obliged
(although it’s true that you’ve never apologized).
You’ve provided us with our launch pad, our venue.
It’s how we assumed our distance from you.
Yes, for all the trouble you made, we’re much obliged.
2: Both Either and Or
Have we acknowledged our unspoken commitment
(the poets among us, that is to say)
to Freud’s epoch-making insight that either/or,
at least in the realms that are important to us,
is but a variation of both/and?
There are many phrases the poet puts down that,
although their gravity is unmistakable,
although they’ve a very definite pull,
confound the poet with respect to what they mean.
At times there is a swerve from an initial sense
which afterthought and revision cannot
recover. At other times what one thought one meant
fails to jive with what comes before or goes after,
and its position within the sequence
engenders awkward, unintended meanings, or –
worse – incongruity and self-contradiction.
At last, the salutary misgiving
intervenes (it comes as a relief – or it should)
that, if everything in a poem fully stacked up,
if it resulted in a rounded sphere
of unequivocal sense without remainder…
well, you wouldn’t have much of a poem, anyway.
Mature poets learn to anticipate
the situations in which, the circumstances
under which they’re likely to call upon themselves
to ritard, to slacken the pace so as
to allow the elements that they’ve occasioned
to settle upon their own configuration,
if only in agreement with themselves
(though of course the monarch-poet must dot the i’s
and cross the t’s if he isn’t to come to grief
with threats of insurrection, which often
voice themselves prior to stylistic advances).
An awareness that comes into its own with age
and experience, with the caveat
that this awareness is never complete, entire –
that something must elude the scribe. As Hegel said,
after all, the Egyptian enigmas
were enigmas for themselves as much as for us.
The Slanted Door
I don’t much cherish our disunity either.
“It seems you’re fond of disagreement. Or?”
Either one or both are right, or else it’s neither –
a fact that each of us would prefer to ignore.
Between two options there’s a slanted door.
Let’s huddle there in the archway and straddle both.
There’s more than enough room for both of us to stand.
In time I’ll come to back off from my oath –
you, to reinterpret your “or” by way of “and”.
To see eye to eye, it is true, we’re nothing loath;
it’s just we aim right past each other’s core.
When I attempt to meet you half-way, I’m an oaf;
if you agree with me for once, then you’re a bore.
Our mutual goodwill is ever damned.
When we meet, we meet in a middle never planned.
3: I Am Not That I Am
What is most likely to occasion the poet’s
consternation at this precise moment
in time would have to be the reader’s tendency
to ascribe the poem’s “narrative I” directly
to the living, loving, breathing, waking,
sleeping, doubting, affirming, thrusting, parrying,
waxing, waning, hesitating, recommencing,
poeticizing, prosaifying,
perceiving and apperceiving subject – namely,
that noumenon in the flesh, the “poet himself.”
Of course, who are we to blame the reader?
For it’s we who’ve allowed the “immediate I”
to use unmelodied verse as a vehicle
for its diverse insipid blatherings.
It’s become such a habit in recent decades
that readers directly interpret each “I” as
“I, the author, to whom these words appeal
and in whose name whatever manner of nonsense
they are able to conjure up is undersigned
with my being’s full authentication
and with it my entire comportment unto death…”
My Rod and My Staff and My Other I
I’ve got this portable rod in my bag
with a platform and a hat.
It allows me to stand off from myself
and to point to this and that.
I’m apt to use it a bit more often
than I’m apt to use my name.
It stands up for me so frequently,
folks often assume we’re the same.
It’s a measuring staff. I use it
to find out just how tall I am.
On its side it becomes a barbell
or a handy battering ram.
It’s much as if I were born with it –
we breathe in and out the same air,
though when I’m fair it tends to run foul;
when I'm foul, it tends to run fair.
I call it mine, but I keep it at bay
lest it hog my share of breath.
It doesn’t much notice who I am,
nor will it take part in my death.
* * *
Ooh baby, baby, we went walking through the park…
A doo-wop song circa ’57.
We assume the singer’s either taken this stroll
with the young woman to whom the song is addressed
or, if not, that he’s taken strolls like it.
To be sure, our audition of the song takes place
against numberless similar utterances,
and we’re never entirely unaware
that we’re well within the realm of convention, trope,
the unapologetic cliché, and so forth.
Still, we assume that the narrating I
is an apparel the singer eases into
as readily perhaps as into his own name.
“I’m youth itself and I’m singing its song.”
But things are not so simple a few years later,
when Bob Dylan, in “A Hard Rain’s a’Gonna Fall,”
details for us the nightmarish horrors
he’s seen (with his own two eyes or in a vision).
“C’mon – a 20-year-old Guthrie wannabe
from Hibbing – what’s he know about horror?”
Yes, but it’s a key moment in the history
of popular song. Poetry is suddenly
involved – maybe not the best poetry,
and overburdened, perhaps, with good intentions,
but a more or less successful experiment
in ascending up the steps of worded
melody past the zero level of solfeg
and the level just beyond that of boy meets girl
(no – I’m not disparaging the love song,
which “boy meets girl” falls short of…you know what I mean).
Did not Dylan’s early songs immediately
render problematic the “innocent”
identification of the writer/crooner
with the lyrical vox that signs itself with “I”?
And this pimply vox had to flee somewhere.
Where else, then, but into the unmelodied poem –
now abandoned as would be bards flocked to the song.
Abandoned to university art,
on the one hand (the Cold War manifestation
of what Gertrude Stein ceremoniously dubbed
“official art”), with its bad plethora
of literary magazines read by no one
and lingering commitments to modernist creeds
that have gone the way of the 12-tone row;
and to the 5th-grade classroom, on the other hand,
where schoolkids are encouraged to “express themselves”
in the versified prose that they are taught
to call free verse (nothing against pedagogy
or the pedagogical appropriation
of verse for instructional purposes –
it’s just we could have done it better than we did).
Verse is thus either “not-yet-Art” or “Art-no-more,”
and even the best-intentioned readers
have come to read all poetry as not-yet-Art,
believing that Emily Dickinson really
walked her dog before composing her poem.
Why shouldn’t they, when poets no longer live up
to an art they keep proving is an Art-no-more?
The Merman and Mr. Jones
Mr. Jones awoke, aroused his dog,
and sauntered on down to the sea.
A merman with a forking triton
emerged and bellered out, “It’s he!”
“Restrain your wrath, dear Sir,” cried Jones,
“and I’ll put you in a poem tonight!”
The mutt ran off as the merman declared,
“I recognize you on sight.
“You eluded my clutch the first time.
Now I’ve found you, forty years hence.
So you came across this abandoned hut
and made it your residence!”
He raised his fork aloft and summoned
his mermignons into a ring.
And they feasted on Jones’s every part,
right down to his sordid Thing.
The mutt returned in search of his master,
but all it found were his bones.
Something had happened, and he never
knew what – now did he, Mr. Jones?