POETS Day! Revisiting Clampitt with Cummings In Mind

Captured in Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto, ON, Canada

I live in a quiet neighborhood. It hugs a thoroughfare like a drop of water on a spider’s tendril; a bump bound by a busy road to the north and a creek to the south. People from around town occasionally visit to make use of the parks, but there’s no other destination to be found unless you live here or are visiting a friend. You can’t cut through en route to anywhere. Traffic is limited to us and Amazon and as a result the streets are alive with dog walking, bike riding, couple strolling, and kids playing. It’s nice and peaceful, but the best part is the three naked coeds who frolic by the creek.

They rent a house from local doctor who spent two years playing linebacker for the Steelers. No foolin’. Like most nursing students, they keep odd hours studying and shadowing professionals at the university hospital, but one thing is certain: Friday afternoon is al fresco cavorting time.

It’s such a Spring and Summertime certainty that if you, like me, are out of the accursed habit of wearing a watch, you could set the sock-drawer relegated “mausoleum of all hope and desire” timepiece by the appearance of light sundresses hanging from the branches of the upper bank pecan tree. Must be two o’clock.

I’m amazed at the wonder recounting my neighborhood’s spoils engenders in friends from other parts of town. At first, I’m met with disbelief. It’s assumed that I’m kidding. How could such a wonder exist?

The thing is, when asked if coeds in their neighborhood have a similar Friday afternoon ritual they answer “No,” but when asked if they’ve checked… it’s my turn for disbelief.

Put natural artistic delight in the human form aside and consider resale value. How have they not, how has everyone not, checked to see if there are lithe naked unattached women between the ages of twenty and twenty-three years old engaging in sun worship on Friday afternoons in their neighborhood? Seems weird to me.

Why didn’t they check? Because they were at work?

Pfft.

Don’t let work get in the way. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

And bring along something to read in case you get there early; something pastoral. Maybe Marlowe?

***

I wrote a POETS Day just over two months ago featuring a few poems by Amy Clampitt. It’s here, if you like. The day after it was published I was doing something – I can’t remember what, other than it wasn’t something that would seem to have any connection to the poet or her works much less something that would spark a “Eureka!” moment – when I had a eureka moment that will remain uncapitalized or quote bound because it was a moment of realizing my failure to make a connection.

Clampitt had referenced a poem by E.E. Cummings, one that I’d written about as well, and I missed it.

There’s a valid complaint about poetry written beginning somewhere in the middle of the last century that claims modern poetry is written for a smaller and smaller audience of attuned readers. It’s by no means a blanket indictment, but there are publications read almost exclusively by academics of a certain bent and avant garde writers whose aim is to transgress poetic conventions. Oddly, those same teachers of poetry and transgressive poets will deny that poetry is defined by limitations to teach or transgress, but that’s a soap box for another day. Too much of what is written tries to be cute, referencing theories or movement principles known to a sliver of the population.

It’s annoying, but being unintelligible to the masses is a mark of distinction, somehow. Not the slightest bit annoying, is an addition to a poem that is unnecessary to enjoyment of the work, but a boon to those who notice.

Ezra Pound was no stranger to art for other artist’s sake and rightly saw himself as a snob in that regard, but he had limits. He admonished writers to be true to the image when building a metaphor. He specifically spoke of a hawk. Take the image of a hawk and fill it full of all the symbolism you please. Make it a stand in for the soul, Jesus, or NASCAR or all three, so long as a rational reader unaware that the hawk is a proxy still sees the hawk as a hawk.

Allow a thing to be more rather than other.

The Clampitt poem I had my eureka about is “Syrinx.” The title is a reference to the vocal organs of birds. It was written in the last year of her life, after her cancer diagnosis.

Syrinx
Amy Clampitt (1920-1994)

Like the foghorn that’s all lung,
the wind chime that’s all percussion,
like the wind itself, that’s merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?–
much less whether a bird’s call
means anything in
particular, or at all.

Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer’s gibbering
Thespesiae iache:

those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.

I suddenly realized that the first seven lines of the second stanza, from “Syntax comes last,” to “first to be jettisoned:”, refer to e.e. cumming’s poem “since feeling is first.” Clampitt taught poetry at Smith and the College of William and Mary. There’s no way she’d reference syntax in the manner she did without knowing it would evoke the Cummings poem for those familiar with it, even if the reader only made the realization a few days after the connection should have been obvious. You don’t have to know anything about Cummings to enjoy her poem. “Syrinx” makes sense as it stands. The hawk is a hawk, or at least a hawk’s voice box. Think of “syntax” as an Easter Egg.

since feeling is first
ee cummings (1894-1962)

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
– the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

In Cumming’s poem, the persona is mourning his lover’s maturation from the world of feeling – which comes fir… you get it – to reasoned adulthood, a maturation he recently experienced himself and sharply feels the intrusion of consequence. Once realized, there’s no more carefree. He can no longer wholly (hear “holy” in addition, so blessedly) be a fool or kiss her.

Syntax is that reason that comes after feeling. It’s order imposed on nature, which he plays with by setting up a natural stopping point with an expected question mark that isn’t there at the end of the third line. But the reasoned mind isn’t content with questions when it can provide answers, so the fourth line. He appeals with passionate images, but in a logically constructed argument. There’s no turning back to pure emotion.

Reread Clampitt’s poem with that in mind. She’s sitting on her deathbed or near enough to imagine its depressions. Feelings give way to reason. A straightforward reading tells you that she’s losing sense, that she’s “past saying anything” and a woman who finds it harder to express what she knows. Add Cummings meaning and she’s saying something else, too. Is she returning to a childlike state? Is she seeing that her reasoned assumptions are lacking?

Now I can’t help but read “Syrinx” without thinking of a return to dust motif.

People are so interesting.