Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

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....
3 comments
Read more