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

Horizontal in a deckchair on the bleak ward,
some feeble-minded felon in pajamas, clawing
a Social Credit broadside from your table, you saying,
“… here with a black suit and black briefcase: in the briefcase,
an abomination, Possum’s hommage to Milton.”
Then sprung: Rapallo, and then the decade gone;
then three years, then Eliot dead, you saying,
“And who is left to understand my jokes?
My old Brother in the arts… and besides, he was a smash of poet.”
He showed us his blotched, bent hands, saying, “Worms.
When I talked that nonsense about Jews on the Rome
wireless, she knew it was shit, and still loved me.”
And I, “Who else has been in Purgatory?”
And he, “To begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet.”
(Lowell, 977)
More like the rock sonnets quoted above, Lowell’s poem deftly mixes
biographical factoids and landmarks in Western poetic traditions with political
and contemporary culture realia. Bishop’s attitude is more rock-like in the
sense of an impulsive release of certain deep identity-shaping and mainly
sexual strains that have also left an enduring imprint on the history of rock as
a performance art that (also) employs lyrics. Although her sonnet proves multilayered
subtleness and refinement, there is a certain urgency and ultimate
frankness to it which is consonant with the pungent drive in most of rock
lyrics, including (or so much the more) in those anthologized as praiseworthy
pieces of poetry. Lowell’s sonnet is by comparison closer to the poetry of
professional poets who write about rock or rock music icons, whence the
filtering of the existential charge through more obviously displayed cultural
and craft-related elements.
I find the paralleling of these sonnets by two major postmodern poets to
the poetry of/on rock quite relevant, since indeed, the emphasis on the art
and craft of poetry and hence on the voice of the poet as poet, mouthpiece of
a time and epitome of a culture has come down in the heritage of Lowell as
critical skepticism regarding a certain grandiloquence and affectation which
are not be found in the more existentially straightforward while also less
self-aggrandizing voices of peers like Bishop, O’Hara and Berryman (cf. for
instance A.O. Scott, unpag.). Such characteristics in the poetry of these latter
poets are, as we have discovered above, salient ones in rock poetry as well,
a poetry that by standing at so many kinds of cultural crossroads has had to
select, encourage, and cultivate styles and manners in mainstream poetry
that were the most compatible to its own purposes and scope. Rock poetry is
thus both a reservoir of tendencies in contemporary poetry that are the most
suitable for American culture as a predominantly pop culture tilted civilization,
as well as a (popular culture) filter that sometimes prophetically encourage
elements that are not yet prevailing in literary poetry. We have thus seen
here how rock and rock-related poetry can sometimes turn into an accurate
barometer of mainstream poetry and an instrument to validate or re-evaluate
established critical assessments of contemporary American poetry.
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
125