Taste Tests, Thomas Hardy, Peter Van Toorn and consistent reception
I bought a First Edition of Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words several summers ago from a used book store in rural Ontario. Near Guelph I think it was. Most of the pages remain uncut.
In addition to a poignant introductory lament about ‘licensed tasters’ mis-labeling his previous work as ‘gloomy and pessimistic,’ it contains a poem, the emotional power of which, if comparison counts in these matters as I think it does, dents claims to greatness made by critics on behalf of Canadian poet Peter Van Toorn, whose obviously erudite ‘Mountain’ series I read yesterday, just prior, quite by accident, to re-reading this:
I met him quite by accident
He laughed in the sun – an ache in his laughter-
As soon as I can find my misplaced copy of Mountain Tea, I’ll add a poem in which Van Toorn uses the word ‘sunset’, or ‘sunrise’ (this, in addition to serendipity, is what got me into comparison mode). The point here, I think, is that great poetry, like physical attraction, packs an almost ‘felt’ punch; an impact, that when experienced, renders others comparatively limp, innocuous, weak.
Also re art: so much regarding reviewing and consuming has to do with the moment: what you’ve just read or seen; your mood, what you’ve had to eat; your expectations…all of which make ‘objective’/consistent reception difficult, if not impossible.
Related posts:
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:56 PM
Nigel, I think the wisest thing said in this post is in its last sentence.
Comapring Hardy and Van Toorn is a bit like comparing minstrelsy and jazz. Charlie Parker is certainly no Loreena McKennitt, but so what? Van Toorn’s mode is generally far more ecstatic than Hardy’s typical mournfulness. I love both poets, but find very little ground for comparison between them.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:23 AM
A felt poem, indeed. Thanks for putting it here.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:56 AM
I am always glad to come across other Hardy admirers (not, in my experience, a numerous band). I liked the felicitous typos “his too think face” and “true foresgith”. The first sounded so plausible that I had to check it in my edition of the complete poems; and, knowing Hardy’s love of unusal or archaic words, I nearly looked up foresgith in the dictionary.
In The Poet in a Valley of Dry Bones Robert Graves says that in a conversation with Hardy in 1924 Hardy said that he now made it his practice to confirm doubtful words and that, a few days before, when looking up a word in the OED, he had found it, but the only reference was to ‘Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd”
Paul
March 24th, 2009 at 10:29 AM
Zach: You are of course correct, the two poems are quite different…but is it unfair to compare them? Must poems be categorized first, and only compared if they fall into the same genre?
As much as anything this exercise in ranking, I think, sheds light on my own evaluative criteria. Poems that affect me deeply, I think, are superior to those which merely amuse. Narrative skill and emotional impact trumps clever wordplay…distinctive, original syntax and diction are of course important, but only those poems which also affect the reader’s intellect and feelings, are worthy of being called great.
Larkin was a huge Hardy fan. I think the reason I love both is because of their abilities to deliver powerful, plain spoken truths…
And speaking of Jazz, I plan to attend the Capetown Jazz Festival next week…in preparation, Larkin’s All What Jazz will be in my take-on luggage. As will Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter…any thoughts on either?
Paul: one of the benefits of not having a proofreader. Thanks for the story!
March 24th, 2009 at 11:05 AM
I’ve talked with some poet friends along these lines for years, and one thing we all agree on is that the best poetry is somatic, something you feel in your body, that has an impact on your person but not just on your intellect or sense of humor. Not dissimilar, I think, from what you’re saying here. As a reader, I look for the poem that takes me completely into its own world, and (re)creates in me an experience that is all-enveloping, absorbing, and creates in me feelings deep in my own soma. It has to touch heart and hands, not just head.
Perhaps the word “best” is problematic, because I think this somatic punch is typical of great poems of whatever style or period or subject. Comparing across styles may be an interesting exercise, but I don’t think you can really rank apples against oranges; they’re different kinds of experience, even if both are sublime experiences. That said, I’m all for Hardy boosterism; he was occasionally so good with the somatic punch in the gut that you remember his poems long after, even if critically one thinks other poems might be better.
Another comparison you might find interesting, therefore, is this poem of Hardy’s against Angelos Sikelianos’ “The Sacred Way.” There are points of comparison yet the resolutions are totally different.
March 24th, 2009 at 6:31 PM
Nigel, you’re free to compare whatever disparate things you want, but I think it’s a bad idea and a useless critical exercise to draw any conclusions from the comparison of a minor Thomas Hardy poem with a minor Peter Van Toorn poem, for the trivially coincidental reason that both poems contain a reference to a sunset.
If there’s a Canadian poet worth reading who writes in the Hardy line, it’s Peter Trower, not Van Toorn. Another is Charles Bruce.
And if you’re going to read a critical case for Van Toorn, Solway’s essay’s fine, but it’s a pretty cursory introduction, written for the republication of _Mountain Tea_ by Carmine Starnino’s Signal imprint. The most substantial piece of criticism written on Van Toorn’s work is my essay “Jabbed with Plenty: Peter Van Toorn and the Canadian Condition,” which can be read in the anthology _Language Acts_, published by Vehicule Press in 2007.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:46 PM
Thanks Zack. I’ll seek out and read your essay.
re: useless critical exercises: I’d argue that far from being useless, any exercise which prompts people to read poetry is worth undertaking.
As for conclusions: I haven’t drawn any about Van Toorn yet, other than that the poem in question, Mountain Nurse, I think, is weak, an undeserving of the praise it may have received.
As for ‘minor’: not sure what you mean. Minor, meaning relatively unknown? Insignificant?
March 25th, 2009 at 12:22 AM
I mean insignificant. Slight. Not important in the context of the poet’s oeuvre as a whole or in comparison with his better poems.
I don’t know of anyone who would stake Van Toorn’s reputation on “Mountain Nurse”; you seem to be confusing admiration for the poet-in-general for admiration for all his poems qua reification of his brilliance.
Likewise, I don’t know of anyone who would hold up “The Love-Letters” as an example of Hardy’s finest verse. It’s a weak poem. “The smile of pleasantry” is a lame stretch for an “e” rhyme. “Of what, I did not know” is a stock procrustean device to fill out the stanza. The feminine rhyme of letters and fetters, in back-to-back lines hits with a heavy-handed clang. The poem isn’t without appeal, but if this was the best Hardy could manage, we wouldn’t be reading him anymore today and Larkin certainly wouldn’t have taken such a shine to him. “Neutral Tones”; “The Darkling Thrush”; “Hap”; “Channel Firing”; “In Wind and Rain”–these are poems worth spending some time on.
As for Van Toorn, try “In Guildenstern County”; “Mountain Fox”; “Mountain Stick”; “Mountain Leaf”; “Dragonflies, Those Blue Jays of the Water”; “Rune”. Some of his translation/adaptations are just brilliant, too, like his extended version of Michaelangelo’s sonnet about painting the Sistine Chapel. You won’t find the mournful, heart-rending effects of Hardy in any of these. Hardy is one of the great elegists of all time, one of the great rememberers and regretters. Van Toorn very differently inclined; he doesn’t see the world as a tragic vale of tears. He’s generally more ludic than lyric. And there’s far too little of the ludicrous in poetry.
Here’s “Mountain Stick”:
Mountain Stick
For pitee renneth soone in gentil herte — Chaucer
As fit for swinging and full of good oak
as the day it was cut down for a walk;
and taken for granted on any hike
till out climbing up a bouldershot brook
one fall, up mountain; and stopping to shake
the stiffness out of my walk, and just make
some tea in the shade by the brook, I woke
to a moon; and like the world’s oldest book
I read my father’s spiral in the stick’s
bronze skin, with flowers here and there cut out,
a line no shoulderload, sweaty hands, nicks
or scratches from years of walking would flout:
a lifeline–one world, one heart, one motion–
swinging through darkness with the sun and moon.
March 25th, 2009 at 1:22 AM
Long past bedtime here in EST. But quickly:
I’m hard pressed to call The Love-Letters ‘minor,’ given its emotional clout, and certainly, I wouldn’t call it weak. I agree with you that the language and some of the rhymes seem dated, a bit worn, stilted, stock, but by the same token, I think they lend charm to the piece, a charm which inhabits our jilted, self-effacing lover, which draws me to him, and which makes the pain he tries so stoically to hide, that much more searing.
Of Van Toorn: Mountain Egghead the strongest so far.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:14 AM
Well, you can argue for the importance of the poem based on the flutter it gives you all you like, Nigel, but certain facts fall on my side. 1)”The Love-Letters” is not included by Robert Mezey in the Penguin Selected. 2) Nor is it included by Samuel Hynes in the Oxford Selected. 3) Nor is it included by Claire Tomalin, Hardy’s biographer, in her selection of his work. All of these books contain over 150 pages of poetry–the Hynes almost 240 pages, including 40 poems from _Winter Words_–selected by people immersed in the Hardy oeuvre, and yet no room for this wee lyric. Why? Because it’s not a very good poem. It’s not that the rhymes “seem dated.” They were never any good; wrenched syntax has never been an element of good writing. Other poems of Hardy’s–pretty much all of which rhyme–don’t have that problem.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t like the poem. Feel free. But you can’t just promote it to major status because of how it makes you feel. Poetry criticism–pace Housman–can’t just be about gut reactions. At least if you want it to be taken seriously by other people.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:29 AM
The problem then becomes, how much of poetry criticism is gut reaction concealed beneath, and justified by, apparently-objective standards? When one (group of) critic(s) starts accusing another (group) of being too subjective, that all too often reduces to, Why can’t you agree that my subjective standards are more objective (i.e. better) than yours? (We all do this.) There are sometimes ingrained cultural biases going on that people aren’t even consciously aware they’re promoting. The positive aspect of all this is that good and great art has room in it for lots of varying interpretations; the work is always larger than the critics, fortunately.
I’m the first to advocate for more objective standards in poetry criticism. But even so, one cannot throw out gut reactions, because gut reactions are part of the aesthetic experience; they need to be included in criticism, if criticism is to be honest, because they are part of the reader’s (critic’s) response. We can perhaps later overrule our gut reactions if they come into conflict with our attempt to be more objective as critics; but they can’t just be ignored.
The honesty of reporting one’s response is what helps the reader of criticism know where they stand. This is the opposite of rationalization and justification, i.e. trying to convince a reader that my subjectivity is more valid than his/hers. Honesty in criticism requires that the critic be aware of and therefore not under the sway of his/her personal tastes and preferences.
So I therefore may freely admit I enjoy a lot of lesser art, such as B movies; I recognize that they’re of lesser artistic value, or quality, than some other kinds of movies, and I don’t assume that just because I like them, they’re good art. At the same time I recognize some art as great art that I don’t particularly like, or at least doesn’t move me, doesn’t give me that somatic experience. And not just because a lot of critics say it is great art, but because I recognize that quality in it, even if I don’t personally like it’s message or contents. I think that’s one possible more-objective criteria.
Other obvious objective criteria are technical, craft-based, mostly about execution. Another criteria along those lines is, did the poem fulfill at its end what its beginning set out to do? In other words, did it live up to its own promise, and sustain itself through to its end?
The trick is be clear that what one likes and what one recognizes as good art, are not the same thing. They’re two different axes of interpretation; they intersect, but they don’t overlap. But the subjective response is always going to be part of criticism; it’s unavoidable. What we can do as critics is be honest about it.
Art speaks to our experience, as well as to the writer’s. That’s one way art is universal: shared human experience. Sometimes that’s a gut-punch rather than an intellectual analysis, and should be.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:07 AM
Don’t disagree with you at all, Mr. Durkee; that’s pretty much what I said.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:20 AM
Further to Arthur’s point, Zach, I’m confident some would take my kind of ‘response’ seriously, Randall Jarrell for example, who says in Poetry and the Age:
“Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares – by a being, not a brain. But they are read just so, judged just so; and some great lack in human qualities is as fatal to the critic as it is to the novelist…’Principles’ or ‘Standards’ of excellence are either specifically harmful or generally useless; the critic has nothing to go by except his experience as a human being and a reader, and is the personification of empiricism…Criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness: a real critic has no one but himself to depend on. He can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response…
March 25th, 2009 at 3:25 PM
I wrote a post that your blog appears to have gobbled.
Briefly, I had a feeling of deja vu when I read your last response, Nigel. I quickly recalled that the bell being rung was a conversation you and I had on my blog almost a year ago:
http://zachariahwells.blogspot.com/2008/05/couple-of-thoughts-on-memorability.html
What I said then can stand in for a defense against charges of me seeking empirical standards:
“Another way of putting this: the greatness of a given poem inheres in its particular lineaments, so talking about the general aspects of “great poetry” is absurd, contributing only to the establishment of standards. And while standard can mean “having recognized and permanent value” it also connotes “sound and usable but not of top quality.”
What makes Browning’s “My Last Duchess” memorably great is very different from what makes Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” memorably great. But if you have in mind a set of abstract standards and rules, and judge every poem you encounter in the light of those assumptions, then it’s easy to miss the greatness of one or the other–and even mistake it for bad poetry.
Criticism of poetry is almost always at its most compelling when its focus is specific. One of the most salient features of poetry thru the ages is its teflonish resistance of generalization.”
While I agree with the Jarrell quote, I’m also going to have to call bullshit on him. Or at least dissect what he means by “real critic.” Jarrell was a real critic and as such had a great deal more behind his judgments than gut feeling, however important a role that does unquestionably play in literary criticism.
I’m saying, in this instance, that you have little else besides your gut behind you. You’re backing a lame horse and you don’t seem to have enough of a working knowledge of Hardy’s poetic oeuvre.
You’re the one insisting on “holding poems to world standards.” Are you saying now that you don’t believe your own rhetoric? You want to hold a Van Toorn poem up against a Hardy poem to see what’s better, fine. But you should be picking strong poems. And you haven’t. You can see it in the case of PVT, but are strangely deaf to the manifest infelicities of the Hardy poem you’ve chosen–a poem that Hardy’s staunchest admirers have passed over in compiling rather capacious selected editions. It’s impossible for you to be objectively wrong in something like this, but you’re damn close to it.
March 25th, 2009 at 5:38 PM
First off Zach, speaking of memory as we did in that exchange on your site a year ago, I must congratulate you on yours…recalling that we communicated on this topic so long ago…no small feat…
re: ‘you should be picking strong poems’
As stated in my initial post, this was not a premeditated exercise in canonization, but rather a serendipitous opportunity to compare two poems. While I accept that there may exist some technical ‘infelicities’ in Love Letters, as mentioned, they are not sufficiently problematic, I don’t think, to diminish the considerable ‘felt’ , admittedly subjective, success that this poem achieves. Subjective, but, judging from the telling, albeit limited, sampling of commentators…representative I’d say of a widely shared position.
Contrary to your suggestion, I do have more behind me than my ‘gut.’ I have the capacity to explain, rationally, why this poem is affecting, something I’d be happy to consider doing after I’ve taken care of a more pressing concern: I need to pack for a flight I must catch tomorrow to Capetown. Once I land , recover from the time change, gather my thoughts, throw back some Beyerskloof, I’ll look at posting another comment.
As for standards: certainly I believe in what I’ve said. Without agreed upon evaluative criteria, discussion is useless. And there’s the rub: evidently you place technical perfection higher up than I do, on the evaluative hierarchy.
And, if we follow the logic of your admirers argument, then the status of all under-appreciated poems would lie static. Van Toorn, because few have admired his work, would remain buried in the past, instead of alive, thanks in part to your appreciation, in this exchange today.
March 25th, 2009 at 7:01 PM
Actually, I don’t believe emotion and technique in poetry can properly be considered in isolation. As Dr. Williams said, a poem is “an emotional machine made of words.” The tortured syntax of “The Love-Letters” makes it far less affecting to me than other Hardy poems. The phrasal awkwardness draws too much attention to the artifice, to the strain of the poet trying to fit his words to a pre-determined scheme and thereby distracts the reader–or at least the reader who cares about how the poet arranges his words–from the poem being told. The poem leans far too heavily on the narrative content of the story. It’s out of balance, out of synch; it’s got a squeaky belt that reminds you constantly that you’re driving.
So no, I’m not so keen on “agreed upon evaluative criteria.” I think each poem has to be approached as freshly as possible. Having predetermined criteria for evaluation too easily throws one off the scent of something unfamiliar.
Van Toorn actually is alive. One of the really unfortunate things about our culture is that living poets who stop publishing slide out of mind. Most, of course, should. But then there are remarkable poets like Van Toorn, who stopped writing after an aneurysm, who should be getting invited to read all over the country, but instead go out of print for years until someone with vision comes along to salvage his work. Bruce Taylor’s another such poet. Last book was 11 years ago and from what I can gather, there’s no next book in the works. Which doesn’t change the fact that he’s written some of the best contemporary poems in the country. Then there’s a certain hack in your neck of the woods who churns out a book every 9 months or so, despite the fact he’s never written a memorable poem in his life. Makes one think of Yeats.
Happy trails. I’m off to Scotland myself, but first must finish packing up my apartment for a move to Halifax.
March 27th, 2009 at 2:16 PM
The thing is, I think there ARE objective criteria for literary evaluation. Or at least relatively objective. Some of them have already emerged from this discussion, sideways if not always directly.
The test of time. Which is less arbitrary than one might think, as “great books” are championed down the years by more than one generation, on their merit. Things do get lost, but many also get rediscovered later.
Technical aspects of writing craft. Good metaphors, the use of the right kind of language as container for the poem’s energy and movement and meaning(s). Internally consistent syntactical choices, even if they’re non-normative relative to the rest of literature. And so forth.
I actually don’t place technical perfection higher than other elements of poetry. In fact, I think poetry criticism has veered too far in the direction of worshipping craft over content. Perhaps that’s truly a result of the workshop/MFA culture as it has evolved—blame is often laid at that door, even if the truth is perhaps more complex. But one thing I learned from music school: they can’t teach you creativity and inspiration, they can only teach you craft. Craft is essential: it’s how well you use the tools of your trade that makes the product rise above the ordinary and into the sublime. But craft itself is not the most essential, or central, or determinative element of quality. As you say, you can’t really separate emotion and technique (experience and craft), because their relationship is synergistic and mutual. And yet one arena I see the over-emphasis on craft in a lot of poetry is in thousands of examples of perfectly-architectured poems that say nothing. Perfect technique means nothing if you have nothing to SAY.