Fairchild's poems are rarely metrical, but they are invariably possessed of such powerful rhythms, deft lineation, and highly charged language that I regard them as poetry of a very high order.

>>Originally posted by Tom Jardine:
I once asked a poet, now a University poet, why I couldn't understand his poetry or most of his contemporaries. He said, "because you probably think poetry is in the line, and others think the poetry is in the whole piece."<<

So why destroy Fairchild's line in an attempt to prove he has no sense of line?

Fairchild is the A-1 reminder of the potentially great power and beauty of the other half of the strange expansive poetry pairing, narrative. "Body and Soul" is simply one of the most amazing poems I've read, period, never mind narrative poems, where it's pantheon-worthy. "A Starlit Night" is a wonderful short lyric. The line breaks are good, but the language is heartbreaking regardless.
http://www.geocities.com/billiedee20...fairchild.html http://writersalmanac.publicradio.or.../10/index.html


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Steve Schroeder

FOsen,

I didn't say Fairchild doesn't have a sense of line, the sense of it I find uninteresting.

My theory is that when the lines and the sentences come as close as possible to the poets individual voice, with immediacy and closeness, combined with form and with structure, then poetry will probably be there. The form and structure help create the focus, the means by which substance is discerned.

This, "They can't believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced man from Okarche who just doesn't give a shit anyway because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block, leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something..."
is prose, not poetry. However effective, however charged, it is far away from intimacy, third person if I can call it that.

And Steve, thanks for the links, but I read Starlit Night too and it is also nprose-arrative. I read prose-narrative when I can, and I enjoy it, but why call it something it isn't? That is all I am saying.

Remember what Frost said, after all is said and done, all you can lay claim to is the form. The form of Fairchild is prose from a technical view and as aesthetic view.

I am not saying no one should enjoy it, just call it what it is.

TJ

Of course, I think 99% of poets call prose poetry, so I know I am in left field.

Well, it's hard to have a meaningful discussion about something if you're constantly getting stuck at Square One. Tom, I've invited you in the past to give examples of what you DO consider to be "poetry" and you have not done so. You only seem able to define in terms of either the negative or the prescriptive, and it is frankly a little depressing.

I'm glad to see this thread. I only recently discovered BH Fairchild, I think in response to something Dave said, and I've since bought Local Knowledge. Of course I am interested in loosely-metrical, or rhythmic, or blank verse, narrative. I'm specifically interested in how we elevate ordinary language to something more. And I think Fairchild does precisely this, he makes it look like he's "not doing anything."

I'm not sure if this is facile because I haven't read enough of him, but he does remind me of Carver. Now, Carver's poetry was incredibly uneven but some of it is among my most-admired.

BH Fairchild has this great opener (to December, 1986):

Dry socket of the solctice,
dull rub of the turning year.


KEB

Katy,

Those are two good lines by Fairchild.

What may help is if I describe how utterly narrow minded I am. I go on Picasso's credo, Either something is great or it is nothing. This, of course limits my mind.

The missing element in all this is apparently no one is going around calling their poetry prose, I guess because it is more flattering to be called a poet rather than a novelist? Who says, I write poetry and aspire to have it termed as prose? Yet thousands write prose and aspire to have it called poetry, even though technically in all respects it is prose. None of this even addresses free verse, or whatever it is to be called.

One of the secrets to success in the poetry world is to let people have their dreams. And, truly, there is something for everyone. Who said, "Don't draw anyone's fire. I learned that lesson."? Of course, I draw fire all the time. And I think it is important to do it. Coddling on the deep end is for teachers, not the poet on the street of honest time.

TJ

"the poet on the street of honest time"...?!

I for one would be thrilled to call myself a novelist, but only if I could write a novel. I don't believe that failed poetry is prose. Good prose stylists are as thin on the ground as musical poets, as it goes.

Anyway, this is not a debate about merit. You're arguing in terms of kind, which is inaccurate and irrelevant to the discussion. In terms of merit, I would rate BH Fairsild higher than most poets who write bouncy, easily-identified-even-by-people-with-a-tin-ear, ping-pong metre - and the fact that his rhythms are subtle does not make him a "prose" writer.

What you should be looking for is originality, deft & plastic handling of the language, and effect.


KEB
'The Poet on the Winding Path of Dishonest Time'

PS - It may be fun to get people's backs up, but I'd be wary about going around setting myself up as the only person besides Picasso who could see what's what. And remember which poets he liked: Stein, Apollinaire...

Katy,
If you read my entry above this I think you will realise that I strongly agree with you.

BUT a warning: in the defence of the obviously sublime: please don't unintentionally put metric poets into the "too stupid to write like grown ups" basket.
bouncy, easily-identified-even-by-people-with-a-tin-ear, ping-pong metre

Those who lack a subtle ear often hear good metric poetry like that and can't tell the difference. I have wondered whether the exaggerated beat in popular music hasn't dulled their receptive faculties? Anyway I know you didn't mean to generalise but many will take a lazy comfort from those words. We must all read with a large heart and mind.

Janet

Janet, you know perfectly well - and indeed so you say - that I was not generalising to the effect that all metrics is ping pong! Nor that all people who like metrical poetry have tin ears. Oh dear. No, it's perfectly possible for anyone to have a tin ear.

Having said which, on a digression, I know you will appreciate the fact that I'm listenindg at this very moment to Caruso, recently remastered (as it were), singing Rigoletto in 1917 and it is subliiiiiiime.

I know that's nothing to do with BH Fairchild. Sorry Clive!

KEB

It's a shame this thread has disintigrated into something so abstract and so little to do with Fairchild's work. I'd suggest we keep broader discussions of poetic theory (pace Tom) to General Discussion. Of course, Fairchild's poems are rather hard to excerpt or talk about in tidy sonnet-like units. Here's one from The Art of the Lathe:

The Death of a Small Town

It's rather like snow: in the beginning,
immaculate, brilliant, the trees shocked
into a crystalline awareness of something

remarkable, like them, but not of them,
perfectly formed and yet formless.
You want to walk up and down in it,

this bleak, maizeless field of innocence
with its black twigs and blue leaves.
You want to feel the silence crunching

beneath your houseshoes, but soon everyone
is wallowing in it, the trees no longer
bear sunlight, the sky has dragged down

its gray dream, and now it's no longer snow
but something else, not water or even
its dumb cousin, mud, but something used,

ordinary, dull. Then one morning at 4 a.m.
you go out seeking that one feeble remnant,
you are so lonely, and of course you find

its absence. An odd thing, to come upon
an absence, to come upon a death, to come upon
what is left when everything is gone.


Perhaps this isn't an overly typical Fairchild piece. It hasn't as much of the eclogic vernacular as some of the narrative pieces, though it shares many of the same themes and concerns.

I very much like the extended simile, which is undercut from the get-go. It begins cautiously, weighing its words: It's rather like snow. The extended (epic?)simile allows for calibrations of thought and comparison that metaphor cannot--it allows both likeness and unlikeness into the poem, sets up a dissonance.

The tercets start off suggesting perhaps terza rima--"beginning" and "something" add to that impression, but it quickly breaks down. It's as though the poem itself, like snow, is both "perfectly formed" and "formless". There is the wonderful diction that rises suddenly out of the white field--"maizeless". Without corn (and of course harvest belongs to a post-lapsarian maturity), but also perhaps unamazed. And the field of innocence is not a maze.

There is the specificity of the hypothetical observations--the snow crunches not just under shoes but houseshoes. And the low grey sky of snow clouds.

The rime at the end sneaks up on us--come upon/ come upon is merely repetition at first, and then both slips away (semantically) and clicks shut (sonically) with "gone." Perhaps there is even something of a literary allusion here--the absence of snow, melted snow, makes me think too of the snows of yesteryear. For this is indeed an Ubi Sunt lament as well.