“The horizon
follows me.
The tall
buildings lurch by.
“I overtake
someone,
or someone
turns and smiles.
“We stop and
make small talk:
--Birth.--Love.--Death.
--Birth.--Love.--Death.
“They read
the lines of boredom
in the rare
book of my face.
“They read
between the lines
and turn
away, hurt.
“I leave
them. I leave the squares
of which I
am an angle,
“And the
truths, the great truths,
at the ends
of their chains, barking.”
On my first
recent rereading, it was the poem’s final lines, reminiscent of Orwell’s
“smelly little orthodoxies,” that grabbed me. Like rabid dogs, many possessors
of today’s fashionable truths – global warming, say, and the depredations of
capitalism – snap and froth and make a mess on the floor. To suggest there
might be another way to look at things is to risk censure or worse.
The speaker
of “Walking Backwards,” I would suggest, is doing just that – defying acceptable thought. He may or may not be a poet, though he
speaks for Coulette’s estrangement from his day’s Poetry Inc. As Donald Justice
and Robert Mezey, editors of the Collected Poems, put it in their
introduction:
“The
relative obscurity in which he lived was not so much the result of a distaste
for self-promotion—though there was that—as it was his cultivation of
virtues that sound rather old-fashioned to a younger generation: Technical
mastery, urbanity, wit, emotional restraint, moral seriousness. But he frankly
loved old fashions, ‘old rooms, old tunes.’ In his warm and generous
friendships with younger poets, he tried to warn them away from
‘newfangleness,’ meaning pretty much what Wyatt meant.”
Reading the
poem backwards, we begin to see a man not striving after contrariness, like an
overheated adolescent, but a man out of time, one unlikely ever to fit in if he
hopes to remain true to himself and the things he values. The poem’s opening
lines might be mistaken for cheap surrealism, but I think Coulette intends
something more emotionally realistic. He wishes to make small talk, to speak of
the fundamentals – “—Birth. —Love. —Death”--
but is misunderstood and hurts feelings. “The rare book of my face” is
gorgeous. Donald Justice published an essay, “Benign Obscurity,” in The New
Criterion in 1997 and included it in his prose collection Oblivion (1998).
He begins with a qualified defense of obscure poetry:
“I hope I
will not be seen as joining the very popular revolt against reason and good
sense if I suggest that there is in fact something to be said for obscurity in
some of its simpler forms. It can at the very least be a sign of the presence
of something hidden, of something perhaps too difficult to express easily, or
even, for some tastes, a sort of code for the seemingly spontaneous or
inspired.”
Justice is
having fun here -- “obscurity in some of its simpler forms” – while making a
serious point. If a poet wishes to be read and appreciated beyond a shrinking cadre
of exegetes, he aims for a balance between incoherence and the phone book. I
don’t claim my understanding of Coulette’s poem is definitive. It’s a work in
progress, and I welcome dissent. Developing this theme with the same quietly satirical
voice, Justice writes:
“I must
suppose that most poets, even if they do not make it their constant aim to say
everything with the utmost clarity, do not go much out of their way on purpose
to prevent understanding. It would be only the self-consciously experimental
poet who would do this, and for that reason we may leave the experimental poet
out of our study. For I like to think that all the best poets are capable of
thinking, and thinking straight, and probably intend to do so most of the time,
although they do not always manage to stick to the plan.”
In my
reading, Coulette sticks to the plan – his plan.
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