[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week is gonna be over now, or it’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I’m re-reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram.” If you aren’t familiar, he discusses the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers, as well as those subsequent. He makes the case that we’ve been roped into an irony trap – too post-modern for our own good – and served a side of warped empathy to boot.

The idea that we’re shaped by consumed drama has nagged at me. Frankly, I feel bludgeoned by it. The saddest scene I’ve seen on video is one lost to channel surfing. It was one of those true crime investigative documentary series. I can’t find or recall the name of the show where I saw the original, but plenty of similar scenes exist. A young woman’s mother was murdered. She’s giving her victim’s impact statement before a judge as part of the pre-sentencing procedure. This should be unprecedented in someone’s life. There should be no proper way of doing things. There should be no blueprint. But she has one.

I know she rehearsed in front of a mirror, because that’s the human thing to do. I know she wanted the most impact, as is implied. And I know she’s not comfortable in front of people, in front of an attentive crowd, in front of a camera. Because few are. There was nothing inauthentic about what she did, and I don’t usually think along these lines, but I figure she did her mother proud. But we live surrounded by stories. Like no other time in history, we have narrative crafted to draw us in playing background. It’s all heightened emotion. Television, streaming, sports talk radio, energetic music, sad love songs. At every turn our attention is drawn and those doing the drawing are well aware they don’t hold a monopoly. The saddest or loudest or whatever the fix du jour draws us in, and the more the more. We’re social creatures. We act as we find appropriate to our experience but our experience is intruded upon by stories, fantastical and elevated circumstance. Emotional displays escalate in response and the exaggerated becomes commonplace. We need to ratchet up for the uncommon, and more and more.

The woman did a wonderful job communicating to the judge. She honored, in horrific circumstances, her mother who, I suspect, would have been thankful and proud. I wasn’t watching critically, but couldn’t help noticing. Her cadence and gestures were effective, appropriate to an actress schooled in swaying audiences. Not a twenty-something-year-old office worker.

It struck me what outliers we are. The Spartans were warlike; men, women, and children ready mentally and physically for conflict and its hardships. Mongols rode “before they could walk.” Vikings sailed. I’m watching this woman flourish knowing it’s affectation, but also knowing she’s not acting. That’s how we see it done. Private grief honed to effect is not wrong, but we are so devastatingly good at it. It bothered me so much, this realization that we are constantly selling. All around us there’s a mass media swarm of minor chords and actors tossing triggers. I don’t think we’ve picked up tricks. I think we’ve incorporated tricks.

There’s a top or a fall. Everything has an upper limit so in time we’ll revert or go in a different direction, but I think our time will be remembered as an oddity; a paroxysm.

I don’t have a theory or even a hypothesis. I saw the office worker’s statement years ago, but I keep seeing examples. So, I’m rereading David Foster Wallace and Marshall McLuhan. Why I bring this up here is because earlier this week I read “God’s Grandeur: Gerard Manley Hopkins,” an essay by Dana Gioia (included in The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays). Reading Gioia’s on a poet who wrote essentially for himself without publishing around the same time as reading Wallace’s on outside influences on writing got me wondering about lack of criticism or feedback. What does it do to a poet if their only course corrections are sui generis?

Obviously, reclusive poet conjures Emily Dickinson, so I’ll include her with Hopkins. For those looking for conclusions or theories, I (again) have none. I just enjoyed considering and thought I’d share.

Neither wrote in a vacuum. Hopkins was a Jesuit, not a cloister. The order employed him as a teacher, though he found teaching miserable. He’d have been schooled in forms and movements, kept abreast of journals and read on his own; aware of the world. As a boy he’d won at least one poetry prize, but direct criticism of his adult work was limited.

On committing himself to the church, Hopkins stopped writing, seeing it as a distraction to his higher calling. In 1875, five Franciscan nuns, among others, drowned in the wreck of the Deutschland. Hopkins’ superior suggested someone write a poem in commemoration. Seeing his calling align with his talents, he volunteered and delivered a 280 line work, “The Wreck of the Deutchland,” dedicated “To the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns/exiles by the Falck Laws/drowned between midnight and morning of/Dec. 7^Th, 1875.”

The opening:

from The Wreck of the Deutschland
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea
Lord of living and dead;
Though hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The editor of the Jesuit journal to which he submitted called it, per Gioia, “unintelligible.” His friend Robert Bridges, the only person with whom we know he regularly shared his poems, again from Gioia, “disliked it so much he later referred to Hopkins’ formidable first mature poem as ‘the dragon folded at the gate to forbid all entry.’” Despite the reception, Hopkins began to write again.

Bridges is an interesting fellow. He was Hopkins’ lifelong friend since youthful school days. Hopkins didn’t just stop writing poetry on entering the vocation, he burned his copies of all his work to date. Thankfully, Bridges saved everything he was sent, both before and after Hopkins’ poetic hiatus. It was he who arranged and published, twenty years after his friend’s death, the forty-nine poems we have.

As an ear for bouncing work off of, Bridges was preposterously ideal. The school friend was a poet in his own right, and per Providence or luck if you don’t believe, an esteemed one: a medical doctor, Baronet, playwright, and Milton scholar. Fifteen years after Hopkins’ death, Bridges served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Five years into his seventeen year tenure as such, he released Hopkins’ body of work. His office no doubt drew attention to the publication. Providence.

It’s disingenuous to say Hopkins only received criticism from an old friend, considering, but his work was entirely original; unlike anything Bridges wrote, unlike anything that had been seen.

You’ll often hear that he revived Anglo-Saxon stress patterns. Maybe. No doubt he was familiar and maybe found inspiration in them and from elsewhere, but what he derived or synthesized or made up was from whole cloth; was not known.

More from Gioia:

“Although he was a Victorian poet, he does not sound like any of his contemporaries—nor any of ours. Hopkins did not build on conventional foundations of English verse. He reinvented the art from the ground up in terms of meter, syntax, and texture.”

Hopkins packed in alliteration, hard consonant beats, and set a quickend pace. “Sprung rhythm” was his great innovation, a meter measuring stresses regardless of syllables.

Had he regularly published, would reviews have affected him? Would popularity or its lack cause course corrections?

“Pied Beauty” is of a handful of poems written before ordination; a last hurrah of sorts before shutting down.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Emily Dickinson took to speaking to her scant and rare visitors from the top of the stairs or with a partially opened door between her, seated as I understand it, and her guest, also seated. There was no line of sight. For all intents and purposes, she was cloistered in her later years. Unlike Hopkins, she published, though only seven of her sixteen to eighteen hundred poems ever saw print in her lifetime. Like Hopkins, she didn’t allow many opportunities for criticism. She sent poems to family and friends on occasion, but none of her friends ended up Poet Laureate. I know she confided in one professional regularly.

In 1862 she sent four poems to Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson who wrote that he experienced, “The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius.” But he didn’t know what to do with them. He was unsure if they even qualified as poetry as understood at the time. In any case, the two struck up a correspondence. She had at least one sounding board.

What makes her special is absolute immersion in metaphor. The poet and critic William Logan puts it infinitely better in his essay, “Dickinson’s Nothings” included in his collection, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History:

“No other poet after Shakespeare has made metaphor the basic currency of imagination—her range is not as broad, her experience not as comprehending; but to live in her poems is to live in a world of stifling privacies and shadowy longings and in a sensibility of extraordinary reach and demand. The woman is an enigma, her poems as revealingly unrevealing as Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

In her privacies she can be maddeningly impenetrable. That makes sense if she’s only writing for herself, and we must assume she often was. Some are easily decipherable. Some, we’ll never unravel. Some require knowing about the poet’s life.

“Alone and in a Circumstance” is about an encounter with a spider and subsequent anxieties. Not knowing that her father’s house, called Homestead, was most of her agoraphobic world in her later life, and that her father was an attorney, might leave you wondering exactly what is going on. Knowing that doesn’t inform completely, but allows for a clearer picture.

Alone and in a Circumstance
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled

And so much more at Home than I
Immediately grew
I felt myself a visitor
And hurriedly withdrew

Revisiting my late abode
With articles of claim
I found it quietly assumed
As a gymnasium
Where Tax asleep and Title off
The inmates of the Air
Perpetual presumption took
As each were special Heir—
If any strike me on the street
I can return the Blow—
If any take my property
According to the Law
The Statute is my Learned friend
But what redress can be
For an offense nor here nor there
So not in Equity—
That Larceny of time and mind
The marrow of the Day
By spider, or forbid it Lord
That I should specify.

More from Logan’s essay, this about the poem:

“The reference in the poem to law books suggests that she is sitting in the family library at the Homestead or next door in her brother’s library at Evergreens.”

I had guesses, but no certainty. That the poem is peppered with law terms is obvious, but knowing a bit about her circumstance, or a great deal as Logan does, and you see that a spider’s made “a gymnasium” out of her father’s desk or shelves of law books. There’s certainly more to the poem. (As and aside: I won’t get into it other than to say that Logan’s commentary on this specific is worth the price of his book, but the draft of the poem was found on a scrap paper with a three cent stamp featuring a picture of a locomotive and with pinned one end under the stamp are two strips of cut magazine article from a review of a George Sands novel. It likely has nothing to do with the poem, but with Dickinson you have to wonder. We’re not her audience.)

Impenetrability has its allure, but she wasn’t trying to invoke mystique. Her reader was herself, privy to all she knew. Why bother with exposition? She slides into metaphor without need to explain, shown purely as the author imagines without compromises that make it accessible. She doesn’t meet us halfway or invite us in. Even out in the cold, we marvel.

Obscurity grants liberties. It doesn’t guarantee genius. I’m sure there are forests of unread composition notebooks filled with amateur verse that deserve to be right there forever under the mattress where they reside. But it’s interesting that two of our most unique voices developed relatively undisturbed.

I thought this was interesting. In the beginning of his Hopkins article, Dana Gioia notes,

“Hopkins ranks as one of the most frequently reprinted poets in English. In William Harmon’s statistical survey of anthologies and textbooks, The Top 500 Poems (1992), Hopkins stood in seventh place among all English-language poets—surpassed only by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, and William Wordsworth.”

They’re both in there, attempts to fly under the radar not withstanding.