'Digressive, a Bit Offhand or Even Genially Banal'

“[T]he unfamiliar sense of excitement that poetic language from the first aroused in me; a sense that words in poems had an almost magical – what I then called ‘tingly’ -- power. I was particularly taken by the rhythms of poetic language, that tension of patterned speech, so distinct from ordinary discourse.” 

That’s one of our best poets speaking. He speaks as a reader and writer. I’m speaking, for now, strictly as a reader. I learned early that much of the best poetry can be described as rhythmically, sonically pleasure-giving language. I remember walking home from school, my steps echoing the rhythm of the words I silently recited: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” Long before I understood anything of Coleridge's poem there was something intoxicating about the cadence, apart from whatever sense the words might possess.

 

The speaker, Eric Ormsby, is a sensualist of sound. In 2005, Canadian Notes & Queries dedicated an issue to Ormsby and included an interview with him, “Menageries of Vocables,” conducted by Robyn Sarah. It was later collected in her Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (2007). Ormsby was born in Georgia in 1941, grew up in Florida and at the time was director of the McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. He is enviably articulate. Here’s a sampler drawn from the interview:

 

“I’d like to think that there’s no English word I couldn’t conceive of using in a poem somehow. And why not? The world is full of fantastic beings – why should our lexicon be any less so? But I have to admit too that this besottedness with words, this playing the ring master in menageries of vocables, can be a self-indulgence.”

 

“[F]orm is the only way I have of reining in my own extravagance. In the end, it’s the tension between exuberance and form that is interesting.”

 

“I admire Frost and Yeats above all other 20^th century English poets and would love to achieve the concentration and authority they could wield with such apparent ease. But this is something I am working towards.”

Ormsby condemns, bless him, “the phoniness and dreary tenor of the whole ‘world of poetry’ (which I detest with all my heart) – so antithetical to the sometimes dogged, sometimes ecstatic, but always enchanting, work of actually writing poetry.”

 

That he is also among our finest essayists is unfair and seems almost obscene. For proof, see Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation (2001) and Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (2011), both published by The Porcupine’s Quill. I was surprised to learn from the interview that Ormsby didn’t start writing essays until 1998, the year he turned fifty-seven:

 

“Slowly I came to see, to my pleasure, that there were many things I could express in prose that would not have worked in poetry, and I began to enjoy writing prose enormously. . . [Y]ou fashion a different authorial voice when you write prose; you can be casual, digressive, a bit offhand or even genially banal – you can make various forms of small talk – all gambits that doom a poem.”

 

This is where I start speaking as a writer, one who learned the hard way that he can’t write poetry. Good prose of many sorts – reading it, writing it -- can be as intoxicating as verse. Ormsby continues:

 

“[P]rose is connected in my mind with the world of affairs, with conversation and interchange, in a way that poetry isn’t – or at least not immediately so. . . . I can’t write the essay or review until I’ve mulled it over for a while, and I can’t actually put words to paper until I’ve thought of an opening sentence or, better, opening paragraph. Once I have that, the rest follows smoothly.”

 

That sounds like many reporters I’ve known, who must formulate the “lede” before they are able to compose the rest of the story. Without it, some are paralyzed. Here’s how Ormsby begins one of his finest essays, “The Place of Shakespeare in a House of Pain” (collected in Facsimiles of Time):

 

“If my Uncle Howard, resplendent in Panama hat and poplin suit, had sworn under his breath over some ‘goddam fool’ trifle, or even if he had only indulged an explosive and unfettered sneeze, Grandmother might at once exclaim: What lusty trumpet thus doth summon us?”

 

The memoir-as-essay is a remembrance of growing up in his grandmother’s house in Coral Gables, Fla., in the nineteen-fifties. The grandmother, the alcoholic aunt and a cast of hapless uncles casually quote and misquote Shakespeare the way more recent Americans exchange catchphrases from pop songs and sitcoms. Find a copy of Facsimiles of Time and read the subsequent seventeen pages, which conclude: “Despite the high-flown diction and studied accents of the actors, the voices come through to me with all the intonations of home.”