Knock Knock II

A Column

KNOCK KNOCK II. KNOCK KNOCK: THE Sequel. Son of Knock Knock. Knock Knock Climbs Out of its Grave.

Back when this magazine was young I wrote a column called Knock Knock and in each included such a joke, along with assertions about poetry. I think it was Richard Wilbur who told me the first knock knock joke that bouleversed me-at least after third grade: "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Eskimos, Christians, and Italians." "Eskimos, Christians, and Italians who?" "Eskimos Christians, and Italians no lies." I ventured into Greek; a few students recognized "Maine, and Aïda," which sounds almost like the first two words of the Iliad. But I could never equal the best-I don't remember who gifted me with it-which was: "Ezra Pound." "Ezra Pound who?" (con animation and air banjo) "Ezra Pound to get you in a taxi, honey, I'll be round about..." Most were poetry knock knocks, like the Shelley triplex: "Shelley gather by the river?" "Shelley Temple." ... "Shelley compare thee to a summer's day?"

In this new incarnation, "II" will perform no more knock-knock jokes.

It's strange, being old. One thing that's clear: Inspiration becomes rarer, and imagination less intense and spontaneous. Wordsworth got it right. I've always been slow to finish poems, and I'm slower than ever. It used to be that several times in the"year I would suffer and enjoy little meteor showers of imagery, phrases and even whole lines that leaned toward becoming poems. I felt spooked during these assaults, frightened and grateful. When the ideas slowed down, I had drafts and fragments that could keep me busy for a year. After six or eight months, as I moved toward finishing some of these things, I would be subject to another little assault of beginnings.

Now I take one note at a time, and more rarely. Maybe a week later I get a phrase or half an image, that seems to belong with the first language given. Words gather themselves, sticking to each other like plaque in an artery. At some point lines may begin to resemble a poem. "Hey," I tell them, "you're like those things I used to write!" I suppose I know more than I once did, about the multiple waysOf failure. Do I shut off possibilities because I am too aware of disasters? It is generally not encouraging, pushing eighty, to read poets who have been there before you. Frost's last book contained two and a half good poems . .. but there is also Thomas Hardy. His Winter Words was posthumous in 1928, the year he died at eighty-eight, which is the year I was born. "Proud Songsters" ought to provide encouragement to aging types:

Hear it as it paces itself; a comma is as acute as a metaphor.

At a mere seventy-six, I anticipate my death-casually. (I just ordered a new car that might do 250,000 miles. Idly, I don't suppose I may have so many.) Yet my anticipations of death began early. When I was twenty-five I wrote, "My Son My Executioner." The manners by which we anticipate death alter over the years. As Stanley Kunitz approaches his hundredth birthday, I remember a quatrain he wrote in his twenties:

Observe the wisdom of the Florentine

Who, feeling death upon him, scribbled fast

To make revision of a deathbed scene,

Gloating that he was accurate at last.

I love the starchy language of Stanley Kunitz in his youth, looking toward terminally fierce literary composition. Does he feel now as he imagined his Florentine would feel?

When good poets die they are celebrated, lamented, praised-just now, tributes to Donald Justice and Anthony Hecht-and after a while people stop talking about them. Years later, a biography, a collection of letters, a complete poems-and they are news again. Many again subside, while others become obligatory in anthologies, critical histories, and college courses. Even Robert Frost faded; T. S. Eliot still fades although "Four Quartets" begins to brighten up. Ezra Pound is consigned to poet's hell for his politics not his poems. My teacher Archibald MacLeish-winner of three Pulitzers-has not been heard from lately. My old friend James Wright is coming back; I hope he will stick around. His teacher Theodore Roethke seems to be clawing at the underside of his grave, or maybe I just want to hear such a noise. As I was growing up, Roethke was one of the young big three: WiIbur, Lowell, and Roethke. They were distinct from the fixed stars-Eliot, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Pound-who were still alive.

In those years, before the rise of the poetry reading, the sound of verse was at the forefront for all these poets. (It is a paradox that poetry today-constantly out-loud-does much less with sound.) Lowell's Lord Weary pounded iambic thunder in brilliant Miltonic paragraphing, as decisive as Yeats without sounding like Yeats. This drum-beat came later to seem melodramatic to the poet himself, as he shifted into the softer and devastating idiom of Life Studies. Those old pentameters still thunder for me: "The Lord survives the rainbow of His will." Wilbur's lyrics had the deftness, the finish and satisfaction of the great seventeenth century, of Marvell and Herrick. Now in his eighties, Wilbur has never stopped making such poems. The New Yorker did "Man Running" a year or two ago, one of his best, and it is still a Wilbur poem, as his poems of the 50s were Wilbur poems.

Roethke moved among styles of sound, with a reckless restlessness. There were the early tight Louise Bogan quatrains that Yvor Winters praised. In his last work, the posthumous The Far Field, he had found Whitman. At a party in Seattle, a few months before he died, Roethke sat me down and dragged galleys of this last book out of his pockets. I read them one-handed, a Scotch in the other. "Got a new book coming out," he. said. "Going to drive Wilbur and Lowell into the shadows!" (His competitiveness was gigantic and boyish.) Six months later I read "The Rose" aloud at a London memorial, and the magnificence of that poem reached me as I was reading it, a generous coda to a poetic life that ended too soon. I still love these late poems, but I find the best and most original Roethke in the weird insistent pounding rhythms of The Lost Son, the volume that began with greenhouse lyrics and went on to the beginning of Praise to the End. Here are "Big Wind," "My Papa's Waltz," "Dolor," and "Cuttings (later)":

He loads every rift with ore, percussive and urgent, imagining bodily urgency, even orgasm, in plant life, moving inward to his own veins and bones. Roethke was a genius aifeding-in, into things not himself, not even human, and his concentration works through the reader's mouth and muscles by way of sound. This rhythm and song is Roethke's own invention, innovative and compelling free verse like the great noises of Williams, Rexroth, Creeley, Levertov, Snyder . . .

Poetry out loud is never quite so beautiful as poetry read in silence. To hear in the mind this sound-beauty, the reader must have read much poetry, learning to love the physical, bodily pleasure of it by an imagination of its presence. In solitary quiet, readers can hear sounds at their best, cherishing in the mouth all the possibilities of consonance and assonance, long vowel and short, as well as the dance of syntax which is rhythm. Great sound in a poem has nothing to do with real performance but with potential performance. Wallace Stevens, both in metrical work like "Sunday Morning" and in his strategies of free verse, wrote lines as sensuous as any in English poetry-and when he read his poems on a platform he muffed his own beauties. A good performer of poetry-seldom an actor-is a lover of poetry who is gifted with a voice that can control potential beauty into actual beauty. Sometimes the poet and the performer can be the same. Galway Kinnell reads his own work firmly but modestly, laying out the sounds that he had coded into the black marks on the page. Too many poets, reading aloud, ignore their own linebreaks or chew consonants like gristle or drop into inaudibility at the ends of lines.

There seems to be confusion between the sound of a poem and the performance of a poem, and between the value of a poem and the response of a live audience. By and large, audiences respond to performances not to poems. When the best poets perform well, they make the sound-beauty audible to a naive audience that mostly does not hear the song when it reads the words on the page. A listener tells the poet, after the reading, that he'd got nothing from the poems on the page, but, hearing them aloud . . . The poet is supposed to feel flattered.

There is also performance poetry, which tends to be performance and not poetry, when the words -reduced to the page-provide no juices for the mouth. I've been to the Nuyorican and other castles of slam, and I have laughed and applauded-but I was never responding to poems. I heard no line breaks; I heard only thrust and energy. I heard no vowel and consonant play, only drive and good timing and jokes or outrage. In print the work remains inert. Nothing in the marks on the page, those jagged lines on the right, carries the vigor performance supplies. Slack language is disguised by delivery, and dead metaphor finds its emptiness papered over by force and voice-tricks, by gestures and facial expressions, by signatures of singular personality. R. P. Blackmur wrote an essay called "Language as Gesture." His point was that printed words on the page-in a beautifully made poem-carry with them the emphases of gesture and pitch, pause and hurry.

In slam poetry speed is valued over slowness, as humor and attack are valued over emotion and thought. The beauty of sound-which exists independent of feeling or idea-is absent. Performance poetry is entirely social-which is the virtue of the form but also its limitation. It cannot exist without an audience. Keats exists without being spoken. Performance poetry flames out like a match. I have a slammer friend with whom I write long letters of combat. He writes me an argument which he thinks will be a winner. He bets me that I cannot find a poem printed in Poetry or the New Yorker which, read aloud at a slam, will win first prize. I could not agree with him more. To me, the notion of the argument reveals its poverty. What the hell do I care, considering a poem's virtue, about the votes of a bunch of cheerful self-chosen enthusiasts in a bar?

He also says, as others have said, that performance poetry returns the art to its oral beginnings. But I don't think that the Nuyorican crowd resembles a bunch of Greeks sitting around a fire listening to the vates strum a gusla singing about the rage of Achilles. I studied Greek briefly, a year and a half, and retain almost nothing, but I know several things or I think I do. It takes a long time to say the Iliad. My friend says that the ideal length for a performance poem is three minutes. And Homer's Greek is slow, slow, slow to say. Apparently Greek poetry is the most mellifluous in history-there is a good book by an Englishman called The Sound of Greek; I can't find it-and honey does not flow swiftly. It is impossible to say the opening lines of the Iliad other than slowly, and it is impossible not to dwell on the assonance of long vowels. The diphthongs ayyy and eeee turn up again and again, long vowels lengthened by slow consonants around them. The sound is heavy, the assonance mighty and magnanimous. By my count, the long ayyy turns up eight times in the first line-hypnotic, insistent, spell-binding. It is the function of gorgeous sound, in poetry, to remove the top of the mind-any critical or reasonable resistance-so that imagination and import may move inside the reader-listener to accomplish their transformations.

Poetry of all sorts now-not just performance poetry; even page poetry-has its principal publication out loud rather than on the page. Although we publish ten times as many books as we used to, and have ten times as many magazines, we have a thousand times as many festivals and poetry readings. But even the best contemporary work lacks the sound-beauty of Milton and Keats, Hopkins and Pound, Lowell and Roethke. The words on the page seldom encode the possibilities that Stevens provided but could not utter. I suspect that because of the frequency of oral publication, we tend to substitute performative gesture for language as gesture. Listen to the noises of the young Pound-pre-war, pre-madness and hatred-drunk on the assonances and cadences of the Greeks. From "The Return":

DONALD HALL has published fifteen books of poetry, most recently The Painted Bed (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

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