[VictoriaGaile]

Tom,

I had no trouble with most of the lines that bother you, nor did I perceive ambiguity or muddle in most of the places that you did. The one line that would probably draw heavy workshop crit is the "Something is filling them, something", since it is both vague and repetitive: but in this poem, it works for me quite well.

If I understand correctly, it seems to me that your primary objection comes down to the use of particle-heavy syntax to produce cadence.

This is an interesting point, since presumably it would be stronger, denser writing if there were fewer particles using up the real estate. It also takes more skill to produce cadence by manipulating substantive words instead of particles.

If I strip out all the particles, pronouns, and helper verbs, this is what happens:

Men forty
learn close softly
doors rooms
coming back

rest stair landing
feel moving
deck ship
swell gentle

deep mirrors
rediscover
face boy practices tying
father's tie secret

face father
warm mystery lather
fathers sons
something filling something

twilight sound
crickets immense
filling woods foot slope
mortgaged houses


which is a pretty drastic compression.

I don't agree that this kind of cadencing is always mediocre poetry. It is not dense, but I'm not sure that density is a *necessary* criterion for good poetry. (Although it may be a necessary criterion for blow-the-back-of-your-head-off poetry. ) It seems to be a way of controlling the pace, among other things: using lots of particles to spread out the content words slows down the succession of images.

The woods/slope/house succession that you objected to at the end of the poem also seems to be a pacing issue: in my mind's eye, the picture was drawn one element at a time, from the outside in. It was more interesting than something like "Behind the mortgaged house, there is a tree-covered slope."

So I disagree with you, but I've found the discussion quite illuminating.


You said,
In other words, fewer readers read with exact sensuality combined with thought; most read the thoughts mainly, and think the poetry is in the thoughts, the subject matter.

I think that there is room for both sorts of poetry. But I would be interested in your essay.

[Alder Ellis]

Hi Tom,

In the words of a wise guy on another board, "A bad poem is simply a good poem no one is ever in the mood for." You don't seem to be in the mood for this one.

The whole "deep in mirrors" business has as its experiential antecedent a subtle process of memory association combined with present realization. Usually, when you look in a mirror, it is for a purely practical purpose -- shaving, combing your hair, adjusting a tie, making sure nothing is amiss with your appearance. You do this automatically every day without a second thought. But then perhaps one day, as you are adjusting your tie in front of the mirror, a recollection steals over you of times when you were a boy trying your father's tie on in front of a mirror. Perhaps you haven't remembered this in many years, but now you do. Why do you remember it now? It is a way of realizing that you are at the stage of life your father was at when you were a boy trying on his tie. Wouldn't you say that this recollection adds "depth" to the usually automatic business of adjusting your tie in front of the mirror?

The whole "twilight sound / Of the crickets, immense" business is beyond explanation, but is the really great thing in the poem, I think. Normally the sound of crickets is background noise, not the focus of attention, effectively ignorable, not something one ever has to deal with. But if, during one of the idle interludes of attention, the attention happens to be grabbed by this background noise, it's like a gestalt-flip. What was foreground (one's interests, concerns, worries, focusses) is now background, what was background (everything one can afford to ignore) is now foreground. And the main thing that is usually kept in the background is one's mortality. Not just that, but invariably that among other things. As Alicia intimated, the word "mortgaged" plays into this idea -- etymologically, "death-pledged."

It's a wonderful poem, if you're in the mood for it.

[Michael Cantor]

Alicia -

Thanks for the post, and for turning me on to Donald Justice. Like Oliver, I wasn't very familiar with his work. There are intelligent, witty at times, and beautifully written - and The Tourist from Syracuse is chilling.

I want to get some of his work, googled, and found seven publications. Selected Poems (1979) won the Pulitzer. A 1995 collection, A Donald Justice Reader, covers four decades, was praised by Dana Goia in an on-line review, and seems like the best bet. Do you -or anybody else - have a suggestion?

Michael Cantor

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited November 26, 2003).]

[Steven Schroeder]

Originally posted by VictoriaGaile:
The one line that would probably draw heavy workshop crit is the "Something is filling them, something", since it is both vague and repetitive: but in this poem, it works for me quite well.

And lots of well-known poems by established poets use the vague "something" quite effectively; from Elizabeth Bishop's "Sandpiper": "looking for something, something, something. / Poor bird, he is obsessed!"

Here's one of my favorite Justice poems, also often-anthologized:

On the Death of Friends in Childhood

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

(1960)


------------------
Steve Schroeder

[A. E. Stallings]

I'm very glad to have reintroduced Justice's work to some folks. He is very much a poet's poet. My own slim volume is, "Orpheus Hesitated Beside the Black River," which is just a taste, really. Interestingly, aside from a couple of sonnets, there are hardly two poems in the same form or style, and there are a number of interesting experiements (a curious truncated villanelle that uses word repetition instead of rhyme, for example.) So he is something of a technical chameleon, which may make one feel that they do not hear a distinctive voice. But certain themes do assert themselves again and again--his love of music (he studied musical composition), and his sense of time and place: a long-ago Miami, and the lost America of the Depression.

I will try to get back to some of Tom's comments. I think some of the things Tom is objecting to are simply elements of the "plain style"--which seeks not to stand out, to be unobtrusive. (In this sense Tom, you are right about the poet almost "trying" to be mediocre, if you will.) Surely, however, to put something specific in place of "something"--mortality, fear of death, age--would lessen its ominousness. And I do think that "mortgage" is the key to the poem. That the poem is about men at 40, their prime, and not, say, men at 60 or 70 is also important. It is a turning point. Death is yet a vague adumbration, a background noise, however inevitable.

A poem instead about old men, in yet another form--blank iambic tetrameter, with occasional rhymes and something of the proportions of an extended sonnet:

A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida

Risen from rented rooms, old ghosts
Come back to haunt our parks by day,
They crept up Fifth Street through the crowd,
Unseeing and almost unseen,
Halting before the shops for breath,
Still proud, pretending to admire
The fat hens dressed and hung for flies
There, or perhaps the lone, dead fern
Dressing the window of a small
Hotel. Winter had blown them south--
How many? Twelve in Lummus Park
I counted, shivering where they stood,
A lttle thicket of thin trees,
And more on benches, turning with
The sun, wan heliotropes, all day.

O you who wear against the breast
The torturous flannel undervest
Winter and summer, yet are cold,
Poor cracked thermometers stuck now
At zero everlastingly,
Old men, bent like your walking sticks
As with the pressure of some hand,
Surely they must have thought you strong
To lean on you so hard, so long!

[FOsen]

Since you‘ve already posted ‘Dressmaker’s Dummy’ (‘remote buffooneries of the weather’ - that's on my personal top-10 list), here's a 1953 sonnet by Justice that was quoted by Philip Levine in a remembrance of John Berryman, who taught them both. -- Frank


The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman:
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen;
They had been told of something called the world;
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.

Ahhh.

[Tom Jardine]

Victoria,

You said: If I understand correctly, it seems to me that your primary objection comes down to the use of particle-heavy syntax to produce cadence.

No, I don't think I mean anything like that. There are mostly common writerly concoctions used, like this:

At rest on a stair landing, They feel it moving Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle.

The line above is mediocrity to the max. It does not in any way construct anything, it motions with cliche. Do you see the "they feel it moving"? When you really put your full entire mind and body against the line, there isn't anything there. And what is "it"? It is the moment when you are supposed to buy into some meaning, like, um, death.
So what is here is a death poem without saying the word death. Death poems are important, but usually only if they offer something. "Tragedies" are to be uplifting, not simply downers.

Alicia,

I see the word mortgage and its effect. But I say that this is writing with the head and not the heart. If one took out the subject of ominous death, there is nothing there in the poem. An example of this is to imagine a painting by Van Gogh, which can be very interesting to many people as we know. Some of the paintings are nothing but a bunch of flowers in a vase, sunflowers and so forth. So it is the sensuous inflectives, the passionate intimacies, imagination and newness that somehow interests the viewer. Another painter, a Sunday painter perhaps, paints the same flowers, and, nothing. So I read Justice as a Sunday sketcher with a touch of Nihilism. In this case, the plain style is short shrift, and easy to mimic. It's everywhere. Here is from todays Poetry.com.


"Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm,
some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others.
Daylight concealed, but only for those
fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up
earth to sky, pagan and unknowable.
How we saw it was how it was." --Stephen Dunn

Here is more dependance on that interminable "it"! (Of
course the word 'it' is needed, I need it all the time,
but not to try make poetry depend on it. Using it like this is soooo common, no wonder people aren't interested in reading poetry. The word 'it' is used so often because people write with their heads--they're actually thinking in a left-brained manner. Isn't it science that Van Gogh is right-brained?

Now who said poetry is what you feel about what you think, not what you think about what you feel? The study of science is intrinsic to writing poetry. Now I really should get orderly and structure an essay.

One start. Most know about the difference between introvert and extrovert. It is a personality mind-set, neither right or wrong. Some like big gatherings of people and some don't, etc. The football guy yelling in the stadium for his team is the extrovert, right? To make a long story short, Jung started out with the terms the exact opposite. What he actually meant was that the extrovert was the one who looked out-at others, to be close, and the introvert was the football guy. (just for examples sake) some psych people may know this bit of history.

Poetry is written the same way, left-brained and right-brained.

Everything you know and feel is to be applied to every word you structure into a line of poetry.


Just a partial ramble.


TJ

[Julie Steiner]

Ramble on, Tom. Diversity is good. The unexamined mindset is not worth keeping. That said, it's also somewhat reasonable to expect charged reactions from charged words.

Here's my favorite Donald Justice poem. I tried looking at the opening again through Tom-influenced eyes, and I found that the tritely-nostalgic incongruity of saying "There used to be" about a continuing natural phenomenon actually provides a good introduction to a poem in which images of eternity and continuity interplay with admissions of change and decay.

Although "the way the sunlight catches the cocoons of caterpillars" presumably remains the same year after year, the narrator's perception of it certainly "used to be" quite different, back in the days when he seemed to witness his grandfather's control over the coming of evening. Justice is looking back at a Golden Age and realizing that, yes, the paint was already flaking off the columns even then, and that the boy's body, too, not just his shadow, was slowly lengthening to a man's. Even the rhyme scheme starts shows signs of decay halfway through, though it returns to its inevitability along with the inevitable nightfall.

On the Porch

There used to be a way the sunlight caught
The cocoons of caterpillars in the pecans.
A boy's shadow would lengthen to a man's
Across the yard then, slowly. And if you thought
Some sleepy god had dreamed it all up--well,
There was my grandfather, Lincoln-tall and solemn,
Tapping his pipe out on a white-flaked column,
Carefully, carefully, as though it were his job.
(And we would watch the pipe-stars as they fell.)
As for the quiet, the same train always broke it.
Then the great silver watch rose from his pocket
For us to check the hour, the dark fob
Dangling the watch between us like a moon.
It would be evening soon then, very soon.

[Roger Slater]

I see little similarity between Justice and Dunn, though such similarity would hardly be damning to either one of these very fine poets. Justice is far more stylized and formal at heart, with poems that are like recursive choreography, while Dunn muses on linearly while (at his best) ending up in surprising places. Justice can be obscure, and Dunn can sometimes seem not obscure enough...mundane, perhaps. But judging them by their best work (the only fair way to judge a poet), they are both truly exceptional masters to anyone who doesn't demand traditional rhyme and meter. IMHO.