The Book of Emblems – Matthew Ladd

I have found T. S. Eliot’s love-grandchild.  From the first poem in “The Book of Emblems”, Matthew Ladd’s poetry seems imbued with similar themes, memes and style as Eliot’s.  Ladd’s poetry is well crafted and precise, and generally evokes a calm yet melancholy mood:

Envoi

Out open windows usher in the cold.

The market falls, and gentle tycoons

postpone their vacations.  A billion children flock

to well-protected dunes

where one can watch the ridleys lay their eggs,

then leave before they swim away.

Each night is a boat, unmoored, that spins and drifts

into a waiting day

that disillusions no one.  No stray wind

erases the eye of your cigarette,

and Saturdays once mad with Chardonnay

are pacified an quiet.

The history books have ripened into fables.

Only a few old men, their hair-

less heads drawn down in collars of soft wool,

play hearts in a leaf-strewn square.

Along with Eliot’s tight control of words and general demeanor, other similarities leap out.  The pages of “The Book of Emblems” are filled with references to the Iliad, Dante, Rousseau, Friedrich Hölderlin, Sir James Frazier, Glen Gould and others.  If you are uncomfortable with cultural references, avoid this book.  Then there are the snatches of French and German, the habit of dividing poems into outline format (Ia, Ib, IIa…), a sense of aloofness: while I sometimes imagine Pablo Neruda tugging at my shirtsleeve, Eliot I often feel is avoiding eye contact—so too with Ladd.  His poem “Marcel Proust’s Last Summer Holiday” captures these traits perfectly.

Balbec’s only historical marker

is a 16^th century iron starboard anchor

half-buried in Pinot Grigio.

No one goes there.  The fishmongers congregate

in martini bars inland from the old city

to drink pastis and sleep with each others’ daughters.

In April, a toxic luminescent algae

masses like crown fire atop the breakers;

fish wash up and are shoved in wheelbarrows.

And when you visit, three months out of the year,

you rarely need to ask questions.  Everything

is answered for you already, the gate unlatched,

the shutters pushed open.  You confess

things are not always as you remember:

the stalls still prop their skate-wings in beds of ice,

but L’Auberge des Oiseaux, over the off-season,

has renamed itself Le Harlequin Hotel.

Marcel, forgive them.  You, too, will end up a liar.

There you have it: muted dissatisfaction; tradition, culture and the decline of both; finding significance in mundane detail; Europe as seen by an outsider.  Eliot through and through.

In full recognition of Matthew Ladd’s poetic skill, I might make a small observation of personal taste: I like his poetry better when he leaves behind the Iliad and the coffee spoons and lets himself be more immediate and less reserved, and to play with language a bit.  My favorite poem was this:

        II. Poem

Start small: a pip.

Now a plate of pips:

mandarin, lemon, soursop.

Now a cluster

of Queen Anne’s Lace,

a blip

on the radar of an RAF pilot.

Now the pilot getting pipped

in the windpipe by a plug of shrap-

nel, roughly the size and shape

of a scarab beetle.

Pip-pop-pip.

His fingers fly to his neck.

The biplane tailspins,

dives into the jungle.

Heart Turned Back – Bertha Rogers

Bertha Rogers write complex free verse frequently about nature, farming, animals and family. Her poetry, lacking any kind of sound or rhythmic device, relies mostly on image, metaphor and juxtaposition, her best poems leaving the reader enjoying the pictures seen or the language used to describe them. In theme and mood she is something like Robert Frost or Seamus Heaney.

Here’s the thing: her poetry is not easy.

No one says it should be; even before the obfuscatory modernists got their hands on it, good poetry was not necessarily easy to understand the first time through. I’m just saying that many things about Rogers’ poetry make it difficult, like a tight knot of words that the reader must unpick. Consider this poem of hers:

Lessons

At sixteen I cut into the worm, I
contemptuously dissected the frog,
laid out on mirrored metal—I saw my face.
Who, you ask, will kill the cat that murders
the bluebird’s chick? In that doomed orchard
dying trees forgot how they edged toward
bees, convulsed to fruit. High in the woods,
beneath the hawthorns, the skirted brambles,
deer the color of dying leaves turn and
turn and go to sleep. The clock in the kitchen,
time swollen, ticks. I talk to the dishes,
the immortal cats. Days like this, the dew
dazzling the sky, it’s all beauty to me;
even the stopped wing; the bent, wet grass.

It’s not that it is incoherent, but it does feel like we are playing cards, and I’m trying to guess Rogers’ hand as she lays down one card slowly after the other, her face inscrutable. The meaning lies in the relationship of the images to each other, but like those “magic eye” posters, you have to keep staring until the meaning comes into focus.

Furthermore, Rogers is not bound by typical diction (not that any poet should be, of course). As a result, the reader is faced with phrases like

I beg them back—those gone prodigals; their
sweet hapless speech outvoicing resilience.

Such word choice can induce both insight and head-scratching.  My guess is that Rogers’ appeal will largely depend on the reader and the reader’s mood: read these poems without distraction and hurry, and savor the rich descriptions.

My favorite from this collection is “A Hunting Story”:

The Saturday hunter meant well.
He meant to kill the jackrabbit
jumping from rotten corn stalks
in the winter-rimed field.

Confused, the old black spaniel
forgot she was a hunting bitch;
became the hunted, the white tail.
She jumped, too.

The bullet from the .22
Got the spaniel clean in the chest.
Her heart’s blood burst to snow,
to stalks, to furrows.

She died in slow black circles.

I sat straight on the wooden chair,
comforting the spaniel’s daughter
and crying, crying. Linoleum roses
grew red at our feet.

This happened in another time.

In the evenings, when I tell
my city-provincial dogs, they stare,
then run in happy circles and fall,
glad, on the Turkish rug.

Rediscovering Langston Hughes

I have rediscovered Langston Hughes. I had read his famous poems—“I, Too” and “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Harlem”—and even taught them in class. I appreciated his poems and his loose, jazzy interpretation of rhyme and meter—playing with it instead of abandoning it like so many Modernists did. But based on my limited selection, I found him unsubtle and a bit preachy.


I take it all back, I swear.

Thumbing through an anthology, I came across “Old Walt” without realizing it was Hughes’:

Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking,
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking or the finding.

Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.

I liked it; I liked how it played with rhyme and repetition, enjoying itself but not taking itself to seriously, not droning. It almost had the feel of a triolet—maybe a jazz triolet. Then I saw it was by Langston Hughes, and, surprised, began to read other poems of his I had never read before.

One thing that I enjoy are his little sketches of Harlem life. Hughes often writes in the voice of a character or includes dialogue.

Put on yo’ red silk stockings,
Black gal.
Go out an’ let de white boys
Look at yo’ legs.
[…]

He plays his authorial cards close to his chest. We aren’t told what to think—only what to see and hear. He keeps his rhyme and meter loose and incorporates it subtlety and effortlessly into the scenarios he paints:

[…]
Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.

Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:

MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL

And part of his playing with language extends to letting you finish lines in your head, or switching them suddenly. I’ve seen this used as a petty gag in some light verse, but look at this:

Dream Boogie

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a—

You think
It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath
like a—

What did I say?

Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!

The interplay between two voices, what is said and left unsaid, the way he sets up the unspoken lines, the ambiguity… I love it. Though the mop confuses me.

One more poem now. I can’t believe I had never read this one.

Frederick Douglass: 1817-1895


Douglass was someone who,
Had he walked with wary foot
And frightened tread,
From very indecision
Might be dead,
Might have lost his soul,
But instead decided to be bold
And capture every street,
On which he set his feet,
To route each path
Toward freedom’s goal,
To make each highway
Choose his compass’ choice
To all the world cried,
Hear my voice!…
Oh, to be a beast, a bird,
Anything but a slave! he said.

Who would be free
Themselves must strike
The first blow, he said.

He died in 1895.

He is not dead.

What I love about it most is the building energy that lands with a resounding crash on the last lines. For that ending to work, for those last four words to resonate like they do, requires a perfect convergence of sound and ideas. This just goes to show that the success of a poem lies in its sound, even when we read it silently. A “prose poem” is no kind of poem at all, and when free verse works, it works because it nevertheless uses sound skillfully, as skillfully as a jazz player, though following no set pattern, uses pitch, rhythm, intonation and phrasing. Langston Hughes does jazz with words, with perfect blend of intellect and emotion.