POETS Day! Amy Lowell

MS Lowell 62 (5), Houghton Library, Harvard University

Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will.

I’ll be getting ready to watch football. A sizable chunk of our family’s Louisiana contingent Pissed Off Early this weekend to come join us in Birmingham for the Alabama/LSU game. Both teams have issues this year so it’s a coin flip as to who’s going to win but we’ve been getting together for this game long enough for me to know that if LSU loses it will be because of a missed holding, pass interference, or face masking call. It always is.

No matter how you decide to spend your illicit Friday afternoon, in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

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My wife and I were talking about the wonderful ways authors find to disparage other authors. Her favorite is Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (“There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.”) I vote for “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” by Clive James despite the target’s anonymity:

His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Books,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
‘My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.’

Amy Lowell is not as widely remembered as an early twentieth century reader might expect she would be. She travelled like a rock star from reading to seminar with her entourage and even shipped her Pierce Arrow to England so she could bluster through literary London from the wrong side of the road. She was “the demon saleswoman” of modern poetry according to T.S. Eliot and she demanded participation from her audience.

Carl Rollyson wrote (“The absence of Amy Lowell,” The New Criterion, September 2007) “On the lecture platform, she would read a poem and then pause, looking out at her audience: ‘Well, hiss or applaud! But do something!” Almost always she got an ovation—and some hisses.’” She had it. Jeb didn’t.

She was the target of a notable attack by a fellow writer. She got into a snit with Ezra Pound over the direction of the Imagiste Movement led by Pound, Richard Aldington, H.D., and F.S. Flint but really by Pound. He admired Lowell’s work and invited her to be a part of the anthology, Des Imagistes.

An Imagiste was to adhere to three rules: Treat the thing directly, use no word that doesn’t contribute, and compose in the sequence of the musical phrase. None took them as dogma for very long, but Lowell held true better than most. Her work included in that first anthology is “In a Garden.”

In a Garden

Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.

Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and plash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.

Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it;
With its gurgling and running;
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.

And I wished for night and you.
I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,
White and shining in the silver-flecked water.
While the moon rode over the garden,
High in the arch of night,
And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.

Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!

She’s known for her love poetry. In the above, the identity of “you” is a mystery. She’d later write openly about her lesbianism and flaunt her relationship with the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, but not always. She could be coy. I’ve no idea what this next one’s about.

A Decade

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

After the publication of Des Imagistes, she agitated to influence the direction of the Imagiste movement, objecting to Pound’s rule over planned publications. What followed the tyranny of Pound appears to be the tyranny of Lowell disguised as rule by committee. Pound abandoned the movement he founded and decried the new Imagism – Lowell removed the French affectation – as Amygism, and he was prurient enough to mean all the entendres.

He marched around at one of her parties with a metal wash tub on his head making fun of her poem “The Bath.” The eponym “hippopoetess” was coined by the poet Witter Bynner, but Pound wasn’t shy about using it freely to describe the five foot tall, two-hundred and fifty pound, cigar-chomping Lowell. Not exactly Twain or James level critique but nobody stoops to kindergarten meanie speak unless they’re really upset. The purity of his childishness is beholdable.

Under her direction by committee the Imagists put out a second anthology in 1916, this one with more Lowell. Three of her much longer pieces were included, among them “Spring Day.” It’s a sequence of prose poems; poems written in free verse presented in paragraph form. “Spring Day” is broken up into five sections: “Bath” (Pound’s washtub inspiration), “Breakfast Table,” “Walk,” “Midday and Afternoon,” and “Night and Sleep.” Below are the first two.

Bath

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.

The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.

Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.

The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whirl of tulips and narcissus in the air.

Breakfast Table

In the fresh-washed sunlight, the breakfast table is decked and white. It offers itself in flat surrender, tendering tastes, and smells, and colours, and metals, and grains, and the white cloth falls over its side, draped and wide. Wheels of white glitter in the silver coffee-pot, hot and spinning like catherine-wheels, they whirl, and twirl—and my eyes begin to smart, the little white, dazzling wheels prick them like darts. Placid and peaceful, the rolls of bread spread themselves in the sun to bask. A stack of butter-pats, pyramidal, shout orange through the white, scream, flutter, call: “Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!” Coffee steam rises in a stream, clouds the silver tea-service with mist, and twists up into the sunlight, revolved, involuted, suspiring higher and higher, fluting in a thin spiral up the high blue sky. A crow flies by and croaks at the coffee steam. The day is new and fair with good smells in the air.

There’s alliteration and rhyme – internal because where else – and there’re other poetic conventions as well. I don’t like it though I’m willing to concede to it a place under the poetry umbrella. It’s inclusion in Some Imagist Poets, 1916 by Lowell is rude.

I’m not alone in insisting on structure as part of a useful definition of poetry. James Matthew Wilson wrote a great book about defining poetry called The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking if anyone is interested. I won’t attempt to summarize his work, but meter, memory, and metaphor are key. The thing is, I’m also not alone among poetry readers who insist on structure in having a great deal of admiration for many free verse poets and poems that break all the rules I cherish.

I don’t want T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marrianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath excommunicated. Did they cheat? Yes, but that the ends justify their meter-ignoring means is apparent to anyone with a library card to see. They’ve written beautiful works. I just let them lie.

An argument for prose poetry is that by setting up natural points for pauses, use of punctuation, and a musical turn of phrase a poem written in paragraph read aloud is indistinguishable from the same material were it read aloud from a copy written in a lineated stanza form.

Okay, fine. I’ll give a shrug and go on about my day because I don’t think disagreeing with that argument is going to do anyone any good. I’m not terribly bothered and I’d rather not spend the effort. But then Lowell goes and puts her prose poem composed in free verse because lineation doesn’t matter right next to her poems composed in free verse that are lineated because… she took her reason for lineation away and forced me to notice.

Metered poetry stops at measured intervals. Free verse doesn’t demand the same but is often broken in the style of metered poetry. If you’re going to take pains to show me that free verse line breaks aren’t necessary, don’t put examples of your free verse poetry with line breaks right next to your teaching moment prose and not expect me to mention cargo cults (Wilson has a great bit in his book about that.) Don’t tell me that something is unnecessary and then do it without me assuming its presence is an affectation. Plumage.

I’d rather read her writing without the debate being thrust on me. She really was an amazing love poet. I’ll leave you with one of my favorites of hers.

Venus Transiens
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli’s vision
Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds
He tossed his lady
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you
To cover your too great loveliness
As with a gauze
Of misted silver?
For me,
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds,
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir
The sands at my feet.