Nr. 2 (19) anul VI / aprilie-iunie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed -- the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
I find this “Sonnet” by Elizabeth Bishop (Bishop, 192), written in 1978,
most probably the last poem she ever wrote, also quite appropriate for our
discussion. The speaker here sounds again as an older artist now focusing on
her own despondency and not admiring, worshipping or even missing/ (non)
responding to a younger one – more beautiful and alluring in Shakespeare,
promising but awkwardly green in Wojahn – but just trying to escape the
tribulations of old age and advancing weakness through the liberating liveliness
of inner gaiety/ gay sexuality. The apparent autism or at least lack of reactions
in the Guthrie of Wojahn’s sonnet is here the solipsistic monologizing self
of the poem’s speaker, who breaks free from the empty mirror to the youth
of the other – an ‘other’ indirectly announced but impetuously embraced by
the concluding part of the sonnet. Bishop’s is itself a fascinating rock poem,
not in the sense of evoking any star in the music or the speaker’s personal
memories and experiences related to rock, but in the way in which it handles
a classic form by imbuing it with a fractured imagery, jagged and edgy rhythms
and apparent carelessness regarding balance in equations like tone with/
against diction. These latter qualities are very close to the most remarkable
accomplishments in the ‘rock poetry proper’ like for (a rare) instance the
posthumous writings of Jim Morrison that I am going to look very closely to
in a special chapter.
What I pinpointed above as crude relationship between tone and diction
has also been approached by Charles Altieri in briefly commenting upon the
same poem of Bishop in a study introducing his expressivist theory of the
affects. To Altieri the exclamation shifts the poem from commentary on what
it might take to be “gay” to a concrete identification with what the poem firstly
advances as rather pertaining to a realm of contemplation or, as the thinker
calls it, speculation. And that mark of exclamation rending the already rugged
surface of what I would call rather allegoric than speculative discourse, allows
the poem “to register the kind of willing that may be basic to gaiety, willing
based not on acts of judgment but on the expansiveness created by how
intentionality finds itself taking hold in particular situations.” (Altieri, 14).
A great representative of the same generation of Bishop, Robert Lowell
also wrote an “Ezra Pound” sonnet that speaks about the impaired dialogue
between old age and younger spirit suggestively evoked by the roughly
six-beat lines arrayed in colloquial “musical phrases,” along the portrayed
master’s legendary guidelines, also indulging in an apparently careless and
yet brazen sequences of slant rhymes; only this time, unlike in the poem
above we encounter two ‘real’ characters, more like in Wojahn’s poem about
Guthrie and Dylan:
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