Parodies, Part 2--"Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"--Kenneth Koch (1962?)

In case there is anyone who reads this blog--I cannot tell, the Sitemeter report keeps reading 0 visitors every week since June, but I am quite sure some people have been here--my posting rate is henceforth probably going to be no more than once every 7-10 days. I cannot quite give it up yet; I still enjoy the idea of having an ongoing archive of work accessible to be stumbled upon by anyone in the entire world who might find something I say appealing. I just cannot, however, write quickly, or briefly, and I definitely cannot do these things while maintaining a tone at once edgy and upbeat, all of which the true blog, as a form in the current age, seems particularly to require.

So I am going to try a different, more completely diarylike, less formal tack with the blog starting today. The repeated failures in the writing and the consequent pointless overexertion I expended on a few recent posts contributed to drive me into an especially dark spell of mood earlier this week. Wild thoughts hurtled around the frontal regions of my brain such as to bring on actual headaches. In rapid succession I determined to get rid of all my books and give up reading and writing for ever, take up some kind of mechanical or outdoor occupation, join the army, mail my undeserved college diploma back to my alma mater and request that they strike me utterly from their records (I actually think about doing this a lot; I was a stupid and lazy student, and am so maladroit and dull-witted in adult life that possessing the thing increasingly makes me feel like a man who has committed a series of ethical crimes that he could easily make reparations for. Living up to my supposed education has, in other words, become such a burden upon me that it seems to be it would be a great relief to be able to tell people I never had one.), acquire an entirely new and cognitively appropriate set of interests, submit to unconditional belief in God, and banish the word and all but happy forebodings of death from my mind altogether I think this was in part due to the circumstance that it was 90 degrees for several days after three weeks of very beautiful cooler weather, the leaves having begun to turn, and so on. Having grown up in the kind of suburban house where one has no sense of what the weather ever is like outside, now that I live in one where one can never avoid its effects I find I am quite sensitive to it.

But to the poem. I will reproduce it, with comments in parentheses and emphases in italics as they come up. The poem most directly being satirized here is of course "This is Just to Say". It is quite famous, the one about the plums in the refrigerator and all that. My wife, who has a knack for beautiful minimalism in her own speech and writing, thinks it is a worthy piece.

1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. (absurd)
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye. (minor chuckle)
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing. (genuinely amused snicker)

3

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. (deep sigh. eyes rolling)

4

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor! (WCW of course was an M.D.)

Williams is a good object for parody because his writing, whether it is ultimately ridiculous or not, and certainly the consensus is that it is not, is never more than a few shades of meaning away from being ridiculous. I have never really gotten him. I read something recently where some teacher of writing was championing his spareness and the precision with which he chose his words and images as an example for the aspiring author to study. This was a book however directed at people who buy books at Barnes & Noble purporting to tell them how to become writers. Is Williams an especially precise and powerfully economical poet compared any of the major poets who have worked in this general vein, or even precursors such as Blake and Tennyson? I haven't gotten that.

Except for the second stanza, the parody is not really that funny. A parody that fails to be consistently funny, or written such as to leave no doubt as to what is absurd or deficient in the original, is to me a failed parody.

In contrast to Brode, our other parodist, Kenneth Koch seems to have more cachet as a real poet. He was on the faculty at Columbia University for decades, where he was apparently very popular. He was identified with the "New York School" of poets and other artists in the 50s, with which the Abstract Expressionist painters and the Beats are also considered to be loosely affiliated. The best of it looks to be in the tradition of solid, snappy, matter-of-fact, not overly cerebral or suffocatingly introspective American stuff that I tend to admire when I see it because a) I can't do it, and b) it is how the real cool kids who matter culturally in America have always talked and thought, and you know I want to be like them. Koch was born in Cincinnati in 1925, and died in 2002.

With regard to Williams, I seem to have lost my record of his birthplace and gravesite, though I actually visited both of them in 1998. He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a well-preserved and still quite bustling pre-World War II, leafy Mid-Atlantic town with a walkable main street, attractive public buildings, etc. It is only about ten miles from New York City, and is probably quite wealthy, but since the houses are old and close together and close to the street it does not give off an aura of exclusivity. There was an old house at the address where Williams was born that I think is probably old enough to be his (he was born in 1885 or 1886) but I am not 100% certain. By the way, if you happen to go, there are no alcohol sales in Rutherford (as of 1998), but if you bring your own wine to a restaurant and have a professional open it for you you are allowed to drink it.

Williams was buried in the neighboring town of Lyndhurst. The cemetery is in a fine spot, up on a hill with an almost unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline (except for a gigantic Medieval Times restaurant complex just beyond the cemetery wall at the foot of the hill). I have some good pictures of it that I ought to try to put up. For one thing, of course, the twin towers are still standing at that time, but also the visit took place just before Christmas and it was one of those years, of which we have been having many recently, where the temperature was around 70 degrees, so there is that weak December light but the grass in green, people are dressed for early fall, and so on.

Although I cannot claim to be a great fan of Williams's, this pilgrimage to his turf I nonetheless consider to have been a success and a vindication of my methods of touring. For I would never have gone to these places otherwise, and there is a great deal of interesting and atractive Americana to be found and observed in walking around and eating in them for a few hours.

Reading Update

I have been occupied for the past few weeks with a number of poems, which I will briefly comment on.

Tennyson-- "The Princess"

I generally look forward to Tennyson's coming up on my list. In his longer poems, he can be a little over-indulgent in his metaphors and romantic details, but his technique and sense of how the language works are so good that there is still much that is satisfying in them. "The Princess", a poem which our author clearly invested a significant amount of time and effort on in the prime years of his life, is not much remembered today except for the songs, especially "Tears, Idle Tears", which are inserted as breaks of comparative lightness from the main action. The plot, for those unfamiliar with this poem, centers around a castle where the women of a romanticized country have retreated to set up a university in order to pursue science and other learning and free themselves from the slavery of marriage, their leader being the gorgeous and fiery princess of the title, who was betrothed as an infant to the prince of a neighboring kingdom, who refuses to relinquish his prerogatives, foremost those of a prince but also those of a man, though he is partially sympathetic to the idea of the ladies being exposed to learning; unlike his more old-school father, who does not even try to fathom what is going on but simply lays siege to the castle with his army to put an end to the nonsense and ensure that the contract he made be fulfilled. In the end the men, their dominance and superiority challenged, hold firm, and demonstrate even to the princess that her proper place is ultimately in submission to a man worthy of ruling over her. One can only imagine how some feminist Phd students must have had a field day with this poem. In imagining the university of women in convocation our poet can only conceive of an ornate hall full of glittering pre-Raphaelite beauties in academic gowns trying to get their gorgeous glowing heads around philosophy and mathematics. No obesity, no frumpiness, no myopia, no slouching posture are to be found in this college. As for possible lesbians there are a few stout farmgirls who seem to serve primarily as the princess's security detail, and one bitter middle-aged woman who expresses feelings of betrayal by the same. There are some humorous details about the various statuary that is found all over the grounds, all of which commemorates the deeds of the most valiant and warlike women and goddesses recorded by antiquity, which parts are well done if a little precious and perhaps a little too amused by the idea of women founding and maintaining a glorious institution of learning.

In the song "Tears, Idle Tears" where he does not have to maintain a narrative but can declaim for twenty lines or so on a general, rather evanescent theme that he is equal to ("the days that are no more") his strengths are better displayed, as, probably are most poets'. To the sensibilities of our time the most striking thing about a work like "The Princess" is that the author either conceived or thought it necessary to render in quite richly and elaborately wrought verse. I don't think it would occur to anyone today, certainly not anyone with the slightest credentials as a poet, to write about such a subject. A novelist of some esteem might take it on but would probably fail due to an inability to understand free from irony. A middling professional-type writer could probably turn a sellable gothic/teen type book out of it, and then a good filmmaker given a $90 million budget and the most gorgeous 17 year old in Ontario to play the lead could make an iconic film that would live...well, it would live for a while, anyway. That is where the creative sensibility of the time seems to be. Not with poetry.

Coleridge--"Christabel"

Since I secretly like romances and old European forests and castles and princesses and dark winters and all of that I enjoyed reading this as an escape from my tedious yet incessantly tasking day to day life. That said, I couldn't really get into the poetry, which compared to Tennyson is rather stripped down, even blah. For example:

"But now unrobe yourself: for I
Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie."

or:

"And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby,
Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall."

This is not the sort of stuff that is going to impress your modern hard science/mathematical/ economist type of intellectuals who are unitiated in and skeptical of the wonders of poetry. Who cares, you say? Well, I think life would be more interesting if the rich heritage of our spoken and written languages were more widely shared and appreciated, especially among people whose superior intelligence is supposed to be their dominant quality (and it would likewise be good for myriad reasons if the wonders of science and mathematics were more widely understood as well). One of the most ridiculous spectacles of modern life is to be somewhere where everybody has a master's degree and no one has anything to talk about with anybody else (and believe me, I am the worst of the worst in this). In fact, in one such circle as this, of the three people who do the bulk of the talking, two of them actually never attended any college, and the 3rd, a very learned man who worked on the early Enniac computers and moved on to building pipe-organs, is 86 years old (people from that generation don't seem to suffer from this affliction).

Auden-"Musee des Beaux Arts"

Ahh, now we're talking. Really, is there anybody who does not love this poem? It matters little how much or how little of it we really understand. It is extremely satisfying. It is delivered just as if the poet were sitting with his intellectual companions, maybe even a woman, in the Grande Place after spending the afternoon with the Flemish Masters, perhaps some Trappist ale and a dish of frites moules set before him, expressing what we all wish to say in such company at such a moment. "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters..." Of course, to be able to continue on for 21 lines at a leisurely, thoughtful pace uninterrupted in any company or public place is probably a dream, but that makes it no less a successful poem. The poet convinces me that a mature human being could have spoken these thoughts in this way to another mature human being, that the tidy flow of the lines constitutes an action, a scene of life.

Auden is anyway from that same generation as Powell, Greene, Orwell, Betjeman, Waugh, etc whose writing I always like so much. Their style of English is remarkably natural and unaffected; they know their language, they are comfortable in their possession of it, and they have confidence in it in turn to adequately convey anything important or worthwhile that they have to say in its most regular form. Now, is it poetry like the old poetry, like something the Elizabethans would write? No, it is a different beast in its spirit as well as its language, it has not the same capacity for immersing itself fully in the events, emotions, etc it describes. it is too intellectual, its critical eye is a little two well educated. This is a fault of most poetry that comes very late in the history of a language. The idea of the poem is a worthwhile one. At first I wondered if the 1930s interpretation of the painting (Bruegel's Fall of Icarus) was more pessimistic than the painter intended, but I later came to the conclusion that it was not.

William Carlos Williams--"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

Another poem on the same Bruegel painting. I am sure all my readers are familiar with it but maybe just for practice I ought to try to get it up here:

Oh dear, it's up at the top. And it's rather small. I will continue to practice with this.

I don't get this guy at all. It says in his biography in the Norton Anthology that his poetry looks easy until one tries to write like him (don't they say the same thing about Danielle Steele?) His voice, shall we say, has yet to come through to me. While I can hear and see Auden at the museum or at the table giving us his poem, or I can hear and see the poet and the scene even in a minimalist American poem like "We Real Cool", what Dr. Williams is conveying that I would not otherwise have had any sense of is not immediately apparent. His Icarus poem was written, it looks like, 24 years after Auden's, and seems to play with the same idea of human nonchalance towards the catastrophes and failures that beset their fellow men. The Auden poem was written by a 31-year old man in Europe in 1938, when the spectre of civilizational horror seemed to have loomed as an inevitability to every cognizant person, Williams's by a 79-year old man in New Jersey in 1962, which was certainly a much less existentially threatening environment, whatever dark secrets and hatreds its population may have been harboring. The production of the Williams poem does not speak with the authority of having great necessity or particular insight that I can see. Getting back to the point made by the anthologizers about the admiration by other poets of Williams's techniques, as someone who has tried to write novels, I have obviously come across many instances where the difficulty of what an author has succeeded in pulling off has perhaps impressed me more than other people reading the same books. Henry James, Joyce, Garcia Marquez, some of the things John Fowles did in The Magus come immediately to mind (note by the way how many experimental and self-consciously "innovative" writers, which in America has been held up as pretty much the supreme achievement to be attained in all the arts for a hundred years, are from countries that were colonies or otherwise far removed in space and ancestral memory from the home territory of their languages). People who attempt to paint or act or play music seriously obviously will be more likely to notice strokes of virtuosity and brilliance of conception in fellow practitioners of their arts than unpractised neophytes. However the appreciation of technique in itself is generally a secondary consideration which one examines as a result of the satisfaction one has received from the initial reading/performance, not in search of it (see the next poem). I am going to amuse myself by rearranging the lines of a couple of William Carlos Williams poems and see what happens, because his breaks of line and stanza do not make any obvious sense to me.

Forgive me there was
the icebox According to Brueghel
I have eaten the whole pageantry
and so cold concerned
the plums unsignificantly
saving when Icarus fell
you were probably near
that were in off the coast
and which his field
so sweet the wings' wax
for breakfast awake tingling
they were delicious it was spring
Icarus drowning
a farmer was ploughing
sweating in the sun
with itself
of the year was
the edge of the sea
this was
that melted
a splash quite unnoticed

Shakespeare--Sonnet 130 ("My mistress's are nothing like the sun", etc)

Obviously this is one of the master models by which, whether one likes it or not, English language poetry and the English poetic mind will always be defined and against which newer poets in this tradition--which we are as yet far from escaping and conquering, however dead the culture may be said to be--will ultimately be measured. When I say measured, I do not mean by the professional critics and university professors either, but by the poet's own intellect, which if he has any sensibility regarding his art, will always recognize the excellences and necessities of mind/spirit/mental composition, whatever, in its highest examples.

Since my understanding of poetry is generally poor, and since I always have some piece of it to read, you can expect to see me tackle it again sometime in the future; Shakespeare too, for the simple reason that most contemporary writing on Shakespeare is horrible, either presuming an unearned and too low intimacy with the man or setting him pointlessly far beyond any bounds of actual life, even in a college classroom or at the theater, where one should expect some accessibility to him. I apologize for the length and sloppiness of composition of this post.