<< Seneca’s Thyestes | Front Page | Literature in the News & Abstractalous >>
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Stuffed Owl and Hamburger
Which title reads, I’m aware, like a very unpleasant-sounding meal indeed. As if I’m blogging-to-warn that Macdonalds are planning a new McOwl special, stuffed with chopped up pieces of quarterpounder-and-cheese.
No, by Stuffed Owl I refer of course, to Lewis and Lee’s incomparable and profoundly hilarious (really, life-affirmingly hilarious) volume. And by Hamburger I mean Michael Hamburger OBE, poet and translator of justifiably elevated reputation. I’ve long admired Hamburger’s work, especially his translations of Celan and Sebald, but also his original poetic compositions. And accordingly I was rather thrown by the appearance of a couple of his new poems in the most recent European English Messenger [vol 15.1, Spring 2006, 38-41 if you must know]; works which will eventually be appearing, it says here, in the Anvil Press publication Circling the Square (forthcoming, Autumn 2006). The poems are ‘British Summer Time Suspended’ and ‘Electronocuted’.
Now, I’m not saying these are bad poems. I’m saying they’re startlingly awful, bark-with-surprised-laughter cringeworthy poems. They contain lines that I’d be alarmed to get from one of my first year creative writing students. This is interesting because Hamburger is not a bad poet. He is an excellent poet, and a translator of genius. But he’s also the author of this couplet:
To Einstein as to Plato,
Time was a hot potato.
If this isn’t quite in the class of Wordsworth’s ‘I’ve measured it from side to side/Tis three foot long and two foot wide’, then it’s probably also true that Hamburger’s greatest achievements have never quite matched Wordsworth’s passages in the Prelude narrating the crossing of the Simplon pass or climbing Snowdon. Not quite as great a poet, not quite as bad; the two things may go together. But pretty bad for all that. Nor is this verse (this is the ‘British Summer Time’ poem) an exercise in deliberately Goethe-ish doggerel. The poem as a whole strives, it seems, for earnestness.
Gobbledygook reigns over nothingness,
Murkier mornings, day’s duration less,
No energy saved while in the earlier dark
Lamps glare on workers, flood their crammed car park.
There are several possibilities here. One is that this is good verse, and I have, without realising it, had a stroke that has deprived of oxygen long enough to kill it that portion of my brain that distinguishes good and bad poetry. Another possibility is that a sixth-form miserabilist writing this in purple ink in his black notebook (cue in Pink Floyd’s ‘I got a little black book with my poems in’ here please, MC) might hesitate before including that tumbledown last rhyme, that sledgehammer alliteration, that scansion-defying, impossible-to-visualise and frankly ugly ‘gobbledygook reigns over nothingness’ line.
And then there’s the second poem ‘Electronocuted’, a poem with the most cackhanded title I’ve come across in many years reading contemporary poetry. This poem is a rant against the medium that sustains, amongst many other things, The Valve, the world wide web; or as Hamburger calls it ‘web indeed, world-wide’:
Information fungus of our making
That over the global surface spreads so fast,
Ocean water no barrier,
That a global deal can be clinched
Before the board has assembled,
Mass destruction delivered
Before war is declared.
So there you have it. But, before you smash your modems with the heel of your boot, vow never to go online again and take a long antiseptic shower to wash off the last of the fungal spores, consider for a moment the second line quoted above. Is there, do you think, a reason why Michael Hamburger, just for that one line (I can’t quote the whole poem without infringing copyright, so check for yourselves and you’ll see for that one line only), decides to adopt the idiom of Yoda? (‘Around the survivors a perimeter erect!’) Unless, perhaps, it is specifically to evoke the froglike one’s zen-like apothegm: ‘unlearn you must …’
Maybe it takes a very great poet to write great bad poetry. Maybe Hamburger is a worthy successor to Wordsworth’s mantle. Maybe the rest of Circling the Square will contains masterpieces. Who can say?
Comments
The Plato / potato rhyme was used by Alan Tate or someone like that.
I see that has Hamburger has discovered some of the basic rules of bad poetry: 1) rhymes always add something to a bad poem that free verse alone can not provide; 2) for extra badness, see how high you can get the average number of syllables per word; 3) high concept—it’s not just for movies anymore. I think that these are some signature styles of *intellectual* badness in poetry, as opposed to adolescent badness or avant-garde badness.
But evaluation of poetry is overrated. Everyone is a poet, and no one reads poetry. (No, English professors and their force-fed students don’t count.) I would rather remain able to appreciate the poetry of the bag lady or the really annoying 25-year-old teen for what it is than become too discriminating.
"Mass destruction delivered” sounds like the Daily Beastian telegraphic style William Boot’s colleagues use in Scoop.
Maybe he started reading his critics?
Rich writes: “Everyone is a poet, and no one reads poetry. (No, English professors and their force-fed students don’t count.)”
I’ve called you on this before, but you seem to stick to your guns for the sake of the witticism.
I went to an inner city high school (not that long ago—early 90s), and our student-run poetry reading group had 25 members.
Plenty of people read poetry—or else Borders and B&N wouldn’t sell the stuff.
My partner reads poetry, and I assure you he isn’t a poet. Nor am I for that matter.
All right, Luther, if I must be entirely serious, then I have to admit that sometimes people read poetry.
Rich would also like to say that the evaluation of poetry is by no means a bad thing, but rather a very good thing.
I am not a poet, but I do read poetry. My wife subscribes to Poetry magazine and also brings home from the library things like The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and such.
It’s kind of a fun game to read through these magazines trying to find poems you actually enjoy. I can usually tell within the first few lines whether a poem is any good, and usually out of a whole magazine I can find 1 or 2 poems that I like.
It has become an axiom for me that most poetry published in such places is not very good and that you need to look carefully for good poetry. It’s like looking for a good purchase at a garage sale.
At the risk of elliding the subject somewhat, the more contemporary poetry I read, the more I pity the poor souls applying their minds to the obscure art. The big themes have been done so often and so well, that it’s a brave person who’d write a poem in 2006 about love/death/memory etc., which leaves so many writers in the unenviable position of having to either produce oblique doggerel (Tom Raworth’s recent output) in the hope some it will have some substance (and it sometimes does) or at least not hurt the ear, or the poet’s left with trying to tackle the big themes on the sly, with silly puns or rendering everything predictably quotidian. The Hamburglar (I made that up myself) seems to have jettisoned even these paltry options in favour of echoing some nebulous (and misplaced) archaic syntax in the line Adam picks out. As Lucas played with his little muppet’s sentences in the hope of making him sound sagacious (and like what or whom exactly? The Delphic Oracle? Shakespeare? Badly translated Dante? F**k knows), the Hamburglar seems to rupture perfectly good syntax to tap into the spiritual ether of the good old, long dead poets of yore (again, who? Shelley at his silliest and most bombastic? Browning’s Childe Roland?). Perhaps Adam can help us out with the Browning possibility.
This said, the Einstein couplet is very funny, in a channeling-the ghost-of-Pam-Ayers (still with pulse, to my knowledge) kind of way. I’m a poet and I didnt know it.
Plato/potato is in John Crowe Ransom’s “Survey of Literature”, which may also have inspired Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Song ("A better man was Aristotle, pulling steady on the bottle..."). I’d guess Hamburger knows the first if not the second.
John E. Is John Crowe Ransom your “Allen Tate or someone like that”?
Very interesting, Jake. Mind you, I’m not sure lines from light verse can be grafted into serious poetry without bathos ensuing.
I’m more interested in the alleged disjunction between Hamburger’s Celan translations and these excerpts from his poetry. What he does with Celan is both interesting and wildly inaccurate—I remember him rendering “Augenrund” as “Vibratile monad eyelid” or something—and while it’s more arresting than certain other efforts I could name, the originals are so lucid and fluent by comparison that I could easily imagine the same intelligence making poems like the above out of Modern Life when it doesn’t have Celan’s ideas to fall back on. But you say you like Hamburger’s other poetry too, so maybe he’s just very hit-or-miss. I find these excerpts indifferent, personally—although “Electronocuted” really is pretty dumb. It reminds me of a visit I paid to, um, Taco Bell several years ago, when they were trying to lure the kiddies by offering them a kids’ meal full of tacos and “Robo-Bots.” I am serious. Robo-Bots.
Truly cringe-worthy. I am not wholly convinced he was ever that good a poet or translator, though. That would require some demonstration. He is no Wordworth, that’s for sure.
One problem with Hamburger is that IIRC he really despise Heine. Granted that Heine was one of the few German authors ever to escape The Seriousness, that’s a pretty serious charge against Hamburder.
Late in the game, but for the record I’ve found this too:
POTATO
“Said Aristotle unto Plato,
‘Have another sweet potato?’
Said Plato unto Aristotle,
‘Thank you, I prefer the bottle.’”
Owen Wister (1860-1938) American novelist
Undated, but this may be the Ur-source (granted that there’s no such thing as a “source” and, if there were, we shouldn’t care anyway.)
Ransom’s poem is supposedly from the late 20s (easily checked, but not using Google). Wister was 60 by 1920, and I doubt that his jingle was the product of his senescence.
I read a poem once. It was pretty good.
I’ve traced it back to Lord Byron, and now I’m going to quit.
“Importance isn’t important: truth is”. J.L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses”.
Bottle and Potato Traced to the Source