Chekhov’s Mistess

The Elusive Art of Discussing Poetry: Maxwell, Muldoon, Paglia

As important as reading poetry may be, so is reading about poems. Without thoughtful edification, a great poem can stand before us like the front desk at the Manhattan Four Seasons Hotel: glossy stone towering black clad stares of condescension. When done well, a critical essay about a poem will slow us down to see nuance in the blink of the poet’s eye, leaving us inspired, often humbled, and better ready for the next poem. One of the most enjoyable of these essays I’ve read this year is Glyn Maxwell’s piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review on Robert Frost’s newly uncovered “War Thoughts at Home.”

“War Thoughts at Home,” Maxwell concludes, was probably never published by Frost because he knew it was not really that good (Robert Stilling provides us with a history of the poem in this symposium published by The Virginia Quarterly Review). As brash as that assertion may sound, Maxwell, a poet himself and something of an heir to Frost’s work, draws his opinions convincingly and interestingly, but even more brashly, sits next to Frost – “The speech of this bird peters out quickly…it’s really just Frost realizing (as I’ve realized and he does now) this isn’t the sort of thing he does well.” I like it. Regarding the first stanza, Maxwell says:

“The first three lines are the sound of the poet cranking up, watching something with a confidence that useful thought will arise from getting it right. War may well be on his mind, but he’s just staring at a house. There’s a little dusting of personification, not unusual—’back side,’ ‘wears no paint,’ ‘shows most its age’ —which could be trailed back either to the poet sitting there working with that familiar self-consciousness you get at the start—’Here I am, the poet; got my coffee, got my pens, work is about to begin’—or to the woman who may or may not be consciously planned at this point.”

A signal of good writing, particularly on subtle or complex subjects to a lay audience, is that feeling that the author is sitting in the armchair next to you, allowing himself to wander – just a bit – to his point, allowing himself to be excited at times, and causing you to get wrapped up in his case. Maxwell does all of that, chatting about war and its poems, about Frost, and exalting the first stanza: “The awareness here, the alertness to the processes of sight and thought, defies imitation. I know that, I tried defying the defiance.” There’s plenty of attitude here, about Frost, Britain, America and formal verse, but never is it distracting from Maxwell’s discussion of the poem.

SCMZZZZZZZ_V36296419.jpg” style=“float:left;padding:0 8px 0 0;”/> Another good story teller about poems is Paul Muldoon. His collection of Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem, is as engaging as anything I’ve read. Oftentimes the benefit we get from lectures like these is the author’s deep reading, that ability to make tiny connections (or at least speculations) between one poet’s work and another’s. Discussing Ted Hughes’ “The Literary Life,” Muldoon says:

“At the risk of going ‘by hasty hop / or accomplished mishap,’ I’ll suggest that Hughes…is alluding to Yeats mediated through Moore – the ‘wentletrap’ is the ‘winding stair’ of a spiral seashell, a neighbor of the ‘fish of the reef / In phosphor-bronze wire.’ In the course of two lines, Hughes points to the two main metaphors for poetry-making used by Yeats – poetry as metal-working in the ‘birds… in phosphor-bronze wire’ and poetry as spinning and weaving in these image of the ‘bobbin,’ the ‘spindle,’ the unabashedly Yeatsian ‘old wheel.’ Hughes picks up on this thread in lines 42 and 43 – ‘drawing each stitch / Tight in my ear,’ with its echo of Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’.”

And sometimes it’s their knowing the back-story or mythology behind a poem. In the same essay, Muldoon draws upon Sylvia Plath’s journals from around the time when the poem was written to make explicit what is happening in the verse form of an encounter between Hughes, Plath and Marianne Moore. I don’t think we always need that kind of backstory, at least not on every poem, but it does make for interesting reading.

I was not so lucky with Camille Paglia’s 2005 Break, Blow, Burn. Paglia’s readings felt forced by the structure of the book – 43 poems each with a few pages or less – never giving herself room to breath, they came off more like a student’s well packed research than a thoughtful reader’s criticism. As opposed to Muldoon’s lectures, Paglia’s actually felt like a lecture.

Paglia’s selection of poems seem as though meant for an undergraduate anthology you might find from the likes of Norton with the exception of a few that might have been chosen purposely to interest a non-poetry reader, for example, Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” Nothing wrong with that exactly, and she discusses her selections in the introduction, but it would have been a more interesting and challenging book with a more surprising set of poems.

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Like the teacher in the movie “Dangerous Minds” who uses Bob Dylan to work her way to Dylan Thomas, Paglia wants to reach the reader on their own terms and uses today’s culture to do so. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could not Stop for Death” is ”as compactly visualized as a screenplay;” Shelley’s “Ozymandias” employs ”effects that are prophetically cinematic;” in Donne’s “Holy Sonnet I” the ”allegorical climax is cinematic;” and ”Shakespeare’s mobile eye prefigures the camera;” a passage in Wallace Stevens’ “Dissillusionment of Ten O’Clock” ”prefigures the psychedelic flamboyance of Pop Art.” A minor point really, but the feeling I got from reading the book was that I was not the target audience when really I should have been (you know, one of those poetry loving, life long learner types – could I be, at 42 not hip enough for these readings of Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley and Dickenson?).

The biggest problem I had with Break, Blow, Burn, – besides her method of rarely ever referring to a poem outside the one under discussion and never enough emphasis on language – was Paglia’s insistence on retelling the story of a poem in prose, using her own metaphors rather than illuminating the poet’s words. This happened all too often, as when Andrew Marvell says in “To His Coy Mistress” “My vegetable Love should grow…” Paglia explains with “Here it swells like a giant, lumbering, phalliform squash, settling across continents.” This commentary is more about Paglia than the poem at hand. Her confidence when writing about poems is reassuring but never leaves open the possibility that this is but one reading, one interpretation where the possibilities are many.

But perhaps I’m complaining too much. If it wasn’t inspiring, Break, Blow, Burn was at least to an extent enjoyable – and enjoyment is my only real criteria for these readings – because I like to read poetry and about poems and am always open to a perspective outside my own. In the interviews I heard with Paglia, I liked very much what she’s trying to accomplish and her attitude about reading and writing. Ultimately I felt that I really just wasn’t the intended audience.

I have more of these books I want to talk about, but at over 1100 words I’m well past acceptable blog-post limits and will have to pick it up later. You may also enjoy The Virginia Quarterly Review’s podcasts of the Frost symposium and Glyn Maxwell reading from his own work.

comments

Nice commentary on Paglia. You identify some of her most annoying assumptions and habits.

    – Dan Green (12/15  at  02:16 PM)

Thanks Dan - I’ve been stewing on my Paglia notes for well over a year now and not sure why I never posted them. The important thing is that what she is trying to do is good and there’s not enough of it (perhaps something for the blog people to take on) so it’s a shame that her book falls short.

    – Bud Parr (12/15  at  04:04 PM)

I like your definition of good writing—authors allowing themselves to wander a bit on their way to their point.

    – Dorothy W. (12/16  at  07:42 AM)

Thanks for an interesting triptych of reviews. Muldoon looks mighty gloomy staring back from the latest P&W.

    – Robert (12/16  at  08:10 PM)

Dorothy, I think that by meandering just a bit, the writer has the opportunity to give us his or her perspective; also it’s interesting that way, if done well, and makes the reader comfortable and avoids one of the pitfalls I saw in the Paglia book of coming off as just lecturing.

    – Bud Parr (12/17  at  09:52 AM)

Robert - I suppose he’s gloomy for good reason. His latest book of poetry is dedicated to his sister who recently died and he has a long (and amazing) poem dedicated to his friend Warren Zevon, who also recently died. The two are present pretty much throughout the book.

    – Bud Parr (12/17  at  10:07 AM)

Thanks for the insight, Bud. I admire anyone who can turn that which is deeply personally felt into meaningful art. There seem to be so many pitfalls when you are that close to the trees, as it were. Yet extending the catharsis beyond yourself - what a gift to humanity.

    – Robert (12/17  at  12:07 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: December 15, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Camille Paglia, Glyn Maxwell, Paul Muldoon

• Comments:7
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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