Carcanet have revisited the 1979 anthology Five American Poets thirty-one years on, and a peculiar assembly they make now, as they did then, Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck and Robert Pinsky. The presence at the outset of the book of Hass’s ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ though, reminds me, again, of that poem’s almost totemic representativeness, as short lyric poems go. It also reminds me how much that poem embodies so much about a certain kind of lyric poem that I find, well, hard to stomach. Here in parody form is an attempt at explaining why. Hass:
There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed.
And my parody rewrite:
There was a woman
I met down the pub and I remembered how, holding
her garish tattoos in my hands sometimes,
I felt a nauseous boredom at her presence
like a thirst for Bacardi breezers, for my childhood clone town
with its pound shops, hospital radio from the cancer ward,
muddy places where we caught the little shit-eating flatfish
called spunkbubble. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless tedium. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way she devoured the take-away
pizza, the thing Tyson the staffie did that hurt her, what
she puked.
What I don’t like about the original is its intense atmosphere of privileged private experience. George Orwell used to intone threateningly about how some things could in fact be true even if they were in the Daily Telegraph, and if this sounds like I’m coming out in an Easthopeite or even Sillimanesque allergic reaction to Hass as quietist, I hope it’s not quite that reductive. I really dislike the paternalistic, patronising narrative framing of ‘There was a woman /I made love to’, and the litany of self-consciously sensitive associations she triggers. ‘I must have been the same to her’, we are told. How does the speaker know that? He or she is silencing the other’s perspective to speak on her behalf, but with a sanctimony and a show of benign superiority I find oleaginous and fake. ‘The thing her father said that hurt her’ is as queasy a moment as any I can think of in contemporary poetry. But consider this comparison. MacDiarmid’s ‘The Watergaw’ ends:
There was nae reek i the laverock's hoose
That nicht - an nane i mine;
But I hae thocht o that foolish licht
Ever sin syne;
An I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.
Here again is private lyric experience. But the reader experiences this privacy as something disquieting, uncanny, alarming even. Whereas in Hass’s case we are flattered into the illusion of a shared intimacy, but one against which every fibre of my instinctive response rejects. My use of the term ‘privilege’ has nothing to do with class, since in strict fairness the woman in Hass’s poem might have been just as fond of Bacardi breezers down a grim boozer as the speaker of my parody. It has to do with a sense of self-importance and assumed readerly consent which I find, finally, repellent, and which I find utterly absent from the alarming privacies of the MacDiarmid poem. No doubt there is a dollop of terrible unfairness in this judgement of mine. But there you go. I can’t read ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ without pulling a very sour face indeed, not just on its own account, but because of how much po-faced, prissy, bloodless, downright terrible contemporary poetry I think flows from its example.
(Five American Poets, ed. Clive Wilmer, Carcanet, £14.95)
