`Gratuitous Delight in Words'

The poem begins as a conceit worthy of a bright child, one that might have been turned by Maurice Sendak into a book. This is Eric Ormsby’s “Song for an Ironing Board”:

“I ride an ironing board to reach the stars.
I prick it with my spurs of spatulas.
It neighs and ripples the old scorch-scars
of its back and flanks. It whinnies,
and I rear back, snorting steam.
I bridle my ironing board with wrinkled bras.
I rein it in with underwear.
How it stamps and paws its trestle!

“O many's
the dawn I've ridden forth with the gleam
of a fresh-pressed collar and jousted with legions
of wrinkles and mutinous pleats.
The unstarched world's Cimmerian regions
yield to my singeing hoof-beats.

“I ride an ironing board to reach the heights
beyond all rumpledoms of wrinkled wash
where the shirtwaist alone shines triumphant.
I ride an ironing board as the iron's lights
like clangorous horse-shoes knicker and clip.
I ride an ironing board that gallops to my lash.
It rears like Hannibal's last elephant,
Alp-traumatized, and trumpets. It’s fireproof lip
psalmodizes –
O my war-stallion, snort-eloquent!”

I cite this poem because I’ve been reading A Lover’s Quarrel: Essays and Reviews, by the Canadian poet-critic Carmine Starnino. Much of the poetry Starnino assesses is unfamiliar to American readers because of its Canadian origin. I was going to say there’s no need to worry about security on the U.S.-Canada border but that’s not quite true. Some of the lousiest Canadian poets have managed to infiltrate southward and set up sleeper cells – Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Erin Mouré and the violently unreadable Anne Carson. But some good poets, David Solway, Irving Layton and Ormsby in particular, have earned their green cards, so to speak. Starnino lauds Ormsby’s “acoustic prestidigitation” and “showmanship,” saying they are “crucial to the success of Ormsby’s ambition: turning the ironing board into language, and that language into poetry.”

In contrast, the American poet Ted Kooser also wrote a poem titled “Song of the Ironing Board” which begins:

“So many hands lay hot on my belly
over the years, and oh, how many ghosts
I held, their bodies damp and slack...”

I’ll spare you the rest. A first reaction: It’s not poetry. Even by the standards of indifferent prose, Kooser’s lines are lifeless and unmusical in a flat, aw-shucks, putatively plain-talkin' American way. (Ormsby, by the way, was born in Georgia and grew up in Florida.) They tout their terrible sincerity and sensitivity, the twin curses of much contemporary verse. Ormsby’s poem, Starnino says, “reminds us that poetry can’t exist without some gratuitous delight in words. For poets like Ormsby artlessness is often a stingy substitute for afflatus.” He continues:

“Ormsby’s art is rehabilitative: words, muffled by monotony of use, are given a noisier life in his poetry. I love his drive to uninhibit our language, to write against the grain of its common denotative usage in the hope of returning to it some of its lost potency. And so what I feel when reading `Song for an Ironing Board’ is the pleasure of writing; of reanimating whatever in language is humourless and procedural with jubilation and possibility.”