'I Can Taste the Language'

The Scottish Poetry Library in 2006 asked American poet August Kleinzahler to name some of his “old favourite” books. This is how he replied: “Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel’s stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.” 

Nicely put. How telling that a poet’s first choices are prose writers, though not, fortunately, writers of “poetic prose” from the tribe of Thomas Wolfe. I share Kleinzahler’s taste, though not exclusively. In the wrong hands, “closely written texts” can turn into purple prose or high-compression avant-garde inertia, with words so dense they emit no light, like a black hole. My preference is always for language that is rhythmically organized, balancing the explicit with the denotative, unafraid to share some of its music – formal beauty tempered by a commonsensical regard for the reader. Good prose is such a pleasure.

 

In the September 7, 1935, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, Walter de la Mare published “The Art That Nature Makes,” in which he writes:

 

“Words are not merely fixed symbols with an absolute meaning and innumerable personal connotations; they consist also of sounds; and of sounds made by the most complex and direct of all instruments—the human voice. Which of the two is the more natural, speech or singing, I cannot say; but the one can be of at least as delicate, supple, and mutable a melody and charm as the other.”

 

I would argue that the same applies to prose. Most of us, of course, read prose silently. I propose an experiment: try reading a favorite writer aloud, fiction and nonfiction, Nabokov and an essay by Hazlitt. Pay attention to the flow and the logic. Do they stumble? Do they commit what jazz musicians call a “clam,” a wrong note? Read with someone else present and watch their reaction. De la mare writes:

 

“Needless to say we may value poetry [and prose] more for its ideas, its philosophy, its message, its edification than for the delight which the mere music of its language may bestow. But that music absent, poetry, in the generally accepted meaning of the word, is absent, whatever else may remain. Like all immediate appeals to our senses, mind, and being, it is a secret language, but one with scores of dialects.”

'Untrue For Ever'

Valentine’s Day invites declarations of love and their opposite. As Dylan, the reliable author of anti-love songs puts it, “You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend.” Some find the day’s institutional sentiments insufferable, or at least worthy of mockery. Charles Lamb, that lifelong bachelor, writes in "Valentine’s Day”: 

“[T]his is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own.”

Questioning the heart as the seat of love, Lamb writes: “[W]e might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, ‘Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;’ or pputting a delicate question, ‘Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?’”

Lamb was an unrequited admirer of the actress and singer Frances “Fanny” Kelly. He even wrote her a sonnet, “To Miss Kelly.” Having seen her the night before on stage, Lamb writes to her on July 20, 1819, saying her performance “has given rise to a train of thinking, which I cannot suppress”:

 

“Would to God you were released from this way of life; that you could bring your mind to consent to take your lot with us, and throw off for ever the whole burden of your Profession. I neither expect or wish you to take notice of this which I am writing, in your present over occupied & hurried state.—But to think of it at your leisure. I have quite income enough, if that were all, to justify for me making such a proposal, with what I may call even a handsome provision for my survivor.”

 

Lamb approaches “stalker” status. Has anyone ever proposed marriage so obliquely? And is he asking Kelly to marry “us” – that is, Lamb and his matricidal sister Mary? And what happened to his sense of comedy? It gets worse: “I am not so foolish as not to know that I am a most unworthy match for such a one as you, but you have for years been a principal object in my mind. In many a sweet assumed character I have learned to love you, but simply as F. M. Kelly I love you betterm than them all.” Our eloquent Elia – he would soon write his first essay under that pseudonym – is tongue-tied.

 

Reading this letter, I’m embarrassed for Lamb but sympathetic. Anyone who has been romantically rebuffed can’t help but feel for the guy. At the time, he was forty-three and Kelly was twenty-eight. As insurance, he writes: “It is impossible I should feel injured or aggrieved by your telling me at once, that the proposal does not suit you.” Kelly’s reply, a masterpiece of tact and diplomacy written the same day, is a single sentence:  

 “An early & deeply rooted attachment has fixed my heart on one from whom no worldly prospect can well induce me to withdraw it but while I thus frankly & decidedly decline your proposal, believe me, I am not insensible to the high honour which the preference of such a mind as yours confers upon me—let me, however, hope that all thought upon this subject will end with this letter, & that you will henceforth encourage no other sentiment towards me than esteem in my private character and a continuance of that approbation of my humble talents which you have already expressed so much & so often to my advantage and gratification.”

 

Kelly signs off as “Your obliged friend.” Within hours, Lamb replies to her reply, having regained some of his sense of humor:   

 

“Your injunctions shall be obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisacal no-how-ish kind of a humour. I believe it is the rain, or something. I had thought to have written seriously, but I fancy I succeed best in epistles of mere fun; puns & that nonsense.”

 

Lamb died unmarried and perhaps celibate in 1834. Mary, who also never married, outlived him by thirteen years. Kelly died unmarried in 1882 at the age of ninety-two. My favorite anti-love poem was published by A.E. Housman, another bachelor, in More Poems (1936):

 

“Stone, steel, dominions pass,

  Faith, too, no wonder;

So leave alone the grass

  That I am under.

 

“All knots that lovers tie

  Are tied to sever;

Here shall your sweetheart lie,

  Untrue for ever.”

'Time So Vicious in His Reaping'

I moved to Montpelier, Ohio, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, late in the summer of 1977. My mental model for such a place was fictional, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I was born and raised in a Cleveland suburb and a small town surrounded by corn and soybean fields seemed terribly exotic. Anderson prefaced his stories with “The Book of the Grotesque,” a brief scene-setter which today I find condescending to smalltown people. He writes:

 “It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

 

It’s all a little silly and saturated in semi-digested Freudian nonsense, but half a century ago I took Anderson’s grotesquerie seriously. The main financial institution in Montpelier was downtown, two blocks from where we lived, and was called the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank. Its president, a very old man, was our landlord, and I resented him for no good reason. The town’s weekly newspaper, where I would soon go to work, was housed in a former gas station. The grocery/liquor store on Main Street was owned and run by a crippled man with a withered arm. Across the street was a pet store owned by a man who always wore olive-green overalls, with a parrot perched on his shoulder. Down his back ran a dense white smear of bird shit.

 

I soon ran into a peculiar-looking young man, always dressed in cowboy regalia. I never saw him do anything except walk around downtown. His face was almost featureless and resembled a slice of ham. Most of one side of it had been erased. He had one eye. I soon learned that he had bungled a suicide attempt with a shotgun. Those not laughing at him adopted a protective attitude. He died a year or two later and I’ve often wondered what his life was like. What made him desperate enough to try to kill himself? Did he ever think about trying again?

 

In his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Scott Donaldson devotes several interesting pages to the poet’s attitude toward death, which remained consistent through the years. When his mother died in 1896, Robinson didn’t grieve. He reasoned that her suffering was over. She was released. When the daughter of neighbors in Gardiner, Maine was drowned while the family was on vacation, Robinson wrote to a friend: “I am never sorry for the dead, but I can be damnably sorry for the living.”

 

An uncle of the same neighbors, Donaldson tells us, “suffered a disfiguring gunshot wound while rabbit hunting,” and lingered for four days. Robinson wrote to a friend that he hoped the doctors “inadvertently . . . hastened things a little.” Robinson was stoical about death, a stance that can be mistaken for insensitivity. His brother Herman became an alcoholic, was estranged from his wife and children and died of tuberculosis in 1909. His eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and had taken his life in 1899 with an overdose. Death was like a neighbor in those days, intimately familiar, not something that routinely happened in a hospital.

 

Robinson wrote “For a Dead Lady” for his mother, Mary Palmer Robinson, after her death in 1896, shortly before he published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before. Here is the final stanza:

 

“The beauty, shattered by the laws

That have creation in their keeping,

No longer trembles at applause,

Or over children that are sleeping;

And we who delve in beauty’s lore

Know all that we have known before

Of what inexorable cause

Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.”

'A Tiny Inkling of Things Far Beyond Me'

“Do you carry a notebook around with you? Do you write things down right away.” 

No, and no. I’m not that organized. My mind operates like a car radio being tuned by a five-year-old, shifting among static, lousy music, commercials and Debussy. I need anchorage. I need to be sitting, preferably at a desk or table, and I need to tell myself, “Now I’m writing.” Nothing is so “inspirational” as the act of writing. I have tested momentum and it works. Boswell quotes his friend in The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785): “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” True, but I’m like a dog with a favorite spot on the porch. Here is Samuel Menashe’s “Inklings” (New and Selected Poems, 2005):   

 

“Inklings sans ink

Cling to the dry

Point of the pen

Whose stem I mouth

Not knowing when

The truth will out”

 

I wondered about inkling and whether it had anything to do with ink, and thus the act of writing. The OED says no. It’s rooted in an older verb, inkle, defined as “to utter or communicate in an undertone or whisper, to hint, give a hint of.” Dr. Johnson has another theory in his Dictionary. He defines the word as “hint; whisper.” Kay Ryan is a poet who shares much with Menashe, starting with concision. Here she is in her 2008 Paris Review interview:

 

“The problem for me was that I willed my poetry at first. I had too much control. But in time the benevolences of metaphor and rhyme sent me down their rabbit holes, in new directions, so that my will—my intention—was sent hither and yon. And in that mix of intention and diversion, I could get a tiny inkling of things far beyond me.”

'You Must First Invent the Universe'

I interviewed Carl Sagan about three years before his death in 1996. The astronomer was charming, patient, friendly and one of the most articulate men I had ever met. He seemed to relish the act of thinking. Questions prompted thought, not prerecorded soundbites. I was prepared to find him a media-created mannequin. Instead, he was smart and attentive, not merely the star of Cosmos. Our interview soon turned into a conversation. George Santayana characterized sensibilities like Sagan’s in Realms of Being (1942): “A mind that would keep up with the truth must therefore be as nimble as the flux of existence. It must be a newspaper mind.” 

The line I remember most vividly from Cosmos has turned into a popular meme: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In short, nothing is original in the human realm. Every invention is based on the inventiveness of our forebears. Combining and fine-tuning previous accomplishments and insights might constitute originality. Otherwise, creation is recycling.

 

On July 28, 1763, Johnson dined with Boswell at the Turk’s Head coffee-house. The conversation begins with Johnson’s criticisms of Swift and Sheridan, writers for whom he had little sympathy. As Boswell puts it, “the conversation then took a philosophical turn” and he reports Johnson saying:

 

"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.”

 

Johnson isn’t disparaging writers and other creators. He is urging humility and a recognition of our ever-present precursors.

'A Form of Knowledge'

A reader asks why “Anecdotal Evidence”? I don’t have a definitive answer. When I covered courts as a newspaper reporter I would hear lawyers and judges casually disparage anecdotal evidence, as opposed to physical evidence or sworn testimony. In other words, it was less reliable, likelier to be dubious or fictional, and thus more like literature. The OED bolsters this understanding in its definition of anecdote: “a short account of an amusing, interesting, or telling incident or experience; sometimes with implications of superficiality or unreliability.” 

You and I dwell every day in the realm of anecdotal evidence. You go to the grocery, witness a shoplifter being taken away, and you go home and tell your spouse. We’re surrounded by anecdotes, assuming we’re paying attention, and as humans we instinctively share such stories, even with strangers. They form part of the civil contract. Anecdotes overlap significantly with what we usually prize as “good gossip,” another ingredient of the social glue. Dr. Johnson tells us in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775):

 

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

 

Another source was “Anecdote and Storyteller,” an essay by Irving Howe posthumously collected in A Critic’s Notebook (1994). Howe defines an anecdote as a “brief, unelaborated, often humorous account of a single incident, taken to be piquant in its own right.” And goes on: “One of its attractions is that in times of dislocation, the anecdote holds out the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.” In the Spring 1992 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein’s essay is titled “Merely Anecdotal.” He enjoys anecdotes and takes them seriously:

 

“If anecdotes are a form of knowledge -- about the zaniness of human behavior, about the shocking stupidity as well as the startling intelligence of people, about our irrationality, our unpredictability, our hopeless comicality -- then it is a form of knowledge that is cumulative and yet without end. If anecdotes teach anything at all, it is probably that it is best never to think we know the last word about any human heart, not even our own.”

 

[“Merely Anecdotal” is collected in Epstein’s 1995 essay collection With My Trousers Rolled.]

'Give Thanks, Give Thanks'

Already people are complaining about spring’s tardiness. This is Houston, where a week or two of cold, even a few brief dips below freezing, are likened to Shackleton in Antarctica. The garden has wilted, shifted from green to brown in weeks. Look at the bright side: you don’t have to mow the lawn. For the moment, no mosquitoes. In the North, February was one of my favorite months. 

Someone asked if I missed Northern winters, and I do, though winter at those latitudes is not one thing. Some years it means snow and cold and little else. Other years it’s a cycle of freezes and thaws, beginning in October or November and ending for good in May with the big thaw of summer, the season that seems like an anomaly, a mere interruption of winter. The best part is the thaw that arrives late in January or early in February, boosting the temperature into the forties or higher. It’s a thaw you can smell, especially in the woods. I think of it as slow-motion decomposition. The earth in patches is bare again and the mineral scent of rot – death turning into life – fills the woods. Skunk cabbage melts snow cover and sends up twisted purple buds, a false harbinger of true spring. It’s a tease, of course. A deep freeze soon follows, sometimes lasting into April.

 

See Aaron Poochigian’s “The Renaissance,” a paean to spring. He doesn’t say so but he’s writing of spring in New York City. An urban spring without skunk cabbage. Here is the final stanza, composed with Poochigian’s customary gusto:

 

“For here and now, this vernal

victory over the squally

season of melancholy

indulgence, for the diurnal

human madrigal

and hibiscus on terraced banks,

for the boon of ‘I’ at all,

give thanks, give thanks.”

 

Poochigian’s epigraph to the poem is from Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise.”