BY JOE WEIL
When I was a young man I wanted verbal fireworks—poets like Wallace Stevens, or the French and Spanish surrealists who baffled and awed and intimidated me with their prowess. I think it is the closest a young male poet, pumped up on testosterone, and born too late and too early for any wars, could come to engaging in combat. The more complicated, or flashy, or surreal, or daring the imagery, the more I recognized it as poetry. Shakespeare didn’t disappoint. The bible thundered forth. I had been hearing or reading the bible all my life and I was stunned when people not so versed failed to recognize my biblical allusions (and being young and arrogant, secretly delighted)
I still believe a working knowledge of Genesis, Job, psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, and Romans ought to be essential to MFA students, along with some dictionary, some history of biblical allusions in the works of English and American poets. We could start with Ai and work our way past Shakespeare. A computer program could be invented to scan all the works and seek out even the smallest references. Meanwhile, the odd ball assortment of fanatic scholars that helped Samuel Johnson compile his dictionary could be raised from the dead and put to work (They’ve had a long enough rest. Wake them up!). Unfortunately, poets being the vain creatures they are, hundreds of new poems would be written jammed full of biblical allusions in order to get into “The Book of Life” (I’d call it that as a tribute to John). Would that be so bad? Probably.
At any rate (the rate at which frogs and flowers fall), I was appalled when I first ventured seriously into the New Jersey poetry scene and heard the readings of poets who were winning grants. These poems were delivered without much flourish (rightfully so), and were nothing you couldn’t see out a picture window in Princeton. In point of fact, I wrote in a journal entry for October 18th, 1984: “In order to win a grant from the New Jersey state council On the arts, you must be A. Understated (flat) B. Sincere, yet laconic. C. Within forty miles of a picture window in Princeton, New Jersey.”
I was out of the loop. I didn’t know Mary Oliver, or Gary Snyder, or Stephen Dunn (I did know Dunn’s early work, but not his later, more stripped down style). I didn’t know the contemplative pastoral/sexual posturing of Galway or the “sexual daring” of Sharon Olds, and, because I didn’t know these poets, I was a victim of their many competent but uninspiring imitators. There was also a little group called the US 1 poets who had gentle, but dictatorial powers at the time. I knew nothing but the Bible, and Whitman, and Stevens, and Blake, and Ginsberg, and the French/Spanish surrealists (but not via the deep imagists). I was an urban poet (working class by profession, and high modernist by inclination) and these were all suburbanites who lived a life style in which yoga, contemplative thought, and a picture window within forty miles of Princeton was not only possible, but common.
When they would hear me read, and I was a good reader and went over well with an audience, they would give a little wince of a smile and say: “You tell wonderful stories” (translation: you are an entertainer, not a poet). The open reading at Maria Maziotti Gillan’s series became my only vindication. In 1987, Ruth Stone heard me read in the open, hugged me, held me at arms length, and pronounced me a genuine poet. Maxine Kumin heard me read my poem “the Glue Man” and came over to where I was sitting and said: “That’s a poem.” Charles Simic heard me read in an open and said: “Good work.” Ruth Stone, Maxine Kumin, and Charles Simic didn’t have to compete with me. They were doing well without the likes of Joseph David Weil. They could be generous. Laura Boss, Sander Zulauf, and, most especially, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, supported me. Most of all, I was aided and abetted by a fellow working stiff poet, Dave Roskos—the first and best publisher I ever had.
All this is preamble to two poems, one by Robert Francis, and the other by a poet I like as a person, but am not always enamored of as a poet: Lucille Clifton. Clifton knows me by name and has also been generous to me when she’s heard me read. She told an ex girlfriend I was a “good poet.” She didn’t have to. I am name dropping only to show how the reading scene is a little like the jazz world. You get on a bill with the head liners, and if you show some chops, they encourage you. It helps. It gives you a few moments of vindication before your junker Toyota turns back into a pumpkin.
At any rate (the rate at which eye lashes, and the complete works of Victor Hugo fall), I have not always been enamored of Lucile Clifton’s work because I think her simplicity can be doctrinaire, and I don’t think simplicity ought to be a law. I agree with Einstein who said (sounding a little like Yogi Berra): “Things are as simple as they are and no simpler.” To insist on simplicity from the get go is as bad as insisting on complexity. You are pigeon holing the poem before it exists. You are confining it to a law it may not want to obey. When some kind person wants to apologize for a simple poem they like, they’ll lard on the adjective/adverb, “deceptively.” I have heard this said of the piano works of Robert Schumann as well as of Robert Francis, the other poet in this essay. “Deceptively” is never needed. It is redundant. “Simple” is already an adjective and I will define it for the purpose of this essay as: “the difficult and fully contrived art of not being ostentatious, flamboyant, or virtuosic, yet still giving aesthetic pleasure.” Simplicity often comes late in the lives of great artists. Brahms achieved it after a body of complex work. Yeats caught onto it. It often happens when an artist no longer has to prove anything and returns to the primal play ground of his art. Bach’s cello suites have the simplicity of pure song. They do not seem contrived (they are, and highly so). Simple is always deceptive if it is not simplistic. My definition of simplistic:
- Purposely, and methodically reduced in verbal forces, like unto an insecure person who keeps insisting he doesn’t need anyone’s praise (and he does).
- Contrived in the worst sense, as in certain Haiku that refuse to break the rules of haiku even when the rules cry out to be broken.
- Insisting on its “simplicity” to the point of being dogmatic and boorish.
- Lacking all necessary humility and all necessary arrogance, achieving the awful oxymoron of “arrogantly humble” and “humbly arrogant.”
- Somehow managing to sound grandiose and pretentious in its “simplicity.”
That will do for starters. We could return to Einstein’s dictum and concede that something may be simplistic when it is simpler than it really is, when it is false to its own best intentions and inner necessity, when it is phony, a fraud, a big fat fucking lie. So much of contemporary “simplicity” is a sham. I don’t blame young poets for recoiling from it. But to be fair, so much “complexity” is verbal masturbation, and not attractive verbal masturbation. To say nothing in a beautiful way is fine. To say nothing in a florid way as if simplicity were the enemy is asinine. So I am almost ready to get to the poems. But first, one last digression:
I finally applied for a New Jersey State Council On The Arts Grant in 1988. I made the mistake of asking for the comments of the panel. Here they are:
Overt and obvious
A mix of wit and cliché
Heavy on the irony
Obviously, a student poet
By irony they may have sensed something endemic to my poems: they are often self deprecating, and the voice is often aware of itself as a blowhard, someone who is speaking, undermining his own authority as he goes along, being both absolutely sincere, and tongue and cheek at once. I grew up being encouraged to enjoy hearing myself speak. As my grandmother said: “They’ll be plenty of time for silence when you’re dead.” Remember, these poets were looking out the window within forty miles of Princeton. They were “straightforward” and ambiguous sans irony. They were “tasteful” (always a bad sign).They liked silence, and the hard won words that arose from it. They didn’t like show offs, even when the show off was aware of himself as a show off, and using it as a technique to get at some deeper sense of speaking out. Irony wasn’t popular. They were right: I am heavy on the irony, and, although I am straight forward, I am also straight backward because I never trust what I am saying and I am shocked when anyone else does. My authority of voice rests on having no authority save that of liking to hear myself speak. I enjoy sound. I write in order not to be silent, and Elizabeth, New Jersey is a loud place. In retrospect, I must agree with them, but “heavy on the irony” isn’t necessarily bad.
As for overt and obvious, a man in love with his own voice, a man who enjoys holding forth is always overt and obvious. I love the obvious. Falstaff is overt and obvious. I wrote a comic poetry in the older tradition of the comic being morally inferior to his audience. My effect depends on a reader or listener seeing their own “lesser” self in the poem and enjoying the naked chicanery of a highly flawed persona holding forth. I learned this through the great cowards and cheap skates: Jack Benny, and Bob Hope. My goal was to reach the stars through the cheap seats—to show how supernatural grace moves through the vapidity and suffering of flawed voices. I am a comic poet, and one of the jobs of comedy is to remind people of the obvious. In retrospect, they were right on this point too.
A mix of wit and cliché. I think I am more humorous than witty. As for “cliché” I like sending them up, playing with the tropes of cliché in order to see how much marrow is left. Yes, once again, they were right.
Finally, I am, obviously, a student poet. I hope I will always be a student poet. Advanced and professional means too often that one has learned how to give the prevailing aesthetic what it wants. I believe in prat falls, in floundering, in being unsure of myself. It is the one thing I have confidence in: deliberate uncertainty, the constant undermining of power.
All this leads me to two poems that are, to my way of thinking, as simple as they are and no simpler. Both are fairly overt and obvious, and both skirt above and avoid two potential disasters of simplicity: the Hall Mark Greeting Card poem of sincere sentiment, and the clever, well structured gimmick poem based on a trick.
First,I think Robert Francis is the greatest “minor” poet America has yet produced. I do not consider “minor” a disparagement. Minor here means someone whose first priority is absolute integrity of craft, someone who does not aim at greatness, at being “major,” but who turns again and again to the poem at hand and makes it perfect for what it is. By this definition, Elizabeth Bishop is a “minor” poet, albeit with major historical significance. She is a close second to Robert Francis for the crown of top minor poet. On a different day, with no snow on the ground, I might put her first, but, today my house is snow bound, and Francis holds sway. A little background:
Robert Francis grew up in and lived all his life in New England. He was a contemporary of Theodore Roethke, a generation ahead of Donald Hall and Maxine Kumin, and his poems were usually metered and rhymed, a fact which shouldn’t matter except he lived all his life like a valiant squirrel in the expansive hawk shadow of New England’s other fully metered poet, Robert Frost.
Francis is both more delicate and varied than Frost. He has his own darkness, and a startling compassion and vulnerability. His compassion reminds me of James Wright, yet, unlike Wright, it is never over done or too sentimental, and it does not depend on love of the loser or outcast. Francis lived a Spartan, hermit’s existence, though he did take his degree from Harvard and he was beloved by fellow poets. During his lifetime he became famous for not being famous. He was a highly admired “underrated” poet. This was what Donald Hall said of him on the back of his Collected Poems:
“Francis is a modern American classic, better (say) than almost anyone who has been gifted with a Pulitzer or a National Book Award in recent decades. I claim him as better than John Berryman or Robert Penn Warren or Delmore Schwartz or A.R. Ammons, and these people have written beautiful poems. As with Hardy, as with Frost, as with Richard Wilbur who has learned from him, Francis must be read in bulk. He does not write long poems. The accrual of small triumphs—told in the same skeptical, tender, funny, and reticent language—makes a long poem out of this Collected Poems.”
I disagree that he must be read in bulk. Poets enter the cannon through five or six poems; Francis would enter through “Blue Winter,” ‘Poverty Grass,” “Waxwings,” “The Pitcher,” and “The Base Stealer.” The last mentioned might be the greatest baseball poem ever written and is a technical, metrical marvel. There are thirty or forty others equally worthy, but these show up enough in anthologies, and ought to keep showing up as long as there is an America. The poem I am jotting down here would deserve to be in any anthology of Christmas poems. What I marvel at is its fearless and genuine sentiment (not sentimentality), its use of slant rhyme and envelope rhyme, and its ability to skirt the edge of Hall mark without ever falling in. It is simple in the best sense. Anything more elaborate would forsake the humility. Anything simpler (say, the normal ABAB rhyme pattern and perfect rhyme) would relegate to the level of ernest doggerel. Like the best tenors, Francis is exciting because he skirts this edge, and never hits the one wrong note, or misstep that would make him plummet. This poem is that rare creature: the genuinely superb occasional poem:
Good Night Near Christmas
And now good night. Good night to this old house
Whose breathing fires are banked for their night’s rest.
Good night to lighted windows in the west.
Good night to neighbors and to neighbors cows
Whose morning milk will be beside my door.
Good night to one star shining in. Good night
To earth, poor earth with its uncertain light,
Our little wandering planet still at war.
Good night to one unstarved and gnawing mouse
Between the inner and the outer wall.
He has a paper nest in which to crawl.
Good night to men who have no bed, no house.
This poem has all the truly child-like candor, yet solemnity of the great Christmas carols. I think of the genuine sadness in a classic song such as “Good Night Irene, Good night.” I think of “Good Night Mr. Moon,” and the “Good Night” section of Hamlet. Most of all I think how Francis manages to achieve the majesty and import of Iambic pentameter while avoiding its more overblown aspects. What saves it from a lesser status is that it never insists on its simplicity. It is ample and magical within its limits. A hall mark card would have made a big deal of how Jesus had no place to lay his head. It would never have put the poem in Iambic pentameter, and the mouse would not have been included unless he was cute. I don’t want to analyze this poem. I want to praise its gentleness and loving reticence, its effortless capturing of both the coziness and stark loneliness of the season. It is, rather miraculously, a poem of both hearth and desolation. If you list the nouns that receive adjectives, the whole meaning of the poem is almost rendered:
Old house, breathing fires, poor earth, wandering planet, unstarved and gnawing mouse. For such a little and truly simple poem, it moves as casually between the domestic and the cosmic, the small and the vast as Milton. Amazing. I will take this poem over Eliot’s “The Journey of The Magi” any day, and I admire “The Journey of The Magi” greatly. Note that this poem alludes to Christ’s birth without ever mentioning it overtly. The one star shining in, and the men who have no bed, no house gain the power and gravity of the holy birth much more effectively than a straight forward retelling. Francis counts on a previous knowledge of the story for his greater ontology, but the poem could be read with pleasure simply fot its eloquent interbreeding of the domestic and the cosmic.
Just as Francis skirts the narrow edge of the Hallmark card, Lucille Clifton, in the poem I am posting here, comes perilously close to gimmick, to a sort of casual cleverness. The poem is a sort of Christian midrash—and it has the audacity to re-invent the idea of Mary, and also to use “Second Coming” in a world where Yeats’s far more dramatic and greater poem still prevails. Still, I think Clifton pulls it off, but barely.
Mary, rather than being a young submissive girl, is an old, somewhat cynical woman. The neat trick here (not the cleverness, but the genuine accomplishment) is how Clifton parses the difference between submission and acceptance of “come what may. Clifton also effectively creates a character in a few deft strokes, not at all common in contemporary poems. It is emphasized twice that Mary, the paragon of belief does not believe. The poem seems to hint that belief is not the most necessary quality of becoming the mother of God. Rather, it is most important to take the miracle in stride, to break through one’s no belief into the action of acceptance. Here goes:
my dream about the second coming
mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.
When something drops onto her toes one night
She calls it a fox
But she feeds it.
There are things about this poem that annoy me: the lack of caps, the ungainly lines, the non-sentences. Clifton knows her bible well, and this older Mary is an echo of Sarah and of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth. One gets the impression that, like Sarah (whose name means she who laughs) the old woman has learned to protect herself from both miracles and the soul crushing disappointment of them never happening. She is also the embodiment of a wizened old woman who refuses to be hoodwinked, who is loathe to show any emotion except a sort of ongoing lack of trust. I’m not sure I trust “when something drops onto her toes one night.” But there is enough fable aspect to just barely pull it off, and the old woman calling that something a fox, but then feeding it, is a nice touch, a saving touch. Again it is a Christmas story, but it refuses sentiment, the usual tropes of gravitas. It is hard headed, but not hard hearted. I liked it better when I first read it this morning, and, a second reading tells me the gimmick aspect of it can soon wear thin, but the simplicity (except for the pretentious refusal to have caps, a trait I find as reprehensible as small case i) is fully organic to the intentions. It is as simple as it is, but no simpler, and the subtle distinction between belief and acceptance is fully earned. Still, there is to this poem a sense of cleverness I worry about in “simple” poems. Is this old lady truly unbelieving, or just in denial? You can argue it either way. That’s the nice thing about ambiguity, but here’s one thing I find unarguable: Francis writes the better poem by not trying to re-invent the story, to make it his own, but, rather, by making it our own. Somehow, his take, as familiar and devoid of novelty as it is, seems fresher; that is the problem with novelty: it can only be interesting as a novelty on the first read. Simplicity, in its truest aspect, is always fresh. You can’t wear out “John Anderson My Jo, John,” or “El Hombre.” You can wear out “my dream of the second coming,” but the last couple lines pull the poem away from gimmick to true invention. It’s a close call, but the poem does give pleasure. Still, if given the choice between “making it new” and making it anciently sudden, and suddenly ancient, I will always prefer the latter. The former is more the meat and potatoes of modern grant’s committees. Their knee jerk aversion to rhyme, meter, and sentiment, would make them choose the Clifton poem. They’d be so, so wrong.
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