There's Poetry in Spyingy and Spying in Poetry
Brower, Brock
There's Poetry in Spyingy and Spying in Poetry by Brock Brower There is a theory around that a lot of spies are disappointed literati. E. Howard Hunt writes trash, and James J. Angleton once...
...During his career underground, Cupcake communicated incessantly by wireless in what gives every outward sign of being stanza form...
...Breath but.ofii’ts aeromancy xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx On its face...
...But Cupcake, of course, can no longer...
...He begins as a master-spy and something of a poetaster, but gradually grows into a blown asset and a near-great lyricist...
...us the final ‘cipher, the key to, how human lonelinessall the cutro.Uts and d,ead-letter drops and ,spies’ lies %e each daily employ-can be decoded., . On 9/30, Cupcake .sends out a message with . “Outstretched arms...
...Funding him by now must be an enormous Burden for whomever is running him, and What he brings in will never be any good...
...0, Isuppose we have been left with Harmless as a kind of humming 6 C can mean...
...After all, how many readers of Walt Whitman inevitably become male nurses during wartime...
...example, IMAGE...
...Brock Bower is a Washington writer...
...Cupcake’s “eleven-phase transposition grid” becomes the poetic rubric for his abiding despair...
...The meter, like any code, is a large part of the total intrigue...
...There are less important, barely identifiable assets in his ambiguous network, named Felucca, The Foot, Thumbtack, Allen Aspirin, et...
...E. Howard Hunt writes trash, and James J. Angleton once helped Reed Whittemore edit a small poetry magazine called Furioso...
...I recall His former crabbed privacies, his sad, Insistence on obscure French restaurants at Noon for passing messages, the bizarre keys For ciphers he would invent...
...He seems obsessed with his place in histories 0 f intelligence...
...Basically the book is one long intercept of the messages from a master-spy code-named Cupcake, who, says Hollander, “worked for an altogether inconvenient little republic which ceased to exist a good time ago...
...There is even a corollary to this theory which says that a certain elitist taste in literature is a likely indicator of overzealousness...
...That too is Cupcake’s fate...
...The line leaps from eleven to thirteen syllables, sending fortH an open, almost Keatsiim plea that fin wraps no messages, There are qo end ofifoms which, .’ enciphered in t,wilight, Are decoded in the blue morning air .. : . . But the same transmission contains another secret message, which can be found by reading down the outsides of the stanza, through the first and thirteenth syllables that have been added...
...The burden of the poem-and Hollander’s statement about the w-orld of spying-is the fashion in which Cupcake is transformed into a kind of ultimate cipher for the secret human condition...
...Or take Cupcake’s fellow agents...
...This, happens doubly, as all things should: in the realm of esgionage...
...it indicates death, an X-ing out, but beyond that, the Xs are the indices to another code (provided in the notes to the poem by Hollander) that spells out “TERMINATE CUPCAKE...
...He is now central to Hollander’s Reflections, the main cipher to Hollander’s intricately transmitted intelligence about the world of spying, about a peculiar network the assets of which were Notional characters, thinner than Yet fully formed on these pages they dwell in...
...But it does strike me that spies and writers, especially poets, do have something curious, even surreptitious, in common...
...really be terminated...
...The stanzas, however, have dates and destined receivers-6/ 10 (TO IMAGE), 6/15 (TO BUN), 6/16 (TO GRUSHA) -and went out often on secret, higher frequencies that Cupcake believed were available only to himself and, for *Atheneum, 1976...
...If iambic pentameter is martially dot-DASH, dot-DASH, dotDASH, dot-DASH, dot-DASH, the hendecasyllabic adds just that one more sneaky dot or DASH...
...Here, then,, ’ this, on all I frequencies...
...As a spy, Cupcake becomes a mere cipher, a naught in the...
...He is on the page, come in from the cold, and in his moment of greatest loss-his disappearance forever from the airwe can believe perhaps that he only regretted he had but one notional life to give for whatever country his was...
...The extra stressed or unstressed syllable gives a kind of breathless rush to whatever Cupcake is trying to communicate, either aphoristically : A clearly-broken, gaily emptied egg is All that the golden word omelette Or lyrically: . Their beauty, the ciphers...
...Lac grows daily more tiresome...
...putting the plain Sense into travelling garb is a kind of Singing...
...But his major contacts are with such spies as Ember and Lac, who, in turn, bear very marked resemblance to some leading poets of our day: Isaw Ember today at the Museum...
...eollapse of ‘his network around him...
...The theory and particularly its corollary seem to me pretty bogus...
...Lyrebird hears, and the last line of the poem goes out from Lyrebird to all frequencies...
...Now he seems an Illumination of the ordinary . . . . . . . as if his work were of the That “universal and public This is an encoded tribute to the poet John Ashberry, just as what appears earlier, as an incidental report, is a bleaker message of regret for the fate of Robert Lowell, nicknamed “Cal,” which read backwards would be How he has risen fussy wide world, manuscript...
...It has eleven beats instead of the standard ten beats of the heroic English line, and subtly allows a poet, i. e., Catullus, to delve deeply into secret human emotions...
...Regrettably for Cupcake, his control, Lyrebird, overheard all...
...It cries out, “0 STOP ME CUPCAKE...
...Perhaps it’s their willingness to employ any ruse, don any disguise, to get at all our dirty little secrets...
...And until They change the codebook, my Eleven seems a kind of measure fit for Reaches of feeling as wide as any mode’s...
...A much deeper psychological profile needs to be drawn of the black operator in either craft...
...W. H. Auden, for instance, could never resist reading other people’s mail, and what is a poet’s persona but a polite term for his cover...
...Or, just as true, vice vena...
...J3Ut.a~t he com: municator-the agent sending forth his messages-Cupcake offers...
...the purest form of language, Thrills the enciphering mind...
...that, too, while we work...
...In other words-putting the above in clear,” as spies say-the spy’s code is the poet’s metric, and Cupcake’s choice is the hendecasyllabic...
...Take, for instance, Cupcake’s code: That code itselJ...
...Maybe, for a start, from the rich intelligence haul contained in John Hollander’s Reflections on Espionage”, a closely held 1976 report on the clandestine mind, encoded as a supremely artful poem itself...
...Out of The Wasteland and the Rsan Cantos comes COINTELPRO...
...And finally there is Cupcake himself, for whom-going “in clear” again -let Hollander be overtly praised...
...If an agent accepts the aesthetics of Pound and Eliot, he must inevitably swallow their politics, and that ends him up a semi-fascist, organizing covert efforts to preserve the power structure against revolutionary elements, .for very nasty reasons...
...From the ashes of himself...
...The ultimate effect is one of loquacity, the intense effort to say all, to inform the world, out of the lonely isolation of the spy’s cover...
...But profitably for the pro fession - ei t her profession-the whole record has now been deciphered to expose the secret dictates of art that underlie the secret lore of spying...
Vol. 9 • March 1977 • No. 1
