Kevin Davies' Lateral Argument

Ron imagines Kevin Davies' dazzlingly funny and inventive 21-page unpublished poem "Lateral Argument" as what Ashbery's Flow Chart might be like "if Flow Chart had a social imagination, a politics." Whether or not this is fair to Ashbery, it's true that "Lateral Argument" is one of the most socially, politically, and just plain imaginatively imaginative poems I have read from a contemporary poet. The poem is hilarious, lyrical, chilling, and perceptually acute.

Davies shifts contexts and tones rapidly, within what are otherwise shapely and well-behaved grammatical periods:

Like coming to the end of a dirt road
in a fever dream, as you stare the vegetation thinning
to reveal a copper-bound book of secret photographs

within which, looking closer, the vulnerable napes
of doomed soldiers and luckless noncombatants
have written upon them the doggerel

of porters.
Farther along
the fractal coastline of postmodern Norway
three lovers begin again
the Wittgensteinian project
of not thinking, not thinking

of a walrus.

This manages to be absurdly abstract and vividly visual at the same time, evocative of both harsh reality and slapstick dreamlife. The "narrative" that runs throughout the poem, such as it is (Ron seems to think it has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, but as far as I can tell, the progression is purely associative and ... well, lateral rather than forwardly linear), reels wildly back and forth from sober reflection to manic non sequitur, as though filibustering for some oblique cause and drawing on whatever material presents itself as the hours drag on. Inevitably, this marathon process leads the poem to comment on its own constructive principles:

We call it stuffing but actually it's form,

that is, emptiness.

This double qualification is circular in one sense: going from the blank mass of "stuffing" to the shapely meaningfulness of "form," only to redefine that form as the blank stuffing of "emptiness." Back where we started almost, alternating between laterally equivalent points on a stuck shuttle. Still, there is a difference between stuffing and emptiness, and the equation of form with emptiness can be justified. Davies never lets us tie his argumentative knots tightly; he keeps skipping ahead of us, dangling shoelaces eluding our grasp. Occasionally he gratifies us by tripping over them comically. But there is more going on here than just trickster-like acrobatics. The poem ends up being a sincere meditation despite and in part because of its own deflations of the meditative act.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44 & Misprision

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then, despite of space, I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the furthest earth remov’d from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land,
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan;
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.

I spent some time lecturing on this poem on Thursday, only to have pointed out to me by my teaching assistant that, despite having read the poem scores of times, I had still managed to misread the grammar at a crucial point. This left me in the embarrassing situtation of having to reframe at least ten minutes' worth of commentary and group discussion as a complete wild goose chase. The troublesome passage was "so much of earth and water wrought, / I must attend time's leisure...." My difficulty was with the verb "wrought" and the apposition of "so much" with "I": I had read "so much of earth and water wrought" as an ablative absolute, referring to a general condition of creation. I failed to see the obvious, that the speaker specifically identifies himself as the object that is "wrought" of earth and water. I wonder how many of my students were sitting silently, waiting for me to realize my mistake!

The entire poem hinges on this meaning, so it's remarkable that I was able to read the poem for so long, so many times, without realizing that I was totally missing it. One reason is that the wrong reading does yield something close to sense: "Because so much is made out of earth and water [and thus there is so much land and sea between us], I have to wait here without you." In this reading, since the earth and water are not directly identified with the speaker, it is not as easy to assign "either’s woe" in line 14 to them: why should the land and sea themselves be sorry, when it is they that are doing the separating, not being separated? From this misunderstanding follows the logical assumption that "either’s" refers not to the elements, but to the two lovers who are kept apart. The speakers' tears then become "badges" not of his own elemental make-up and the sorrow that mortal condition entails, but emblems of the reciprocal longing shared by the two lovers. But as one of my students pointed out, how do we know the absent beloved is also woeful? Maybe he's glad to be away from the weepy lover.

I am less concerned with this specific misprision of mine than the general principle that Shakespeare's sonnets are so adaptable to such misprisions. Part of me still clings irrationally to the idea that "either’s woe" can at least suggest the two lovers as well as the obstacles between them. One might also think, to take another example, of the "Bare rn'wd [ruined] quiers" in Sonnet 73, where "quiers" must mean the "choirs" or church seats where the singers stand, but inevitably also evokes the singers themselves and their singing, or even the "quires" of printed pages, perhaps pages of lyric poetry (as my other teaching assistant remarked). And this is a case of fairly articulable shades of meaning that can be made to adhere to a reasonably coherent spectrum of readerly options, however correct or incorrect. There are countless cases where the potential for much more unruly "creative" misreadings is very high, or where the question of sense never even makes it in the front door. Thousands of readers, I'm sure, have read and enjoyed these poems for ages and often neither had the slightest idea what some of them were "saying" nor that it was the case that they didn't have the slightest idea. These readers were, and have been, and will continue to be, perfectly happy just doing whatever it is they do when they read the poems in "the wrong way." So what is it that they do when they do that? What is the status of those "wrong meanings"? Critics have argued persuasively that meanings besides the "main" ones work with various degrees of force and intensity alongside those main meanings via association, allusion, overdetermination and other parareferential functions (as in the examples from Sonnet 73 above). This is the very bedrock of the possibility for (or necessity of) interpretation. But that line between possibility and necessity is thin, suggesting that imagination/phantasy and error, as the ancients and the early moderns believed, are very closely allied. I find the prospect of an (in)comprehensive poetics of error to be one that continues to seduce me.

Traditional Meter

As I at one point considered making Elizabethan experiments in quantitative versification a substantial part of my dissertation, I have spent some time reading various prosodic treatises, some of them very interesting from a historical point of view, for example Saintsbury, whom Jonathan mentioned, and Derek Attridge's Well-Weighed Syllables and The Rhythms of English Poetry. I can't think of such a book that would really be helpful in the context of recent arguments over traditional form in contemporary poetry, however, because it would have to theorize not just "how meter works" but how it could justify itself in a verbal culture that no longer recognizes the conventions of meter as self-evidently appropriate. (Anthony Easthope's Poetry as Discourse does offer a stimulating Marxist perspective on the historical specificity of particular metrical conventions.)

For me the real issue (other than what I regard as the ineptitude of most New Formalist writing) is not so much whether there are contemporary writers capable of achieving skillful effects with traditional meter--there are, certainly--but whether such effects can sustain the weight of their cultural moment. I used to wonder why there weren't forgers of classic poetry in the same way that there are forgers of classic painting. One reason is obvious: there wouldn't be that much money in it. But why doesn't it seem possible that someone could succeed at it even if they were to try? Forgers of painting fool experts all the time, but does anyone believe for an instant that any halfway competent Renaissance scholar could be fooled by a contemporary text claiming to be a lost poem by say, Michael Drayton? There is a difference, of course: painters are generally copying an extant painting, whereas there would be no point in copying a poem. But there are postmodern artists who do works in the style of the old masters for ironic effect, and who do an excellent job of recreating historical effects of light, texture, etc. There are no contemporary poems, on the other hand, that recreate archaic diction and spelling in an earnest attempt to create a "convincing" artifact. I do remember some imitations of nineteenth-century poems in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession: they were embarrassingly obvious in their newness, and they were only trying to emulate the work of one century past. The reason, I now think, that this can't be done is that people are just no longer culturally wired either to think in the ways necessary to produce relevant metrics in a traditional vein, or the ways necessary to process it as readers.

The reason Pope, with all his clockwork-like preciseness of gait, is so metrically admirable is that his verse perfectly embodies a certain idea of Enlightenment English humanity: cool, rational, balanced, confident, fussy, insufferable, condescending, unrufflable. Contemporary people are rufflable, and it's silly to pretend otherwise.