TOP54-DES51
This Old Poem #54:
The Poets Laureate Special Edition #7:
Howard Nemerov 's A Spell Before Winter
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 4/19/03
When Howard
Nemerov 1st hit the poetic scene he was- truly- something different.
In those post-Poundian, post-New Critical times he was a formalist, but not a
Neo-Formalist (Neo-Fo), & pretty damned good at it. The 1960s saw him as the
premier sonneteer of the time. But, something occurred along the way- he got
old, dull, & bad. HN strayed from what was probably his 1st love,
poetry, & did the trite thing of writing prose (short stories & novels),
essays, & criticism. Yet, as his poetry suffered his accolades grew: the
Pulitzer, the National Book Award, & topped it all off with a reign as
American Poet Laureate from 1988-1990. Months after being stripped of the honor
HN died of cancer in 1991. It was almost as if his life were utterly dependent
upon acknowledgement.
Yet, he truly was a good sonneteer in his youth. Who recognized it? Well,
no one after the 1st few years. A review in the Nation magazine once
stated: ‘Nemerov's virtues are all in fact unfashionable ones for our time:
vivid intelligence, an irreverent sense of humor, a mastery of formal verse, an
awareness of mystery.’ You don’t have a clue as to what this man’s
poetry was like, do you? Here’s a hint- read his c.v.:
Howard Nemerov was born March 1, 1920 in New York, New York. He graduated from the Society for Ethical Culture's Fieldstone School in 1937 and went on to study at Harvard, earning a bachelor's degree in 1941. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book. He then began teaching, first at Hamilton College and later at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Washington University, where he was Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death.
Nemerov's numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize; The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); Mirrors and Windows (1958); The Salt Garden (1955); and The Image of the Law (1947). His novels have also been commended; they include The Homecoming Game (1957), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954), and The Melodramatists (1949). Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the National Medal of the Arts. He served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri.
Or better yet, read this poem, in the utterly banal, & smelly foot in the face self-conscious way of most Academics:
Because
You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From
silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And
then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Some nice music, granted, but utterly joyless, & utterly without any
uniquity. This pseudo-Stevensian posing is all-too rampant with aging poets who
don’t really want to put out a true artistic effort, but would rather fall
back on playing the wizened Buddha who drops occasional shitlets of verse for
the acolytes to sniff.
Or even worse, read this prose dissected into lines. There is utterly no
music. But HN & others would counter that this is ‘blank verse’ because
it is prosy, & it hews to the 10 syllable count of pentameter fairly well.
Trust me, though, this is prose in execution & fundament:
Storm Windows
People are putting up storm windows now,
Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain
Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass
I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream
Away in lines like seaweed on the tide
Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind.
The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass
Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by,
Something I should have liked to say to you,
Something... the dry grass bent under the pane
Brimful of bouncing water... something of
A swaying clarity which blindly echoes
This lonely afternoon of memories
And missed desires, while the wintry rain
(Unspeakable, the distance in the mind!)
Runs
on the standing windows and away
Don’t believe me? Ok, gander here:
People are
putting up storm windows now, or were, this morning, until the heavy rain drove
them indoors. So, coming home at noon, I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
frame-full of rain; through the water and glass I saw the crushed grass, how it
seemed to stream away in lines like seaweed on the tide or blades of wheat
leaning under the wind….
Same 1st 2 sentences. No one but a poet with nothing to say
poetically would dare to enjamb this. This is almost a sure-fire way to know if
the ‘poetry’ you’re reading is truly poetry. & I won’t even go in to
the obvious fallacy of meter.
Enough with this- let’s hit the ‘poem’ in question:
A Spell Before Winter
After the red leaf and the gold
have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.
Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.
Underlined are all the clichés. This poem is a good example of the difference between a poem being trite & being Classical. The poem casts no spell- I suppose the 2 stanzas ending with the same line was supposed to induce hypnosis- whatever. With a little tweaking, & subversion of these clichés this could actually be a very good poem. Lemme take a stab:
A Winter Before
After the dead leaf and the old are one,
Brought down in the mind, by hammering again
The bruised and discolored, October's lame
Woes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Brinks steeper into itself, shrinking into shade.
There is no knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills’ hunch implores; the north wind slows.
Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening must and tarnish of this rime,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The standing water and the stiller stone,
The yellow maze of the willow in its black
Relief of the elm, the stark, violent light
Where suddenly, readying in nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum briskly gains.
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things,
The old hills’ hunch implores; the north wind knows.
The rewrite is a much better poem- not a great 1, but much
more in sync with the sort of stuff HN wrote in his early, headier poetry. 1st
off, the clichés are banished- all are subverted, but most of the nice music is
retained by using similar words. Here is a key, Dear Reader: phrases that sound
alot like clichés- such as violent light- actually trigger the listener
or reader into hearing the cliché- silent light- but forces the reader
to re-read. You, de facto, get a duplicity that is not grammatically there. This
is how to use & undermine clichés. Listen, I’ve just given you a VERY
important insight in to poetry & the difference between Classical &
cliché. You figure out the rest. I could explain how the change in title, the
dropping of a couple of lines, or narrative change affects the body of the poem,
etc.- but regardless of how it does, you’re smart enough to see this stuff on
your own. Here’s the main points: it’s not cliché, it plays off those clichés,
& most of all it forces you to read it again. So go do it!
Final Score: (1-100):
Howard Nemerov 's A Spell Before Winter:
55
TOP’s
A Winter Before: 80
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