[Tom Jardine]

Bill & David,

That is quite a response to the poem, Patina. Well done. It takes a lot of time to write something like that, the poem and the response. We all need more time.

David, two years ago at West Chester there was a symposium of first book authors, who read from their books, moderated by Len Krisak. (If my memory serves.)

When questions came up, I asked the only one. I asked for each of the panelists to quote a favorite line from each of their books, and explain why it is their favorite line. Len said, "I think that is the hardest question I have ever heard at WC."

I think only one offered a line, and it was a meant-to-be jokey line, effective but jokey, humorous. The other poets flipped through their books and squirmed.

It is a hard question, one I like. Could you offer several favorite lines from your poems and explain the line itself, how it came to be, how it relates to poetry in general, how it is your voice, how it is effective, readable and original.

TJ

[David Mason]

I too like this question and thank you for it. I can be fond of lines that are perverse, like Auden's "and even then if perhaps," from a heptasyllabic masterpiece, "Atlantis," that I've written about elsewhere. But if a poem does not have a high quotient of resonant lines it's not likely to grab me, and I'm often taking private pleasure in little effects that few others will ever notice. I've got a poem called "Home Care" coming out in TLS that begins:

My father says his feet will soon be trees

This is something that my father actually said once. He looked down at his feet and said, "They're gonna be trees." Since his ashes will be scattered in the mountains among stunted firs and heather, he's right in a way. I used that line as the opening because it seemed to have an element of surprise, and it helped me set up a pattern of rhymes.

In "Larking for Larkin" I rather like this one:

Suffering always felt better when it was brief

Because it takes my natural tendency to the maudlin and turns it ironically. And it sounds rather Larkinesque, too.

From a poem called "Nooksack" that appeared in the Formalist I like the ending:

Snow me an island. Rain me a mountain.

Perhaps it's that derrangement of the senses I like there?

From "The Bay of Writing" I like the conclusion:

Music of everything I have not written.

That poem was inspired by a reading of Anne Carson's brilliant early scholarly book called Eros the Bittersweet, but the landscape referred to, Kalamitsi, a diminutive of Kalamus, the reed from which both flutes and pens have been fashioned, was once my home in a happy time, and remains the home of one of my all-time heroes among writers: Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor's tragedy is that his memory is sufficiently shattered that he will never finish the trilogy of books some have called his masterpiece. My poem is dedicated to Fermor, though TLS did not print the dedication for some reason.

I'll finish with two pairs of lines I like:

from "A Thorn in the Paw," a poem about religion that appeared in Poetry a while back:

Birds high up in their summer baldachin
obey the messages of wind and leaves.

I've always tried to imagine bird life, and was happy to get that biblical baldachin in there.

And the end of "New Zealand Letter" I like for its celebratory complexity:

this metamorphic world, tidal and worn,
rooted, adrift, alive, and dying to be born.

One of my students complained that I end with a hexameter in a pentameter poem, but the effect was a deliberate underlining on my part.

No doubt I'll change my favorite lines another day. But here are a few of which I am not ashamed.

[David Mason]

Janet,
Are you asking what I think about the longer poems of Eliot and Auden? I wrote a dissertation onAuden's longer poems and could go on about them, if you like.

[Janet Kenny]

Dave, you wrote:
Janet,
Are you asking what I think about the longer poems of Eliot and Auden? I wrote a dissertation onAuden's longer poems and could go on about them, if you like.

I'm really asking whether you think there is any life left in older forms such as the redoubled sonnet's connected string of 15 sonnets, or do you think our modern aesthetic directs us more comfortably to more "organic" forms which grow out of our speech and film/video experience? The necessary virtuoso re-use of lines in the redoubled sonnet may seem like an affectation to modern readers.
The long poems of Derek Walcott are led by the shape of their narrative although they refer to older forms.


Unfortunately I don't own a copy of "Omeros" so I can't discuss it specifically. I have only read it once.
Omeros


I would love to know what you think of Auden's longer works.

Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 01, 2004).]

[Tom Jardine]

David,

Good lines and good comments on them. Thanks.

TJ

[David Mason]

Janet,
The crown of sonnets is still being done effectively. One of the best works of Marilyn Nelson is her sequence called "Thus Far By Faith," and she's got one or two more crowns that I've yet to see in print. I actually think the longer poems will work best if they do have some formal buttress. For example, while most of Ludlow is blank verse, I deliberately used a sort of Shakespearean method of ending scenes with rhymes to create subtle resonance. Walcott is in a sense a model here for the admixture of formal patterns and freshly heard aural culture.

Auden's longer poems are all over the map. Unlike Walcott, he didn't really have the dramatist's ability to make characters and is more likely to make allegories, but what astonishing things he did despite that weakness. I think he's the most intellectually rewarding of all the modern poets. Here are a few quick sketches of each of his longer poems:

Paid on Both Sides: his early charade, is a fabulous allegorical drama about the divided self, the way private conflict creates public conflict. His use of Anglo-Saxon patterns to create a "primitive" energy in the poem is remarkable.

"Letter to Lord Byron": a delightful defense of "light verse" but also an early stab at the verse essay, circling through autobiography as well as a set of ideas about society. This in a sense morphs into his hudibrastic verse essay, "New Year Letter," which pulls in an extraordinary range of intellectual history as it tries to dissect the dilemma of a world at war (1940-41). Contemporary poetry is so thorougly imagistic in its character that the verse essay is incomprehensible to many modern readers. Auden makes it a lot of fun.

One longer poem I'm leaving out for now, because I haven't come to grips with it, is "The Orators," but for me the two masterpieces of the long poem in Auden are really "For the Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror." These both take dramatic or mock-dramatic form (characters, scenes, etc), but since I've never seen them performed I can only judge them as literary performances. Britten thought the former too wordy to be set to music, which was Auden's original hope. In any case, as a non-Christian I'm intrigued by how deeply I love Auden's skeptical Christianity in "For the Time Being." I think it has to do, really , with the way he catches so much modern feeling and modern experience in his ironic retelling of the Incarnation story. The Narrator's speeches are among my favorite passages in Auden, and his Herod is weirdly hilarious.

"The Sea and The Mirror" takes up that skeptical sense of self that goes all the way back to "Paid on Both Sides" and has wonderful things to say about the limitations of art in our lives when we face the ultimate things: death, etc. These two longer poems are veritable encyclopedias of poetic forms, by the way, and could be used in a class teaching poetic form very profitably.

Finally, there is his wonderfully weird long poem called "The Age of Anxiety," which frequently uses a more strict approximation of Anglo-Saxon measure as it relates a story both Joycean and allegorical about four people. The complexity of this piece is daunting, and I think it's rather marvelous while at the same time feeling that it's just not my favorite of the longer works. To call it a failure is going too far. It's just an acquired taste.

One might argue that some of Auden's longer poems, like Eliot's Quartets, are really sequences rather than sustained long poems, and that narrative, per se, is not his bag. Yes, I agree. But if anyone can be said to have made a sort of narrative of ideas, it's Auden, and if anyone can give emotional color to intellectual life, it's Auden.

The fact that I'm more interested myself in grounded drama about people does not prevent me from loving Auden's longer poems.

[Janet Kenny]

Dave
I will read "The Age of Anxiety" carefully and be back when I've done so.


Because I come from a culture that was , in my youth, more focused on England than on America, my approach to Auden and Eliot was a little different from that of most Americans. I think that the contemporary events at the time I posted my poem and the shared old world romantic middle-class socialist conditioning I share with Auden, meant that my poem might as well have been in Chinese.
Thanks for those more than interesting insights and reflections.
Back when I've refreshed my familiarity with the works in question.
I should say that I know and love the Byron letter.
best
Janet
PS: I'm reading "The Age of Anxiety. I find the prose sections rather deadly and never in my life have I been so annoyed by capitalised lines. Little gems appear but, my word, we earn them.

"The Sea and the Mirror" impresses me more deeply. "Prospero to Ariel" is rich. Surely the best of the plays and the most philosophically resonant character in any play. Auden is deep in Shakespeare's head. Prospero always seems to me to be the closest voice to what must have been Shakespeare's own voice and Auden has put it on like a costume and then starts to weave his own voice and thoughts through the other voice.
Caliban must wait. Obviously a complex prose monologue.
Ariel's Postscript seems the best poem in the piece.


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 02, 2004).]

[David Mason]

Yes, I love that evaporating sigh....And what Prospero says about having to live without magic at this point in his life.

Take a look at the Narrator's speeches in For the Time Being. There are great things in them.

[Janet Kenny]

Dave you wrote:
Yes, I love that evaporating sigh....And what Prospero says about having to live without magic at this point in his life.

I saw a superb Italian production by Giorgio Strehler of"The Tempest" in the Piccolo Teatro of Milan. Prospero was Tino Carrarro, a great actor with the right commanding presence although not a tall man. He sent Ariel out through the auditorium into the Milan traffic, then, at the moment of relinquishing his powers he snapped his wand above his head--there was a loud CRACK and the theatre went dark. When the lights came back the stage was just an empty place with sticks and cloths lying about and Prospero was an ordinary bloke in shirt sleeves.

Auden has caught the same thing.

Thanks for encouraging me to read it.
Janet
For those who are interested:
Giorgio Strehler

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 03, 2004).]

[Janet Kenny]

Dave
If you're not exhausted, how about a list of basic reading for those who wish to develop dramatic and narrative poetry?
If the answer is:"Go and look for them yourself", that would be understood.
best
Janet