THE WEIGHT OF A FEW WORDS
Fandel, John
keenly felt in the scene where Clara goes to see the store owner while he's still under the impression that she is a n unwed mother. She doesn't realize that this is the reason he is being...
...It is the admirable characteristic of poetry to be soon over--~but not done with...
...And so it goes...
...What good is it...
...And this is the second use of writing poetry, for me: it enlightens me...
...Whether looking at a hexameter or a galaxy, an Alexandrine or a meteor, Adamant Iwantoknow and Evenerup Iveamindtoo are almost bound to ask the kind of question that fiddles with things, the metronomes and telescopes of the world...
...Yet it is a carefree exercise, I think, speculating----not having to be an absolute Jove . . . Zeus . . . Jehovah . . . the kind of intelligence that need never do any guesswork about what it's all about...
...Not one of them, not a blessed one...
...This is the perfect gesture of a Mary with "it...
...Perhaps the 10,000 sonnets, alone, of Dr...
...We are bold to speak our own minds when others, at the drop of a hat, uncover theirs...
...Is it the right adjective...
...But it is never worthless...
...Still they write poems that take the top of your head off...
...How poetry lightens me is what I want to be quite clear about, for myself, first of all, lucid as Hippocrene, pellucid--lightened, but not light-headed, even at 5,738 feet, the most sacred altitude, less Paradiso, to a poet...
...writing in the English language whose works might one day be considered classics...
...I am enlightened because I am lightened, no longer an unsung Atlas...
...Mystery...
...That is, I'm all for poetry being useful in the local here and the immediate now because ultimately its usefulness leads us to the ulterior good, fulfilled being, the good that is just beyond the temporary goodness, explored being...
...Only questing questions...
...Read and ponder it if you are willing to face a world in process of being turned upside down---and need help...
...This twosome comprises the kind of intelligence which wants to take Big Ben (Westclox or Westminster) apart to see what makes it tick, or bong...
...In other words, Gala celebrates our modern preoccupation with art about art imitating life: a celebration spangled with wit, robed in deepest frustration and melancholy, sequined with laughter that never, not for one syllable, steps out of the spotlight of West's inventive intelligence...
...At one point in particular, she just flops across his desk all of a sudden, landing on her stomach with her head propped on her hands close to his face and her feet sticking up lolling in the air...
...BOOKS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Critics' Choices for Christmas R. MeAfee Brown In ,4 Socio-Theology of Letting Go: The Role o/ a First World Church Facing Third World Peoples, (Paulist Press, $3.95), Sister Marie Augusta Neal has produced one of the wisest and most demanding books of our time, a series of addresses whose cumulative impact touches our complacency with all the gentility of a battering ram...
...It is a matter of public policy...
...But I like meandering under plane trees: that is, I like to question things, in spite of my questioning questioning...
...How much less hidebound William James makes all of us in his reaction to hearing poetry: In listening to poetry . . . we are often surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us...
...It is a good thing they are around, rooted right in us, constant Adam and Eve, to keep us alive to the facts of our lives, to remind us we are creatures who want to know about the makeup of our Monday world, what makes it work, so that we can snooze a little longer, a little more snugly, on Sunday morning . . . or doze, Sunday afternoons...
...In the context in which it occurs and with the result it has of bringing her face within kissing distance of his, it is a wanton gesture...
...Questing is better than questioning...
...But then I question my not questioning...
...I agree with Robinson: poetry "is good for something or nothing...
...Mystery...
...It lightens me of avoirdupois, the heaviness of this world which, momentarily, the mind trades off through the weight of a few words...
...That might lead to fisticuffs...
...Not only do I question my answers, I question my questions...
...Creating a small, make-shift model in a cellar, writing a novel making itself up with only a couple of characters and a limiting situation, the writer perpetually sees the entire astronomical and literary cosmos, a word whose Greek root means harmony...
...Not the only way, maybe, but a natural way...
...I feel less defensive about my own hair-raising reaction to a lyric, after reading that--though perhaps not quite ready to found a Scalping School of poetry . . . nor to prove poetry by Updike's Scalp Test: "I would know I had one (a poem)," he has said, "when my scalp crawled...
...Some sort of transformation, a kind of transmogrification, however insensible, has made me in the rarest way a lighter accepter of the universe, a keener acknowledger of it, a happier viewer of the violet or the Vatican, a happier versifier of Venice or the vanishing point...
...His most recent book o/ poems is Bach and a Catbird (Roth...
...You can quest the Holy Grail, for instance, without disturbing your neighbor...
...And Chaucer, after Horace, had Harry Bailly decide to judge poetry on its moral teaching (sentence) and pleasure (so/aas...
...It has "a passion for disharmony" as our own lives do, expressed by never forgetting the larger and smaller orders through which we glimpse that chaos...
...What is it...
...To reduce "the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world" to a few weighty words in a few moments of serf-forgetting is one of the delights of Adamandeveallofus, one of the lightened states of being...
...I am enlightened only in a remarkably limited way...
...What a marvelous confession of wise iguorancemand unlearned knowledge[ When he goes on to say: Experience has taught me, when I am shaving, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of Poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act, I feel less defensive about my own horripilation, on reading a sonnet...
...for, as Spender said, "with poetry one is less sure than with anything else...
...No substitute for the spilled milk in the sky, the model is no more a literal replica than West's novel is his wish fulfilled...
...I have a somewhat less heady, a little more cerebral reaction to poetry, myself...
...Get rid of it...
...But our own little orders will not necessarily win a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, or a halo...
...The Goose-Flesh School of poetry, the Cranial School, the Cutaneous Shiver School--take your pick...
...Like Rat, as Mole saw him, "absorbed and deaf to the world," alternately scribbling and musing, I may have therapeutic hours .ahead of me fiddling with this incondite thing, this contraption of words, this thingamajig, t~s thingamabob, this iambic line, this poem, this lyric, this sonnet, these few words that stand for the world rehearsed, reordered, the new awareness of the old mystery...
...How much more confident Housman makes me when he says: I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but I thought we both recognized the subject by the symptoms which it provokes in us...
...Marie Augusta suggests that the appropriate response for the non-poor is a theology of relinquishment, of diminishment, of "letting go...
...Poetry is part of that Monday to Sunday questing stroll through life, part of the weekday/weekend world, a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy, a teeny part of the universe, though weightier (etymologically, teeny is smaller than tiny by weewhich com~s from weq, OE for weight), And What is it...
...Whatever answers I sometimes dream up, I question...
...Poetry, like anything else, if it has no uses, is of no use whatsoever...
...The world is lighter...
...I'm for Utility for Ulteriority...
...How much more daring Dickinson makes me when she says of poetry: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It might be deplorably bad, in fact, simply atrocious, horrible...
...No moonbeam, star-struck daydream this...
...Is this the right question...
...Moments like these are what leave the "it" girl's men startled and helpless, and leave the rest of us pretty delighted as well...
...It's strictly a child's sort of gesture, too, like flopping on one's bed in one's own room...
...A novelistic sequel to his autobiographical Words for a Deaf Daughter, Gala (Harper and Row, $8.95) is "the scenario of a wish-fulfillment," telling how Wight Deulius, a writer and amateur astronomer, brings his retarded daughters to the United States for a visit that they spend, along with Wight's poet companion, Pi, in building a model of the Milky Way...
...delight/wisdom...
...Then why shouldn't Fandel echo what Frost echoed: docere/ delectare...
...That is a fresh way of saying something said long before Frost...
...Harvey Cox John Gardner calls his fellow novelist John Fowles the only author now...
...What will happen if the poem should r into another'~ }en...
...I am not, that is, a prophet with the world resolved, pat in my pocket, the free world reduced to a Liberty dime, if made into a new exchange by the coining of a poem...
...There are poets Commonweal: 791 like that, just like that, with not a sliver of an idea of what poetry is, what poetry is good for...
...Then, coming back to self, to my I.D...
...It is lighter because I am enlightened...
...The analysis is both tough-minded and specific: "Relinquishment refers not to symbolic private acts but to public initiatives in the form of debt moratoria and the release Of resources...
...I agree...
...There is a certain ambiguity in her personality that's very attractive, a certain combination of innocence and sex, a certain _9 . . who can say...
...I go further...
...We do not even begin to give a nod of approval to the world until we have ourselves tried our hand in somehow or other shaping its intractable atoms into something we can OK...
...I am enlightened, and the world is somewhat less unintelligible, somewhat less heavy, less of a weary weight...
...No question about it, I would not like hemlock...
...It is a matter of structural diminishment...
...Ronald Christ Although the words galaxy and gala have no etymological connection, Paul West has written a novel that joins them in a verbal festivity modeled on the Milky Way...
...On the one hand, such a move is an allurement, a bold play, something almost suggestive and erotic...
...I question an adjective like right for question...
...is just as natural, and practical besides...
...You know his sentence well enough to hear the echo my sentence makes...
...What good is it...
...a googolplex is 1 followed by a googol of zeros...
...Recall his words about poetry: "it begins in delight and ends in wisdom...
...I question questioning...
...it is brimming with the inconsequential...
...The weight of a few words lightens me, then, as long as the focal object 9 December 1977:792 is not blurred, not intruded upon, not eclipsed by some person from Porlock --the reason for Yaddo, the McDoweU and the Millay colonies...
...somewhat less hairy, fleshy, it still has a heart beat...
...It requires a reader who is not afraid to listen to arguments about politics (Fowles is a socialist who reads Lukacs and Gram9 December 1977:794...
...It has its value, the weight of a few words, give or take 50--not a googol of them, because it is (or should be) the admirable characteristic of poetry to be succinct, to remind us of the virtue of brevity...
...for Jeffers's hand-reared four-storey headlandboulder tower in Big Sur, if not Yeats's hand-restored three-storey brick-andstone tower, Thoor Ballylee, in County Galway...
...Poetry checks loquacity," Emerson claimed...
...That is reassuring to me, questioning poetry and its uses-- tentatively...
...This is not just a matter of simplifying individual life-styles (though it can include that...
...My poem may never shake a leaf off the National Laurel iree...
...I pretend I'm walking under plane trees now, (any similarity between Socrates and me is purely poetic license), letting you listen to the questioning going on in me, the questioning that is a quest--a questing . . . one hopes not too pedestrian...
...I have two for a starter, two old faithfuls: What is it...
...She had "it...
...It might be a new addition to the old Junk-Shop heap of dated or dilipidated Art...
...Fowles's latest hook, Daniel Martin (Little, Brown, $12.95) i s a full-blown philosophical novel composed by a vastly thoughtful man who also writes extraordinarily well and can tell a story...
...But there it stands, nonetheless, the unadorned proof of a wrestle and a waltz with the world...
...What good is it...
...Gala outshines, outlanghs and outthinks any other novel I've read this year...
...Sometimes I simply accept, not questioning anything, poetry least of all...
...is not the only way of looking at verse, or universe...
...West's celebration is our gala...
...lighten/enlighten...
...What a startling touchstone...
...But that is not always knowable...
...Why get it by heart...
...Then why shelve it...
...Already there are enough sonnets, I would bet, to wallpaper every room of the many mansions in our Father's house, besides...
...I'm not for split~mg them...
...Merrill Moore, the prolific psychiatrist-poet who used to write a sonnet while waiting for a red light to turn green [undoubtedly with envy] would do the job...
...ll I know about poetry is questions...
...On this word I stop---or by this word I am stoppedmto illusCommonweal: 793 trate, if not by example, the virtue of brevity, the weight of a few words...
...It might be stuff...
...She doesn't realize that this is the reason he is being stand-offish, so she turns up the heat...
...are as right a way to look at poetry as at that contraption we bought on Sale t o . . . but we have forgotten why we bought it and what it is for, simply because we do not know, never did, what it is...
...specifications and proportions, to my name and fingerprints, to my Social Security number, to the color of my hair, my eyes, to my bifocals, to my race and religion, to my 145 pounds, is to come back to an enlightened self...
...Again, "this is a larger task than can be accomplished with private charity...
...word, too...
...Well, there you have it, there it is, what poetry is for, its practicality, its use, my answer to What good is it...
...I admit I owe Frost something for that...
...But, by making a poem, arranging fifty-or-so words into a conceivable shape, what Auden calls a "verbal contraption," I am not a privileged citizen in Eastofeden...
...So poetry multiplies, not by leaps and bounds, but by words, words, words---wordsworths _9 . . wordsworse's...
...Writing poetry lifts burdens off me, some as light as a laundry list, others as heavy as certain catalogues of the conscience...
...A Roman first said poetry is made to teach (docere) and to delight (delectare...
...even a poem "ought not to be fissionable," I say with Wilbur...
...I have a going thing with life...
...sentence/ solaas...
...Because she contained a share of both the innocent young things that preceded her and the steamy voluptuaries who were to follow, she is a richer characterization than either...
...The first thing that constant duo has told me about the use of writing poetry is this: poetry lightens me...
...into yours, ~:ould be another lightening to enlighten---/ hope...
...Liberation theology being the appropriate theology for the poor, Sr...
...Stay away from this book if you are unwilling to face change...
...We all know about the unexamined life, its supposed value, and we all know where that phrase came from...
...ff it doesn't, it ought to...
...Our world is a glut of images...
...And when I consider what some of my fellow craftsmen have said about poetry, what it is, what it is for, I am simultaneously encouraged and nonplused...
...What we may have forgotten is how his questioning, under a plane tree, led to his unquestioning drinking of the hemlock...
...I have turned a little bit of chaos into a little bit more of cosmos,--"another triumph over chaos" is how Roethke defined poem--and, not unlike our Father, I might look upon it to see it is good...
...It's a movement full of sudden girlish exuberance of just the kind Mary always showed...
...It is a quieter JOHN FANDEL, Commonweal's poetry editor, leaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...It is also a matter of not doing things for the poor, but empowerment of the poor, since "no people can speak another's truth...
...All of us also know the Questioner he was...
...And nonsense...
...It is the weight of a few words become a focal object (I borrow William James's borrowed terminology, probably a bit old-fashioned) that relieves me of the avoirdupois of marginal objects . . . until, of course, that marginal thing, that inconsiderate bulk, that ting-a-ling thing of mere pounds, begins to ring, and my self, lost out of myself, is brought back to identity by a wrong number...
...Instead, both model and novelmreflexive metaphors for each other--are crafty meditations (complete with charts, drawings and analyses) on what a man can do---write, build, love--while watching himself do it at the same time...
...On the other hand, though, the impulsiveness in it is impish...
...No good, no practical good...
...But to question the Holy Grail...
...Daniel Martin is an unapologetically adult book in a sense quite opposite from those allegedly "adult" movies...
...A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros...
...That pegs me as Utilitarian, capital u. I do not mind the label, so long as I am understood as Ulteriortarian, equally capitalized...
...no theoretical exercise in how to write the Novel either...
...When the skin on my head felt tight...
...Affirming that "the Gospel mandates the poor to take what is theirs," and that "no right of ownership supersedes human need," she argues that "the church is called upon to support the poor asthey reach 9ut to take what is rightfully theirs...
...Do we need yet one more iambic pentameter to add to the umpteen five-footers lined up on the 800 shelves, making the googol of the iambic line a googolplex...
...I put it rather simply, I say it in four words: Poetry lightens to enlighten...
...None of that, nor hemlock...
...No cause for embarrassment, therefore, this blissful universal ignorance, because, accounting for every single one of them, who of the poets, proven in poems, has put down the last word on what poetry is...
...We never understood it...
...I bear witness to that here and now on the evidence of my own pulse, on the clues given by my own feeling and thinking, my own head and heart...
...Lightened, I am not only unaware of my pounds when I am writing a poem, I am also unaware of my metaphysical weightlessness...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 25
