The Fascination of What's Difficult

...Even those hornets are mating and making their house on the underside of a mill-stone, and hardness is the first fact of poem after poem: stone, bone, chitin...

...the working with hardness brings out a fierce constructive violence in the verbs, as all this "adamant" and "flint" sort of stuff is honed, splintered, blazoned...

...his story of how, out of the desperate, unforgiving relation between a world of stone and the growing things that cling to it by imitating its armored ways, arises strangely the realm of articulate thought, painting, poetry, the art work considered as revelation, sacrament, and protective talisman, by its distance and its "stillness" itself a kind of armor against death and, possibly, love also...

...Trying to say this another way: A fine poem is not so much a thought as it is a mind...

...armor...

...lace/on a whalebone pubis...

...he writes by a kind of radar, and a relevant sound is assumed to be a relevant sense...

...Struck...

...This predilection for what is not only odd but also oddly right may have been nurtured in him by his many years' work at translation, that desperate double-entry bookkeeping where you get the word exactly matched at a price you hope isn't always extortionate, the momentary perfection at the risk of stopping the discourse while everyone says Ah!— The cinquefoil thicket laced with a pollen of poppies...

...I have not the power any more than the intention of exhausting the possibilities of the poet's language...

...Confronting a mortal situation, the choice of attitude is "between sugar and granite," "and the death of a son needed granite...

...And it is fun to do only because the poetry itself beautifully responds to the effort, by reason of the musical, echoing, inter-allusive mode of its composition...

...Such a poetry may contain sermons no less than the plainer sort, but the sermons will be in the stones, and not whitewashed across their surfaces...

...More than any other poet writing in English, more than John Crowe Ransom or Marianne Moore, Belitt plays that dangerous game of the mot juste, the specialized name kept for the one occasion, what he calls, in a phrase that may serve for definition and example at once, "the matched and extortionate word...

...Ideally, one could learn this poetry best with someone else who was reading it at the same time, and that is just what a review—if this is a review —cannot do...

...So much notice to the reader seems only fair...

...The same sexual and fatal word introduces the last stanza of the poem about the hornets...

...Yeats, whose phrase gave me my title, spoke also about the need to set one's chisel to the hardest stone...

...as though the one response would naturally evoke the other...

...The efforts of insects (or men) to endure on a stone world leads on to thoughts of architecture, and the relation may work both ways: "the bee in his ziggurat" of one poem answering in another to the Alhambra seen as an "ascending wasp's next heaven...

...Trying to see and give some impression of the felt unity in this growing complexity of related relations is not easy, but it is fun to do...

...Even a lake is seen as "a burnish of water," and I suspect Belitt singles out pomegranates for special attention among fruits, not for the usual "poetic" reasons associated with romanticism and exotic tropical climes, but only because they contain granite...

...a much simplified model of the motions of the human mind, but all the same you have to talk with it a while before it will say what it's about...

...But the evocation of a world of unliving obduracy, where only insects (and, as we shall see, armored men) are at home, begets a concentration on the equal and opposite sign, of flower and fruit clutching the rock for their living: in a granite quarry he sees how "the maple sweetened the block at its root," how it was "Rigors of quartz" that "Darkened the sheaf and emptied the apple-crystal," so that "the taste of the granite followed the taste of the fruit...

...These instances suggest another trait of the style...

...And sexuality too is closely related with these thoughts of adamant security, wherein the additional distancing of art is possibly an added element: on a painted fan a shepherdess is "stilled in a spangled sierra...

...It goes with this that Belitt very often writes poems in which the discourse is more radical than linear, in which the meaning of the poem is gained not from reading through it so much as from reading around in it, and from listening to recurrences and obsessive preoccupations in a series of poems...

...A couple of things first about style, so far as this can be discussed in abstraction from its materials...

...Put together with other evidences, though, it appears as consistently an element in the poet's reading of this life...

...the plough, on its side in the leavening cloud And the dazzle of stubble," "the kingdom of nuance, the fiends of inhuman refinement...

...wherever you touch it, some relevance appears, like answers to like, an imitation not quite exact enlarges the area of apprehended relations and one's sense of their fluent order...

...My object is both to increase my own understanding and to persuade the readers, by the way of demonstration rather than the way of exhortation, of the pleasure to be derived from the study of this poetry which is not only difficult but in other ways unfashionable as well...

...In this world the soft, defenseless organism must adapt the armor of the inorganic or imitate it organically...

...So in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra the verse-forms of ancient poets are woven into the architectural design...

...But I hope that my detailed and pedantic enthusiasm may incite some people to read Belitt's poems...

...moreover, one of the new poems in it is dedicated to me...

...Taken by itself, this might be not merely hard to read but impossible to read...

...that we get to know it rather as we might ideally get to know this world itself, not by moralizing instructions but by the repetition and variation of its forms...

...In the richest example of all, the lightning that once struck a house in Vermont, and that then evoked its correlative scene in the poet's childhood, leads at last to the art work seen as a sacrament: As once in Toledo: A Greek at a burial, coming nearer, Struck at the shroud of Count Orgaz, found the eschatological greens in the rust of a cardinal's cape, the gold of the surplice's threads, rolled back the stone of his eyeballs in the place of the skulls, and shewed us the bread of our lives...

...It is, in the first place, a very hard world...

...Yet I hope it will also be fair for me to put down some of my observations on Ben Belitt's poetry, escaping the charge of puffery simply by not puffing, only observing...

...That may be not only on account of my incompetence, but also because the transaction between poetry and its reader may be not so much a "structural" matter, as people are fond of saying in the classroom, but rather more like an electrical figure, of accumulation and discharge, a process of which I have recorded what I could of the fleeting traces...

...their effect is To humble the conjuror and mock the enchanter With the unreflective revelation of the obvious...

...And I think to see how for this poet the idea of being "struck" focuses a complex of meanings indissolubly concerned with childhood, sexuality, death, and art, with the revelation of the forbidden and sacramental...

...Instead of trying at once to "solve" these difficulties, though, I read on, among poems I know and poems I don't, listening for the characteristic configuration of details that will compose its world, and whose varied repetitions will yield something of the meaning of that world...

...That thought of stones, by the way, is piously appropriate to Belitt's subject matter, as I shall show...

...that is "why" the poem arose like a hornet—because the sting in the hornet's tail, the lance of the warrior that "forces mortality's sweat drop," and the lightning that struck from heaven, are one...

...But perhaps I should try to complete the present demonstration as far as I can in a little space, bringing my account to where the complex of clustered associations begins to point toward unity...

...Reviewed by HOWARD NEMEROV The author of this book is my friend...

...This kind of writing suggests something that may perhaps be true of all poetry, though less apparent in most: that the body of a poet's work supplies the attentive reader with a grammar and a lexicon which he must elicit in order to read beautifully...

...In a richer example, Paolo Ucello's painting, drawn from the violence of battle, stills that violence and eternizes it in art, the painter's art first and now the poet's: I would fight that battle after the battle, Inward and naked, after the outward Packs like a weaver's spindle or poises like a picture Baroque with the ceremonious violence of the shuttle, The pencil, the burin, the matched and extortionate word...

...readers, as well as writers, ought to consider it...

...So when I read the first poem in this book, "The Hornet's House," one I haven't seen before, I am mostly just puzzled, though delighted moment by moment with striking surprises of the language, "a wafer of smashed candelabrum," "the Chaldean increases/Of stars in the hexagon, the bells of beneficent amber," and so on...

...The attraction of a poetry somewhat deeply enciphered is, I think...

...The fit inhabitants of this hard world are insects: hornet, wasp, bee, turn up over and over, characterized by the stinging weapon, which may also be the constructive instrument of art ("needle," "burin") as well as having sexual meaning, and by their exoskeletal armor...

...Apart from its being necessarily incomplete, my demonstration is perhaps not very beautifully ordered...

...But more often it is this reliance on how things sound that makes possible his characteristic combination of great elaboration with great intensity, in such phrases as "the pit of a petal's serration...

...and the surfaces, of stone, of poem, are often to a first look unyielding of much in the way of meaning or general proposition...

...Sometimes the defect of this virtue makes him put his elements a little too close together, as when he writes "a temple's example...

...Belitt receives the world more exclusively by the ear than most...

...in Ucello's Battaglici di San Romano a warrior carries "a locust's weight of armor...

...In the guise of Adam naming the creation, the poet sees living things primarily as armored aggressions: "the horn of their jawbones shining," and "wing-cases breaking like clasp-knives...

...blades of knife, sword, axe, adze...

...A menacing intensity, I was going to say, but I realize that by now he's got me doing it too...

...Returning to "The Hornet's House" with a little more perception of how it might constitute an emblem for the poet, who has put it at the head of his book, I read again of the insects' triumphant establishment of home and continuance on their unpromising millstone, and I come to the surprising last lines, where with the mating of the hornets the poem also arose like a hornet, in rabbinical blacks and siennas, On craters and crosses...