NEW POEM: IN MEMORIAM HELEN VENDLER, APRIL 2024

IN MEMORIAM HELEN VENDLER, APRIL 2024

Critics who die are never loved;

Love itself is a paradox their ambiguous work

Cannot solve; theirs are the rocks

The penmanship of prose is driven onto –

Theirs the grove the poet is not laurelled in –

Canyons divide what labours they prove

To themselves have value, from

The impression made by them on authors

Stranded to one side of their prodigious wake –

They take more than they give, some say –

While others bask in their praise, as if

Their gift was new, more luminous solar rays –

But even when their own texts approach,

Penumbral, art itself, the beauty or truth

They claim remains incongruously peripheral,

Like the third lover in any complicated bed –

Used, then merely tolerated, perhaps despised,

For envy is bred by savage intimacy entangled by

Parasitical limbs – or what passes lyrically for such,

In the books they tore to shreds, or adumbrated,

As the worthiest of desire’s deceitful accolades.

All that can be said, fairly or in fallacious fury,

Surely is, the problematic of their lives is maybe resolved,

Perhaps pyrrhically, by the fact at least they failed in style.

April 24th, 2024, London

by T Swift

Comments

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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