In Times of Sorrow and Fear is When Poets Appear

Ireland's greatest living poet 

and America's greatest ever Speaker

 

I. 

 

Irish poetry has a long and illustrious history. 

 

Whether written in Gaelic, in English, or formed within the complex interplay of these two languages and traditions, no one can deny that the bards of Ireland - both in their medieval and modern incarnations - have produced a body of work that is uniquely rich and worthy of admiration.   

 

Arguably, however, Irish poetry this week scaled new heights and we can now add the name of Bono to a roll call of honour that includes Swift, Wilde, Yeats, and Heaney ...

 

 

II. 

 

I know that his St. Patrick's Day poem for Ukraine has been much mocked and dubbed by some as the worst poem ever written - I even saw it described, shamefully, as a war crime in its own right, inflicting unnecessary suffering upon those who have had the misfortune to hear it. 

 

I find that shocking and I simply don't understand all the personal abuse and ridicule aimed at mega-rich rock superstar Bono, who is attempting to bring a message of peace and love to the world. But, as Taylor Swift once famously said, the haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate, hate) and it's up to the rest of us to rise above their animosity and shake off all negative vibes.

 

Bono's poem is a profoundly beautiful verse and I will be forever grateful to the first female Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, for sharing it - in her own inimitable manner - during the annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon, held at the White House earlier this week: click here. 

 

I didn't think I'd ever read lines more moving than those written by William McGonagall, recounting the terrible events of December 28th, 1879 (i.e., the Tay Bridge disaster in Dundee). But Bono has surpassed even this glorious verse with lines like these:

 

They struggle for us to be free 

From the psycho in our human family 

Ireland's sorrow and pain 

Is now the Ukraine 

And Saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy.

 

Brilliant. 

 

Now send on the Riverdancers ...

 

 

 

The Wisdom of Solomon 2: On the Grain of the Voice and Further Remarks on Lunacy

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

simonsolomon.ink 

Dublin-based poet, critic and translator, Simon Solomon, has been kind enough to leave several lengthy comments on recent posts and I would like here to respond to some of his points, hopefully demonstrating the same intelligence, humour, and breadth of reading as this rather shadowy figure ...

I: On the Grain of the Voice [See: Bootylicious]

As a matter of fact - and I'm not entirely convinced I said anything in the Bootylicious post that implied otherwise - I'm not affirming "the beauty of male Welsh choirs for their proximity to the coal pits and the dust of Mother Earth". Barthes may love what he terms the grain of the voice, but I don't want to hear the blackness of the lungs, or the phlegm in the back of the throat, thank you very much.

In short, I don't like earthiness: but nor do I like those big, booming voices which tremble with powerful emotion and technical brilliance, or have what people like to think of as soul. If people absolutely must break into song, I prefer they do so quietly in a non-expressive, non-showoffy, slightly hesitant, slightly shy manner (perhaps not always hitting the right notes).

I don't care whether someone has a talent for singing because, ultimately, like Larry David, I can't stand the sound of the human voice; a trick of the larynx that, as you rightly point out Simon, is no longer so impressive in a predominantly visual culture.  

II: Further Remarks on Lunacy [See: On Lunacy]

I'm perfectly happy for you to number yourself amongst the lunatic fringe, Simon. And it's clear from some of your - shall we say more poetic - comments made in response to my post on the Moon and it's supposed effect upon human biology and behaviour, this is where you belong ...

So whilst, obviously, I'd rather be beneath the stars with Sylvia Plath than Roger Scruton, I'm not sure I'd want to attend a dinner party made up of "myth-making mavericks". Nor would I choose to consult with the latter if I wanted to learn something factual about the Moon (i.e., about the real body orbiting the Earth and not the spooky object that some think is made of cheese).

Can you not at least concede the possibility that one might discover something more amazing about the Moon from astronomers and physicists, than from artists and poets? Or do you really believe that even William McGonagall has more to offer us than, for example, Brian Cox?

Actually, despite the two studies you cite, there really is scant evidence for any significant lunar effect on either surgical or criminal activity and the thirty-three-year old article by C. P. Thakur and Dilip Sharma is - I would have thought - clearly nonsense. See Eric Chuder, Bad Moon Rising: The Myth of the Full Moon (2014), which explains why this is so.

As I indicated in the post, there are many people - including politicians, doctors, and police officers - who believe in the lunar effect; just as there are many otherwise perfectly respectable and perfectly reasonable individuals advocating alternative therapies, including homeopathy.

Your argument from intuition that because the Moon's gravity "can move something as vast as an ocean" it must be able to affect "our small and frangible human bodies", is the exact opposite of how things actually work - a kind of pataphysical denial of reality or, at the very least, a misconception regarding the laws of physics in relation to scale.

(Just so you know, the gravitational pull of the moon on a human body is less than that exercised by a mosquito on your arm; measurable, but bordering on the infinitesimal. Or, to put it another way, when a mother holds her new born baby in her arms, she exerts approximately twelve millions times more tidal force on the infant than the moon overhead.)  

Finally, yes, of course, the human body is an open system; otherwise, as you rightly say, we'd "all be living like autists, psychotics and sad, solitary sacks" (in fact we'd not be living at all, as we obviously need to eat, breathe, and excrete waste materials to sustain our existence and these activities require openness and exchange).

But it's quite a leap to then say there are "no such things as individual bodies" and humanity is "one collective cosmic contagion"... This may be true at a philosophical-libidinal-psychic level, but it's certainly not the only truth. For there's also the truth of singular being; that I am I, you are you, and I am not you, you are not me, and that the Universal Oneness of Humanity is a lie (and a dangerous one).

Every man and every woman is a star, wrote Aleister Crowley. Which means, according to Lawrentian protagonist Rupert Birkin:

"'At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can.'"

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

In other words, if you want to live a cosmic life, burning like a tiny sun or as cold and mysterious as the Moon, then you must become starkly inhuman; beyond speech and feeling, beyond responsibility and obligation, beyond understanding ...

We don't need to open ourselves up to others, Simon, or serenade them by the light of the silvery moon; we need, rather, to come into a strange conjunction or equilibrium with them as singular beings. Or something like that ...

Note: readers interested in part one of this post - On Sincerity, Authenticity, Black Sheep and Scapegoats - should click here.

Ben Lerner: The Hatred of Poetry (A Review)

Ben Lerner is a very clever man: a poet, a novelist, and a professor of English. And so it's no real surprise to discover he's written a very clever little book on the hatred of poetry, which, he argues, is essential to the practice of writing poetry; a practice that is also destined to failure, no matter how successful certain poems might appear. For whilst it aspires to be an art of transcendence, poetry is ultimately as mortal and as mundane as everything else. Thus, as Lerner points out, the poet is always a tragic figure.

Discovering this, however, is a bitter disappointment to many practitioners and readers and it makes them rather resentful. But hate, as Lawrence says, is more often than not only love on the recoil. And so as much as Lerner claims to dislike poetry and to read it, like Marianne Moore, with a perfect contempt, he remains of course devoted to it and his book is a defence of poetry (as a space of authenticity), not an assault upon it, nor another tedious and premature announcement of its death. 

Unlike those who feel in some manner betrayed by poetry's failure to deliver on its promise, Lerner seems to rejoice in the impossibility of writing a genuinely successful (or successfully genuine) poem, i.e. a virtual as opposed to an actual verse. He has - in part at least - reconciled himself to the fact that "There is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all, and at best, a place for it." [18]

And Lerner remains determined to defend this place; not merely as an individual writer struggling with his own unique demon, but as a member of a wider human community, despite the latter often being no more than a privileged white male political fantasy - the myth of universality - as he exposes and concedes.  

Following his introductory remarks, Lerner provides fresh and insightful readings of two great poets, Keats and Emily Dickinson, who, although very different writers, nevertheless "make a place for the genuine by producing a negative image of the ideal Poem we cannot write ... [and] express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions ..." [51-2]

More controversially perhaps, he also makes a case for reconsidering the work of William McGonagall - thought by many to be the world's worst poet. Lerner doesn't wish to challenge this critical consensus, but, more interestingly, argue that it's the abysmal nature of his verse that gives it value:

"The horrible and the great ... have more in common than the mediocre ... or even pretty good, because they rage against the merely actual ... in order to approach ... the imaginary work that could reconcile the finite and the infinite, the individual and the communal, which can make a new world out of the linguistic materials of this one." [51-2]

Lerner then discusses Whitman. And, to his credit, he does so with the same relaxed brilliance as he discussed the other poets mentioned, concluding that Walt's great utopian project has never been - and can never be - realised.

Whitman thought he could personally embody all differences and all contradictions, could speak for one and all. But he couldn't. And Lerner's discussion of the black female poet Claudia Rankine, whose work "reflects many of the contradictory political demands made of poetry while providing a contemporary example of how a poet might strategically explore the limits of the actual" [87], explicitly tells us why this is so.

Poems, Lerner concludes, "can fulfil any number of ambitions ... can actually be funny, or lovely, or offer solace, or courage, or inspiration to certain audiences at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community" [101-02], no matter how restricted in scale and provisional the latter might be.

But they can't rise above time, express irreducible individuality, achieve universality, defeat the more powerful language games of society, or bring about a revaluation of all values. Thus we need, if you like, to curb our enthusiasm for poetry; if we stopped expecting too much of it and persisting in our idealism, then we may possibly learn how to stop hating it too.

Indeed, if we strive in a Nietzschean fashion to consummate our hatred and perfect our contempt, then, who knows, "it might come to resemble love" [114].  

Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

This post is gifted to my friend Simon Solomon as a slightly premature birthday present.