>Ashbery's "The Virgin King"

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“The Virgin King,” The New Yorker September 29, 2008

            Neither an Ashbery fan nor an Ashbery critic, I have little to say about his “The Virgin Queen.”  A short poem of two cinquains, it contains his characteristic wit and associative gesture, but it doesn’t, for me, reach beyond either.  In fact, it reads like a poem he slapped together in seconds, using the tools for which he’s known and popular but not really building much with them.  Of course, that assessment could be way off . . .

            The poem moves very quickly, and if it’s at all concerned with readers’ ability to keep up, it doesn’t show it.  The first two sentences begin with the ambiguous, without-antecedent pronouns “They” and “It” respectively.  They assume readers will go along for the ride, examining this hole they’ve created, the hole that a focused subject generally occupies.  That subject could be “The Virgin King” of the title.  But who’s the Virgin King?  Initially, the phrase made me think of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, although the poem seems to have nothing at all to do with her, and so the title wouldn’t appear to be riffing her.  A quick Google of the phrase returned hits naming Richard Branson, the King of the Virgin Empire, but the poem seems equally unconcerned with him.  So, we have an opening stanza—half the poem—that doesn’t focus attention on a subject, grammatical or contextual, effectively fogging reader focus in such a way that nothing seems important.  Everything does.  And, the one place Ashbery does draw our attention, the “innocent details” he places in quotation marks, is equally unhelpful and arbitrary, a red herring, since neither innocent nor details resonates with anything particular in the poem.

            The second stanza has much the same effect: there’s an ambiguous “you” (which does work as the reader) and an ambiguous “we.”  We’re forced again to pay attention to things other than subject and subject matter.  But, it’s in this other realm that the second stanza offers high contrast to the first and so becomes interesting.  Both have sort of a waggish humor, which connects them, but structurally they’re very different from one another.  The first is comprised of four relatively short sentences, the second of two sentences, one built with a few subordinate clauses that extends its main idea across four lines.  So, the first stanza reads somewhat choppily, full of staccato; the second reads quickly and fluidly in comparison.  Consider the opening of each.  Stanza one: “They know so much more, and so much less, / ‘innocent details’ and other.”  The comma after more and the endstopped linebreak keep the sentence from picking up the pace, from creating a strong sense of rhythm.  Stanza two: “Something tells me you’ll be reading this on a train / stumbling through rural Georgia,…”  Not a single pause until the comma after Georgia slows us down, and probably readers cruise through the enjambment at train.  The line is trochaic until its last few words, giving it noticeable rhythm, and as such its feel is much different than that of the entire previous stanza.  Of course, the train is stumbling, an interesting verb for a train and a bit of an oxymoron considering the pace of the sentence that contains it.

            Anyway, I appreciate some of the poem’s tidbits as mentioned above, but they seem to me more like drills to an exercise than facets of a poem (I guess I’m making some kind of poetry assertion here).  It’s like Ashbery wrote an imitation of himself.  This is fine . . . except I find myself saying oh, that’s an Ashbery poem, which chalks it up to being little more than nothing in and of itself. If you’ve read much of his previous work, then you know everything there is to know about this piece.

>Marilyn Hacker's "Names"

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“Names,” The New Yorker September 22, 2008

            I don’t think any contemporary poet nails the sonnet into its box as effectively as Marilyn Hacker.  This isn’t to say she has written the best sonnet in the last X-amount of years necessarily, but she has regularly proven her ability to use and abuse the form to her great advantage.  This is true of her villanelles, too.

             “Names” is an Italian sonnet right that closely follows the traditional form of meter, rhyme scheme, and turn.  Only a line or two is perfectly iambic, which is not a problem, but the lug of the rhythm is immediately clear: “Be mindful of names.  They’ll etch themselves” she writes in line one.  The first foot here is a headless iamb, but the rest of the feet all fit the proper flow; so, rhythmically, the poem’s tone is set, one line swinging readers to the next and so one, even in the case of endstopped lines.  That’s simply the way pentameter works—it keeps the story rollin’.

            But it’s not Hacker’s use of meter that I particularly enjoy; it’s her end rhymes.  Those of the first envelope quatrain are straight forward and simple: themselves, glass, pass, dissolves.  The B rhymes are straight while the A rhymes are slightly—but just slightly—slanted.  The second four lines bend end-rhyme a bit more: twelves, grass, piss, calves.  The B rhymes share consonance via S, but their vowels have shifted.  The A rhymes share a similar slantiness.  But, what’s really cool isn’t the transformation of sound within the quatrain but its play with the first set of B rhymes.  Glass and grass are straight, sharing vowels and consonants, while pass and piss are slant, sharing consonants.  The echo is obvious, binding the quatrains with more than a simple ABBA rhyme scheme.

            How this interplay affects meaning—I don’t know.  Nor do I think any end rhymes must support some kind of rhetoric…end words maybe, but the rhyme is there in support of the form.  I’m just saying Hacker pushes the form beyond its usual, simple requirements.

            In terms of true coolness, however, it’s the end rhymes of the sonnet’s sestet that really, for me, make the poem click.  Consider lines 10 and 13: “A sparrow lands in the japonica….wingbeats intrusive and symphonic—a….” (italics mine).  That’s very (I hesitate to say) clever, at the very least creative.  And the rhyme, for such an usual example of it, doesn’t feel forced, either.  It feels worked, considered, deliberate.  “Japonica” is the less common name for a camellia, so I’m conjecturing it wasn’t Hacker’s first choice.  Maybe she wrote “symphonic” first only to end up at “japonica” later as a result of the sonnet’s strict form (of course, it’s impossible to know without asking the poet).  I believe, too, this diction helps her emphasize the poem’s turn.  None of the previous language is anything like “japonica,” the poem’s only four-syllable word.

A well, that line is the only one that’s a complete sentence (though it ends with a semi-colon).  This, along with the shift from the ground-dwelling park-folk to the airborne sparrow, also emphasizes the turn.  After this, the names, the poem’s only grammatical subject with the exception of the first sentence through nine lines, have disappeared.  They’ve been replaced by “a sparrow…massed pigeons” that flee the scene, “a / near-total silence” that takes their place.  This interests me because the disappearance of names is exactly what Hacker is asking us to be aware of in the first half of her poem: “Be mindful of names,” she writes, “They’ll pass / transformed, erased, a cloud the wind dissolves.”  And, in fact, they disappear in the amount of time it takes readers to get two-thirds of the way through her sonnet.  Her advice seems apropos

But what exactly are these names?  Are they representative?  Symbolic?  I’m not too sure.  I do think of names and dates when I read that line, historical facts we’re supposed to remember at all costs as students and that we probably forget as non-students.  Both are sort of concrete ways of tabbing history while it happens, after it’s passed.  And, there is a sense of this history passing in the middle section of the poem as the pre-teens play and the adults go about their business, all at the park somewhat oblivious to the turnings of the world.  The anonymous, distanced speaker seems to be the only entity sentient of such turnings.  She notices the sparrow and the flock of pigeons taking flight “as if it were a signal,” an important phrase suggesting there is something of which to be aware.  But the others are locked in their own worlds, kids and adults alike.  It’s funny, but in the poem, those worlds—and their inhabits—don’t seem important by the sonnet’s close.  The birds do.

>Bob Dylan's Two Poems

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 “17” and “21”, The New Yorker, September 22, 2008

            Years ago I read Tarantula, Dylan’s first book of poems, and, though I hate to say it, I wasn’t impressed.  Even as a fledgling college writer I knew I wasn’t reading what I’d come to think of as poetry.  His poems were interesting, yes, laden with the images and quirkiness the fill his songs.  But even the best lyricists, it seems, don’t necessarily make the grooviest of poets.

            So, these two poems written in the Sixties to accompany some Barry Feinstein photos are funny in their way, but I don’t know what else to think of them.  The first, “17,” narrates the photo of a car parked in a garage where a chandelier hangs.  Nothing else is in the garage (or in the picture, for that matter).  The poem lacks capitalization and commas, among other conventions, though it does use periods.  To indicate speech style, every instance of the word to is solely the letter “t,” as in “after crashin the sportscar / into the chandelier / i ran out t the phone booth . . .”  I like this funkiness.  The funkiest twist of all is the end, however, this weird, abrupt jump to a comment about Marlon Brando.  As the speaker looks out a window—he’s taking a break from composing “a suicide note”—he sees a crowd, for which he says “i really have nothing / against / marlon brando.”  It’s a weird thing to write.  Was he killing himself because he thought he’d had something against Brando?  Is the comment related to the crowd (who’s chasing Brando?)  The poem, itself, is weird.  But is weird enough?  I guess what I’m saying is, “17” just lacks depth.  Many of Dylan’s lyrics might actually suffer from this problem, but with music, vocals, etc., that potential problem never quite becomes an issue—and doesn’t need to: lyrics are part of a song.  But, for a poem, the language is everything.  It must do all the work.

            That having been said, Dylan has some nice lines, a good sense of the poetic line in terms of creating a complete thought and moving on.  “i really have nothing” (/ against / marlon brando), for example, would seem to indicate the speaker’s frame of mind: he crashes car, can’t get a hold of his wife or a chair, becomes a public spectacle, writes a suicide note.  He’s had a bad day.  He’s got nothing to gain and nothing to lose.  And, it’s nice to see Dylan’s characteristic list in play in the poem.  A good deal of the first half of the piece is just a list of actions in a vein similar to that in many of his lyrics, especially those to some of his older albums like Bringing It All Back Home.  And, his language is generally imagistic and specific.  It’s the depth of it that I don’t particularly care for.  The poem predominantly stays on the surface of itself.

            As for “21,” I prefer it to “17.”  Unless it’s accompanied by the car and its chandelier, The New Yorker doesn’t include the photo it describes, though the poem makes the picture clear: a pool, some puppies, and death.  One reason I prefer it is for its use of enjambment.  The first poem arguably has two enjambed lines with the Marlon Brando passage, but “21” is replete with them.  Enjambment, of course, isn’t necessary for a quality poem; however, it does put tension in the line and plays with rhythm among lines in ways endstopped lineation simply cannot.  I’m interested in the poem’s little story too: death was all about the place the day it took the girl but skipped town the day of the funeral.  And, I mean—what does death care about a funeral?  So, I guess I agree with the poem’s point there, should it have one.  And, like in “17,” the images are specific and the language simple but interesting: “death silenced her pool.”  It would seem the reaper, here, is the reaper of the indoor mini four-lanes.  That doesn’t make sense, exactly, but it’s interesting.  It makes me think.  Maybe the girl died in a way unrelated to the pool—to Feinstein’s picture—and death is just taking care of any witnesses: rippled pool water, “her little toy dogs.”  Maybe she died by drowning.  The meaning isn’t clear, but language makes me consider it, which is a good thing.

            Dylan’s put out nearly a zillion albums since the early sixties, and I have a lot of them right up to Modern Times, which he released just a few years ago.  I’m a respectful, appreciative fan.  And, it’s good to see him in The New Yorker.  But, without the music, his poetry doesn’t excite me the way poetry should.  He’s a good example of why poetic doesn’t necessarily mean poem, why song lyrics aren’t necessarily poems either.  Donald Hall wrote a great article on the acoustic differences between these art forms.  I think it was in the APR, but I don’t recall . . . should I find it, I’ll link to it here.