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16.11.05 The Lady Of Shalott's In Hot Water Again

I grew up in a house steeped in art. At the dinner table, my mother would read to us out loud poetry, or bits of books she was enjoying, or news pieces that caught her fancy. Thanks to her, I've stayed wedded to poetry throughout my life. I love the electric clash of language of people like Rilke, Berryman, grumpy old Frost and Yeats, even good Andrew Marvell. And while I appreciate rhyming structures (Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 and Roethke's "I Know A Woman" are two of the best seduction poems ever written), I remain a massive apologist for the delights of blank verse, no matter what Stephen Fry might think.

The volume of poetry of which I'm fondest is indeed blank verse: John Ashbery's A Wave, a book I stole from my school library because it had a pretty cover. I later found out the cover was by Vija Celmins. I dived in, and in the long acquaintance this slim book of poems and I have had with each other, I've grown to understand and adore Ashbery's lively, unexpected, wilfully obscure and often quite humourous language. I became a big fan of Celmins' art, too. (There's a monograph on her at the ICA Bookshop that will be mine, someday soon.) The new edition of A Wave still bears the same Celmins painting, though with updated typography.

The other day, in need of a bit of linguistic solace, I pulled my now dog-eared copy down from its shelf. It opened at random, to a poem called "Darlene's Hospital", one that I had never really engaged with before, being too busy untangling "Trefoil" or "More Pleasant Adventures". Today, now, "Darlene's Hospital" hit the older me like a fist wrapped in velvet. It's about a woman who is dying. I excerpt a stanza from it below. Read it out loud. All good poetry should be read out loud - preferably in front of friends, with a drink in your hand. Listen to the way the words bump and hustle up against each other; the mad images phrases paint as they collide. That's what it's all about:

Now we're often happy. The dark car
Moves heftily away along low bluffs,
And if we don't have our feelings, what
Good are we, but whose business is it?
Beware the happy man: once she perched light
In the reading space of my room, a present joy
For all time to come, whatever happens;
And still we rotate, gathering speed until
Nothing is there but more speed in the light ahead.
Such moments as we prized in life:
The promise of a new day, living with lots of people
All headed in more or less the same direction, the sound of this
In the embracing stillness, but not the brutality,
And lists of examples of lots of things and shit-
What more could we conceivably be statisfied with, it is
Joy, and undaunted
She leaves the earth at that point,
Intersecting all our daydreams of breakfast and lunch.

- Darlene's Hospital, part of second stanza, circa 1987, John Ashbery.

( 4:56 PM )

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