Emily Dickinson : The Poet as Selflorist, 2

I would have no newes printed; for when they are printed they leave to bee newes; while they are written, though they be false, they remaine newes still.

- Ben Jonson, Newes from the New World Discover'd in the Moone

Literature is news that STAYS news.

- Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

It's traumatic when performed art becomes recorded art. (Gawd, do I really sound that whiney?) And poetry's been traumatized longest. Sure, we have all that noise; sure, we can pattern it. But what's the point post-literacy?

So, there's been the pleasure of showing off, when someone's willing to be impressed, or when we can pretend that someone is. There's been seduction and devotion and advertising, when we want our words to stick and intrude far from support of paper. There've been brief re-marriages of written word with notated music before career ambitions drove them apart again. Pound and Zukofsky sincerely believed that poetry became corrupted as it drifted from song, but that didn't make them want to become Sappho or Thomas Campion or Smokey Robinson: it made them want to become a textual version of Brahms or Bach or Webern.

And then there's nostalgia for the days when sound made sense, because it was all the sense we had, even if we usually couldn't say what it actually meant, Remember the good times? Couldn't we bring them back before they're completely lost? The familiar problem of Ossian and Wordsworth, Olson and Rothenberg....

Traditional ballads and heroic epic didn't play much part in the social life of mid-nineteenth century Amherst, Massachusetts. To take them as role models would have been a purely literary affectation rather than a return to orality.

Dickinson's community did, however, include a lyric form comparable in centrality to (say) folk songs for Robert Burns: the hymn.

Of course the Protestant hymn was a written and notated form, but it was expressed in oral performance in public, in the family circle, and presumably within the concert hall of one's skull. (Limited seating, but excellent accoustics.) Would it be possible for an atavistic poet in a literate society to take that written devotional lyric as an origin for oral composition? What might such a throwback look like?

Well, we might expect a reversal of the written lyrics' preference for eye-rhyme. We might expect a return to assonance and slant-rhyme. We might even expect hypercorrection.

We might expect the formal grammar of written sentences to be replaced by the looser, more dramatic and fragmented syntax of spoken English. Since formal syntactic punctuation then loses its function, we might expect a simpler notation of phrase breaks and emphasis — dashes, say, and an occasional exclamation mark.

We might expect the literary meter to revert to some features of traditional ballad metrics. That is, a simple regular form might serve as a reference point for ear-and-mouth, perceived as a default mode even if frequently varied in practice. Again positing hypercorrection, it might be deviated from so often that irregularity became the real but imperceptible rule. (And we might expect a great deal of posthumous meddling from editors who prefer the properly regular.)

Dickinson is mostly thought of as a poet of hymnodic quatrains, and there’s no doubting she was partial to hymn meters. A survey (see appendix) of the first quatrains of the 295 poems she wrote in 1863—her most productive year, in Franklin’s dating (which I follow here), and the year that saw the creation of most of her renowned poems—yields one hundred in common meter (8686). At a distant second, comprising about one eighth (37) of the total, come the short-metered poems (6686). Another familiar meter, long meter (8888), Dickinson used only six times, each time rhyming it as couplets. There are also three poems in the sestet variation of common meter known as common particular meter (886886). But the surprising and wholly unrecognized feature of these celebrated poems is that Dickinson worked most frequently in none of the above, often inventing a meter for a poem and using it just that once. The number of poems Dickinson composed in 1863 in patterns rare or unheard of in religious or secular lyric poetry, including her own, surpasses even those in common meter.

- John Shoptaw, "Listening to Dickinson"

We might also expect a re-re-definition of "verbatim recall".

The Sacred and Profane Masochism Tango

What can you possibly do with more love? Smokey Robinson lost in ecstatic contemplation of his hundred lifetimes:

"Live it down.... Wear it down.... Tear it down...."

Elvis Presley's lascivious staccato:

"Punch it. Kick it. You can never win. You know you can't lick it."

Nothing Personal, 6

Pop music makes a horrifically misleading comparison point. English song and poetry in English have diverged too much since Campion's day, and as much as I love the lyrics of Chuck Berry, Lord Melody, Smokey Robinson, Tom Verlaine, the Coup, Mos Def, and Slug, none would fit a little magazine or chapbook.

A closer demotic relative of contemporary lyric is stand-up comedy, with its definitional dictions, its canonical revolutionaries, and its School of Quietude.... They're different forms with different capabilities, but there are examples from both who'd fit either.

Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are

Pop critics never paid much attention to Smokey Robinson's work from the 1970s and early 1980s. Maybe it's because a couple of his biggest hits were weak and written by other hands. And I guess Pure Smokey, an attempt to apply Norman Whitfield naturalism to middle-class family life, may be too peculiar for most tastes. (Although anyone capable of swallowing Mott the Hoople....)

But Smokey's Family Robinson, Where There's Smoke..., Warm Thoughts, and Touch the Sky all sound (and feel and move) like an Apollonian auteur at a comfortable peak. Off the singles-and-touring treadmill, Smokey's voice gained suppleness. Unlike the empty-pated yodel-birds who still rule contemporary R&B, he was able to maintain intellectual focus across a long groove. And whereas most quiet-storm songwriters travelled from point A to point A with an extended loll at point A, Robinson found a way to structure the new expanse.

Twist endings hadn't been all that uncommon in country or soul 45s — two lovers, both of them are you — but unless delivered by the most extravagantly soulful of voices, their effect was shallow: a startle, a novelty.

Instead of jokes, Robinson began to produce simulations of realistic emotional shifts, and the sting in the tail usually carried an anodyne. In numbers like "Into Each Rain, Some Life Must Fall", from behind an ostentatiously presented, ludicrously threadbare conceit, Smokey pulls a magically affecting image. Starting as post-separation lament, "Heavy on Pride, Light on Love" builds into a frenzy of middle-aged lust; starting from rarified sentiment, "Touch the Sky" reaches the same destination. As a collector of romantic-vengeance songs, I'm fondest of "The Hurt's On You," which seems at first like the usual smarmy sarcasm, then pivots on a single line into an expression of genuine empathy — of community, even.

But as pure concept, the most remarkable example is his belated answer to "The Love I Saw in You (Was Just a Mirage)": If nothing lasts forever, than our love can achieve the immortality it desires only by embracing impermanence.

Castles Made of Sand

Castles made of sand
Don't let our love be like
Castles made of sand

Blown about by strong ocean breeze
Scattered, scattered, in a million tiny pieces
Unstable
Unable

Washed away when the tide starts to change
And nothing left, no, nothing, no trace of where it stood
Weak foundations
Mere imitation

Well
If our love is made of sand
Then let it be a desert land
A desert land
Let it be strong and free
And wide and warm
Like a desert land

Let it be strong and wild
And free and warm
Like a desert land

Reference Work, 2

You read a story and suddenly there's a part that becomes just words because you know nobody ever did it like that, or said it that way but you have to pretend just to find out what happened. What I am describing is like that, too. Everything flattens out and isn't real.

- The Captain, Equinox

My challenge was to not point out how our friendship, or Ian's encouragement of my artistic ambitions, or, for that matter, the laughter we shared watching Godard's Alphaville at the Bleecker Street Cinema, expressed possibilities of connection that our daily orgy of nihilism denied.

- Jonathan Lethem, "The Beards"

I agree with Leonard that there's a thinness in much highly-praised contemporary fiction. But the thinning agent's not foreign blood.

In serious mainstream prose it's easier to incorporate John Wayne as a villain than to reproduce his attraction as a lead. An ambitious story or novel must make Ignatz genuinely destructive and Krazy purely female. The sensitive protagonist has no siblings; the jolly uncle is a child molester; superhuman privileges bring no joy and improve nothing.... These are generic conventions. They're integral to the story being told, but when I strike them my stride falters. I don't slip, but I slide a bit.

What disappoints Leonard are Chabon's, Franzen's, Moody's, and Lethem's references. What disappoints me is the familiarity of their disappointments. It isn't specific to these novelists, or to subjects like soul music or comic books. The same story's been told of painters and boxers, poets and actresses, gypsy fiddlers and twelve-tone composers: the transmutation of exhilarating matter into glum defeat.

Artists like Herriman, Hawks, and Gaye delight through the thrownaway (even if well rehearsed) gesture that transfixes. By nature, they're anti-plot — or at least anti-character-development. When narrative attempts to depict such lyric effects, they can only be given too little or too much attention. If it's made the point of the story, the point of the story must be loss. It only takes a few minutes to hear a song by Schumann or Mimms — and then where's the hero? Even as articulate an artist as Smokey Robinson can only tell us that rich guys love cocaine.

Alternatively, the writer may try to suggest some aspect of the experience in passing, using the critical equivalent of free indirect discourse, or may, like Stephen King and James Joyce, flatly cite brandnames.

In any case, narrative is saved: life is only interrupted. The choice has nothing to do with the referent itself, nothing to do with "high" or "low". Wagnerian opera was as bad for John Jones as hip-hop was for Arthur Lomb.

It may, however, say something about the referrer. Across media, a downward turn indicates depth. Chris Ware, like Lethem, started in high-art institutions, became revulsed by academic pretensions, was attracted by genre practitioners, established himself as a star in the most conceptually daring end of low-art publishing, and then (with a success that stunned his new peer group) was welcomed into the market covered by the NYRB&TBR. For both Ware and Lethem, disappointment was a vehicle.

On the other hand, prose fiction can embody its own sort of lyric effect. Lethem's "Sleepy People" is an example whose lack of critical regard shows how low beauty places in most readers' and reviewers' criteria. Although in some ways the career of Karen Joy Fowler anticipated Lethem's, her preference for comic structures puts her in constant danger of being reshelved from high-middlebrow to chick-lit or YA. And the most enthusiastically referential of storytellers — Howard Waldrop, Guy Davenport — unable to sacrifice the gaiety of their scholarship, remain coterie property.