Eratosphere - Notes for Another Alan Sullivan Presentation

I've had a request to post the presentation I made on the same panel as Aaron at West Chester. I cut a few parts on the fly because I was running close to the time limit and wanted to allow for the introduction and audience reaction time. They are noted in square brackets. Here it is:

Tribute to Alan Sullivan, West Chester, June 2012

Thanks, Catherine.

Hello, everyone. It’s good to be back at this conference again. My only problem is that I’m trying to write a poem about my experience here but the weather’s so good that I can’t find a way to work in my pet rhyme: "West Chester" with "sou’wester".

It’s a pleasure to be on this panel, in the company of Sam, Aaron, and Catherine whom I’ve met before, and thanks, Catherine for inviting me. But it’s a particular pleasure to be here with Tim, because even though he attended my baptism by Alan Sullivan in The Deep End at Eratosphere almost 12 years ago and we’ve been in contact ever since, this is the first time we’ve met face-to-face.

I never met Alan but I learned about him through: his moderatorship of The Deep End at Eratosphere; his editorship of Tim’s poetry; and his website. He wanted to leave a legacy and chose the internet route in preference to traditional publication. His website stands today, at seablogger.com, as a virtual memorial to him. It contains his own poetry and writings, his memoirs, and his blog on a wide range of topics : business, climate, culture, faith, health, hurricanes, literature, nature, politics, travel, volcanoes, warfare, and weather. He was a man of many parts.

But, as Burns said in Tam O’Shanter, “to our tale”. I’ll focus on what I know best: Alan’s work as moderator of The Deep End at Eratosphere.

In the nineties I was living on Vancouver Island but had a job which involved long hours and lots of travel. I wrote formal poetry because I loved to do it, because it shut down my mental to-do list, and because I could fit it into the fragments of free time my schedule afforded. I wanted to get better, but I didn’t want people to know what I was doing. “Would-be poet“ wasn’t part of my corporate image. So I poked around the internet anonymously.

I found lots of reciprocal flattery sites but little feedback of substance. Then I stumbled into the Deep End. Some of my humorous poems involved a Scotsman called Big Ian, and his nefarious sheepdog, “Porridgeface”. Still concealing my serious poetry habit from the world, I registered, using “Porridgeface” as a nom de plume, one which hardly commanded respect. I posted a poem called “Poacher”. Alan commented. I sat back from my computer screen and said to myself, “Finally! This guy knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t mince words. Here is where I can learn to improve.”

Alan told me “Poacher” was a metrical mess and too old-fashioned for today’s world. He also granted that I might have enough of a metrical “ear” to be teachable.

I responded with a modernized version. At first he wondered whether I was an experienced troublemaker, or “troll”; but when he came to understand that the complete revision was a genuine response to his comment about archaism, he accepted me. Despite my flippant nom de plume, I had passed his three entrance tests: basic ability, a serious interest in improvement, and a thick enough skin to take hard critique and use it constructively.

Many failed. Alan would direct them to other boards or learning channels. Some protested. Some members of Eratosphere thought his treatment too harsh, and criticised it. But Alan wasn’t one to buckle to the neediness of poets or to criticism. That’s why The Deep End, even though it was an open board, was able to maintain high standards of poetry and critique throughout his tenure, or, more accurately, reign.

[After that, Alan softened to the archaism and we went to work on the original version of "Poacher". It had lots of flaws, including (dare I admit to this?) inversions. Alan, and others on the Board at the time, showed me how to polish it.

Here’s a stanza from the final version.

Mured in his castle, portcullis and stone,
he lords off the backs of the poor,
while we’re bleak in the smoke, hollow-bellied and cold,
while we’re bleak in the black house, beds rotted with mould,
our bairns with no shoes for their feet.
but the salmon are running, bright silver they’re running,
to their redds, their rites, and their red leaves of autumn,
but the salmon are running, white torrents of sleet,
but the salmon are running this moon.

It was the first polished poem I had written. I was hooked. Over subsequent years, I learned more and more from Alan, others on The Deep End, and from Tim Steele’s book, All the Fun’s in How you Say a Thing, to which Alan referred me. ]

During that time, Alan abbreviated my “Porridgface” name to “Po”, which in Scotland, from where I hail, means”toilet”. I didn’t correct him. “John” wouldn’t exactly have been an improvement.

So what made Alan so gifted as a poetry editor? Let me tell you, in his own words, why he had become known on The Deep End as the "EfH", or “the Editor from Hell”.

By way of introduction, Tim’s world involved bird-shooting, ducks in the wetlands and pheasants on the high-and-dry prairie. It also involved farming, and, at times, he was beset with droughts. They dried the land but inspired Tim to spates of poetry. Here is what Alan wrote about one of these poems in a blog entry dated March 5, 2003:

I have always enjoyed the challenge of bringing flawed works to fruition. Tim’s first drafts are often murky, contradictory, or fragmentary. Sometimes they’re wordy and windy. I tell him the truth about these defects, and I propose remedies, or even rewrite whole passages.

Of the various poems we redrafted last month, this is the one that changed most dramatically. Here is the original version:

Little Elegy

Mudholes I used to wade for mallard drakes—
hip-deep in loonshit—pass beneath the plow
or pamper pheasant cocks that now
dust-bathe in what were lately prairie lakes.
Drought can come on so swiftly: green and gold
are burned to brown faster than ditches dry.
When dirt blown from a lakebed blears an eye
unused to tears, maybe the lake grows old.
Or is it some malevolence from the sky?
A “Yes” answer is a romantic lie.
This self-pitying lyric looked irredeemable at first glance. It was originally conceived as a setting for “hip-deep in loonshit,” a silly phrase for which Tim has an inexplicable partiality. After a hat-tip to Frost (“green and gold”) the poem veered into the rhetorical question about a lake which is dry (i.e. dead) and lakebed dust that stings a bleary eye “unused to tears.” This seemed an almost embarrassing plea for sympathy, though I don’t think Tim fully considered the implications. By taking such a “romantic” stance, the author was inadvertently reinforcing the “lie” that he meant to decry.

During our initial discussion of this poem, Tim froze up more quickly than a Minnesota lake in November. It became obvious that his imagination simply couldn’t encompass an alternate version. Here is the redraft, which took me about half an hour to work out:

Ducks’ Loss, Pheasants’ Gain

Mudholes I used to wade for wingshot drakes
pass beneath the plow
or harbor grouse and pheasant cocks that now
dust-bathe in prairie lakes.
Drought can come on so swiftly: heading wheat
dries to worthless straw.
What ails this wind-bedeviled land, what flaw
brings unrelenting heat?
What thirst draws down the wells, unclouds the sky?
To ask is to invite a facile lie.
Note the change of form. I purged some of the flabby language by shortening the alternate lines. This makes for a very interesting effect, diagonally slashing through the envelope rhyme scheme. In place of the sentimental image, I enlarged the rhetorical question and built toward the ending, which I reworded for a more subtle statement of the theme.

They don’t call me the EfH for nothing…

That’s “editor-from-hell.”

Alan could assess a poem from many angles— concept, metaphor, tone, title, concision, precision, syntax, stanza-form, meter, line-length, rhyme, enjambment, and sound—and could confidently identify its improvable dimensions and point the poet to them. He was uncompromising until he had pushed poets to the limits of their ability. And these limits tended to expand as they learned from his commentary, not only on their poems, but on the poems of others.

Let me now say a few things about Alan’s poetic precepts, as I saw them.

Two of his hallmarks were concision and precision. One of the better known poems reflecting on 9/11 was written by an eye-witness, Charles Martin. He called his “After 9/11”. Too many words for Alan. He called his own, “9/12”.

The poetry section of Alan’s website contains seven excellent literary essays. One, called “A Fine Line”, deals with Tim’s poetry. I’ll quote a passage:

By 1978 publication and admiring friends had enhanced Murphy’s confidence enough for him to send Wilbur a packet of poems. The reply, though prompt and courteous, was also strict and daunting. Wilbur told the novice not to imagine sensational subjects could substitute for charged language, lively rhythms, or vivid rhymes.

Alan strongly espoused Richard Wilbur’s guidance and practised what he preached.

Charged Language: From "9/12"

Struts deemed indestructible
broke in the blowtorch heat.
Three great frets of finial steel
stand on end in the street.

Lively rhythms: From "Sunset at Shinnecock"

My first wealth was the spit where water rose
and fell, rose and fell over shelving shoals—

Vivid rhymes: From "The Hardihod of Hope"

When death’s dispatch proves tardy,
how should a poet cope
with the hopelessness of Hardy,
the hardihood of Hope?

Alan had a reputation for rooting out what he called “weak qualifiers”. But he wasn’t as hard about that, or most other things, as he first appeared. In his blog, he discusses a poem by an Irishman named Oliver Gogarty. In it the poet says that when a red-haired whore comes home late at night he will sing and soothe her to sleep. The poem finishes with the following lines.

The sound comes to me
Of a lapsing, unsoilable,
Whispering sea.

Alan writes that an Irish critic had likened the poem to doggerel and said the adjectival accumulations “bespeak a straw-hatted classicism”. Here’s what Alan has to say in reply:

There’s more going on than clever use of modifiers or allusions. The closing lines offer a subtle and very beautiful metaphor in which the woman is implicitly compared with an ocean: “lapsing” like the errant beloved, “unsoilable” because her depths are not sullied by her superficial storms, “whispering” intimately in the night. Ah. That is lovely.

Because Alan was such a disciplined perfectionist, some thought he might inculcate a style in others that was as rigid and austere as the Northern landscapes to which he was at times drawn. Here’s an extract from Law of the Taiga:

When a harsh winter starves the mangy deer
or budworms chew a clearing in the spruce,
scavengers like the raven soon appear
and fireweed puts a swatch of sun to use.
Selective forces constantly reshape
the patchwork landscapes of Nahanni Park,
Darwinian winnowings that we escape,
for only here, where mankind leaves no mark,
does nature’s incivility persist.
We love it more the less we coexist.

Yes he could at times be rigid and austere. But Alan originally wanted to be a musician. Here’s an extract from another poem, Long Bay Jump. Check this out for rigidity and austereness:

Steel band shake up the Bomba Shack;
rooster crow and the rafter crack.
Rasta man blow Jamaica toke.
Road Town van fetch the hotel folk.

Full of the moon, ganja and rum,
Long Bay jump ‘til the morning come.

Sun lift up as the moon drop down.
Church bell ring, and the preacher frown.
“All you sinner now kneel and pray.
Hear no more what the Devil say.
”
Full of the moon, ganja and rum,
Long Bay jump ‘til the morning come.

(Attempt to get audience to participate in repeated chanting of refrain)

I wanted to write like Dylan Thomas. I wanted to use rhythm and sound to sing in my chains like the sea. Although Alan, the moderator, often counselled me to moderate my “floridness”, I knew he could hear what I was trying to do. [His approval was sparing and meant a lot when granted. Once he wrote me an email about one of my poems. It was called “To the Dead of Winter” and was addressed to thousands of skeletons after a fall salmon run. Here’s a stanza:

Now is the time of the snow
though at noon there’s a moment of thaw
when the river runs clear by the skulls
and the gill-plates at rest in the shallows
or enveloped in white on the gravel
like masks. And your head has a jaw
that grew hooked as you ran with your instincts aflame
and your scales turning scarlet; the maples became
inflamed with your fire which the winter would tame
as it laid down your dead like the law.

In the email Alan said he was jealous of my having written it, and that meant more to me than publication in “The New Yorker”, not that they were requesting the poem, mind you.]

In his essay on Tim’s work, Alan writes:

If poetry is ever to regain the broad audience it has lost ... it must learn how to sing again; and it must sing of places and experiences familiar to a wider public.

Incidentally, I have one problem with Dylan Thomas. I have no idea why he counselled his father to avoid sex after death. Or was I misreading when I thought he wrote “Do not go genitally into that good night”?

I’ll close with some snippets from Alan’s blog. They relate to arrangements for his own death:

I will leave instruction for a reading of Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm (in my wording, of course). If Tim M is present and in voice he will be welcome to sing the opening verse of the Naval Hymn, “Eternal Father.” Perhaps some other ceremonial element will occur to me.

Yesterday I spoke of these issues with my friends Eric and Mike.... I told them I would stay with my plan for a wake at sea.... We made morbid quips about casting ash in oil slicks — who knows, there might be a bit of oil still riding the Stream when the time comes. And here on the internet I have cast my electrons. They too will disperse in time, but perhaps the translations will last awhile.

Much more than the translations. Legacy was important to him. I’m privileged, along with many others to be part of the great living legacy of poets and poetry of which he was progenitor at Eratosphere. It’s fitting his ashes were scattered on water. In the Deep End he was a Poseidon.