The Los Angeles basin got steady rain all last night, the first we’ve had since early spring. With the morning came further fall weather, a crisp breeze and high skies, this temporary dream architecture of brisk clouds and temps in the low 60s. The city looks like it got a great night’s sleep. As Lord Byron says in a letter, weather accounts for a large part of one’s mood, which is especially true in a region that tends to collect foul air, and which has lately suffered from the grime of long-term drought. Angelenos are in a fine mood, is what I’m saying.

In honor of today’s vigor, allow me to introduce a poem by one of the city’s great writers, Dana Gioia. Published in 1991 (as part of the somewhat preciously titled The Gods of Winter), it derives a little extra weight from the fact that the Nineties were the tail-end of the bad Smog Years, when LA seemed like a city in all sorts of decline, not least environmental. Smog alerts had hounded the populace since World War II, and yet here they were, still choking. But really, Gioia’s meteorological YAWP will touch any city-slicker’s besmirched heart, which, if you want to get theoretical, is where the eyes and the mind and the feet all meet.

It may resonate with anyone who’s ever woken up happy. Take a deep breath. Listen!

Back home again on one of those bright mornings
when the city wakes to find itself reborn.
The smog gone, the thundering storm
blown out to sea, birds
frantic in their joyous cacophony, and the mountains,
so long invisible in haze,
newly risen with the sun.

It is a morning snatched from Paradise,
a vision of the desert brought to flower—
of Eve standing in her nakedness,
immortal Adam drunk with all
the gaudy colors of the world,
and each taste and touch, each
astounding pleasure still waiting to be named.

The city stirs and stretches
like a young man waking after love.
Sunlight stroking the skin and the
promiscuous wind whispering
“Seize the moment. Surrender to the air’s
irrefutable embrace. Trust me that today
even seduction leads to love.”

Too many voices overhead. Too many scents
commingle in the stark perfume
of green winter freshened by the rain.
This is no morning for decisions.
A day to ditch responsibility, look up
old friends, and dream
of quiet love, impossible resolutions.

Copyright © 1991 by Dana Gioia

It’s not the weekend, but it is the week’s end. We have some poetry for you!

I don’t know if American teenagers still read the Beats, but when I was a teenager in America, I loved them so much that for a high-school class I co-wrote/-assembled something called The Book of Jack (Kerouac) for English class. Sized for a giant’s coffee table, this cardboard-bound collage of pictures, quotations, inspired drawings, and scholarly citations now rests in my parents’ basement, probably where it belongs. In the late 1990s I was a Kerouac man and, to a lesser degree, an Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs man. I didn’t know that “the Beats” is a clunky historical term that many Beat writers disliked immediately, or that scholars have since partially dismantled it, and I would not have cared if I had known.

My literary spider sense tells me that most readers outgrow the Beats. That is, while they do not usually come to dislike that bundle of mid-century coastal bohemians, the Beats do start to feel immature, or at least limited, as one acquires more education and gets older. The same impulses and attitudes which made them radical in the 1950s also keep them right in the teen wheelhouse: emotion, iconoclasm, expressivity, the new, the raw, existential peaks and valleys, all those urges toward various modes of ecstatic alienation (1). In the long run their thematic and formal register also led me to Whitman, Blake, Rimbaud, and other poets Ginsberg and company admired.

For what it’s worth, the Beats grew out of the Beats, too. Kerouac became a pudgy conservative who hung out with William F. Buckley in the Sixties; the poet Gary Snyder spent most of the peak-Beat era in Japan; Ginsburg and Burroughs both lived well beyond their demographically median life expectancies and became comfortable old Literary Figures (2).

Much of their canonized work has not aged well, at least for me. Ginsberg’s best stuff (such as “A Supermarket in California,” his comically poignant vision of a Walt Whitman dumped in mid-century America) is very, very good, but it’s almost entirely from the 1950s and 1960s; and unfortunately this period constitutes only part of his hefty Collected Poems. Burroughs’s reptilian prose only sounds good when someone with a gravel-munching voice like William S. Burroughs reads it aloud. Junky and Naked Lunch haven’t kept their bloom: the former is impressive until you encounter something like De Quincey’s Confessions or David Lynch, while Lunch (which David Cronenberg turned into a film) is shocking for maybe 30 pages the first time you read it, after which it becomes a boring round of grotesqueries. I remember nothing Gregory Corso wrote. I do recall reading Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind on the bus while traveling to high-school soccer games.

The homie Kerouac wrote too much too fast, and a lot of his fiction belies a surly, misogynistic beef with the world. Try to read Big Sur or The Subterraneans without cringing, then perhaps sobbing—even in high school I realized that the bibulous self-pity of many of his male narrators was gross. Imagine Woody Allen as a Catholic drunk. I’ve never gotten through Dharma Bums even though I’m generally neurotic about finishing books I start.

I’ll ride for On the Road, though, even in adulthood. Despite its sentimental racism, juvenile grasp of women’s lives, and occasionally questionable ethics (it venerates Neal Cassady, or “Dean Moriarty” in the book, a boring, obsessive, half-literate speed freak who seems to not so much interact with women as inhale them), the novel stands up to re-reading. It isn’t merely a young person’s book, a white teenager’s book, or a classier version of Bukowski. It’s a narrative about America. Kerouac’s lyric intensity turns purple in places, but as a whole the novel is poetic in a way  few American books are: we’re talking the empyrean, we’re talking up there with Faulkner and parts of Their Eyes Were Watching God and James Baldwin. More importantly, because great prose does not excuse imaginative thinness, Sal Paradise’s wounded longing, his conviction that a more authentic American life exists somewhere, resonates with a deep tradition of New World dreaminess and a distinctly American pessimism, of the Death of a Salesman variety. In fact, it points back to European romanticism and, if you really want to stretch the point, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Jane Eyre. It is Kerouac’s Illmatic.

But if On the Road is the Beat generation’s greatest single text, Gary Snyder has had the most consistent career. My favorite poems of his are mainly from the 1950s and 1960s, but he never fell off the way Ginsberg did, or tumbled into mopey narcissism like Kerouac. Although his experience is often the basis for what the speakers of his poems see, the texts are nonetheless more interested in the outside world, especially intersections between human life and the more-than-human environment. (Snyder’s 1992 volume No Nature: New and Selected Poems pointedly rejects the term “nature” as a European construct. DEBATABLE. Anyway.)

The poem we have here is “Above Pate Valley,” from Snyder’s debut Riprap (1957). As a young man he spent summers laying trails in the Sierras, and this labor (“riprap” is rubble used for paving and walls) figures in his writing. Note how the poem tinkers with syntax and elides certain expected words like the articles “the” or “an,” producing a notebook of observations with an almost physical sense of cognitive movement; note its ethic of paying attention to the world, to the world’s physicality as well as the human histories present in this material flux; note how the text flows from a believably human narrator but doesn’t privilege him, remaining humble before the world. Note all kinds of lyric greatness, y’all. Enjoy a marvel of American English.

We finished clearing the last

Section of trail by noon,

High on the ridge-side

Two thousand feet above the creek

Reached the pass, went on

Beyond the white pine groves,

Granite shoulders, to a small

Green meadow watered by the snow,

Edged with Aspen—sun

Straight high and blazing

But the air was cool.

Ate a cold fried trout in the

Trembling shadows. I spied

A glitter, and found a flake

Black volcanic glass—obsidian—

By a flower. Hands and knees

Pushing the Bear grass, thousands

Of arrowhead leavings over a

Hundred yards. Not one good

Head, just razor flakes

On a hill snowed all but summer,

A land of fat summer deer,

They came to camp. On their

Own trails. I followed my own

Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,

Pick, singlejack, and sack

Of dynamite.

Ten thousand years.

NOTES
1) When Howl was published in 1957 the Partisan Review retorted with a comically snobby, pissy, quite funny John Hollander review which is excerpted here.
2) And Burroughs was a heroin addict and chain smoker for decades. 

When he started publishing, Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was quickly grouped with other young British poets who were poised to follow W.H. Auden’s lead, rejecting what they saw as the gratuitous, reader-alienating Difficulty of modernists like Pound, T.S. Eliot, Stein, and Stevens. In other words, they disliked how hard it was to decipher, let alone enjoy, many canonical modernist poems—the Cantos, anyone? (Most of them also detested Dylan Thomas’s lush neo-romanticism.) Starting in the mid-1950s, journalists foisted the label “the Movement” onto Gunn, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and others; then New Lines, an influential 1956 anthology that Conquest edited, presented them as cohesive, not just contemporaneous.

Like all narratives this one simplifies a lot, which is why most of the so-called Movement poets refused the term (1). Yet there are discernible patterns in the work of these individual writers, who sought a poetics that was aesthetically pleasurable (it rhymed and scanned in meters that English poets had been using for centuries) and less thematically opaque: none of The Waste Land‘s maddening footnotes. More accessible, more public, in other words. Larkin turned out to be Auden’s greatest heir, but Gunn has also staked a place in the anthologies. (Amis wrote fine poems, too, but he is known more as a brilliant comic novelist.) Larkin, whose letters sometimes have a nasty provincial streak disguised as half-ironic Tory wit, claimed to detest Gunn’s work—”What a genius that man has for making an ass of himself”—but then again he also preferred Sylvia Plath to Robert Lowell. Even geniuses have moments of shaky taste (2).

No doubt Gunn’s lifestyle, or stories about it, also bugged Larkin, who saw himself as a conservative. By the time he was being touted as a new voice in British poetry, Gunn had moved to San Francisco. He spent the rest of his life there. An openly (by the late 1970s) gay man who rode motorcycles, dropped lots of acid, hung out with lovers in leather, taught at Berkeley, and generally appeared just fine with hippies, queens, bikers, and other Bay Area species, you probably wouldn’t peg him as a Royal Army veteran educated at Cambridge.

His life in the Bay supplies a lot of his subject matter; as such he might seem fully Americanized. However, in terms of its formal structures, Gunn’s strongest poetry derives from an English lyric tradition which prizes conceptual lucidity, metrical cohesion, pleasing rhymes, and a frequently ironic (not to say cynical) view of human life. He may write about surfers and sometimes mess around with free verse and syllabics (like a damn Frenchman!) but ultimately he’s a traditionalist who leans toward patterned meters.

As far as Anglophone poetry goes, there are two main species in this metrical genus. Accentual-syllabic verse, where you look at the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables within lines that have the same total number of syllables, is the most common. Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter is probably the best-known example, but accentual-syllabic forms have been the foundation of English lyric since the 1500s, and you can draw a line from Marlowe to Ben Jonson to Marvell to Pope to the nineteenth-century British giants (e.g., Keats, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Housman) to modern poets like Auden and Larkin. You could also throw in certain Americans, like Robert Frost, the Fugitives, and Yvor Winters, the aesthetic arch-conservative whom Gunn studied with at Stanford (3). Straight-up accentual verse, where you only count the number of accents (not the syllables), regardless of where they fall in a particular line, is also a Gunn mode. Gerard Manley Hopkins is the king of this one, which ultimately goes back to Old English texts like Beowulf, but Coleridge and Milton also experimented with it.

Now, like any skilled formalist poet, Gunn rarely sticks with a totally regularized beat. A lyric’s meter serves as a baseline, not a straitjacket, because the poem will get boring and shitty if it bounces along the same track the whole way. Even when working with, for example, rhyming couplets—the ultimate in neoclassical regularity, favored by eighteenth-century wig bros like Alexander Pope—Gunn will shift accent-placement and line-length, or occasionally swap in a slant rhyme where the pattern would seem to call for a full one. Indeed, you often get texts that seem to hover between accentual and accentual-syllabic verse; hey, most literary classifications are somewhat imprecise.

So what’s the poem for this edition of Topical Verse? It’s “Nasturtium,” from Gunn’s 1992 collection The Man With Night Sweats. More lit-crit talk below.

Born in a sour waste lot
You laboured up to light,
Bunching what strength you’d got
And running out of sight
Through a knot-hole at last,
To come forth into sun
As if without a past,
Done with it, re-begun.

Now street-side of the fence
You take a few green turns,
Nimble in nonchalance
Before your first flower burns.
From poverty and prison
And undernourishment
A prodigal has risen,
Self-spending, never spent.

Irregular yellow shell
And drooping spur behind . . .
Not rare but beautiful
—Street-handsome—as you wind
And leap, hold after hold,
A golden runaway
Still running, strewing gold
From side to side all day.

This is a love poem, devoted to the community where Gunn found a home and to the nasturtium itself, a common flower of resplendently strange appearance. (This is what a nasturtium looks like up close, and this is what they look like in tumbling, spilling floods of color.) The flower is a metaphor but it’s a flower too.

Nasturtiums, which have shallow roots and reproduce via seeds that look like tiny shriveled craniums, are rapacious spreaders and excellent climbers. Perfections up close, they are even better en masse; repetitive and profligate, they lend themselves to filigree, and illustrators, designers, and other artists have long prized them (3). Gunn uses a weedy, light meter—generally three accents distributed over a six-syllable line, though some lines can be read with four accents, all of it arranged into three stanzas of equal length—that mimics that plant’s organic form. Nasturtiums do well in poor soil, loving a “sour waste lot,” and will in fact produce fewer blooms if you water or fertilize them too much.

Iambic pentameter is the workhorse of English poetry because lines with ten-ish syllabus and five-ish beats are long enough to do complicated stuff with, in terms of sound and image, but not so long that they run out to the page’s edge, which would tax the reader. (Poems that care about musicality usually need the propulsion that comes from line breaks and new starts after that drop.) But even with relatively scrawny lines, Gunn does some cool stuff. For example, although the meter and the rhyme scheme used in the first two stanzas persist into the third, in that final unit the punctuation partially abandons the syntactical conventions of standard English. In its closing exuberance, the stanza’s punctuation serves mainly to organize sensuous impressions.

Read metaphorically, the nasturtium represents survivors, in particular the gay men who made it to the big free city (free compared to the places many came from, at least) and settled in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Castro after “poverty and prison / And undernourishment.” Seen in terms of the “golden runaway,” Young-Man-Escaped narrative, the lyric is hopeful.

However, its surroundings are grim: The Man With Night Sweats is largely a meditation on the first terrible decade of AIDS, the plague years that tore through urban gay communities. Gunn lost a lot of friends. A few pages after “Nasturtium” the book’s last section begins, opening with the titular poem. The noun “prodigal” has a dark slant, and Gunn builds cold irony into the dream of nonchalance, pure subjective freedom, and endless “spending” (a verb poets have used for centuries as a half-comic euphemism for ejaculation). There is no “all day.” Life is always preparing forms of suffering.

At the end of Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007), a man named Stefan Pashov, who drives machines in Antarctica, says something beautiful:

Suffering reproduces aggressively, as do viruses (bad) and nasturtiums (good). Poems are diffusive too, hauled out of the languages we’ve devised and passed from writer to reader. Texts are partially biological. You see this vividly when the same poem demonstrates both the human compulsion to make metaphors—plundering nature for tropes to help us describe our lives—and our urge (still flickering in 2014) to admit the otherness of living things.

NOTES
1) In the second appendix of Kingsley Amis’s mammoth Selected Letters (seriously, it could stop a bullet) you’ll find some superb parodies of Movement poets that Amis mailed to Larkin (one of his best friends) in 1956. Titled “All Aboard the Gravy Train: Or, Movements Among the Younger Poets” and written by one “Ron Cain,” it pokes fun at the tics and tendencies of Gunn, Robert Conquest (another one of Amis’s bros), Larkin, D.J. Enright, Amis himself, and others frequently deemed Movement types.
2) Letter to Robert Conquest, 20 February 1962, reprinted in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 341.
3) Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell are also handy with traditional forms, though both were perfectly comfortable writing lots of free verse.
4) Plus the blooms are edible. Very tasty in fact, a spry pepper. Makes you look cool if you put them in the salad you bring to a picnic.