POETS Day! The Poetry of Ninth Grade English, Revisited

I was in a used bookstore downtown, earlier today. It’s a ramshackle place with books and old magazines stacked on warped piles of records and rolled up blueprints and “Mardi Gras 1977” posters leaning against assumed tables; probably enough kitschy crap to deck out a whole reinvigorated warehouse district worth of lesbian coffee houses.  The poetry section shines. Either the owner’s tastes or the resale temperament does a commendable job filtering out new age gibberish and incongruent anthologies plus he shelves criticism with the criticized. I picked up a book of T.S. Eliot essays on Elizabethan drama. Last time I found a collection of poets’ views on Yeats. Five bucks, both.

While I was perusing the poetry a young woman, attractively in her mid-twenties or so, came in and struck up a conversation with the owner. She was in town for business, she said, doing a three-day project that only took two. She didn’t know anybody in town. Could he suggest anything? Sights? A place for lunch?

The only other person in the shop was a young guy, roughly her age, perusing local history and thumbing through old magazines. I knew he heard. The place was too small not to have. I’m old and happily married. The owner, older still. I don’t know local history guy’s story. I don’t know any of attractive work tourist’s story beyond what I’ve shared either, but what I had always considered a laughable cliché – a used bookstore hook up – was not unfolding before me despite the stage being improbably set. Local history didn’t so much as look over his shoulder.

Gliding from “Where did you say you were from?” to “You know, I was about to head over to the Italian place across the street. If you haven’t had lunch…” wouldn’t have been that hard. I wanted to tell him to pull up his Rupert Everett pants. Rom-com opening scenes don’t just fall into your lap, especially not ones where one half throws in that she’ll be flying out the next day (I’ve read that no strings attached casual encounters are sought after by a certain type of shallow man.)

Eventually, the younger guy left. I paid for my Eliot and followed suit. She’s probably back in Detroit and he probably knows a little bit more about Bull Connor, but neither has a story to, or not to, tell. Other people’s lives.

It’s POETS Day. As per usual, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Spend a bit of energy finagling your way out of work and seize the weekend a few hours before regulations allow. Do with it what you will, but if you’re young and single, the bookstore meeting place mirage may well be real. Just don’t get bogged down in local history.

***

A couple of weeks ago I was hunting for the essay where Robert Frost famously wrote about “sound and sense.” It turns out that I’m not as informed as I think because he famously wrote it in a letter instead of an essay. He expounds on “sound and sense” in lectures and interviews multiple times, but the passage I was looking for comes from a letter to John Bartlett dated July 4, 1913. This is a fairly long excerpt, but it displays with clarity the consideration behind poetic transmission.

“You see the great successes in recent poetry have been made on the assumption that the music of words was a matter of harmonised vowels and consonants. Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived largely at effects in assonation. But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short track. They went the length of it. Any one else who goes that way must go after them. And that’s where most are going. I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense. Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

Sound and Sense was the title of one of my prep school textbooks, written by Lawence Perrine and Thomas R. Arp. My school was grades Five through twelve. Until eighth, you worked from the Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition series. I guess it was assumed by ninth grade that you worked out nouns and verbs, could diagram a sentence, and had opinions on the Oxford comma so the powers moved you on to a lit primer. If I were to go back in time to the first day of school in 1987, I think I’d see it as a milestone; from structure to content or something like that. But time travel’s unlikely. Seen through fourteen year old eyes, I picked up a stack of uncompelling textbooks in the gym with my locker assignment and combination and thought it was cool how many girls grew boobs over the summer.

I bought a copy of Warriner’s, the final one we used in eighth grade, a few years ago off Amazon. It’s the 1986 edition. As best I can tell we would have had the 82, but close enough. It’s a handy reference; basic when needed and specific. I like standing athwart Chicago and MLA and still having a publication at my back. It’s the grammar heavy selection in a desk side quiver that also holds Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire.

The cover pictured on Amazon was of the teal seventh edition Sound and Sense I remember. For whatever reason, when I moved the book to my cart the picture changed. They delivered the eighth edition in a bolder blue with gold writing. Crocket was wearing darker suits in lieu of his iconic white towards the end, and where went Miami Vice went we all, I suppose. I didn’t expect much from a used copy for $5.65 ($3.99 shipping) and frankly forgot I’d ordered it. The used books run on a much longer schedule that the regular Prime overnight. It’s pretty good.

The poems are selected because they’re exemplars of one of the chapter heading characteristics like “Allusion,” “Tone,” and “Imagery.” They’re good selections by revered poets and the final section is titled “Poems for Further Reading.” It’s just what it sounds like; eighty pages of well-known, well crafted poetry. The entries are set alphabetically rather than curated so you jar straight from Elizabeth Bishop to William Blake, but that’s okay. It’s a sampler and a pretty good introduction.

I flipped the book open randomly in new book reception style to see whatever it is I feel I need to see in a new book before settling down to read it. I landed on page seventy-four (“Figurative Language 1”) and there was a favorite: Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” I’ve talked about that one here before, so here’s just a bit for reference.

from To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

In all but the “Poems for Further Reading” chapter each poem has a few questions after it for class discussion or “homework,” a dwindling practice that needs invigoration. From the set after Marvell’s: “2. What is the speaker urging his sweetheart to do? Why is she being so ‘coy’?”

In my day that was an invitation to court expulsion with a detailed but honest answer, or for anyone with an older brother or sister to start singing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The modern ninth grader might be left wondering. Maybe the woman in the poem was being coy because she’s only halfway through Teen Vogue’s “Guide to Anal Sex.”

Philip Larkin is introduced early in chapter two (“Reading the Poem”). Good. Rip the rosy glasses off and give the kids a dose of futility.

A Study of Reading Habits
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don’t read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who’s yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

“Yeah. Books are crap. Learning is crap.”

“So, you enjoyed the poem?”

“Damn you, sir. Damn you and your circular love-of-learning trap.”

Sylvia Plath makes her second appearance on page 70 (“Figurative Language 1.”)

Metaphors
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

I don’t remember anyone being conspicuously quiet when we discussed this poem. I don’t remember discussing this poem at all, but I think I’d be attuned, looking for anyone who was suddenly involved with her watch band. It doesn’t seem like it to hear people talk, but teen birth rates are dropping – have been – for quite a while. It’s hard to get an exact anything because some of the studies I found use a data set (a bit jargony and probably has a precise meaning, but you know what I mean) of girls 12-19, some 15-17, and all manner of in between. The peak seems to have been in 1957. No one in my high school had a baby. There was one girl who took a suspicious vacation to Montana for six or so months and that provided one hell of a speculation playground for all of us navigating newfound technologies like three-way calling, but we didn’t know.

After school specials terrorized us. To read media directed at our cohort, everybody was a devil’s wink from dropping out of school to work in a coal mine in order to afford an Africanized bee proof existence for your soon to be super predator child. Pit Bulls were also a concern.

As a ward against conformity, particularly for young girls, Sound and Sense gives us “Pathedy of Manners” by Ellen Kay (Denotation and Connottion.”)

Pathedy of Manners
Ellen Kay (1931- )

At twenty she was brilliant and adored,
Phi Beta Kappa, sought for every dance;
Captured symbolic logic and the glance
Of men whose interest was their sole reward.

She learned the cultured jargon of those bred
To antique crystal and authentic pearls,
Scorned Wagner, praised the Degas dancing girls,
And when she might have thought, conversed instead.

She hung up her diploma, went abroad,
Saw catalogues of domes and tapestry,
Rejected an impoverished marquis,
And learned to tell real Wedgwood from a fraud.

Back home her breeding led her to espouse
A bright young man whose pearl cufflinks were real.
They had an ideal marriage, and ideal
But lonely children in an ideal house.

I saw her yesterday at forty-three,
Her children gone, her husband one year dead,
Toying with plots to kill time and re-wed
Illusions of lost opportunity.

But afraid to wonder what she might have known
With all that wealth and mind had offered her,
She shuns conviction, choosing to infer
Tenets of every mind except her own.

A hundred people call, though not one friend,
To parry a hundred doubts with nimble talk.
Her meanings lost in manners, she will walk
Alone in brilliant circles to the end.

I don’t know anything about Ellen Kay. Duck, Duck, Go desperately wants to tell me about Ellen Key, “a Swedish difference feminist writer on many subjects in the fields of family life, ethics and education,” and Ellen K, an LA radio personality who “took over the morning show at KOST after longtime morning host Mark Wallengren moved to afternoons,” but as to the poet, I get only offers from online Cliff’s Note molds to provide analysis for the poem above.

It’s a bit cliched, I think. “Be your own woman.” “Don’t live your life for a man.” Peggy Sue Got Married just told us about tradeoffs. There were ways they could have gone to make the point more emphatically. Anne Sexton would have put a cigarette out on Kay’s forearm. That’d make a great Joan Didion essay.

Yeats is properly featured often. Students first meet him on page 127 (Allusions.)

Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Ovid leaves Leda laying by a stream, post offstage rape, while Zeus frolics on as a satyr in search of his next conquest. DaVinci portrays her with an arm wrapped around swan/Zeus. H.D. writes of the rape of Leda as a consensual act. “the warm quivering / of the red swan’s breast.” I consider H.D.’s “Oread” one of the most perfect images in poetry, but her “Leda” falls flat.

Yeats portrays brutality; terrible action to match consequence. There’s no trigger warning.

Sound and Sense bills itself in the preface as “written for the college student who is beginning a serious study of poetry,” but that’s akin to a producer’s pitch to Glenn Close. “This role is perfect for you. She’s an attractive middle-aged woman whose grandson has a break down in his last year of medical school.” It’s age flattery. There’s nothing in it that can’t be gleaned by a high school kid. I’d imagine college students might feel a little ticked off, spoken down to.

I grew up just ahead of Captain Planet and the Planeteers. “The 1990 Children’s Television Act (CTA) requires broadcasters to provide educational and informational television programs for children,” writes either Sandra L. Calvert or Jennifer A. Kotler in their paper “Lessons from children’s television: The impact of the Children’s Television Act on children’s learning.” Before that, bad guys robbed banks, tried to drop anvils on speedy birds that were coy about flying, and wanted to rule the galaxy. Nobody saw a need to thwart will to power via littering. Stories got less interesting.

My seventeen year old son has studied Frost, The Seafarer, and Sanburg. The school isn’t shying away from anything. His textbook is a disembodied collection of blips floating around in the cloud, not as sensitive to a teal or bold vogue by cop show. I don’t see an ethos emanating from it. That’s a worry now.

This last one was written after Disney came into being. It relies on knowing the cleansed fairy tale. In a book for kids, it signals to the reader that they are expected to be mature enough to discuss such material with adults. It’s a well-placed break with kid stuff.

Whoever had my used Sound and Sense before I did highlighted “Lust’s magazines lay strewn, bare tits and asses / Weighted by his “devices” – chains, cuffs, whips,” and “Retrieving several pairs of Sloth’s soiled drawers.” Little brat.

Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins
R.S. Gwynn (1948- )

Good Catholic girl, she didn’t mind the cleaning.
All of her household chores, at first, were small
And hardly labors one could find demeaning.
One’s duty was one’s refuge, after all.

And if she had her doubts at certain moments
And once confessed them to the Father, she
Was instantly referred to texts in Romans
And Peter’s First Epistle, chapter III.

Years passed. More sinful every day, the Seven
Breakfasted, grabbed their pitchforks, donned their horns
And sped to contravene the hopes of heaven,
Sowing the neighbors’ lawns with tares and thorns.

She set to work. Pride’s hundred looking-glasses
Ogled her dimly, smeared with prints of lips;
Lust’s magazines lay strewn–bare tits and asses
And flyers for “devices”–chains, cuffs, whips.

Gluttony’s empties covered half the table,
Mingling with Avarice’s cards and chips,
And she’d been told to sew a Bill Blass label
In the green blazer Envy’d bought at Gyp’s.

She knelt to the cold master bathroom floor as
If a petitioner before the Pope,
Retrieving several pairs of Sloth’s soiled drawers,
A sweat-sock and a cake of hairy soap.

Then, as she wiped the Windex from the mirror,
She noticed, and the vision made her cry,
How much she’d grayed and paled, and how much clearer
Festered the bruise of Wrath beneath her eye.

“No poisoned apple needed for this Princess,”
She murmured, making X’s with her thumb.
A car door slammed, bringing her to her senses:
Ho-hum. Ho-hum. It’s home from work we come.

And she was out the window in a second,
In time to see a Handsome Prince, of course,
Who, spying her distressed condition, beckoned
For her to mount (What else?) his snow-white horse.

Impeccably he spoke. His smile was glowing.
So debonair! So charming! And so Male.
She took one step, reversed, and without slowing
Beat it to St. Anne’s where she took the veil.