`In Poetry the Immediate Pleasure is Physical'

Poetry stops working when it stops singing, though there are many ways to sing. When the singing stops, poetry turns into a species of prose, and often not very good prose. Here’s Thomas Dekker singing in Patient Grissil (Act IV, scene ii):

“Golden slumbers kisse your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise:
Sleepe pretty wantons do not cry,
And I will sing a lullabie,
Rocke them rocke them lullabie.”

Sorry, it’s not Lennon-McCartney, circa 1969. It’s Dekker, circa 1603, but you can only laud the Beatles for their good taste in musical lyrics. Now, for the tone-deaf:

“I remember your death, reject all answers,
Noon, tall time, at Orizaba stern you stood.
In ecstasy of wake you who made a bridge leaped.”

That’s from “You, Hart Crane,” a poem that manages to sound simultaneously vulgar, sentimental, dull and perversely unmusical. The author is Charles Olson, whose “masterwork,” Maximus Poems, Eric Ormsby has rightly declared “unreadable.” Olson was among the prime contributors to the ongoing demusicalization of American poetry. Here’s a countervailing argument, a celebration of the inseparability of poetry and music. I excerpt it from “Poetry as Isotope,” in Ormsby’s Facsimiles of Time:

“In poetry the immediate pleasure is physical. Recurrence, repetition, pattern, design, account for much of the pleasure we receive from poetry; these returning patterns correspond to something in ourselves, to something in nature. They correspond to the rhythm of things. They echo the beat of our hearts, the pulse in our throats, the cadence of our breath. They reflect larger sequences of recurrence: the alternations of night and day, the succession of the seasons, the elemental speech of natural processes; the voices of rivers or of oceans; the various dialects of the winds; the articulated and recurrent cries of birds.”

From the same essay, here’s Ormsby’s definitive assessment of politically polemical poetry:

“This is the poetry of protest and in many ways is typical of much of the poetry written in the United States and Canada over the last few decades. Often discursive, generally outraged, indeterminate as to form, such poetry is a poetry of opinion and message; we tend to like or enjoy it in proportion to the correspondence of our own opinions with those of the author rather than for any overriding literary reason; indeed, it is almost invariably bad as poetry.”

For its massive but graceful learning, the beauty of its prose and the soundness of its good sense, I urge you to read Facsimiles of Time, published in 2001 by The Porcupine’s Quill, of Erin, Ontario. Ormsby was born in Georgia in 1941, raised in Florida, and for 20 years was director of libraries and professor of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Since 2005 he has served as chief librarian of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, in London. I have just received Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems, published earlier this year by Biblioasis, of Windsor, Ontario. It’s an elegantly beautiful piece of bookmaking that brings together Ormsby’s five previously published books of poems, and some 40 pages of previously uncollected work. The collection reflects a life’s work. In his preface, Ormsby says the earliest poem dates from 1958 (when he was 17); the most recent, 2006. The pleasure of his poems begins in the mouth. They give pleasure to the tongue and lips and ears. Take the first stanza of “A Fragrance of Time,” first published in Daybreak at the Straits (2004):

“Time is not sequential but serpentine.
Time winds in retrogressive coils.
Time monuments itself in sudden pearls,
Accretes and crests and columns travertine
Confections that turn vaporous as lace.”

Those lines, as I read them aloud to myself, make my mouth water. The repeated “k” sounds in the fourth and fifth lines give me a shiver, and I noticed I nodded my head as I read them, responding to their pulse. For now, forgo meaning and listen to Ormsby’s chamber orchestra later in the same poem:

“For us death’s moment will be crystalline,
The vein of quartz within the lode of time,
And promise of the ores of consequence.

“I who have always cherished sentience
The way the May-wind-ruffled columbine
Cradles its petals as its leafstalks climb,
Am privileged to know that moment mine.

“Cessation is itself a fragrance of time.”

The cascade of rhymes and half-rhymes is ravishing. I will spend a lot of time listening to Time’s Covenant.