A reader is displeased: “Oh my aren’t you witty?” He/she was offended by something I had written a long time ago about Robert Bly. Granted, criticizing Bly is like shooting fish in the bathtub with a bazooka. I was a little ashamed of myself but that passed. My consolation is that X.J. Kennedy comes to my rescue with “On Being Accused of Wit” (Dark Horses, 1992):
“No, I am
witless. Always in despair
At
long-worked botches crumpled, pitched away.
A few lines
worth the keeping, they are rare.
Blind chance
not wit entices words to stay
And
recognizing luck is artifice
That comes
unlearned. The rest is taking pride
In boring
duty. This and only this.
On keyboards
sweat alone makes fingers glide.
“Witless,
that juggler rich in discipline
To whom the
Virgin might have dealt short shrift,
Flat on his
back with beatific grin,
Gracing the
air with slow-revolving gift;
Witless, La
Tour, that painter none too bright,
His
draftsman's compass waiting in the wings,
Measuring
how a lantern stages light
Until a dark
room overflows with rings.”
Dark Horses is Kennedy’s finest collection. It includes the
best poetic tribute to J.V. Cunningham I’ve read -- “Terse Elegy for J.V.
Cunningham,” first published in The New
Criterion in October 1985, barely six months after Cunningham’s death:
“Now
Cunningham, who rhymed by fits and starts,
So loath to
gush, most sensitive of hearts --
Else why so
hard-forged a protective crust? --
Is brought
down to the unreasoning dust.
Though with
a slash a Pomp’s gut he could slit,
On his own
flesh he worked his weaponed wit
And penned
with patient skill and lore immense,
Prodigious
mind, keen ear, rare common sense,
Only those
words he could crush down no more
Like matter
pressured to a dwarf star’s core.
May one day
eyes unborn wake to esteem
His steady,
baleful, solitary gleam.
Poets may
come whose work more quickly strikes
Love, and
yet -- ah, who’ll live to see his likes?”
Thank you,
dear reader, for giving Kennedy, if not me, the opportunity to work his “weaponed
wit.”
2 comments:
Read the linked piece on Bly. I was interested in your comment that C. S. Lewis is a writer you're not interested in. I find that surprising. Setting aside his Christian writings, you're not interested in his literary criticism? Not even his big book: "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama" (1954; recently reprinted [2022] by Harper One [they even took the trouble to re-typeset it)?
Surely you might reconsider. Lots of good stuff in Lewis.
The Discarded Image (on the medieval worldview) is also a fine book. As for his fiction, Till We Have Faces (his last novel) is very powerful; Lewis considered it his best book. It stakes out his position in a much more oblique - and I think more effective - way than his more overtly Christian works.
I've never read any of Bly's criticism, but the silly men's movement stuff makes me think of something Evelyn Waugh said - "When the water holes ran dry, people sought to drink at the mirage."
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