[Clive Watkins]

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

[Tom Jardine]

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

[Clive Watkins]

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

[David Mason]

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).]

[Janet Kenny]

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).]

[Tom Jardine]

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).]

[Clive Watkins]

"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.

[David Mason]

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).]

[Tom Jardine]

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

[Janet Kenny]

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.