A
REVIEW OF THE OPEN DOOR: 100 POEMS 100 YEARS OF POETRY MAGAZINE
by Dominic Bury
The Open Door, an anthology of one hundred
poems, painstakingly cherry-picked from the one hundred year archive of the
esteemed American magazine Poetry succeeds
wholly on the premise on which it was conceived. In placing emphasis on the
poem, and not seeking (as is common within the poetry coterie) to clump
together poets into distinct historical groups, teams or even factions, with
their associated influences, successors and champions, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman have produced something not only fresh, but
critically important.
Granted,
many of the previous century's leading figures are in. Ezra Pound's 'In a station of the metro' opens the anthology, Yeats's 'The fishermen' ends, and the
pages are filled by among others T.S.Elliot,
Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and William
Carlos Williams. Yet the anthology does not feel like a homage to fame,
where a few lesser lights are reluctantly inserted for padding. Instead, as
Wiman attests in his introduction the archive has been approached just as they
approach the hundred thousand submissions that come into their office each
year. They seek 'poem by poem, with an eye out for the unexpected - the one off
masterpiece that juts up like a mountain from the landscape you thought you
knew'.
During
a recent writing course, I was shocked to hear the current British poet
Laureate Carol Ann Duffy proclaim 'I
have written a great deal of poetry, but I am still trying to write just one real
poem.' Yet this brutal and wonderfully humble confession is the exact bones
about which The Open Door is formed.
In seeking poems that have both mastery and mystery, where language is 'honed
to unprecedented degrees of precision, but exists within - and in some way
acknowledges - some primal and nearly annihilating silence' Share and Wiman
produce an anthology with more electricity and palpable energy than the
majority of comparable 20th century offerings. It is this ethos, this
direction, that makes the anthology tick. It acts not only as heavy evidence of
the magazine’s principled aesthetic but the result is an anthology that acts as
testament to what a poem is, what it can achieve, and as a manual with which
future poetry can be written.
Quite
as interesting as what the anthology may provide the future is what it tells of
the past. Within both the poems themselves and the editing choices, the all
encompassing influence of modernism is found. That Edwin Arlington Robinson is the only poet to be included between
1912 and 1928 other than Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Butler
Yeats, Hart Crane and Isaac Rosenberg is highly significant.
Not only is Robinson's poem 'Eros Turannos' the only poem in the anthology
unaffected by modernism, but its publication in the magazine in 1914 and the
publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915, is indicative of
a seismic and irrevocable shift in the poetry landscape. For fair analysis,
take the first stanzas of each poem. Stanza one of Robinson's poem reads:
She fears
him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in
his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she
meets and what she fears
Are less
than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly
to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Take
in contrast the first stanza of 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the
evening is spread out against the sky
Like a
patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go,
through half deserted streets,
The
muttering retreats
Of restless
nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust
restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that
follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious
intent
To lead you
to an overwhelming question . . .
The
two are as different as clay and wind, and despite its profundity, Robinson's
poem, with its opaque metaphor and simple end rhyme pattern seems now in
comparison to be archaic, overwritten, and inelegant. The fact that all the
other poets included between 1912 and 1928 are considered to now to be
arch-modernists highlights how much of an impact the movement had, erasing
almost two-hundred years of poetic tradition.
As
alluded to in the anthology's introduction, there are always those who will
seek to react against modernism, even if they cannot totally elude its grip,
and fruitfully, it is this reaction that produces what is, if not the best,
then certainly the most unnerving poem in the book. Don Paterson's fabulous poem 'The Lie' shows how formal metre and
rhyme pattern are still potent vehicles. A narrative of a young boy's
incarceration by the poem’s speaker, it is both the repetition contained within
the final line and the slight alteration of the 'AABA' rhyme pattern in the end
stanza that so affects the reader. 'The Lie' is among perhaps five poems that
in their own unique ways come to the fore. Along with the aforementioned 'The
Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock', P K
Page's 'My chosen landscape', Basil
Bunting's 'Brigg flats' and Craig
Arnold's 'Meditation on a Grapefruit' stand out.
What
a poem is remains hard to put a finger on: a dark patch in the corner of the
eye, that when looked towards moves further and further away. Yet what ties
these and all the poems in the anthology together is that they are all
unequivocally poems. They feel like poems, they positively reek like them. For
all their wonderful variety, each of these poems catches the dark patch, holds
it to the light and say 'This, dear reader is a bloody poem. Yes, yes, god
damn, a thousand times yes.'
Dominic Bury is a young British poet. He recently graduated from an MA in CW at Kingston University, and is currently an editorial assistant (intern position) at Eyewear Publishing, as well as a professional Governor.
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