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blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
The poem, from which these lines come, takes the form of one long 24
line sentence. It has a shimmering quality. An atmosphere of elation hovers
around it as if the words are creating a present moment in the mind of
the reader that will not stop presenting itself the whole ‘thick
length’ of the poem. There is a buoyancy and immediacy of tone lifting
us to a kind of summit from which we see the sow in all her creaturely
detail ‘with wild surmise’. I am reminded, not only of Keats,
but also of Mallarme, ‘The lovely untouched alive now.’
Yet how do we know that these lines are unlikely to have been written
by a contemporary British poet? In asking this I’m not so concerned
with national stereotypes (‘St Francis and the Sow’ is by
the American poet Galway Kinnell) as with a dimension of the poetic tradition
that feels quite different from what we are currently familiar with here.
One aspect of this difference is Kinnell’s relation to modernism.
‘Modernist’ poetry in this country tends to be identified
with a culture of language — a preoccupation with its internal dynamics,
its workings and textures. The reading experience is seen as a collaboration
with the poet in a pleasurable pursuit, not unlike a ‘Round Britain
Quiz’, of the encrypted and oblique. From this point of view J.H.
Prynne is an exemplary British modernist.
American poetry has had a very different take on modernism — one
closer to its origins in the European avant-garde. In the work of Pound,
Stevens and Ashbery we still hear echoes of Rimbaud’s radical announcement
in 1871 that the poet is ‘truly the thief of fire’. His mission
is to bring us du nouveau, the new – an unmediated free act that
cannot be subordinated to any prior system of cognition or recognition.
In its most extreme form this ideal of immediacy represents a defiance
of culture that reason says is impossible. In the end, history forecloses
on even the most radical gestures. But in the form in which we see it
in Kinnell’s poem, we experience a freshness and a laying-bare of
sensation; and, almost as if the poet could outrun time, we feel we are
living, in the world of the poem, in a constantly recurring present moment.
In his wonderful ‘How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry’
Edward Hirsch explores two poetic modes, the poetry of praise and the
poetry of blame, citing a comment made by the anthropologist of religion,
Jane Harrison: ‘The rituals of expulsion, riddance, cursing, and
finally purification issue in the literature of blame; the rituals of
induction, of blessing, and of magical fertilisation issue in the literature
of praise.’
It would be interesting, if there were space here, to speculate on the
role of irony in British poetry. Because irony interposes distance, in
contrast with the ideal of immediacy I have been discussing, and holds
up its objects — back to front — to doubt, critical scrutiny
and contradiction, it might be possible to argue that it enacts a poetry
of blame.
But let the last word go to a British poet. In ‘Making, Knowing,
and Judging’, Auden wrote: ‘Poetry can do a hundred and one
things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct – it may express
every possible shade of emotion and describe every conceivable kind of
event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise
all it can for being and for happening.’
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