'Deliberately Set Out to Stalk Material for Poems?'

“If your message to the world is Thou Fool you are not going to be the most popular poet around, especially if you say it in meter. Thou Fool is in fact a perfect iamb. No, it is not a spondee. If a lifetime of writing in meter has taught me anything it is that spondees do not exist. One always comes down on one side or the other, as rarely in life. I may be unfashionable, but no more unfashionable than I was forty years ago.”

Here is a poet who knew beyond reasoning and doubt that writing a good poem without meter is almost humanly impossible. The few obvious exceptions are rare as albinos in nature. See his “Carpenters” (Steeplejacks in Babel, 1973) for a meter-minded poem notable for concision and for its uncharacteristic, overtly Christian subject matter. Near the conclusion of his 106-page memoir (dated Aug. 5, 1988), previously written about here and here, Turner Cassity turns at last to his own hard-earned craft:

“The English lyric is too relentlessly first person and too relentlessly centered on the internal.  . . . The possibility that poetry might deal with settings and characters as well as drama or fiction is alien. For those who wish to put the emotion or the act or the image directly on the page—an impossibility; ink is all one can put on the page—the very word medium must be offensive, as it denotes something that intervenes. I find a demanding medium liberating rather than otherwise. The more secure the technique the wider range of subjects I am prepared to deal with. Few poems I read, however, have a subject.”

What they have is award-winning gush. Without scaffolding, the structure collapse into rubble. No one cares what flies off the top of his head. Few have sufficiently interesting minds. Cassity defers to prose to make his point: “Flaubert wanted to write about nothing. Poets do. But Un coeur simple is not about nothing. It is about the passage of time.” Cassity aims high, citing the finest thing Flaubert ever wrote. His poems are about buildings, music, places, and most frequently not history but events in history. One can’t imagine a poet less interested in theory, grand generalizations or, most tediously, “poetics.” When a poet starts carrying on about “poetics,” run screaming from the room: Bore Alert. Cassity explains:

“You will learn more about America by sitting two hours in the cocktail lounge of any Holiday Inn than by reading all of De Tocqueville, and you will have a more enjoyable learning experience. Do I deliberately set out to stalk material for poems? Yes, of course. Inner space exists to be supplied. Familiar as I am with human treachery, I certainly would not depend on the deeps of my psyche to fuel what I hope will be a sixty-year career. Its very delight would be to fail you when you most needed it. All the psyche can dependably do is act as a pilot light. Arranging fuel for the main blaze is a logistic problem like any other.”

As the epigraph to his 1991 collection Between the Chains, Cassity uses this brief exchange from Ivy Compton-Burnett’s The Mighty and Their Fall (1961):

“We are too used to the idea of work to realise its meaning,” said Hugo. “I had early suspicions of it, and dare to act on them.”

“What a comment on life,” said Lavinia, “that to be out of work is held to be sad and wrong.”

“Satan lies in wait for idle hands,” said Selina.

“But only Satan, Grandma. And he is hardly seen as a model of behaviour.”