My further exploration of Dorianne Laux’s oeuvre has continued with Only as the Day is Long, her 2019 ‘New and Selected Poems’ (Norton). I’m surprised that no British publisher has brought out an edition of her poems, as I’m sure they would be very well received over here. They’re largely autobiographical, at times uncompromisingly frank – like many of those of one of her key influences, Sharon Olds – in how they address love and sexual love, mental health and sexual abuse. Like both Olds and Philip Levine, who was her mentor of sorts, Laux is over-reliant on the block-poem form, or at least, the selection in Only as the Day is Long makes it seem so. When read en bloc, block poems can resemble brain-dump splurges, in which stream-of-consciousness digressions and occasional non sequiturs are given free rein to run ahead of thought. The effect of this, without any Elizabeth Bishop-like periodic pauses, hesitations and tentative self-questioning, can therefore be a little wearying. However, when this mode succeeds, as in many of the poems from Smoke, e.g. ‘Fast Gas’, available to read and hear here, Laux is a dynamic, marvellous poet.
That’s not to say that Laux can’t slow her poems down, by using other forms; ‘The Crossing’, for example, from her fourth collection, Facts About the Moon (2005), consists of nine couplets. Courageously, it unravels an encounter with ‘The elk of Orick’, in northern California. I say courageously, because it takes an extra-large dollop of chutzpah to risk comparison with Bishop’s great poem ‘The Moose’, which can be read here. Unlike ‘The Moose’, Laux’s poem didn’t take 26 years to write and doesn’t first have stanza after stanza of (wonderful) ‘dreamy divagation’ (a scene-setting hymn to smalltown Nova Scotia) before the animal(s) finally appears; instead, it gets straight to the encounter, with wit and charm:
The elk of Orick wait patiently to cross the road
and my husband of six months, who thinks
he’s St Francis, climbs out of the car to assist.
As this opening indicates, the poem is effectively a love-poem. The description of the elks, one intuits, could equally apply to Laux’s new husband: ‘heads lifted, nostrils flared, each footfall // a testament to stalled momentum, gracefully / hesitant’. The mid-poem capture in words of the elks’ procession is magisterial and breathtaking:
[. . .] They cross the four-lane
like a coronation, slow as a Greek frieze, river
wind riffling the wheat grass of their rumps.
As in ‘The Moose’ the poem’s finale depicts a showdown with a female animal:
Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk
stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart.
One stubborn creature staring down another.
This is how I know the marriage will last.
What a fabulous chink of poetry this is, as lovely in its way as Bishop’s:
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
In its briefer, but no less compelling manner, ‘The Crossing’ is as much of a classic poem as ‘The Moose’.
There are several interviews with Laux online, including one, here, which includes this fascinating paragraph:
Poetry is a slippery beast, a shape changer, a beast with wings, a bird/dog, a hermaphrodite, a water bearer and light bringer, the life force rendered through language, a sieve, a chute, a cone of darkness, an aggregate stone. It’s changed me by reading it, though not in a way I can speak of. It’s a feeling inside a thought inside an image. It hunts me down. It haunts what haunts me. It changes me while I write it in that I lose myself inside it, making me weightless and colorless, fragile and fearless. It’s always been with me, even before I knew what it was, it ran ahead of me as I walked through the world, making me look around and take it in through my senses, stop and stare, or listen, or smell or touch or taste until the object of my attention no longer possessed a name, and then poetry dared me to name it.
That ‘It hunts me down’ is chilling but any obsessive poet can surely identify with it, and with the wider sentiments expressed in these sentences.
Why Elizabeth Bishop has been on my mind is because I’ve also been re-reading her Collected Poems and a 2002 book of essays, Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe), edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott. What’s intriguing about the essays is that most of them are written by esteemed poets – Nichola Deane, Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-Jones, Jamie McKendrick, Peter Robinson, Anne Stevenson and Shapcott herself – some of whom are, or were, academics also, rather than by academics who aren’t also known as poets, so they are more personal, readable and less dry than might otherwise have been the case. That said, though, the essay I liked the best and got the most from was by Barbara Page, at that time Professor of English at Bishop’s alma mater, Vassar College, in which she analyses some of Bishop’s draft to see how the poems were sharpened by changes of emphasis, especially in the last few stanzas of ‘The Moose’. Donaghy’s contribution, the briefest in the book, considers the influence of Auden. Feaver slightly overstates the case that ‘Bishop reclaims not just the female psychic space from which she was ejected at birth, but the psychic female space lost to her in early childhood through her mother’s severe mental illness and subsequent incarceration in an asylum’ (and death). Rees-Jones’s highly idiosyncratic piece starts with admissions that she had come to Bishop’s poems ‘reluctantly’ and hadn’t read all of them, and she doesn’t really add much from then on. Despite, and maybe because of, these and other flaws, it’s an engaging assortment and well worth tracking down.
I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:
Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.
The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.
The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.
Tag: elizabeth-bishop
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January reading (2)
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 