[Tim Murphy]

I have importuned R.S. Gwynn, Charles Martin, and Robert Mezey to join me as guest on the Lariat in the coming months. But my first guest (July 4) is Timothy Steele, author of "Uncertainties and Rest," "Sapphics Against Anger" and "The Color Wheel," (poetry) and "Missing Measures" and "All the Fun's In How You Say A Thing," criticism. You can learn a great deal about Tim by simply typing Timothy Steele into your search engine and visiting his web page. Tonight though, let me introduce you to Tim by typing the neo-formalist poem I would most kill to have written:

Timothy

Although the field lay cut in swaths,
Grass at the edge survived the crop:
Stiff stems, with lateral blades of leaf,
Dense cattail flower-spikes at the top.

If there was breeze and open sky,
We raked each swath into a row;
If not, we took the hay to dry
To the barn's golden-shimmering mow.

The hay we forked there from the truck
Was thatched resilience where it fell,
And I took pleasure in the thought
The fresh hay's name was mine as well.

Work was a soothing, rhythmic ache;
Hay stuck where skin or clothes were damp.
At length,the pickup truck would shake
Its last stack up the barn's wood ramp.

Pumping a handpump's iron arm,
I washed myself as best I could,
Then watched the acres of the farm
Draw lengthening shadows from the wood

Across the grass, which seemed a thing
In which the lonely and concealed
Had risen from its sorrowing
And flourished in the open field.

One could argue that Timothy has written a greater poem or two, but none has meant so much to this Timothy.

[mandolin]

Wonderful! Both the poem and that Timothy Steele will be Guest Lariat. It seems there was a discussion either in Musings on Mastery or The Discerning Eye where Alan Sullivan suggested that a particular metrical question be put to Mr. Steele -- I'll see if I can dig it up.

[Tim Murphy]

A month ago I posted some superb sonnets by my contemporaries. Here's another, by Tim Steele.

Dependent Nature

The worker settles where the jade plant blooms,
Then settles on a blossom to her taste;
Her furred and black-and-yellow form assumes
A clinging curve by bending from the waist.

So, too, the sweetpeas, climbing on their net,
Cast wire-wrapping tendrils as they flower,
Nor need they shield themselves from a regret
Of the dependent nature of their power.

They're spared the shrewd self-mockery of the sage
Attuned to limits and disparity.
They're spared the sad mirth serving those who gauge

The gap between the longed-for and the real,
Who grasp provisional joy, who must not be
Desolate, however desolate they feel.

[SteveWal]

Originally posted by Tim Murphy:
A month ago I posted some superb sonnets by my contemporaries. Here's another, by Tim Steele.

Dependent Nature

The worker settles where the jade plant blooms,
Then settles on a blossom to her taste;
Her furred and black-and-yellow form assumes
A clinging curve by bending from the waist.

So, too, the sweetpeas, climbing on their net,
Cast wire-wrapping tendrils as they flower,
Nor need they shield themselves from a regret
Of the dependent nature of their power.

They're spared the shrewd self-mockery of the sage
Attuned to limits and disparity.
They're spared the sad mirth serving those who gauge

The gap between the longed-for and the real,
Who grasp provisional joy, who must not be
Desolate, however desolate they feel.

Well, I've tried to like this poem. If Tim Murphy likes it, then it must be good. And I can't fault the metre or the rhymes, which are all very apt, and sometimes witty (blooms/assumes for instance) So I guess it must be me.

I find the opening trope (bee = worker) to be very tired. Then it goes on in its rural idyll way, with its message at the end of the poem of hope against hope, and I think, how many times have I been here? This is a poem which does all the right things, in all the right ways, but which doesn't move me. It reads like an intelectual exercise. Or an exercise in writing a sonnet.

But maybe I'm missing something. The fact is that for me this poem offers no surprises, nothing to write home about. I wish I could like it because everybody thinks that Timothy Steele is a great poet. But then I've never been terribly impressed by presumed greatness.

Maybe I'd relate to it more if I came from the country rather than the town. But I doubt it; I still couldn't get over that opening line about the bee. Or the way it takes a neat little "moral" out of nature, for all the world like one of the early 20th century Georgians.

Technique isn't everything.

[Len Krisak]

Somehow I just know, even before I begin, that I'm going
to regret doing this, but when has that ever stopped us?

Steve, I, too, don't think this is Tim's best poem,
not by far, and yes, he has on occasion been charged
with sententiousness, but...

You mentioned the wit. I am struck by that worker bee
that bends from the waist and thus inadvertently (and
wittily) mimics someone bowing--as to a superior force,
or in this case, necessity. Frost's lines come to mind,

"And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season."

The poem is graced with moments like this (words like
"clinging") that allude to the human application with
considerable subtlety. Tim could, of course, just come right out and say, "Hey, we're dependent on nature, and it's wiser to acknowledge that than to play the mordant wise-ass who has tragic knowledge at his emotional disposal"--but then, it wouldn't be a poem, but a sentence. I think what Tim does here (since you mention the Georgians--great poets some of them, by the way) is close to what Virgil does in the (here comes a variant of that word again) "Georgics."

As for finding something perpetually new or novel--not
a Georgian moral, I guess you would say--I think of Dr.
Johnson's comment that men more often need reminding than
instructing. Tim's poem does have human applicability,
but it is no more blatant than say, Dickens's "Bleak House"--900 pages that basically advise, "be kind; don't do evil." It IS the dramatization--the technique, or as Robert
Mezey put it somewhat crudely in another thread, the icing
IS the cake--that is the poem. A perpetual quest for an
eternal avant garde of technique or of novel or even bizarre
thought leads us to James Tate. I'll take Tim.

[SteveWal]

Hmmm....

I don't think I was really talking about a perpetual avant garde, just I think some sense of the poem as a discovery rather than a re-telling of something I already know. Even if that discovery is by way of being a re-discovery. Ashbery (not flavour of the month here, but nevertheless) once said that telling people something they already knew was an insult to their inteligence.

And I'm not terribly interested in novelty either; not for its own sake. Like I said, it's not the versification that's a problem; maybe it's the sense that I'm being talked at rather shared with.

As for James Tate, well, he's written some good poems (The Lost Pilot) but probably too many. Anyway, it's a personal opinion; I can't like everything .

[Tim Murphy]

Steve, I don't like Whitman and Williams, let alone James Tate. And you "can't for the life of you see what anyone sees in" Wendy Cope, whom Tim Steele and I adore. Well, it's a big tent. Nobody, least of all Tim Steele, claims that he is a "great" poet. Let's reserve that appellation for the dead or nearly dead and award it to maybe five figures in this century. I'm sure my candidates would differ in every particular from yours: Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden and Wilbur. The beautiful thing about Timothy Steele is that he is a potential nominee, and I disagree with Len about whether this sonnet is one of his best poems. I find Tim too structured, too reticent, too perfectly behaved for my own depraved tastes. At the same time his mastery of rigorous form has been a constant goad to me to perfect my own practice, ever since Dick Wilbur first read me Steele in 1995. Finally I find that his best poems occur when he lets slip the scholar's hood as he does in both of these poems I've posted; they break my heart, and I commit them to my crowded memory.

[Alder Ellis]

Steve W >> I find the opening trope (bee = worker) to be very tired. Then it goes on in its rural idyll way, with its message at the end of the poem of hope against hope, and I think, how many times have I been here? <<

I don't think the "worker" at the outset involves a trope -- it's a simple reference to a worker bee. And I don't get any message of "hope against hope" at the end. . . .

>> They're spared the sad mirth serving those who gauge

The gap between the longed-for and the real,
Who grasp provisional joy, who must not be
Desolate, however desolate they feel. <<

The graspers of provisional joy might be said to entertain "hope against hope", but the poem is not endorsing their position or presenting that as a message. I think the poem avoids any obvious message. The issues it deals with are certainly not original but it arrives at them through original perceptions (as opposed to clever rephrasings) and achieves a quite fresh and poignant philosophical suggestiveness, or so it seems to me.

Two things do bother me about the poem, though: the repetition of "settles" in the first two lines (I would be inclined to substitute "hovers" in the first line), and the unidiomatic "a regret / Of" (presumably meaning "a regret about").

[Len Krisak]

I understand Ashbery's complaint--it's just that Dr.
Johnson disagrees with him. So do I. I know of at least
one or two people now walking the earth who might benefit
not from the "message" of Tim's poem (ugh! Ugly word), but
rather from a meditation on what Tim's speaker says of
those non-clinging individuals in our world. His speaker,
in effect, by characterizing those people, offers yet another perspective on the human condition. And my comments
on Tim's subtlety and wit in the piece (what I suspect Tim
Murphy is also responding to besides the implied wisdom) still apply. Technique can't of course be everything, but
then, what can? What it can be, however, is wonderful. Something along the lines of "absolutely necessary, though not sufficient."

[SteveWal]

Maybe Ashbery and Johnson could fight it out at the OK corral, Len!

Personally, I'd say I was about 90% in agreement with Ashbery. So I guess I disagree with Johnson. Well, apart from that 10% where I think, maybe he has a point...

I guess I don't really look for good advice from poetry. I've probably heard too many sermons in the past (these days if a sermon seems likely, I just tend to duck.) And I don't think "new" is the same as "novelty." I think there's an endless supply of new ways of seeing; it doesn't have to be some big insight.

But in the end, however one interprets Timothy Steele's sonnet, there's something about it that doesn't appeal. I'll concede that it's a good poem; that it can be moving to other people. I can't fault the metrical skill.

There are several writers I "should" like who mean little to me. Tennyson and Hardy for two. Great poets undoubtedly; but they don't quite ring my bell. There are lesser poets, like Clare or Charlotte Mew, who I prefer. I could make a big critical arguement as to why; but it would all be special pleading and I don't have the training.

Ashbery just does it for me more than Timothy Steele. Probably always will. Doesn't mean I can't apreciate the skill of Steele, and the fact that Ashbery's poems are sometimes damp squibs, but if push comes to shove...