Poetry Notebook Read Free

echoes if the mad logical meeting had not forfeited our attention, as when a barroom
war hero piles on that fatal implausible detail too many.
    After this sudden and damaging loss of pressure in section IV, you don’t, for the rest of the poem – two and a half more numbered sections – hear much that doesn’t remind
you of what you have heard before. The structures of phrases and sentences are made more recognizable because the content they had earlier in the poem has not been equalled, so that they stand out
like ribs in a starved chest. ‘The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits’ is new and strangely gorgeous, but precious little else is, whereas the first two thirds of the poem, up to
the point of breakdown, glitter with fragments that you can’t forget. I first read ‘Voyages’ in Sydney, a city in which you can taste the ocean in the summer air, and I can still
remember the first thrilling impact of such moments as ‘The waves fold thunder on the sand’, ‘The bottom of the sea is cruel’, ‘Of rimless floods, unfettered
leewardings / Samite sheeted and processioned . . .’ (but I thought ‘Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love’ was painfully weak), ‘. . . the crocus lustres of the
stars’, ‘Adagios of islands, O my prodigal’ and the catchily florid, neo-‘Adonais’ lines near the end of part II:
    Hasten, while they are true – sleep, death, desire
    Close round one instant in one floating flower.
    Feeling tolerant, at the time, about preciousness if it sounded sufficiently compressed, I was much taken by that floating flower, and also, of course, by the killer line at
the very end of that same section:
    The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.
    For several days I practised a wide spindrift gaze myself, until it occurred to me that I might look like a seal in search of a mate. But the embarrassment didn’t stop me
writing nonsensical sequential poems on my own account. In several unfortunate instances I managed to get these published by student magazines. Not very many years later, I started having
nightmares in which I featured as a fireman from
Fahrenheit 451
vainly searching for any copies of those magazines that I had not yet incinerated. The nightmares stopped when I was at last
able to see how unlikely it was that anyone had ever remembered a line I had written. And anyway, like abstract painting, abstract poetry extended the range over which incompetence would fail to
declare itself. That was the charm for its author.
    But even the most dull-witted author was obliged to realize that his freely associating work of art – proudly meaningless, although really meaning everything – would have no readers
unless it had its moments. Whether in a formal poem or an informal one, everything depended, and still depends, on the quality of the moment. Formality and informality are just two different ways
of joining the moments up. The question will always be about which is superior, and the ‘always’ strongly suggests that neither of them is. Whatever kind of poem it is, it’s the
moment that gets you in.
    Just lately I was granted a powerful demonstration of this when I started rereading Robert Frost, something that I have done every ten years or so throughout my adult life. I would never stop
reading him if there were not something talkatively smooth about him that allows me to convince myself he is not intense. Then I pick him up again and find that his easy-seeming, usually iambic,
conversational forward flow is a deception, a way of not just bringing show-stopping moments to your attention but of moving them
past
your attention, so that you will form the correct
impression that he has wealth to spare and does not want the show stopped for such a secondary consideration as brilliance. Take a poem like ‘At Woodward’s Gardens’. For more than
half its length, the monkeys in a cage could be characters in a prose narrative that just happened to