Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

 Manchester: Carcanet. £9.95.

           English Primers on the Four Quartets will tell you what every literary-minded child-genius already knows: T.S. Eliot studied, with great admiration, the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. Eliot’s poem, especially in those passages which speculate about time, clearly betrays the philosopher’s influence. But how much of Bradley is really in the Quartets? Does his influence extend beyond what we might call the “ideology” of the poem to its breathing texture? I raise these questions (guiltily - because I haven’t the slightest intention of answering them) as a way of illustrating the centrality of a problem exhibited in this book by Mark Strand, whose poems have been penetrated very deeply by the “feel” of philosophy. I say “feel” because Strand’s poems are not philosophical in the ordinary sense, they are not the Tractatus in verse. But they do have an important relationship with the kind of metaphor one often finds in books like the Tractatus.

           We may think of philosophy as an attempt to know the world, as a map, say, of a jungle, or we may prefer to think of it as an attempt to change the world, as a jungle-slashing machete. But map or machete we are likely to conclude that, like philosophy itself, our understanding of what philosophy is intensely metaphorical. Maps, machetes and jungles also point to the kind of simple metaphors which philosophy, with its usual appeals to clarity and universality, tends to use. When William James, in the course of illustrating a problem about how we use language, produced the metaphor of a squirrel clinging to a tree, it was not important for him to say whether the squirrel was a Red or a Grey, no more than it was important for Quine to explain whether his rabbit-as-seen-by-two observers was a buck or a doe. Such simple metaphors give philosophy books something approaching a common landscape (in the sense that we speak about writers having landscapes) and it is this landscape which we see in the underlit, underpopulated poems of Mark Strand. The conclusion of ‘The Accident’ is fairly typical:

I listen to the wind
press hard against the house.
I cannot sleep.
I cannot stay awake.
The shutters bang.
The end of my life begins.

Strand’s poems, especially the earlier ones from the 1960s, sometimes give the impression that they were written by a computer into which one had fed a truckload of data about small-town life and then asked it to come up with the “lowest common denominators”: wind, birds, houses, trains. Not only are the most common features of a certain way of life endlessly presented in this book but everything about them which might impart character, everything personal and specific, is carefully suppressed. A Strand door, for instance, is happy to be a plain rectangle. It has no distracting gnome-headed knockers or security-eyes - and it has been stripped well beyond the eddying paranoia of knotholes. There are no brandnames in sight - no Pepsi, no Aspirin - and there are precious few place-names. One feels one has stumbled into an allegorical landscape after an important allegory has been concluded:

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy

But all this is not merely a consequence of taking on board the feel of philosophy books. It is also a matter of the particular philosophy which is influencing Strand: Existentialism. The many forms of Existentialism, after Heidegger, tend to picture the world in emphatically dramatic, and mostly humourless, ways, usually taken up with what are regarded as first questions such as “Why is there anything?” and “Since I will die how should I live?” Strand is adept at catching this tone:

Why are you going?
Because nothing means much to me anymore.
Why are you going?
I don ‘t know. I have never known.
How long shall I wait for you?
Do not wait for me. I am tired and I want to lie down.
Are you tired and do you want to lie down?
Yes, I am tired and I want to lie down.

           Since Existentialist approaches are now old-fashioned this gives Strand’s use of stripped-down landscapes a curious “period” feeling, like something from the Cold War. I have in mind here the intellectual atmosphere which fostered W. H. Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’:

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
      No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
      Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
      An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
      Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones and dry as level as the place:
      No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
      Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

Unlike the inhabited deserts of Strand’s work, the populated blankness, which Auden evokes so magnificently here, serves a contrapuntal purpose (to set off what the mother of Achilles expects to see on the shield of her son). It is also intended to show how certain abstract utopian visions can enter history with annihilating efficiency. Written in 1952, the poem is plainly infected by post World War II cynicism - there is a readily perceptible weariness of utopian schemes in which whole populations are, at best, large numbers and, at worst, expendable obstacles. The Zombie Zone here is eerily unspecific - we might say, as we normally do about such things, it could be anywhere - partly meaning there is nothing specific about the place, partly that movements like Communism and Fascism have been influential all over the world. And yet at the same time this landscape couldn’t be anywhere - meaning that the blankness has been exaggerated beyond the bounds of the possible to the point of being a cartoon - however bleak a place might be, we cannot imagine all its features being erased. This combination of emptiness and exaggeration is paralleled in many poems from the same period like, for instance, Robert Frost’s ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’:

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the sand.
They look at the sea all day [...]

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

“All turn”, “all day”, “any watch” - the statement of the poem is as universal as its landscape. One of the problems with Strand’s work, and there are many, is that while the landscape is indeed universal there are no interesting statements being made, although the tone would make one believe that something very important was being said, as one can see in the following passage which has a similar landscape to Frost’s:

There is a shore and people are waiting.
And nothing comes back.
Because it is over.
Because there is silence instead of a name.
Because it is winter and the new year.

Strand’s poetry also has a relationship to other poets who have been openly influenced by Existentialism, poets like Paul Celan. Although he has the very reverse of Celan’s extensive and to some degree neologistic vocabulary, he shares with him a slow, deliberate use of language, and a disposition towards “mystifying” the simplest of things: stones, bread, milk, trees. This has the advantage of making the materials of the poems instantly recognizable. But the simplicity of the imagery, and the related simplicity of the rhythms, mean that the force of the poem must be carried by its concepts. It must point beyond itself It is not so much the poem itself which may be beautiful as the idea behind the poem. The poem must have some sort of hinterland, a feeling for, in Chandler’s phrase, “the country beyond the hill”. And if Strand’s work does have a hinterland then one feels that it is an unvarying one in which everything looks the same as everything else: “a plain without a feature bare and brown".

           The question of landscape ties in with the question of influence in Strand’s poetry. Harold Bloom’s work on influence, particularly his long analyses of the Romantic crisis poem, connect his Freudian notions of overcoming predecessors pretty explicitly with landscape. Bloom’s reflections on this topic are sometimes reminiscent of the computer game Mortal Kombat in which the combatants can usually choose a different backdrop (e.g. Polar Glacier, Martian Crater, Rooftops of Megalopolis) for their square-shouldered stand-offs. The Bloomian variation on this would be that the landscape one chose would be an indication of the poet one desired to overcome. To follow this analogy, the landscape which Strand chooses is usually so negative that it can be taken, with a squint, as co-extensive with other bleak literary landscapes - as if he were in a wilderness about to take on Beckett, in an allegorical landscape about to take on Kafka, or in chilly New England about to take on early Lowell. But somehow in this sub-Bloomian mode, balloon-muscled versions of Lowell, Beckett and Kafka never step forward to slay or be slain and this is largely because as a player Strand is always in retreat. We can rarely see beyond the frame to where the other Combatants are.

           When they do come into view, the poems are not necessarily improved, but they tend to have more character. As is usual in the canon of any American poet, there is an imitation of Whitman, the self-consciously-titled ‘From a Litany’:

I praise the trees on whose branches shall sit the Cock of
              Portugal and the Polish Cock.
I praise the palm trees of Rio and those that shall grow in
              London.
I praise the gardeners, the worms and the small plants that
              praise each other.

But such Whitmanesque particularity is very much the exception in his non-specific environments. Another exception is ‘Shooting Whales’, one of Strand’s better poems, where one doesn’t exactly get a Mortal Kombat-Stormy Nantucket style engagement with Melville and Lowell but one does find their presence comfortably acknowledged. In this poem, we also find one of those plain suburban fixtures, which swirl so dolefully through Strand’s anonymous nebulae, at last finding imaginative contact with something appropriate:

The whales surfaced close by.
Their foreheads were huge,
The doors of their faces were closed.

Excellent. The doors of their faces! But this Kafkaesque depiction of something unimaginably powerful implacably shut to the observer finds few equivalents in his work. If I speak about Strand in relation to Frost, Auden, Celan, Kafka and so on it is precisely because the poems are meant to remind you, ever so discreetly, of other (better) poems. Like the characterless objects with which they are filled, one can project almost anything on to them. What identifiable moods they do have are so generalised, so extreme, that they appear like caricatures of emotion:

It is cold, the snow is deep,
the wind beats around in its cage of trees,
clouds have the look of rags torn and soiled with use,
and starlings peck at the ice.
It is north, poor north. Nothing goes right.

For much of the time the poet is experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul at the sort of latitude where night lasts for six months, while in the rest of the poems he appears to be experiencing a Luminous Dawn of the Heart. The poems veer from “Nothing goes right” to “Everything goes right” with the minimum of explanation. Take, for example, the short poem, ‘The Coming of Love’:

Even this late it happens
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

This is the kind of poem which gives the bourgeoisie a bad name. Here are all the gleaming accessories of a romantic evening - candles, bouquets, stars and pillows - jostling together in an impromptu setting without, it is true, overt signs of a romance, but with the cloying feel of romance several times removed. The objects are left to stand by themselves but not for themselves. Instead, like alarm-clocks which make toast and tea, they form part of an obligingly servile class of objects existing only for the gratification of the narrator. What more could bourgeois man want? Here the consolations of Christianity, or displaced Christianity, are left freestanding, detached from the hardness of a philosophy which might permit them to make sense. “The coming of love”, the poem murmurs, “the coming of light” - well yes, all right, but what kind of love, what kind of light? The poem is all about tone, the cool, soothing tone of a Meditation Exercise tape for Stress-Prone Professionals. It is meant to sound “redemptive”, “affirming”, “compassionate” - and all the other clichés of contemporary criticism which its design anticipates. Strand’s work is an example of one of Existentialism’s unfortunate by-products. The high percentage of first person pronouns and the general air of wish-fulfilment evoke a world where everything is centred around “me”. Even when this state is projected on a third person the effect is like a Disney film, where everything has Mickey Mouse eyes:

And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place
Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept
The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,
And stones, weightless for once, came and themselves;
       there
And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain And aisles of corn, and slept.

“Weightless”, “miraculous", “tender” - the poetic adjectives betray what the poem would like itself to be. Strand’s sole originality, if that’s what it can be called, is that he combines Existentialist cliches from this century with even dustier cliches from the nineteenth (in the midst of his odes to anxiety, the wind is heard to pass “like a stream of sighs”, or “whispers” “alas, alas”) almost as if Being and Nothingness had collided with Flowers from Many Gardens. Nor should the book’s approximation of the feel of philosophical metaphor be taken to mean that there is any kind of philosophy to be found within it. Occasionally in the midst of its flatness and melodrama, one hopes for something of depth from this book - and then one comes up against a passage like this:

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
           noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

And that trip on Poesy’s extended wing comes courtesy of a man nominated in 1990 (by the Librarian of Congress no less) for the reopened office of Poet Laureate of the United States. You can’t get much more specific than that.