Hollander's Poetic Playfulness
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing HOLLANDER'S POETIC PLAYFULNESS By Phoebe Pettingell In the last century many poets still played a game that probably dated from the Renaissance. Participants were given a...
...According to Ovid, Arachne hanged herself, and was transformed into a spider...
...In 11 stanzas, we are directed through various metaphysical journeys...
...Games bring more than critical insights to Hollander...
...Always something of an intellectual scrapper, he has long been putting up his dukes to punch out ill-conceived popular notions of poetics...
...In fact, Hollander went on to provocatively suggest, "The contemporary equivalent of the cheesy sentimentality associated formerly with the rhymed jingle of greeting card verse might be called rusty irony, today associated with the easy flabbiness of a ubiquitous form of short-lined free verse...
...Variations on a Table-Top" was inspired by Steinberg, "whose carved and painted balsa table-tops were sculpted drawings of the table-tops they were drawn upon...
...Thus the whole Renaissance intrigue turns out to be nothing more than silly critical speculation, much like all the pseudobiographical suppositions about Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa...
...Anyone who has attended a poetry workshop, or—worse fate— taught one, will sympathize with his pointed assessment of the ideologues who clutter our poetry journals and writing schools, shrilly proclaiming their own breakthroughs even as they try to insure that other schools of verse—particularly those that advocate disciplined crafting—are held up to ridicule...
...Not all poems about pictures reflect them accurately...
...Sloppy construction or thought rouses Hollander's most biting wit...
...Although it can be amusing to watch Hollander suavely dispatch his enemies with telling rapier thrusts, his admirers find him most admirable as a poet...
...After all, many critics have claimed that rhyme itself stifles naturalness...
...Painting fascinates Hollander...
...Getting from Here to There" takes its inspiration from a word game invented by Lewis Carroll...
...Is it to mimic nature, as some of the ancient philosophers thought...
...Contemplating one of Magritte's surrealist works, Painted Model—in which the artist actually brings the nude before him into being as he limns her on his canvas, Hollander disputes the formulation of one of his precursors: The painter's brush consumes his dream proclaimed The vatic Yeats, and wrong again...
...Often it is said that no work ever quite lives up to the internal vision behind it...
...Velazquez' Las Hilanderas portrays the mythological story of the weaving competition between the goddess Athena and the maiden Arachne to determine who could create the most realistic tapestry...
...The landscape itself might be from an anxiety dream...
...By changing one letter at a time, a player transforms, say, "dawn" to "dusk" in six steps, or "east" to "west" in eight...
...Yet it takes a sharp eye (or a peek at the notes in the back of the book) to realize that the alteration of "came" into "went" suggested both action and setting...
...It points up the vagaries of fame and the sensibilities of different eras— for what could seem more offensive today than a Jewish comic with an Irish name doing takeoffs on African-Americans...
...All those intersecting planes and superimposed perspectives help us notice fresh relationships between things in our own world— things that had previously escaped our eye until the engraver's insight highlighted the pattern for us...
...Not so, argued John Hollander in his 1997 essay collection, The Work of Poetry: "Poems are always making parables about their form, about the way in which poetry is half created by, and half creates its patterns and structures...
...Escher...
...He misdirected us, and so we came By a long route, which took us through a cave Filled with the lapping of a distant wave...
...The young then, and the brave Were no less uniformed Than armies of their day, Well-drilled in their own way, And state-of-the-art well-armed...
...To sit down with a collection of his poems is almost like entering the alternative universes of an artist like the Dutch M.C...
...The result becomes a poignant tribute both to his parent and to the late James Merrill...
...Teenage prodigy Christina Rossetti was a champion at this activity...
...Robert Browning's "Last Duchess" explains how the facial expression that supposedly drove her husband to do away with her was, actually, a figment of the portrait painter, "wrought for the sake of shadowing alone,/The false depiction of his pencil...
...So it is easy to cheer Hollander on when he takes up his fighting stance against such bullies...
...In this clear realm of dream and wish His dream is being nourished by his brush...
...The soft chiming of the end words intimates the water caressing that misleading path...
...This "can hardly be/Whitman's polyphony/of differences," the poet aptly notes...
...Aperennial foe of the superficial notion that "originality" depends merely on the sincerity of the writer—after all, people who believe they've been abducted by UFOs are perfectly sincere—he reserves special sarcasm for the supposedly "nonconformist" '60s...
...But Hollander has found another example to disprove this truism...
...In this poem, that consummate spinner, the spider, suggests another alternative...
...This prompts an exclamation of what we mean when we say that an artist reproduces his surroundings "truthfully...
...By contrast, some of the greatest works by modernist masters sound most "natural" when buttressed by formal prosody...
...Early Birds" is a wonderfully complex and moving account of the way his life briefly intersected with that of an old vaudeville blackface star, George Moran of "Moran and Mack, the Two Black Crows...
...However, Hollander's observations suggest that he could be one of the greatest art critics if he chose (indeed, he has often written brilliantly in prose about the work of favorite artists...
...for here...
...Or to show our inner selves, as some newer schools have maintained...
...Many modern and postmodern schools of theory have hidden their essential shallowness under an intimidating facade of rhetoric that dismisses any opponent as philistine, reactionary or psychologically flawed...
...Consider those wry Yankee aphorisms of Robert Frost—or W. B. Yeats, who captured his era and its principal figures in meter...
...She...
...The cave brings to mind Plato's metaphor for those shadowy perceptions that limit humankind's ability to see reality...
...But Hollander is no curmudgeon...
...Hollander dissects the metaphor "spinning a tale," and broods on the deepest purpose of creativity...
...In part, I think, this may be attributed to his enjoying artfully arranging patterns...
...The Parade" begins: Back in the days when the sound of the various different drummers Pounded out for all comers The same unchanging command To march against Whatever Or to go limp and be Dragged off in the piety Of some general palaver Was only a cut above Proclaiming with shows of passion The hemline length of fashion...
...Yet in Hollander's treatment, Moran becomes a Shakespearean figure, demonstrating the futility of our best efforts even as he impresses us with his heroic persistence...
...Our confidence already on the wane We wandered, wondering, ever more in want Of knowing where the the way really went...
...Today we have been conditioned to think of such pastimes as mechanical, and therefore antithetical to creativity...
...He has consistently been one of the most innovative poets writing during the last 40 years...
...In Hollander's poem the duchess is not even dead (Browning's duke never says that she is, except by implication) but has merely taken herself off to a convent...
...Pursuing a similar theme, "Then All Smiles Stopped Together" allows the subject of an imaginary painting in a poem to have her say...
...Figurehead and Other Poems (Knopf, 90 pp., $22.00), his 17th collection of verse, ranges from metrical quatrains and tercets to syllabic modes such as the Sapphic...
...Sometimes his fertile imagination dreams up a new form from a seemingly unlikely source...
...Figurehead contains meditations on the works of such masters as Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, Saul Steinberg, René Magritte, Edward Hopper, and Charles Sheeler...
...In other words, the work is an end itself, fashioned for what it must do (in this case, catch food...
...As with the best comedy, John Hollander's playfulness illuminates the brave pathos of human endeavor...
...It seems to him more like "goose-stepping jackboots" whose arrogant march is driven by a terror of the very sameness that "blurs each face/in its appalling mirror...
...Auden's anthology piece, "Musée des Beaux Arts," with its idiosyncratic description of Pieter Brueghel's Icarus, is a case in point...
...In "M & M's," playing around with his mother's name, Muriel, he stumbles onto its resemblance to the surname of a close friend and fellow poet...
...Participants were given a string of rhyming words, and whoever forged them into the best sonnet won...
...The contest ended abruptly when Athena noticed her rival's subject—the brutalities of gods against mortals...
...In the poems Hollander goes further, trying to find words to reproduce, rather than describe, the effect of a work...
...keeps her unimaginable feelings to Herself, and representing not parts of life But only her high art itself traps even The bee, let alone all the nations of the fly, with What she has woven of her ultimate thread...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 4
