'Turning the Meter on Like a Spigot'

We no longer expect poets to have anything interesting to say, whether in written or spoken language. Blowhard density among them has always exceeded the general population’s. Think of Whitman, Pound and Olson. But today, with poetic accomplishment inversely proportional to volume and prolificacy, blather (the enviable name of a magazine edited by Flann O’Brien when he was still Brian O’Nolan) is pandemic. A pleasant respite is the work of Maryann Corbett, who is interviewed by A.M. Juster at First Things. Mike asks her about the impact her training as a medievalist has had on her practice as a poet. She answers:

“The one problem with studying very old poetry and linguistics is that it doesn’t leave many credit hours for contemporary poetry! So my ears were almost entirely trained by poems in meter, and I did little real study of free verse. That accounts for my habit of setting out in some sort of meter whenever I start to write a poem—turning the meter on like a spigot and letting it run.”

C.H. Sisson was fond of quoting a French critic: “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” Reading free verse too often is like watching ballerinas perform in snowshoes. It’s graceless and lumpy and elicits not pity and terror but pity and boredom. It helps that Corbett has inhabited the daily world we know, and has paid attention. Her themes are humble, not cosmic. She expresses “sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” She knows about work, married life and children. Here is the Nabokovian-titled “Speak, Memory. Or Not”:

“This cute café, these college kids at a table,

this brunch I'm sharing with my children's crowd.

I tick off novelties amid the babble—

tattoos and piercings, earphones up too loud—

“but jeans are changeless, and the young men's hair

is long, as achingly long as it was back then.

(I clamp my mouth shut tightly. Fair is fair;

this is their time; these are my daughters' men.)

“And talk rehashes topics I'd have heard,

subject for subject, several decades gone:

the war, the sexes (almost word for word),

politics, jobs, the same mad rattling on—

“I will decline to comment. They don't need

my sage advice, nor do they need to know

this priceless and expensive life they lead

was lived already. Or how long ago.”