Here is an interesting piece about B H Fairchild, a poet whose work I very much admire:
http://www.cprw.com/Bakken/fairchild.htm .

Clive Watkins

Clive,

I'd be interested in how you appreciate Fairchild, when the structure of the writing is 100% prose, made to look like poetical form.

The cprw review has many examples of poems which use the mudane standby of "summary" instead of imaginative and imagistic writing with voice, sound and many other tools in poetry. Fairchild's tools are few, and not new, except what is in usual prose.

TJ

I am sorry if you cannot see in these poems what you call “imaginative and imagistic writing with voice, sound and many other tools in poetry”.

Poems they most certainly are, not prose, at least in my book, and use the resources of language in rich and often subtle ways. They are full of vivid and imaginative details and employ a range of registers (is that what you mean by “voice”?) to powerful expressive effect. Also, many are organized according to a more elaborate architecture than one sometimes sees these days.

Some of these features are exemplified in the passages included in the article. Buy the book; read the poems, Tom.

Clive Watkins

In the past I've had students think of Fairchild as being too close to prose--until they heard his work read aloud with conviction. Then they were able to get his genius for shaping narratives in lines. I think he's one of the most important American poets going--utterly original, at times even sublime. I've seen new work from Pete that equals his past high points, so he's still going strong. By the way, his second book, Local Knowedge, has been reprinted by Norton in a significantly revised version, so readers can see that this intelligence has been at work longer than we had known.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited March 11, 2006).]

Clive,
There is a sculptural grandeur to these poems. While I do sincerely admire them I confess I experience a simultaneous annoyance that traces back to my pioneering New Zealand roots where real art was masculine and born out of the struggle with the land. Katherine Mansfield was a flicker of hope but the calloused hand controlled the gates to heaven. Fairchild seems to be such a poet.

He is splendid. I recognise that.

Janet

PS: This quotation...
We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says
what are you thinking? And I say, beauty, thinking
of how very far we are now from the machine shop
and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons
of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks
and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough
to weep more or less silently at the darkened end
of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning
the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty,
or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again
that no male member of my family has ever used
this word in my hearing or anyone else’s except
in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer.

...struck a familiar chord. I wrote this scrap from a poem for my own father some years ago. Wiley Clements published it:


Beauty, a word my father never used,
suffused my dad out there amidst the frost
as he recalled his childhood on the farm
and grieved for all those days of freedom lost.




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited March 11, 2006).]

David,

"I have never heard of such a thing. A man wanting to shoot his wife. His wife. I am standing in the center of the room barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman is crying and being held and soothed by my mother. Outside, through the open door my father is holding a shotgun, and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill, who bows his head and sobs into his hands."

This quote from the review, is nothing but prose in how I understand things. Sure, parts are effective, well written, and can be read with conviction. But this is summary writing, the kind they give movie directors who then create a scene and get the actors to make it come alive. Other quotes from the review fall into the category of journal writing. "Oh, hear me, how poignant, how poignant!" This once again reminds me of the famous quote, "You don't write poetry about ideas, you write poetry with words." Fairchild, to me, if it is all right to express my opinion, writes with thoughts and ideas, and ignores all writing except prose. Mark Twain writes effective prose, even poetical at times, but I wouldn't format his writing in stanzas and call it poetry. Fairchild seems to use a kind of breathy talk-talk, which makes me think he writes to hear himself talk. Is Fairchild a thoughtful person and maybe perceptive? Sure? So are lots of people. The writing leaves me cold.

Here I am, spending a lifetime trying to write and exactly avoid what Fairchild does with sentences, and here it is being praised. Go figure.

My old argument from two years ago: why are all these prose writers running around calling themselves poets when the people who write poetry have no intention of calling themselves prose writers?

Ok. It is good prose.

TJ



[This message has been edited by Tom Jardine (edited March 11, 2006).]

"Here I am, spending a lifetime trying to write and exactly avoid what Fairchild does with sentences, and here it is being praised. Go figure."

Go figure, indeed.

Well, Tom, then I don't know what poetry is and you do. It seems to me unjust to take this passage out of context and out of lineation just for the point of dissing it. What about the arc of the whole poem, its management of narrative voice, etc?

Look at Fairchild's line breaks in the opening stanza and how effectively they set up a quiet wit that would be impossible in prose:

I am so young that I am still in love
with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,
submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,
not even them. Nobody can hear them.

When I look at the passage you quote and put it back into the lines Fairchild gave it, I see again the subtle effects of lineation that could not be achieved in prose--something both visual and aural that creates additional layers of irony and meaning.

Perhaps you're saying only strictly metered verse can be poetry? I can't tell from your remarks. If so, we really do differ. Fairchild does have some metered poems--usually accentual rather than accentual-syllabic. But his freer poems heighten language too in many ways.

Janet, I hope you read the whole poem from which you quote. It is called "Beauty," and I do not know many modern poems that reach such a sublimity after its deliberately "prosaic" opening. The more you know of Fairchild, the more you understand how profoundly philosophical a poet he is--steeped in Heidegger, among others. Anyway, I'll leave off this argument now. I have an essay on Fairchild coming out in a future issue of the Sewanee Review, and wonder if it would do anything more to convince people how rare and astonishing a writer he is.



[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited March 11, 2006).]

David,

No, I am not saying that only metered poetry is the only poetry.

I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually, not even them. Nobody can hear them.

Your quote above, without the breaks, is good writing, but it doesn't rise very high. It is plain speech, which I think is a style, but it is dull to me.

I used to live in Baltimore, in Fells Point where all the bars were, hidden pubs on alleys, basement pubs, after-hour pubs, where drinks were potions for the alchies. All the ones I knew, now are dead.

You see, this kind of style is easy to do. 20 seconds later, it sounds just like Fairchild. Prose. Drippy hear me talk type stuff.

Your: "What about the arc of the whole poem, its management of narrative voice, etc?"

Is an old argument. 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."

And he was right. I'll be back, got to do an errand.

And David, I didn't say you don't know what poetry is, we have different points of view, I guess.

TJ

May I say that as one who has travelled aesthetically with painting, especially the American abstract expressionists like Diebenkorn and even Rothko , I find the largeness, nobility and controlled chaos of these paintings in much that I read above in Fairchild. The weight and space of thoughts and images. Composition.

In the end there are no prohibitions in art. Every element is there in relation to others and I at least recognise the larger music before I care tuppence about the details.

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


------------------
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.

That's a fine commentary on a fine poem, Alicia. Thanks for posting it!

Kind regards...

Clive

There really is something prestidigitational about the apologetic simile(s) phasing in and out of the text - you've left the trees behind by stanza 3 when all the fresh snow is a pristine maizeless field of innocence - and then you get branches and leaves on that as well. In the trance of poesised delirium these things bring about, the declarative and neatly prosaic statement, stanzas penultimate-ultimate, creates an empty field all of its own.

Thanks for showing...

Thanks, Clive & Peter.

Before this topic slips away, I wanted to share another poem from the Art of the Lathe, to explore the power and resonance of titles. I'll share it first without its title and let it stand alone. (Folks who know the title can kind of sit back for a bit...) Just curious how the poem reads to people "as is":

I knew him. He ran the lathe next to mine.
Perfectionist, a madman, even on overtime
Saturday night. Hum of the crowd floating
from the ball park, shouts, slamming doors
from the bar down the street, he would lean
into the lathe and make a little song
with the honing cloth, rubbing the edges,
smiling like a man asleep, dreaming.
A short guy, but fearless. At Margie’s
he would take no lip, put the mechanic big
as a Buick through a stack of crates out back
and walked away with a broken thumb
but never said a word. Marge was a loud,
dirty girl with booze breath and bad manners.
He loved her. One night late I saw them in
the kitchen dancing something like a rhumba
to the radio, dishtowels wrapped around
their heads like swamis. Their laughter chimed
rich as brass rivets rolling down a tin roof.
But it was the work that kept him out of fights,
and I remember the red hair flaming
beneath the lamp, calipers measuring out
the last cut, his hands flicking iron burrs
like shooting stars through the shadows.
It was the iron, cut to a perfect fit, smooth
as bone china and gleaming under lamplight
that made him stand back, take out a smoke,
and sing. It was the dust that got him, his lungs
collapsed from breathing in a life of work.
Lying there, his hands are what I can’t forget.