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

I wish I’d never written T.S. Eliot or C.S. Lewis or even E.E. or e.e. cummings because I’ve established a period pattern where now I think TS, CS, and EE/ee is more elegant. The Chicago manual makes a distinction between initials used in combination with a full name – F.D. Roosevelt – and initials used in the desert – FDR. Yes, and then no, to periods. I’m with the British on Dr and Mr, though in practice I’m in the habit of Dr. and Mr. As a rule of thumb, a shortened Professor becomes a Prof. with a period because the final letter of the contraction is not the final letter of the word. Dr ends with the R, so D…r makes more sense than Dr. Auto-correct puts me off periods even in the case of Prof. because I had to go back and uncapitalize the B in “because” as anything aside from Mr. Mrs. and Dr. gets embiggened as a matter of resolute coding. In most cases, British punctuation makes better sense to me. To paraphrase T?S? Eliot, grammar did not precurse language. We spoke, later wrote, and then imposed inflections, pauses, and groupings. The marks are servant to the writer, so mixing and matching a little American, a little British, and a little intuition isn’t all that bad. It has the added business of flustering hobgoblins.

There is a school that insists D.H. be D. H., but that’s absurd. I’m not sure how the article above will end up. As of this writing, all that exists of it beyond this intro—which I normally write last but I’m so bothered—is “POETS Day! D.H. Lawrence” and I’m incensed that there are periods abbreviating David and Herbert but not Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday even though I know there are different rules governing acronyms and initials. I have a history of T.S. Eliot, but very much want to recant and adopt TS Eliot going forward. I’m struggling internally with a man v man and man v society conflicts.

In any case, It’s Friday. The work week is done but for make work pretending as you look forward to the weekend, so why bother with the show. Get out and go play. Duck out mid afternoon and start the weekend off on your terms. Piss. Off. Early., Tomorrow’s. Saturday.

But first, some verse.

***

I spent a great many years working as a sommelier. That means I spent a great many years reading wine reviews, wine histories, and essays about wine. After a while, you see the limits of jargon. There are only so many descriptors in use by wine writers. It’s not that a full thesaurus is denied, just that, by a seeming mutual agreement, a handful of characteristics are called by all by the same terms. The writers aren’t incapable of being exotic, it’s just that, when writing for the public, they communicate with the more general “citrus” than they might “charcoal flame kissed rind of mid summer bergamot picked a dancers breath from Calabrian pepper roots.” Too exotic, and you lose the audience. People are reading because they want a sense of what a wine tastes like so a few agreed upon terms describing agreed upon flavor profiles work to everyone’s advantage. I don’t believe the “barnyard” aromas on a red Rhone’s nose smell like an actual barnyard, but I recognize the smell as what has been previously described to me as barnyard and find utility in using the term with like interested people.

It gets ridiculous. With a limited palate palate, there are only so many ways to describe a wine, thus all the diversions about coastal breezes and what generation removed a Californian farmer is from simple Burgundian grape picker ancestors whose old world traditions continue unchanged in the rustic doored fermenting warehouse over there beyond the gift shop. In one issue you may read a description of an Anderson Valley Cab as “hints of cherry on the nose, with graphite and deep blackberry up front, and a lingering tobacco finish.” In the next issue, the same writer might describe a Napa Merlot as “hints of tobacco on the nose, with blackberry and graphite up front, and a lingering cherry finish.” Throw in acidity now and then and you have a mad-lib marketing plan ready and set.

It’s not always the writers fault. There are times when you read and realize the author may not have tried the wine at all or he’s so far gone as to set himself above the reader and not bother caring about communicating anything but his own superiority, but writers like that are few and great to have around for finger pointing and laughing purposes. When trying to discuss in common terms, there can only be so many terms in common. Sometimes the writer gets bored and phones it in.

Poetry critics should not be confused with people who write about poetry. William Logan is a good critic. He’ll tell you why a poet errs, why you should be impressed, and in his best moments, he puts the work he’s examining in context, catching dishonesty, expansion of previous themes, false emotion, and damned impressive grasps of subjects others have toyed with. He’s not alone. Then there are writers about poetry; blurb writers, interns who put out introductions for anthology web sites other than Poetry Foundation (which continues to be generally excellent), and middling graduate students. I suspect the former, latter, and in between are, more often than not, one in the same.

The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence [periods theirs] notes of his poetry, “a great many of his poems are didactic, prosy, irrational, undisciplined, sentimental, obscene, ranting, whiny or otherwise virtually unreadable,” yet his best work stands “alongside the finest poetic efforts of the twentieth century.” The whole rant above came because I read the Cambridge Companion quote and thought, “What utter nonsense,” with a great big sneer on my face. It’s all over the place. Then I sat down and read a swath—more than the here and there I knew through the years—from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence [again, not mine]. Cambridge is dead on. There is nonsense all over the web about his “sense of the human,” and “vivid use of metaphor.” I read the Cambridge bit, dismissed it as similar blather, and came away upended.

Here’s a few lines from one of his most famous poems.

from Snake
DH Lawrence (1885-1930)

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

The whole goes on quite a bit longer. It has an enviable melody, though he insists that’s not a requirement. He insists on being undisciplined. His essay “The Poetry of the Present” serves as introduction to his 1920 collection New Poems, but it was released to a wider audience in the pages of Poetry magazine. It’s a manifesto of sorts, where he champions poetry of the present. Too much poetry, he says is about the past or the future. He wants to celebrate the immediate. It cannot be forgotten that he was a novelist of consequence. If for no other reason, follow the link to “The Poetry of the Present” for his prose. An example:

“Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness.”

He is undisciplined as a matter of practice, no matter the contradiction. In his early career, Lawrence wrote traditional metered verse, rhyme and all. In fact, and I’d not seen this before, his Collected Poems has section headings titled “Rhyming Poems” and “Unrhyming Poems,” but he all but abandoned meter after. In “Poetry of the Present,” he extols free verse, especially as practiced by Walt Whitman. But I think he goes too far.

“It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse, no use drawing a melodic line which all the feet must toe. Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant.”

He gives away the game, I think. Those of us who believe poetry should be tied to meter but are charmed by certain brilliant works of free verse maintain that great practitioners, like Eliot or Pound, work to a rhythm all their own. At the very least, he’s saying that there doesn’t need to be a cohesive rhythm throughout a work, but he goes on:

“We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial foam or artificial smoothness. But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm. All the laws we invent or discover—it amounts to pretty much the same—will fail to apply to free verse. They will only apply to some form of restricted, limited unfree verse.”

This is the quiet part said way too loud. There are no restraints, so anything can be free verse. We are to accept free verse as poetry, so anything can be poetry. It’s a gut shot; a disturbance to the detente. A lot of people are wiling to look the other way and not mumble about indented prose if it sounds nice. I’m willing to do that with Lawrence’s work because it does have a rhythm of its own. It is beautiful at times. Meaningful at times. He should have let the issue lie.

I like to call things -esque, and Lawrence is certainly Whitman-esque. He’s a more restrained, but focuses on the exuberance of a moment from different angles. I’m not a fan of Walt Whitman, but I admire his description, then his sidestep and description of the same thing from a slightly different viewpoint. It seems like he’s indecisive as to which description to give, but that’s not it. Each gives a different flavor or aspect. Lawrence does something similar.

from Sicilian Cyclamens

When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow:
When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it in a knob behind
—O act of fearful temerity!
When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven, their eyes revealed:
When they felt the light of heaven brandished like a knife at their defenceless eyes,
And the sea like a blade at their face,
Mediterranean savages:
When they came out, face-revealed, under heaven, from the shaggy undergrowth of their own hair
For the first time,
They saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes, growing
Where the slow toads sat brooding on the past.

Here’s a moment. Wait, here’s the moment again. Very much in the present.

Politically, Lawrence was all over the place. Bertrand Russell called him a Proto-German Fascist and force for evil. He is described as a right winger with no love for democracy and a dislike of labor, a man who called for a dictator, and a monarchist. He described himself as a socialist, though rejecting the Soviet brand. Per Wikipedia, when living abroad, he told his sister that, were he at home and able, he’d vote Labour. Who knows. I bet he’d be a hell of a good time in a bar room debate.

His poems were frequently decried as obscene as were his novels. He seemed to delight in revealing what he perceived as hypocrisy. He had private friends, but few public.

He was run out of Cromwell during the war as a suspected spy. That was not the first time he was accused of espionage. When traveling in Germany with his wife Frieda, nee Richtofen of the flying Baron family fame, he was arrested. This was right before WWI when tensions were high and he was an out of place Englishman. The Richtofen connections cleared everything up. The marriage itself was scandalous. After his death, his friend Catherine Carswell wrote a letter for publication defending him (from Wikipedia):

“Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilisation and the cant of literary cliques.”

The phrase “husband of one wife” might lead you to believe he was a pillar of fidelity. I don’t know that he personally had affairs, but his wife, when he started seeing her, was married to one of his teachers and she and Lawrence eloped to Germany leaving her three children behind. It wasn’t until securing a divorce two years later that he became a pillar of the marital tradition.

Other than Carswell, I’ve read that EM Forster and his friend Aldous Huxley were notable public voices to speak kindly of the man, but they were in the minority. He was much admired for his prose, poetry, very much for his travel writing, and even his painting, though the one gallery show I read about was closed by the authorities. Obscenity again was the charge, and half of his display was confiscated, returned on the promise that he’d never show the paintings publicly in England again.

A bout with pneumonia in his teens left him weak. A recurrence in his twenties probably didn’t help. While living the Bohemian life on his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in 1925, he and Frieda took a trip down to Mexico where Lawrence picked up the double whammy of malaria and tuberculosis. That nearly killed him. You can see the trajectory. Five years later, in 1930, his tuberculosis finally took him.

Years after his death, the public began to recognize his quality. Mores that were mores weren’t any more. Obscenity laws loosened and his posthumous reputation grew. The 1959 trial over publication of the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover changed British publishing and brought his name, nearly thirty years after his death, front and center.

After his death, his reputation grew and over time no one remembered objecting personally. Everyone in the sixties was at Woodstock. Every French grandfather was in the Resistance.

Below is one of his dirty, naughty poems that was pulled from his 1929 collection, Pansies before publication.

The Noble Englishman

I know a noble Englishman
who is sure he is a gentleman,
that sort –

This moderately young gentleman
is very normal, as becomes and Englishman,
rather proud of being a bit of a Don Juan
you know –

But one of his beloveds, looking a little peaked
towards the end of her particular affair with him
said: Ronald, you know, is like most Englishmen,
by instinct he’s a sodomist
but he’s frightened to know it
so he takes it out on women.

Oh come! said I. That Don Juan of a Ronald! –
Exactly, she said. Don Juan was another of them, in love with himself
and taking it out on women. –

Even that isn’t sodomistical, said I.
But if a man is in love with himself, isn’t that the meanest form of homosexuality? she said.

You’ve no idea, when men are in love with themselves, how they wreak all their spite on women,
pretending to love them.
Ronald, she resumed, doesn’t like women, just acutely dislikes them.
He might possibly like men, if he weren’t too frightened and egoistic.
So he cleverly tortures women, with his sort of love.
He’s instinctively frightfully clever.
He can be so gentle
so delicate in his love-making.
Even now, the thought of it bewilders me: such gentleness!
Yet I know he does it deliberately, as cautiously and deliberately as when he shaves himself.
Then more than that, he makes a woman feel he is serving her
really living in her service, and serving her
as no man ever served before.

And then, suddenly, when she’s feeling all lovely about it
suddenly the ground goes from under her feet, and she clutches in mid-air,
but horrible, as if your heart would wrench out; –
while he stands aside watching with a superior little grin
like some malicious indecent little boy.
– No, don’t talk to me about the love of Englishmen!