POETS Day: LSU and Robert Penn Warren

I have no idea what run[ning] forward into experience means. I don’t think Bedient does either, as it were...

Photo and fiddlin’ with it by Rene Sears

I’ve spent a lot of this last month’s non-rainy days in my backyard making noise. The constant noise comes from a small but surprisingly loud bluetooth speaker that subjects my neighbors to (lately) Elvis Costello, Blondie, Joe Jackson, and whatever the Amazon Music algorithm associates with albums by those three. Blondie does a particularly good cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” so the when that comes on the neighbors get to hear it repeat at least a second time. The intermittent noise comes from my new table saw.

We redid the living room and dining room, by which I mean we turned the living room into a office for my wife and I with a big TV to watch muted baseball games on all day, turned the dining room into a living room, and realized that we always eat at the kitchen table and don’t need a dining room. To decorate the living room formerly known as the dining room, we pulled old prints and paintings out of the closet and took them to a framer.

The largest was a Willem De Kooning print from a 1994 National Gallery exhibit. I’m fond of the print. I went to that exhibit to keep a friend company and came out interested in art. It’s odd shaped; 39 ½” x 30 ½”. We picked out a green distressed painted frame with gold trim and learned there were types of glass. The woman told us it would cost $325 to do the job. That’s a very fair price, it turns out, but if you haven’t had anything framed in over a decade and come in with no frame (sorry) of reference as to price, it’s a bad number. I had five other pieces I needed framed.

I found a Skil table saw for $300 on Amazon. Plexiglass doesn’t come in 39 ½” x 30 ½” pieces, but for $92 dollars you can get an 8’ x 4’ piece from Home Depot and a $5 plexiglass cutter to boot. To use the cutter without doing any damage to myself or the sitting-eating-morning coffee furniture I have outside, I got a pair of sawhorse hinges ($26) and some ¾” flooring board ($24). Wood glue was cheap, as was stain, but not knowing how a given stain would look on my chosen pine ($8 per 96” x 3 1/2” time two and then once more because of a defective measuring tape) I bought several (~$11). A Kreg jig ($47) is useful to put screws in at an angle. There were various and sundries: screws, rags, polyeurothane spray, hanging wires, d-rings, those little swivel things that keep backing board in place, backing board, etc.

All told, to set De Kooning in a lovely espresso stained frame cost just over $700, but, as I explained to my wife, there are five other frames to build (for which I’ve bought glass, plexiglass, more sandpaper) and we’ve yet to get amortisizing. The saw, which I love boundlessly, will pay for itself before we run out of wall space. Ipso solvit. All is well.

This is all to say, it’s POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work and revel in the afternoon, but consider spending your newly aquired freetime frivilously unless you’ve set a few dollars aside.

First, a little verse.

***

My wife’s great-grandmother is one of the few women of her generation of whom it’s never been claimed was at one point roommates with either Amelia Earhart or Zelda Fitzgerald. She did, according to my mother-in-law, once have an apartment in Baton Rouge on Chime Street, which runs as north boundary of LSU’s campus, and while there attended lectures taught by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

She told me this on Chimes Street at Highland Coffees. This was during our goodbye breakfast with my son who’s starting as a Freshman at the university. I had no idea Fitzgerald spent any time teaching, much less in Louisiana. Zelda was a Bammer, but I thought after his service in the South they headed for colder living in Minnesota and New York, repented and tried less humid warmth in California, and then ran around Europe not knowing if they were hot or cold because Celsius. When I got back to Birmingham I poked around the internet. I can’t find anything linking Fitzgerald and LSU.

I wonder if she meant Robert Penn Warren? Vanderbilt was his alma mater and he hung about the place teaching minor classes and getting strung along. LSU offered him what Vanderbilt wouldn’t and off he went. He taught in Baton Rouge from 1934-1942. That puts him in great-grandmother time frame.

For those brief years, LSU was home to a revolutionary pair as Warren, with fellow professor Cleanth Brooks, consolidated wisps and thoughts, theories and practices, and codified New Criticism in their 1938 book, Understanding Poetry. It’s a watershed. Per the wonderful and helpful biographers at Poetry Foundation:

“According to Helen McNeil in the Times Literary Supplement, Warren and Brooks helped to establish the New Criticism as ‘an orthodoxy so powerful that contemporary American fiction and poetry are most easily defined by their rebellion against it.”

Fellow English Department employees were less than amused. They didn’t like Understanding Poetry and were probably outraged as, within a couple of years, it became a common textbook in universities across the nation. The school was annoyed by Warren and Warren was unhappy at the school. Scott McLemee writes in the Chronicle of Higher Learning that funding for The Southern Review, Warren’s university sponsored literary magazine, was cut off and the administration offered him a measly raise – an obvious insult – in 1942. He went off to be cold in Connecticut and, like the Fitzgeralds, Minnesota.

From McLemee’s article:

“Missing from the collection, which LSU Press released this year, is a letter from the writer’s final months in LSU’s English department. ‘This place is a real hell-hole,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘a real sty.’”

As acrimonious splits go, LSU had seen worse. William Tecumseh Sherman resigned as superintendent of the school, nee Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, to go burn Atlanta when the state seceded from the Union.

As someone who’s suddenly fond of the place, I wish Warren had been happier. It’s a beautiful campus. The parade ground at the center of campus is ringed with ancient looking live oaks. I’ve no idea why these and not other living growing oaks get called “live,” but so say the signs and plaques at the foot of each informing strollers and hurriers late to class which luminary alum or well wisher sponsored each tree. I say “ancient looking” because they look girthy, gnarled, and wisened though a sign tells me some were planted as recently as 1970. I couldn’t tell which.

When I lived in Savannah I knew Spanish moss as flowing red bug hosts; long clumpy bunches like clippings off Bernadette Peter’s perm circa The Jerk. Louisiana Spanish moss is less so. It’s a fuzz, mostly, with only a few wisps. It may not be Spanish moss, but that’s what transient students and a few locals called it. The stuff has partially eaten a traffic light at the intersection of Highland Rd. and Stadium Dr. The green and yellow are fuzzy with what, from five or six cars back, first appears to be matted leavings on multiple abandoned bird nests but you get to spend a lot of time looking at it if you try turning left. Up close it looks like Chia municipal infrastructure.

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 1, affixes the date 1942 to Warren’s poem “Bearded Oaks.” I found it in a scan of Poetry from October 1937, so who knows when the thing was written. I’m assuming it was after his 1934 arrival in Baton Rouge. I also assume that at least one of the trees I saw scattered about campus grew pre-Me Generation and inspired him.

The Bearded Oaks
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

The oaks, how subtle and marine
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.

So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light:
The grasses, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.

Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.

Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.

The storm of noon above us rolled,
Of light the fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still.

Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descend, minutely whispering down,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.

All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage, the rage of stone;
If hope is hopeless, then fearless is fear
And history is thus undone.

Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
All windows, once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping, fled.

I do not love you less that now
The caged heart makes iron stroke,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke.

We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for eternity.

Warren was the first U.S. Poet Laureate. He won the Pulitzer for Fiction for his southern-high-school-curricula-staple novel, All The King’s Men, in addition to winning the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. To date, he’s the only person to win Pulitzers for both fiction and poetry. I’ve read numerous pieces written in his time referring to him as “greatest living.” Poetry Foundation’s write up on Warren has a bunch of quotes from luminaries commenting on the poet’s greatness and style. A lot are illuminating, some half so. Here’s a helpful one,

“In a Sewanee Review article, Calvin Bedient notes that Warren’s poetry is written ‘in a genuinely expansive, passionate style. Look at its prose ease and rapidity oddly qualified by log-piling compounds, alliteration, successive stresses, and an occasional inversion something rough and serviceable as a horse-blanket yet fancy to [sic]—and you wonder how he ever came up with it.’”

followed by a half so.

“Warren favored very long and very short lines, the use of which creates an irregular meter and sentences that seem to wind down the page, ‘run[ning] forward, as it were, into experience,’ says Bedient in Parnassus.”

I have no idea what run[ning] forward into experience means. I don’t think Bedient does either, as it were, but it is helpful to have someone familiar with the oeuvre giving a heads up on the poet’s idiosyncrasies. You can recognize a pattern and say to yourself “Ah. He does that. I know because I’m the type of person who cares to look into such things,” and be proud of yourself.

I’m not familiar with the ouevre. I’ve read a few here and there over the years and noted things, though. Here’s my half so thoughts, marinated in subjectivity with no grounding in common assumptions or standards. He writes with confidence, or at least writes to appear confident. I see this in the risks he takes. From the above, “I do not love you less that now / The caged heart makes iron stroke,” is sappy and cliched but sappy and cliched works there. A less sure hand might have shied away from such a line to suit an expectation other than his own. Too much devil-may-care attitude leads to foolishness like talking shit about LSU. It works in his poetry, though. Maybe I’m seeing the experience he’s run[ning] forward at.

I’m closing with half a poem. The excerpt is long for this space so forgive me for the partial. I’m including it because it’s beautiful. He changes pace unexpectedly but without jarring, indulges a great deal in alliteration (affect a lisp and try to read the second line aloud), and maintains rhyme. There’s nothing to hold up as unique or innovative (at least to eyes born so long after his) but the whole works. This is part one of the second part of “Two Pieces After Suetonius.”

II. Tiberius on Capri

1

All is nothing, nothing all:
To tired Tiberius soft sang the sea thus,
Under his cliff-palace wall.
The sea, in soft approach and repulse,
Sings thus, and Tiberius,
Sea-sad, stares past the dusking sea-pulse
Yonder, where come,
One now by one, the lights, far off, of Surrentum.
He stares in the blue dusk-fall,
For all is nothing, nothing all.

Let darkness up from Asia tower.
On that darkening island behind him spintriae now stir.
In grot and scented bower,
They titter, yawn, paint lip, grease thigh,
And debate what role each would prefer
When they project for the Emperor’s eye
Their expertise
Of his Eastern lusts and complex Egyptian fantasies.
But darkward he stares in that hour,
Blank now in totality of power.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]