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: writing
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January reading (2)
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January reading (1)
I’ve started my reading in this new year where I left it in the old, with the American poet Dorianne Laux. I’d first encountered Laux’s poetry back in September, when ‘The Shipfitter’s Wife’ was one of many poems I enjoyed in the Seren anthology Women’s Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, and soon after bought a secondhand copy of her 2000 collection, Smoke, published by BOA Editions., which coincidentally includes that poem (It’s available to buy on their website, here.) Laux’s poems are plain-speaking, but far from plain. Here’s the opening sentence of ‘Pearl’, a 38-line, block poem about Janis Joplin:
She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,
this moonfaced child who opened her mouth
to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced
daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Optis, and the booze-
filled moon, child of the honky-tonk bar-talk crowd
who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown
open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted
at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out
into the sawdusted air.
I especially like that ‘gravel pit churning in her belly’, and the repetitions of ‘faced’, ‘moon’ and ‘belly’. Laux would’ve been 15 when Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Monterey Festival, and she must’ve been inspired by Joplin’s example of a young woman putting herself and her soul right out there. The poem is both a paean and an elegy for ‘this little white girl / who showed us what it was like to die / for love’; but beyond that, it is, like many of the poems in the book, an elegy for the wilder times of the late ’60s and the ’70s.
I also loved Invisible Dog (Carcanet, 2024), available to buy here, a generous selection from the oeuvre of the Mexican poet Fabio Morábito, translated brilliantly from Spanish into English by the Welsh poet Richard Gwyn. In an interesting ‘translator’s note’ afterword, Gwyn notes that Morábito’s first language is actually Italian and that he didn’t live in Mexico until he was 15. Gwyn evidently worked very closely with him on the translations. One thing I like is that Gwyn more often than not plumps for the direct translations of words, rather than sometimes not-especially-close synonyms, the approach which blighted the last translated poetry published by Carcanet that I read, It Must be a Misunderstanding, Forrest Gander’s translation of another major ’50s-born Mexican poet, Coral Bracho. Morábito’s poems are always set out in narrow-ish blocks, and the tone is invariably one of someone just matter-of-factly and often wryly pointing out how things are. In ‘Unidentified’, for example, he shows us the poignancy of anonymity:
In the last photo
we find him once again,
this time in the middle of the group portrait,
embracing the others,
and they are all smiling and embracing him in turn,
all with a first and last name except for him,
who was not identified.
Another very enjoyable read was the SmithǀDoorstop anthology, 5, a bargain-buy available here, showcasing five new, or, rather, new-ish, poets who are all members of the Writing Squad, whose website is here: Helen Bowell, Prerana Kumar, Eva Lewis, Laura Potts and Ruth Yates. Each contributes six poems except Lewis with three. Kumar’s explorations of her Indian heritage and use of language stand out:
Let us believe her bones remain bird-hollow
in this wind that smells of rosemilk,
let her hear the grinding of cardamom,
a sparrowed lullaby humming the weeds
(‘I rewind the Second My Mother’s Girlhood Breaks’)
Potts’s poems are also linguistically rich – ‘Yesterday’s Child’ begins, ‘The sun slid like a knife through the April night / and bled like an egg, like a budburst head’ – but also have an appealing, melancholy tone to them. Yates’s poems are quirky and funny (haha), like those of her father Cliff and brother Luke, with an engaging unexpectedness: one poem begins with an ‘Oh!’; and my favourite poem in the anthology, the utterly marvellous ‘Otter’ opens thus:
They used to swim in Nye Bevan pool,
just before chips. Nicknamed Otter
for their ability to stay at the bottom of the pool
and crawl along it, way before their Taekwondo
years: this was self-control, perseverance,
indomitable spirit. [. . .]
I admire any poet who can chuck in big abstract nouns like that and make them count.
So far this month, I’ve also read two prose books and started a book of letters. The first was a book I bought and read 30 years ago: Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld, first published in 1970 and now, it seems, out of print, which is a shame because it’s a genuine classic. Chesney scoured through the archives, newspaper accounts, correspondence and many other sources to give a full flavour of the sub-strata of British society in the middle decades of the 19th Century. In passing, Chesney considers the worlds of itinerant workers, e.g. ‘navvies’ and circus and other show folk, plus beggars, and criminals and their networks of all kinds, and how these worlds symbiotically interacted. The details are at times unbearable, especially the descriptions of the appalling living and working conditions in the ‘rookeries’ of London and other cities. Chesney employs the slang vocabulary of the times, summarising them in a glossary, which includes such gems as ‘beak-hunting’ (poultry-stealing), ‘choker’ (clergyman), ‘crabshells’ (shoes), ‘crusher’ (policeman), ‘flying the blue pigeon’ (stealing roof lead) and some which are too prurient to repeat.
Having loved its predecessors, I was naturally predisposed to liking Barbara Pym’s third novel, Jane and Prudence (1953), in a Virago edition with a lively and perceptive introduction by Jilly Cooper, who claims it is Pym’s finest novel. Fine and witty though it was, for me it didn’t quite reach the heights of Excellent Women. One of the joys of Pym’s writing lies in how she could turn a crisp and delightful simile:
Miss Trapnell went to the filing-cabinet and put some pieces of paper into a file, and Miss Clothier drew a small card index towards her and began moving the cards here and there with her fingers, as if she was coaxing music from some delicate instrument.
The letters are in Words in Air, the collected correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – even in its paperback form, it’s a slab of a book, due in part to over-scholarly and therefore over-fussy editorial annotations. A treat nevertheless and I’m only about a tenth of the way through so far.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 