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  #11  
Unread 01-27-2004, 04:12 AM
oliver murray oliver murray is offline
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Wiley,

Many thanks for reading and commenting. Yes, "slean" is the word we always used, and I had it in the poem, but changed it to "spade" as it is sometimes called a turf spade (more by poets than turf-cutters) as I wasn't sure it would be understood.

Regards,

Oliver.
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  #12  
Unread 01-27-2004, 08:40 AM
Amy Small-McKinney Amy Small-McKinney is offline
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HI. I like very much the way this poem moves and even, to my surprise, the echo of lay and layers. I like the texture. The only place that I feel does not live up to the rest of the poem is here:

My grandfather was a policeman
who’d learned shorthand, to take
crop records and witness statements
in times of civil war and land disputes,
noting property boundaries,
and where the dead lay.

It seems to need to be tightened here so that it meets the standards of the rest of the poem. It sounds just a bit flat as is, especially beginning with "to take/ crop records and witness statements/in times of civil war and land disputes/ Somehow, for me the poetry is lost in the list at this point.

Oliver, you manage to write about the lives of others and the most mundane material and move me deeply. Amy

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  #13  
Unread 01-27-2004, 11:02 AM
Robt_Ward Robt_Ward is offline
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Oliver, et al;

I'm going to take the opposing side in this discussion, and offer a counterpoint to this tide of praise. While there is much lovely raw material in this poem, and some sparkling turns-of-phrase, the poem as a whole could be described, IMO, as "a string of missed opportunities."

The first section somewhat stumbles out of the gate, and seems to be spinning its wheels a bit before it attains traction with the word “oily”, and then flies down the straightaway to a lovely, sonorous finish: “…and every move / of cloud is noted in the straight-carved pools.” Had the poem in its entirety lived up to this early promise, I’d have been delighted; and frankly I had expected it to.

However, the entire middle section takes its cue from the opening line and reads to me as more-or-less arbitrarily lineated prose. It reads as if written by a solid writer of fiction who had a mental checklist of points to establish. If this were a powerpoint presentation, we’d express it as a series of “bullet points”.

Moving on to the third section, the first 3 ½ lines continue in this prosaic vein. With the word “shorthand”, the poem begins to turn back to something more expressive, which is good, but some infelicities creep in which are very bothersome. For one thing, shorthand is not “tapped out”, that’s Morse code. But more troubling still is the way the poem, as it draws to its conclusion, seems to suffer a disconnect; I don’t think the sum is correctly derived, as it were. The arithmetic is flawed.

To go a little further with that, what I mean is I can’t really derive how the fact of the water’s “patiently, without prejudice” recording of the sky has any relevance to anything — except by assuming Oliver means that the black water now records the statements and testaments of the seasons as once his grandfather did those of the people of that place. But the water’s NOT recording, it’s mirroring. It’s transient. It’s strictly real-time, there’s no history to it. The grandfather, on the other hand, was leaving a record, he was recording the building blocks that, collectively, comprise the history of the place. So for me, that’s a subtle but disturbing disconnect.

In a larger sense, when I talk about “missed opportunities, here’s what I’m thinking — look at the subject matter here; the digging, the discovery. Look at what’s discovered; a piece of wrought gold, comprised of intricately curlicued design. Think of what shorthand is; a code in curlicues, notating a history. There’s a parallelism here that’s not exploited at all, and that’s a missed opportunity. As is the opportunity to “dig deep” with the poem, just as the grandfather dug deep in his bog and discovered a “shorthand” of history that was laid down 3000 years before.

I’m sorry I can’t be more enthusiastic, because (as always) Oliver is showing us a wonderful eye for detail and is able to “place us” sweetly in a time/site other than where/when we are, but in the end I find myself looking back at the poem and saying, “What was the POINT here?” There’s this entire, implied subtext of language and consciousness that goes absolutely nowhere, and the poem is essentially reduced to the level of simply conveying information. It could be so much more.

(robt)
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  #14  
Unread 01-27-2004, 12:12 PM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Robert, Oliver, et al. This afternoon Clive, at Oliver's urging, will be posting his own reflections on this poem, and his theme is "missed opportunities."

Frankly, I don't know that I'm even competent to comment on free verse. Fixed, maybe. All the free verse in my head consists of Biblical verses and a little Eliot, some Pound. Were I Oliver, I would rewrite this as formal verse, it is such rich material. And I know no other way to do it justice. But Clive and Dana Gioia and Bob Mezey and Don Justice, among others, could do it justice in free lines.

Clive is assuming command here for the next month, and I'll be travelling, keeping my head low. The Sphere is the opposite of the mainstream poetry scene, a place where free verse is the crazy old aunt in the attic. Let us redress the balance. Margaret and Dee taking over non-Met is a great start. Clive and Robert exposing Oliver to Deep End standards here is a big foot forward. Out hunting with my cousin John and his puppy Thor, I winged a rooster who took off through the long grass; and I shouted : "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, Feeney and Thor!"
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  #15  
Unread 01-27-2004, 01:49 PM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Dear Oliver

Thanks for posting this interesting piece. I have to say at once that I have some reservations about it, though I am fairly certain that mine will be a minority report. To me it seems rather a sketch for a successful poem than the finished article. To change the metaphor, there is clearly good material in this for a strong and moving poem, a quarry seamed with words and images and feelings; but it needs more work to dig the material out and shape it.

Allow me to think my way through this poem sentence by sentence.

The first section opens with a picture of “grandfather's turf-bog” whose cut sides are “black / and oily as fruitcake”, but this attractive image is abandoned almost at once for what will be the key trope of the whole poem. The movements of clouds reflected in the pools are described as “noted” there, as if in a stenographer’s pad: the pools are the pages, the curling motions of the clouds the shorthand outlines. When we learn that the grandfather wrote shorthand, a skill which helped him in his work as a policeman, the trope turns into historical fact.

Cutting peat in the bog, the man strikes into a “hard leaf”. At first, I took the “hard leaf” to be an unexpectedly dense layer of peat. This seemed a felicitous and potentially rich image, as if the bog itself were a kind of shorthand pad on which history was recorded, the image paralleling the image of the pools of water as pages in a pad. On this reading I found the next phrase confusing. If the “hard leaf” is one of the layers in the bog, it difficult to understand how it can be described as “interrupting the thin layers of time”: it is itself one of those layers.

The next sentence, however, made another interpretation of the phrase “hard leaf” much more likely: the “hard leaf” is in fact part of the man’s find, some part of the pin, such as a flange or a capital. The shift is a little confusing. But on this reading, too, the “hard leaf” cannot properly be described as “interrupting the thin layers of time” (italics added). It may be embedded in one of the layers of the bog; it may be found at such and such a layer or even across more than one layer; but it hardly constitutes a break in the stratification.

The next lines glance back briefly in the direction of the peat as fruitcake with another culinary image: the man washes the “clogged metal clean / of the dark gruel of the bog”. Then in the next section, by a further shift, the pin itself, “with its repeating curve design”, seems to resemble a shorthand outline. The metaphorical trajectory is awkward. The “hard leaf” in the bog-as-notepad becomes a bronze-age pin which in turn resembles a shorthand outline, an outline which would naturally appear on the page of a notebook.

What the pin seems to represent is endurance beyond the span of a human life; for the pin, lost in the ground so long ago, has now been “in the Museum for nearly a hundred years”, decades perhaps after the speaker’s grandfather died. The next sentence is in many ways the turning point of the poem: the pin

…never bore his name and shorthand is
like a memory of an ancient language,
a code tapped between enthusiasts.

That little co-ordinating conjunction “and” has to carry a lot of weight. I am not convinced it is up to the job. What is the relationship between the clauses on either side? As to the shorthand, the issue is not that shorthand notes endure or are ephemeral (they are neither more enduring nor more ephemeral than any other kind of writing) but that they are indecipherable, “like a memory of an ancient language, a code tapped between enthusiasts”. In this respect, they might seem to resemble the bronze-age pin, but surely what the pin can say about the past from which it came down to us is not entirely opaque. It seems odd, therefore, that whereas we are invited to ponder the fact that the grandfather’s name was not noted by the museum and that his shorthand is lost or unreadable and, with it, the life it preserved, the possibility of “reading” something about the original owner of the bronze pin from its curvilinear design is not entertained. Only the chance visual resemblance of the marks on the pin to the marks of shorthand is relevant. This seems an expressive opportunity missed.

The double simile gave me further problems. In what ways is shorthand “like a memory of an ancient language, a code tapped between enthusiasts”? As someone who writes shorthand (and who, as it happens, collects antique shorthand books), I am not convinced that shorthand is in any way “like” a language, or even a "memory" of a language. No manual system I am aware of (apart, perhaps, from Dutton Speedwords) is at all like a language: they are all writing systems, kinds of script. On the other hand, shorthand can certainly be used as a code and historically has indeed been used in that way. The two similes confuse things whose underlying principles are quite different.

In fact, old shorthand systems are in general not indecipherable, though it is true that they may be to particular readers: it is often possible to read shorthand notes written centuries ago in systems that are no longer used. A public instance was the deciphering of Pepys’s diary, but I know this from my private experience, as well.

I was disconcerted in a different way by the phrasing of the second simile – “a code tapped between enthusiasts”, for it moves us into another world, a world of secret agents and wireless circuits and Morse messages tapped out in circumstances where the operator lives under constant threat of discovery and death. If this is to be regarded as a gesture towards Ireland’s troubled history, then “enthusiast” surely strikes the wrong note: I hear in it something close to the colloquial term “anorak”.

In the final sentence, we are brought back to the image of the bog-as-notepad as the site where some trace of the grandfather’s existence might after all have been recorded: “…somewhere, some marks he made must still be left, deep in the black water”. These would presumably have been the marks left by his peat cutting, essentially a process of slicing vertically downwards and therefore in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the imagined pages of the bog-as-notepad. These marks are clearly not the equivalent of the shorthand outlines he would have written across the surface of the page of an actual notebook, though equivalence is what seems to seems to be implied.

The closing image, part of the same final sentence, returns to the reflecting surface of the pools as resembling sheets of paper on whose horizontal plane the sky is recorded, a metaphor in which tenor and vehicle are more accurately adjusted. Of course, this kind of recording differs from that represented by real shorthand, by the bronze pin and by the “marks” the grandfather’s spade left in the bog in that they scarcely qualify as recording at all: the reflections of the clouds are more fleeting than the clouds themselves, disappearing at the margin of the watery page.

This recording occurs, we are told, “patiently, / without prejudice”. The phrase places human concerns in a wider, natural perspective, one which absorbs them and offers to draw out of them their passion. At the same time, it seems by association to characterize the grandfather: this, so it is implied, is the way in which he took his shorthand notes. The effect is moving. Alternatively or in addition, is there perhaps a hint that his recording, by contrast with that of the “black water”, might not have been done “patiently, / and without prejudice”? To the extent that there is such a hint, it is, in my view, a false note at this late stage, offering to open up speculations about the grandfather’s politics for which nothing earlier in the poem has prepared us.

The dominant feeling here is pathos at the brevity of human life and at its unrecorded passing, a perfectly fitting and honourable topic for a poem about a relative. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, the poem is spoiled by the sometimes muddled and poorly focussed handling of the extended trope on which it is built. This is always a danger in poems with a single “master trope”, particularly perhaps in short poems where any incoherence may be more obvious. In longer poems, images which recur in new contexts do not necessarily have to agree in sense or structure with earlier appearances, and indeed there may be advantages in the shifts of nuance which new contexts can create.

There are a few other, more scattered points I should like to make.

Some of the line-breaks puzzle me. (Of course, this is always likely to be a matter of debate in non-metrical verse.) In general, my starting point would be to look at the syntactical units for clues about possible line-breaks. Breaks across such units, because they interrupt the natural forward drive of the sentence, need to be weighed carefully. For instance, breaking “black and oily” after “black” tends to throw an unnatural emphasis on to each adjective. In rather the same way, the momentary suspension on “move” set up by dividing “every move / of cloud” is not repaid by the interest of what follows. In your first paragraph, I should have considered this pattern:

On my grandfather's turf-bog
the sides of the dug pits
are black and oily as fruitcake
where the spades have cut the peat’s face,
and every move of cloud
is noted in the straight-carved pools.

This has the to-my-mind further advantage of allowing a subdued three- and four-beat pattern to be felt. I think there are places elsewhere in the poem where better arrangements of the existing text are possible: ”shorthand is”, for example, seemed a particularly weak line-end.

I wondered why you repeated some words. In “and where the dead lay. / On this bog he struck down to a hard leaf / that lay, interrupting the thin layers of time”, the double occurrence of “lay” in such a small space seemed casual rather than significant and therefore an irritation. Though it supports the key trope, I wondered if using forms of the verb “to note” both in line 5 and in line 10 drew unnecessary attention to a parallel the reader might be expected to find unaided.

You may want to look again at the punctuation. I would have put a comma after “peat’s face” to mark the change of subject in the second part of the compound sentence. I would delete the comma after “fruitcake”. The comma in “a hard leaf / that lay, interrupting the thin layers of time” should also go. On the other hand, in “He washed the clogged metal clean / of the dark gruel of the bog / then cycled sixteen miles to the police station”, a comma is needed after “bog”; some would argue that grammar requires “and” before “then”. A full stop is required after “a hundred years”. I would put a comma after “name” for the same reasons that I would put one after “peat’s face”.

As others have remarked, there are some striking phrases here; there is some rather flat writing, too. In “every move / of cloud”, “move” to my mind is just filling a place. The first sentence of the second paragraph is in effect narrative prose and sparks only in the last clause, and there not strongly. I wonder, as well, if more might have been made of the visual and tactile qualities of the bronze-pin (which might have allowed the deeper implications I mentioned to be drawn out more richly). As it is, “The bronze-age cloak-pin of fine-beaten gold / with its repeating curve design” seems – if you will forgive the pun – rather lacklustre.

It is a cruel test, one many of my own poems might not pass, but set this as prose and look at it again. I am not one of those who think that line-ends in non-metrical verse are nugatory, that non-metrical verse is just chopped-up prose. But the question stands: how well as prose does this read? To my ear, despite the potentially interesting subject-matter, it sounds a little pedestrian.

Sorry, Oliver! As said at the outset, there is clearly good material here for a strong and moving poem. I would like to see you do more some more quarrying and shaping.

Kind regards

Clive
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  #16  
Unread 01-27-2004, 05:23 PM
Robt_Ward Robt_Ward is offline
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Clive,

I find it fascinating how you and I have found essentially the same strengths and the same weaknesses in this poem, although coming at from vastly different persepctives. Your depth of reading, of course, dwarfs mine, but then, I saw the poem for the first time today...

Nah, that's an excuse: I doff my cap to the master-scholar among us.

As an aside, I read the "leaf" as exactly that: an actual, bronze age depiction of a leaf, in metal. No doubt my interpretation is colored by having just seen last night the second film in the Tolkien trology, "The Two Towers", where just such a cloak-clasp in the shape of a leaf played a prominent part.

Oliver,

I hope the one-two piunch of me and Clive isn't in any way discouraging: both of us find wonderful raw material, and very well-observed... But, in the end, the "art" of poetry that transcends is the doing of it "just so", and the goal, while always elusive, is well worth the striving.

(robt)
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  #17  
Unread 01-27-2004, 08:50 PM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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I have to confess it was not without mischievous intent that I posted this poem, which I think is good. The reactions are polar, uncritical admiration (except Amy) on the one hand and Clive and Robert with their densely reasoned and argued criticism on the other. I do think Clive's proposed re-lineation of the beginning is persuasive. But again, I'm hesitant to commit myself to any view, because I don't know shit from shinola when it comes to free verse. Oliver?
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  #18  
Unread 01-27-2004, 09:09 PM
Janet Kenny Janet Kenny is offline
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Hi Clive,
I felt that some other point of view might help to keep things moving.


What Marks We Leave

On my grandfather's turf-bog
the sides of the dug pits are black
and oily as fruitcake, where the spades
have cut the peat’s face and every move
of cloud is noted in the straight-carved pools.


The first section opens with a picture of “grandfather's turf bog” whose cut sides are “black / and oily as fruitcake”, but this attractive image is abandoned almost at once for what will be the key trope of the whole poem. The movements of clouds reflected in the pools are described as “noted” there, as if in a stenographer’s pad: the pools are the pages, the curling motions of the clouds the shorthand outlines. When we learn that the grandfather wrote shorthand, a skill which helped him in his work as a policeman, the trope turns into historical fact.

Clive, I find your reading of this stanza to be over-literal. “Noted” is subtly picked up and enlarged further on in the poem, but at this point is dropped in as--if you like--a pathetic fallacy which in my opinion is acceptable and works well. I love the reflected clouds in the “straight-carved pools”. A haunting image.

My grandfather was a policeman
who’d learned shorthand, to take
crop records and witness statements
in times of civil war and land disputes,
noting property boundaries,
and where the dead lay.
On this bog he struck down to a hard leaf
that lay, interrupting the thin layers of time.
He washed the clogged metal clean
of the dark gruel of the peat.
then cycled sixteen miles to the police station.


Cutting peat in the bog, the man strikes into a “hard leaf”. At first, I took the “hard leaf” to be an unexpectedly dense layer of peat.
Again I find your reading is impatient and over-literal. Patience is needed as a poem unfolds and it seems strange to blame the poem for not being what you assume it to be before you have assembled all the pieces of evidence.
This seemed a felicitous and potentially rich image, as if the bog itself were a kind of shorthand pad on which history was recorded, the image paralleling the image of the pools of water as pages in a pad. On this reading I found the next phrase confusing. If the “hard leaf” is one of the layers in the bog, it difficult to understand how it can be described as “interrupting the thin layers of time”: it is itself one of those layers.
No wonder you found it confusing. It seems you assumed once again before gathering the accumulating evidence. The “hard leaf” is not yet explained. The pieces are still being assembled as is the sense of mystery and curiosity. In my opinion “thin layers of time” is a perfect metaphor for the strata in a peat bog.


The next sentence, however, made another interpretation of the phrase “hard leaf” much more likely: the “hard leaf” is in fact part of the man’s find, some part of the pin, such as a flange or a capital. The shift is a little confusing. But on this reading, too, the “hard leaf” cannot properly be described as “ interrupting the thin layers of time” (italics added). It may be embedded in one of the layers of the bog; it may be found at such and such a layer or even across more than one layer; but it hardly constitutes a break in the stratification.

I took this passage to mean that a surprisingly tangible object interrupted the intangible “idea” of “thin layers of time”.

The bronze-age cloak-pin of fine-beaten gold
with its repeating curve design has been
in the Museum for nearly a hundred years
It never bore his name, and shorthand
is like a memory of an ancient language,
a code tapped between enthusiasts.
But somewhere, some marks he made
must still be left, deep in the black water,
below the surface that, patiently,
without prejudice, records the sky.


The next lines glance back briefly in the direction of the peat as fruitcake with another culinary image: the man washes the “clogged metal clean / of the dark gruel of the bog”. Then in the next section, by a further shift, the pin itself, “with its repeating curve design”, seems to resemble a shorthand outline. The metaphorical trajectory is awkward. The “hard leaf” in the bog-as notepad becomes a bronze-age pin which in turn resembles a shorthand outline, an outline which would naturally appear on the page of a notebook.

It seems a stretch to object to “gruel of the peat(not “bog”)” as a culinary image and I felt no impulse towards culinary matters. It’s a textural image. The movement to the shorthand outline is a strong visual calligraphic image and harks back to ancient, ideographic markings found by archaeologists.

What the pin seems to represent is endurance beyond the span of a human life; for the pin, lost in the ground so long ago, has now been “in the Museum for nearly a hundred years”, decades perhaps after the speaker’s grandfather died. The next sentence is in many ways the turning point of the poem: the pin

…never bore his name and shorthand is
like a memory of an ancient language,
a code tapped between enthusiasts.

That little co-ordinating conjunction “and” has to carry a lot of weight. I am not convinced it is up to the job.

I actually agree with you Clive. I would delete “and”.
What is the relationship between the clauses on either side? As to the shorthand, the issue is not that shorthand notes endure or are ephemeral (they are neither more enduring nor more ephemeral than any other kind of writing) but that they are indecipherable, “like a memory of an ancient language, a code tapped between enthusiasts”.
“Shorthand” is an arcane script understood by initiates--OK all writing is, but shorthand is a shell-game code apart from but within a public code. Samuel Pepys used a code for that reason.
In this respect, they might seem to resemble the bronze-age pin, but surely what the pin can say about the past from which it came down to us is not entirely opaque. It seems odd, therefore, that whereas we are invited to ponder the fact that the grandfather’s name was not noted by the museum and that his shorthand is lost or unreadable and, with it, the life it preserved, the possibility of “reading” something about the original owner of the bronze pin from its curvilinear design is not entertained. Only the chance visual resemblance of the marks on the pin to the marks of shorthand is relevant. This seems an expressive opportunity missed.
If you want to extend the poem then yes, that would have been possible but this poem, it seems to me, is about the evanescence of connections, his grandfather’s contribution, unrecorded. It seems to me this poem is about loss, broken links and an aching feeling of the unimportance of people, no matter how great an experience or contribution may have seemed to them. The grandson’s sense of pride and hurt at the absence of any sign that his grandfather found and donated the leaf/pin. All of this in a darkly beautiful and unnerving setting.
The double simile gave me further problems. In what ways is shorthand “like a memory of an ancient language, a code tapped between enthusiasts”? As someone who writes shorthand (and who, as it happens, collects antique shorthand books), I am not convinced that shorthand is in any way “like” a language, or even a "memory" of a language. No manual system I am aware of (apart, perhaps, from Dutton Speedwords) is at all like a language: they are all writing systems, kinds of script. On the other hand, shorthand can certainly be used as a code and historically has indeed been used in that way. The two similes confuse things whose underlying principles are quite different.

To the uninitiated shorthand seems like that whatever it is to the initiated.

In fact, old shorthand systems are in general not indecipherable, though it is true that they may be to particular readers: it is often possible to read shorthand notes written centuries ago in systems that are no longer used. A public instance was the deciphering of Pepys’s diary, but I know this from my private experience, as well.
I mentioned Pepys further up. I repeat that for most people shorthand is impenetrable and therefore mysterious.

I was disconcerted in a different way by the phrasing of the second simile – “a code tapped between enthusiasts”, for it moves us into another world, a world of secret agents and wireless circuits and Morse messages tapped out in circumstances where the operator lives under constant threat of discovery and death. If this is to be regarded as a gesture towards Ireland’s troubled history, then “enthusiast” surely strikes the wrong note: I hear in it something close to the colloquial term “anorak”.
(“anorak”. A personal bias surely? Any word is possible for a poem.)

Or the Count of Monte Cristo in prison. A seeming reaching out to the unseen other. Or a goldsmith tapping a pattern in a leaf.
But somewhere, some marks he made
must still be left, deep in the black water,
below the surface that, patiently,
without prejudice, records the sky.


In the final sentence, we are brought back to the image of the bog-as-notepad as the site where some trace of the grandfather’s existence might after all have been recorded: “…somewhere, some marks he made must still be left, deep in the black water”. These would presumably have been the marks left by his peat cutting, essentially a process of slicing vertically downwards and therefore in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the imagined pages of the bog-as-notepad. These marks are clearly not the equivalent of the shorthand outlines he would have written across the surface of the page of an actual notebook, though equivalence is what seems to seems to be implied.
Parallels. Not equivalents. I think this is a misreading of the poem.
The marks on the gold must have been engraved into the surface. But I find this too literal yet again. The marks left by the grandfather would be actual and psychological or imaginary.

The closing image, part of the same final sentence, returns to the reflecting surface of the pools as resembling sheets of paper
Really?
... on whose horizontal plane the sky is recorded, a metaphor in which tenor and vehicle are more accurately adjusted. Of course, this kind of recording differs from that represented by real shorthand, by the bronze pin and by the “marks” the grandfather’s spade left in the bog in that they scarcely qualify as recording at all: the reflections of the clouds are more fleeting than the clouds themselves, disappearing at the margin of the watery page.

This recording occurs, we are told, “patiently, / without prejudice”. The phrase places human concerns in a wider, natural perspective, one which absorbs them and offers to draw out of them their passion. At the same time, it seems by association to characterize the grandfather: this, so it is implied, is the way in which he took his shorthand notes. The effect is moving.


I agree that it is moving. I read it as a parallel set of images that continue apart from the involvement of the grandfather. It goes on regardless.
Alternatively or in addition, is there perhaps a hint that his recording, by contrast with that of the “black water”, might not have been done “patiently, / and without prejudice”? To the extent that there is such a hint, it is, in my view, a false note at this late stage, offering to open up speculations about the grandfather’s politics for which nothing earlier in the poem has prepared us.
If Oliver says yes to this I will accept it but it seems an utterly irrelevant conjecture to me.

The dominant feeling here is pathos at the brevity of human life and at its unrecorded passing, a perfectly fitting and honourable topic for a poem about a relative. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, the poem is spoiled by the sometimes muddled and poorly focussed handling of the extended trope on which it is built. This is always a danger in poems with a single “master trope”, particularly perhaps in short poems where any incoherence may be more obvious. In longer poems, images which recur in new contexts do not necessarily have to agree in sense or structure with earlier appearances, and indeed there may be advantages in the shifts of nuance which new contexts can create.

I agree about the brevity of human life but I’d extend it to the lack of recognition of deeds performed and valued by those closely connected. The effacing nature of time. That’s why the gold leaf is an interruption in the layers.

Clive, I will leave your anaylsis of the line-breaks. I wanted to talk about the interpretation of the poem.

I don’t know whether I have contributed anything of use but I felt another view was needed.
Best regards,
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 27, 2004).]
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  #19  
Unread 01-28-2004, 04:06 AM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Excuse me, Oliver. This is really an aside to Janet.

Dear Janet

Having spent a considerable amount of time on this poem already, I have no wish to get into a discussion of discussions, a regress that might seem endless and would certainly be tiresome; nor would it serve the only purpose of any importance in this thread and the only one I have any interest in: helping Oliver to make a better poem out the material he has.

I shall now immediately break that undertaking about discussions of discussions to comment quickly on your remarks, picking out your points by quotation and dealing briefly with each in turn. (The quotations from your piece are in italics, with my original words embedded in them in bold.)

...

I find your reading of this stanza to be over-literal. “Noted” is subtly picked up and enlarged further on in the poem, but at this point is dropped in as--if you like--a pathetic fallacy which in my opinion is acceptable and works well.

The title of the poem is “What Marks We Leave”, which activates at once and quite plainly the sense of “noted” in line 5 as referring to the process of recording. And have we not seen scenes in films and read passages in books in which the boss instructs his secretary to “Take a note”?

At first, I took the “hard leaf” to be an unexpectedly dense layer of peat.
Again I find your reading is impatient and over-literal. Patience is needed as a poem unfolds and it seems strange to blame the poem for not being what you assume it to be before you have assembled all the pieces of evidence.


Poems, like all literary artefacts (like music), exist first sequentially and, later, both sequentially and in memory. It is a mistake to discount the first way of reading in favour of the second. There is indeed an awkward shift here, as the poem moves directly from the explicit description of how the grandfather used shorthand to take notes to the “hard leaf” he finds in the bog. At this point Oliver does not control with sufficiently clarity the connotations of his own diction, diction that exists in the metaphorical field established right from the title. This leads to the possible confusion I describe, one that contributes nothing to the aesthetic effect.

If the “hard leaf” is one of the layers in the bog, it difficult to understand how it can be described as “interrupting the thin layers of time”: it is itself one of those layers.

No wonder you found it confusing. It seems you assumed once again before gathering the accumulating evidence. The “hard leaf” is not yet explained. The pieces are still being assembled as is the sense of mystery and curiosity. In my opinion “thin layers of time” is a perfect metaphor for the strata in a peat bog.


This does not address the point I raised.

I took this passage to mean that a surprisingly tangible object interrupted the intangible “idea” of “thin layers of time”.

This, too, does not address the issue I raised.

It seems a stretch to object to “gruel of the peat(not “bog”)” as a culinary image and I felt no impulse towards culinary matters.

Look again. I did not object to the image. “Gruel” is does indeed belong to the category of culinary topics, whether you felt an impulse towards such matters or not.

The movement to the shorthand outline is a strong visual calligraphic image and harks back to ancient, ideographic markings found by archaeologists.

A point I make.

It seems odd, therefore, that whereas we are invited to ponder the fact that the grandfather’s name was not noted by the museum and that his shorthand is lost or unreadable and, with it, the life it preserved, the possibility of “reading” something about the original owner of the bronze pin from its curvilinear design is not entertained. Only the chance visual resemblance of the marks on the pin to the marks of shorthand is relevant. This seems an expressive opportunity missed.
If you want to extend the poem then yes, that would have been possible but this poem, it seems to me, is about the evanescence of connections, his grandfather’s contribution, unrecorded. It seems to me this poem is about loss, broken links and an aching feeling of the unimportance of people, no matter how great an experience or contribution may have seemed to them. The grandson’s sense of pride and hurt at the absence of any sign that his grandfather found and donated the leaf/pin. All of this in a darkly beautiful and unnerving setting.


You write of the “evanescence of connections”, “broken links”, “an aching feeling of the unimportance of people” – But that is my point exactly. Oliver misses the opportunity to deepen his poem in just that direction.

To the uninitiated shorthand seems like that whatever it is to the initiated.

While that may be true (indeed, I conceded the point in my own piece), it does not excuse the radical muddle here. Oddly, indeed, the fact that shorthand is a script, not a language, makes it a more poignant image of the lost life of the grandfather because it puts it tantalizingly less out of reach. If the speaker only knew the “code”, he could read it. If it were really in another language, the ability to transcribe the “message” into a familiar alphabet (to decode it, as it were) would still leave him ignorant of the past he wants to connect with. This is yet another instance of a missed opportunity and arises from a lack of focus on the words being deployed.

I was disconcerted in a different way by the phrasing of the second simile – “a code tapped between enthusiasts”, for it moves us into another world, a world of secret agents and wireless circuits and Morse messages tapped out in circumstances where the operator lives under constant threat of discovery and death. If this is to be regarded as a gesture towards Ireland’s troubled history, then “enthusiast” surely strikes the wrong note: I hear in it something close to the colloquial term “anorak”.

(“anorak”. A personal bias surely? Any word is possible for a poem.)


Any word is possible, but only the right word will do. This is not the right word, belonging to a domain of experience and a register out of kilter with the context.

Or the Count of Monte Cristo in prison. This suggested parallel suffers in the same way as Oliver’s original.

Or a goldsmith tapping a pattern in a leaf. Let’s get back to the words of Oliver’s poem: “a code tapped between enthusiasts”.

In the final sentence, we are brought back to the image of the bog-as-notepad as the site where some trace of the grandfather’s existence might after all have been recorded: “…somewhere, some marks he made must still be left, deep in the black water”. These would presumably have been the marks left by his peat cutting, essentially a process of slicing vertically downwards and therefore in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the imagined pages of the bog-as-notepad. These marks are clearly not the equivalent of the shorthand outlines he would have written across the surface of the page of an actual notebook, though equivalence is what seems to seems to be implied.

Parallels. Not equivalents. I think this is a misreading of the poem.


Fine. “Parallels”. But the point still stands: this is yet another fuzzily rendered image where sharper and more evocative possibilities existed.

The closing image, part of the same final sentence, returns to the reflecting surface of the pools as resembling sheets of paper - Really?

Yes. Really. The poem is called “What Marks We Leave”, explicitly refers to shorthand, throughout deploys metaphors drawn from shorthand, opens with the image of the motions of the clouds being “noted in the straight-carved pools” and closes – surely by design – with the same image, “the surface that, patiently, / without prejudice, records the sky.”

Alternatively or in addition, is there perhaps a hint that his recording, by contrast with that of the “black water”, might not have been done “patiently, / and without prejudice”? To the extent that there is such a hint, it is, in my view, a false note at this late stage, offering to open up speculations about the grandfather’s politics for which nothing earlier in the poem has prepared us.

If Oliver says yes to this I will accept it but it seems an utterly irrelevant conjecture to me.


My point once more, and one which, you will note, I phrase as a question. I am suggesting that Oliver might want to consider that a reader might choose to take the words in this way and that he might therefore want to ask himself whether he wished to reinforce this hint, to remove it altogether or just to ignore it.

...

And that is where I shall leave both your comments and Oliver’s poem.

Regards

Clive
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  #20  
Unread 01-28-2004, 08:03 AM
Terese Coe Terese Coe is offline
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I think Janet has made some important points here, and I agree with many of them; in particular, the excessive literalism she finds in Clive's remarks.

I agree with Clive on the wrong "note" struck by "enthusiasts" as a word choice.

He said: the issue is not that shorthand notes endure or are ephemeral (they are neither more enduring nor more ephemeral than any other kind of writing) but that they are indecipherable, “like a memory of an ancient language, a code tapped between enthusiasts”. In this respect, they might seem to resemble the bronze-age pin, but surely what the pin can say about the past from which it came down to us is not entirely opaque.

I would suggest Oliver delete "and shorthand
is like a memory of an ancient language,
a code tapped between enthusiasts." It's clearly a digression which adds little if anything.

If a bronze-age pin can be said to be "like a memory of an ancient language," as Clive suggests, isn't everything in the universe similarly articulate to a greater or lesser degree? Isn't that what this poem is about?

What the pin can say about the past is of course "not entirely opaque"! What the sides of the peat-bog can say is, however, rather opaque to us, especially considering it is now underwater. The pin is no longer under the earth or under water; it is here to be "read," both because it is gold and because it interrupted the digging of the peat. This is the quality of discovery. Discovery is always an interruption, and simultaneously a continuation (and here one could bring in destiny and whether it is predetermined, but that would surely bring us too far afield).

Clive also said: Alternatively or in addition, is there perhaps a hint that his recording, by contrast with that of the “black water”, might not have been done “patiently, / and without prejudice”? To the extent that there is such a hint, it is, in my view, a false note at this late stage, offering to open up speculations about the grandfather’s politics for which nothing earlier in the poem has prepared us.

I would suggest there is no such intimation here, and Clive is reading this in (in my opinion). Thus there is no false "note."

As for the clouds "noted" in the pools, I find that verb quite charming in that position.

Oddly, indeed, the fact that shorthand is a script, not a language, makes it a more poignant image of the lost life of the grandfather because it puts it tantalizingly less out of reach.

Actually, the grandfather's life is not out of reach; he is mystically evoked by the poem and Oliver's memory, the peat bog and the pin; the shorthand is far less relevant to that evocation than the other factors. Not to be aware of that is to miss a great deal.

Finally, re: I have no wish to get into a discussion of discussions, a regress that might seem endless and would certainly be tiresome; nor would it serve the only purpose of any importance in this thread and the only one I have any interest in: helping Oliver to make a better poem out the material he has.

I shall now immediately break that undertaking about discussions of discussions to comment quickly on your remarks...


I don't understand. Isn't discussion what we're here for? It's hardly a "regression," and it's only tiresome to those who find it so.

Terese





[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited January 28, 2004).]
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