Naughty Games and Imperial Imagism
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Naughty Games and Imperial Imagism By Phoebe Pettingell THE EPIGRAM WAS once considered a kind of poetry useful for clever commentary on the culture. Marcus Valerius Martialis...
...Much of Martial's verse is devoted to mocking sexual deviancy...
...Our culture would be more honest if we had writers who could produce parody without merely sounding partisan—epigrams are the opposite of talk show hosts simulating outrage against the other side while falling for the blandishments of their pet politicians...
...The comparison arouses nostalgia for earlier eras when rapier-sharp humor punctured the posturing of governments and the pretensions of elites...
...Rome, like ancient Greece, disapproved of homosexuality, but pederasty was considered normal, even admirable...
...Martial is not a great artist, but he provides refreshing social commentary and a cleansing humor that pokes holes in affectation and encourages us not to take ourselves too seriously...
...the best Oppen poems simply indicate lines of inquiry we might pursue, while also implying that investigations of such subjects are invariably open-ended...
...Martial’s targets were poseurs, social climbers, alcoholics, women who used their virtuous reputations as a cover for their affairs, sexual perverts, and literary critics...
...Assembling objects and images, Oppen derives meaning from collages made out of these elements: The 'inch-sized Heart,' the little core of oneself, So inartistic The inelegant heart Which cannot grasp The world And makes art Is small Like a small hawk Lighting disheveled on a window sill...
...What do we expect of a poem or painting or musical composition...
...Augustus, in founding the empire, pretended to be saving the republic...
...In the Introduction to Martial’s Epigrams: A Selection (Viking, 205 pp., $24.95), translator Garry Wills observes that everything in these “short insult poems exists for the final thrust...
...In addition to drawing from the seven volumes that appeared during Oppen's lifetime ( 190 8- 84), this one also contains verse that appeared only in magazines as well as unpublished lyrics...
...On an old boat they bought, they navigated the waterways of North America...
...After publishing Discrete Series, Oppen gave up writing for almost three decades...
...Since the compactness of the epigram adds to its effect, he realizes the best English renditions make use of meter and rhyme rather than free translation...
...Let us agree Once and for all that neither the slums Nor the tract houses Represent the apex Of the culture...
...Oppen belonged to the "Objectivism" group...
...He commemorated his own era's greatest disaster—the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.: What once in beauty and renown was cherished In fire and ashes has with horror perished...
...But fear not...
...His own epigram, however, owes much to Martial, whose work invariably carried a sting in its tail...
...His most significant work, still in the Modernist mode, was written late in life...
...He lived through one of the most chaotic periods of history, when old certainties were overthrown before people could come up with new ones...
...Hence, his sharpest scorn falls upon those who betray their intimates or spurn the benefactors who once supported their ambitions...
...Not really metaphysical...
...Its body brevity, and wit its soul...
...Nonetheless, this book performs a valuable service...
...He often uses modern substitutes for Martial's Roman orGreeknames...
...Oppen's poems enact his thinking...
...His understanding of the Roman Empire is matched by his grasp of the qualities that make Latin a splendid vehicle for succinct wit...
...Oppen served in the Army during World War II, but in the McCarthy era, fearing political repercussions, he moved to Mexico and did not return until his daughter enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in 1958...
...Having joined the Communist Party, he felt that poetry offered nothing useful to the international worker, so he became a union organizer...
...But as Davidson observes, Pound and Eliot amassed "cultural fragments toward an eternal dynastic edifice...
...better known to us as Martial, did not invent it, though his savage, often raunchy, lyrics perfected a form that continued to be popular through the early 20th century in America and somewhat longer in British humor magazines...
...But this puts other constraints on his interpretations...
...Political propaganda and advertising debased language in ways that made it harder for a writer to sound honest...
...To a flatterer pretending to be afraid of becoming an object of his satire, he scoffs: You cower, fearful of my caustic verse...
...Cosmetic...
...You are not good enough to bear my scar...
...A dwarfish whole...
...In his Preface, Weinberger lists Oppen's recurringthemes: "the Middle English western wind, Blake's Tyger, the boats in Maine, people in cars, his foxhole in the War, Mary's beauty, Robinson Crusoe, city walls, city streets, crowds, the young, tools, ditches, glass, and the words 'little' and 'small.'" This list is not to suggest that Oppen ignored broader expanses...
...Coleridge’s phrasing is somewhat equivocal, apparently because he doubted mere cleverness is justification for a species of poem...
...Auden or James Merrill have been able to make of the more famous Latin epigrams...
...Wills correctly identifies the conservative nature of this sort of humor...
...Cuckolds were figures of fun...
...For a terse definition, one can do no better than that offered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: What is an Epigram...
...Adopting a breezy slang to convey the epigrams' original flavor, Wills can be as entertaining a writer as Martial, yet sometimes he renders into doggerel what Robert Herrick or Alexander Pope transferred into genuine English verse...
...Marcus Valerius Martialis (c.40-c.102 C.E...
...Oppen's ultimate subject is the purpose of art...
...They are the barracks...
...Those trying to flee the fiery ash were struck down by poison gases released from the mountain...
...A political radical, his reputation soared in the 1960s and '70s when he was discovered by young revolutionary poets fed up with what Modernism had turned into and looking for ways to breathe new liveliness into language...
...Another resurrection, New Collected Poems by George Oppen (New Directions, 425 pp., paper, $24.95), has been edited by Michael Davidson...
...Opposing the fashion for rehashing mythological themes, he advised: Your lines are labored, far too superficial— The learned myths they treat are artificial...
...Yeats embraced fascism, TS...
...Martial often reminded his audience that purity is dull, and that if his books were not salacious they would probably not be purchased...
...For poets who might care to make you grovel, Seek out some starving scribbler in a hovel...
...Praying that she be protected from the terrors of the underworld he requests that the earth piled on her grave "press lightly on her, as she did on you...
...Prophetic...
...Wills is an ideal champion of epigrams...
...A place long hailed in poetry as favored by the gods for its beauty became a monument to the implacability ofnature...
...Adulterous females have always been fair game for epigrammatists, and in less politically correct times, so were older virgins or matrons still trying to attract men, especially those who were "cradle snatchers...
...The designation was devised by Louis Zukofsky, although as Kenneth Rexroth later noted: "Almost all the people Zukofsky picked as Objectivists didn't agree with him, didn't write like him or like one another, and didn't want to be called Objectivists...
...This set up an endless round of antinomies, of people professing simple pieties while indulging in complex depravities—the very people Martial homed in on with his radar for pretense and masquerading...
...But Wills quickly drops the analogy and goes on to cite the aspects of Martial’s world that resemble the United States’ culture: “Well, like the Romans, we Americans celebrate rural virtue while wallowing in urban vices...
...He influenced both the Beats and the Black Mountain poets...
...As his work often avers, there is a constant tension between our aspirations and the rather bleak details that constitute our daily existence...
...Unlike those poets, he was careful to mock society rather than Caesar, and thus survived while they lost their lives to Nero’s murderous rage...
...Certainties are never provided...
...Satirists skewer social pretense and decadence because they believe such behavior detracts from virtues they admire...
...In line with the times, he considered adult homosexual relations shameful and associated them with "oriental" (meaning Greek, Turkish, Egyptian, or Persian) decadence...
...Oppen's disjointed syntax became frighteningly disconnected toward the end of his career as he developed dementia...
...The latter in particular would present significant problems to English metrics and lose their decadent connotations...
...But neither one negates the other...
...Huge bulls are a lion’s prey, The butterfly can flutter safe away...
...he was concerned with materials for construction...
...Although one can debate Oppen's status among the great poets of the era, he unquestionably knew how to define the problems everyone faced...
...Give up Medeas, sacrilegious dinners, And all the tales ofinnovative sinners...
...Oppen produced his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934...
...So that slums are made dangerous by the gangs And suburbs by the John Birch Societies But we loved them once, The mechanisms...
...Quintessentially apoetof the early Modernist period Oppen started out sitting at the feet of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...
...Poetry was diminished in the eyes of the ordinary reader...
...Do we gape at the sunken ships or at the ocean floor they lie on...
...Since he lived on an inheritance large enough to support his wife Mary, daughter Linda and himself, the family was free to lead a nomadic life...
...In his 50s he briefly retired there, but was so bored he soon returned to the hurly-burly of Rome...
...The dated reference will send younger readers scrambling to the Internet to learn the identity of the onetime daunting Sunday night king of the airwaves and cutting syndicated columnist...
...The poet seems to have preferred boys to women, frequently waxing sentimental over them in a way that may arouse squeamish feelings in today's readers...
...He does not bowdlerize the frequent obscenities, some of which would be unprintable in this publication...
...To make your poetry appropriate, Some natural catastrophes relate...
...His writings are "a naughty game meant to elicit a socially pretentious shock...
...Still, his best output does not resemble that of anyone else writing in his time...
...The poet explained, "I was attempting to construct a meaning by empirical statements, by imagist statements...
...A classicist turned historian who often writes about moral issues from a Catholic perspective, he has recently produced an acclaimed translation of Saint Augustine's Confessions...
...Martial prized friendship...
...Does that differ from a skyscraper or a boat or a bird sitting in a tree...
...The Modernists were deeply concerned with the state of the culture and often became enmeshed in the ideologies of their eras: Pound and WB...
...Despite his nostalgia for rural virtues and values, as opposed to actual life, he was sometimes progressive in his literary tastes...
...Martial claimed to despise urban culture and to long for his farm in Spain...
...A typical epigram reads: You pose as cosmopolitan...
...Wealthy Romans, who built villas overlooking the bay of Naples on the slopes of Vesuvius in the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, died by the hundreds in a two-day period...
...It includes a Preface by Eliot Weinberger and a CD of the poet reading...
...Revive the epigram, I say...
...Find your excoriator in a bar...
...It was at this point that Oppen resumed writing poetry...
...He was always closely observing civilization, but avoided sounding grandiose or proffering compact answers to the eternal questions: Van Gogh went hungry and what shoe salesman Does not envy him now...
...One of Martial’s rare forays into the political arena castigates Marc Antony for betraying Pompey Two more tender lyrics memorialize a six-year-old slave girl whose playfulness cheered his household...
...As the translator points out, Martial is not very spiteful about real people, unless they have done him or his loved ones an injury...
...Oppen would not attach "more fragments to an already debased architecture...
...The early 20th century spawned innumerable literary movements with names ending in "ism...
...The perils of buying into our own spin have been amply demonstrated during this Presidential Administration, not to mention our current cultural decadence...
...Light And miraculous...
...In our own time, what might WH...
...Martial was born in Spain, also the birthplace of his distinguished contemporaries Seneca and Lucan...
...Eliot became a Monarchist, and Auden's early work proclaims Communist sympathies...
...Martial appreciated that contemporary scandals and horrors make fruitful subjects...
...Wills calls Martial “Rome’s gossip columnist” and compares him to Walter Winchell...
...Contemplating shipwrecks, he decided: We have a taste for bedrock Beneath this spectacle To gawk at The ambiguity of the syntax here is deliberate...
...both are compelling...
...He was deeply influenced by Heidegger and Wittgenstein as well as the 17thcentury metaphysical poet George Herbert, whom he often quoted...
...Oral sex was an object of disgust...
...The title refers to an abstruse mathematical concept...
...You claim that you could suffer nothing worse...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
