'Somme--Summation--of a Quicker Age'

A reliable way to judge the worth of poetry is the ease with which it can be memorized. The first poet I voluntarily committed to memory was T.S. Eliot. My motive was not a classroom assignment but personal pleasure. Eliot had died that year, 1965, when I first read “The Waste Land” and the rest. My reaction was instantaneous: I liked having his lines in my head, as I had lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. It has always been my habit when walking any distance to sing (quietly) to myself or recite poems. I find my natural walking cadence, even with a cane, compliments much poetry, especially that composed in iambic pentameter, the lingua franca of English verse. Eliot was an early entry in that on-demand library.

Recent poets have produced little I’ve wanted to memorize So much of what they write, particularly those poets who suck up all the prizes, is rhythmically indifferent, little more than stunted prose. They seldom offer musical pleasure, among other things. I know some Auden and Larkin, though I’ve been reading them for decades, and a few living writers, though only lines, not complete poems. Among the recently dead (2009) I’ve decided to enter some Turner Cassity into the Kurp data base.  

Memorization is not as simple as it was in 1965, when I turned thirteen and was studying Latin. The aging brain compels one to work harder to retain specific wordings.  I still hold on to facts well –“trivia-minded,” as a friend calls it – and my memory is highly associative, but with poetry it’s more like discipline and grunt work. Part of the attraction, I suppose, is the challenge. It’s like lifting those weights twice a week in physical therapy, doing it each time two or three times more than my therapist says.   

How many poems have you read about Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914 and started a world war? Here are the opening lines of Cassity’s “Man of the Century” (The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems, 1998):

“His portrait will not grace news magazines,

This killer of the morganatic wife

(I write here as a quasi-feminist)

And of her Archduke spouse, but by the bridge

In Sarajevo--it is named for him--

Each shell that falls is warhead to his shot,

As in Hiroshima (iambic please)

His is the gesture of the blackened hand,

And Hiroshima (trochees now; I write

As a revisionist) itself much more

A monument to him than any bridge:

An ultimate in deconstructionism,

Somme--summation--of a quicker age.”

Few poets are as smart, contrary, learned, worldly wise, technically deft and funny as Cassity. He thrives on “unpoetic” subject matter. Another twenty-one lines follow in “Man of the Century,” including these:

“The Dual Monarchy was born to flex;

And K.u.K. not being K.K.K.,

It did not lynch. It did not even hang.”

“K.u.K.” is the abbreviation for kaiserlich und königlich, referring to the Habsburg monarchs who reigned simultaneously as Kaiser (Emperor of Austria) and König (King of Hungary) from 1867 to 1918, when the war started by Princip ended.