How Poems Get Made by James Longenbach

Author:James Longenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

New York

the savage’s romance,

accreted where we need the space for commerce—

the center of the wholesale fur trade,

starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes

—and sometimes the verb is emphasized, especially in order to be negated, as in these concluding lines of the poem.

It is not the dime-novel exterior,

Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war canoe;

it is not that “if the fur is not finer than such as one sees

others wear,

one would rather be without it—”

that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the

universe;

it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity,

the otter, the beaver, the puma skins

without shooting-irons or dogs;

it is not the plunder,

it is the “accessibility to experience.”

“New York” does not capitalize on the repetition of line-lengths, rhymes, or stanzas, but it does foreground the repetition of a syntactical pattern (the reiteration of it is not shifting powerfully back to it is in the poem’s final line). More importantly, it synchronizes this syntactical pattern with the lineation (each new iteration of the repeated clause beginning a new line), as the more obviously repetitive “My Apish Cousins” does not. These repetitions allow us to feel, long before we’ve deduced the poem’s semantic logic, that its catalogue of disparate materials is purposeful, not merely quixotic. And when the poem concludes, the Latinate diction of the phrase “accessibility to experience” (quoted from Henry James) rises from the predominately Germanic diction immediately preceding it (otter, beaver, iron, dog, plunder) as satisfyingly as the words hemp, rye, and flax rise from the predominately Latinate diction of “My Apish Cousins.”

Moore didn’t want the rigor of her free-verse poems to seem any more or less contrived than the rigor of her syllabic poems. Organizing her 1924 book Observations, she began with syllabic poems like “My Apish Cousins,” moved on to list-like free-verse poems such as “New York,” and crowned the book with an over-500-line index that feels like the long poem in which Observations logically culminates—a catalogue of catalogues.

antlet

Antarctica

ape, curling with an

Apish Cousins, My

Apollo

art, arcanic

artichoke

artist and money

artists, fools

What could be more predictable than the repetition of the alphabet, more confirming of our expectations? What could be more unpredictable, more inviting of our curiosity, than the alphabet? It’s enticing to imagine what an antlet might have to do with Antarctica, merely because of abecedarian contiguity. But it’s also enticing, when reading Wyatt, to imagine what the word debate has to do with the words rate and late simply because the words happen to echo one another in a stanza rhymed aaa. It’s enticing to imagine what the question is it possible has to do with the question is it possible when it’s repeated in a new stanza. It’s enticing to imagine what the line A man stepped in and asked if I was going up has to do with the line A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.

“If everything in the world were completely identical,” says Søren Kierkegaard in Repetition, “in reality there would be no repetition, because reality is only in the moment.

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