“The tongue
is what we strop our words on.”
Sometimes
we’re not ready for a writer. Over time, values and tastes evolve, deepening
and decaying as we age. The writers we love at fourteen are unlikely to remain
unchanged after half a century. A few do – Kipling, Shakespeare – but we’re
always adding to and culling the private library we carry in our heads.
Fortunately, the world’s stock of literature is bigger than any reader and
perfectly indifferent to our decisions.
Several
years ago, the poet David Sanders, proprietor of Poetry News in Review, sent me
a copy of The Collected Poems of Henri
Coulette (University of Arkansas Press, 1990), edited by Donald Justice and
Robert Mezey. It wasn’t a matter of incomprehension or indifference. I saw the
technical deftness, the wit and sophistication accompanied by a satirical
tartness. Coulette (1927-1988) had many of the qualities I most enjoy in a
writer. He reminded me of Turner Cassity, but with the ferocity lowered. Still,
I shelved the book after one reading, grateful to David but untouched, like Teflon.
Last week, I
pulled the book out again, curious and guilty after hearing Coulette was
admired by Zbigniew Herbert. In their introduction, Justice and Mezey quote the
Pole as saying that while reading Coulette he felt “at once in the presence of
a major poet, one in complete control of the technical resources of his art,
but—more important to me—one who has seized upon thematic material of central
importance to the modern world.” The lovely line quoted at the top is from “The
Black Rose,” one of two previously unpublished poems Coulette dedicates to
Herbert. Here is the final stanza:
The black
rose, distilled, is our milk,
Our bitter
milk. Na zdrowie!”
In three
lines, Coulette alludes to World War II, a German board game (“Don’t get angry,
pal”), a Polish blessing and toast, and possibly to Paul Celan’s most famous poem. When Coulette makes a pop culture reference, it doesn’t feel like
slumming. He knows movies and detective novels, Horace and Raymond Chandler,
and sees no reason to leave them behind. “The Fifth Season” is from his first
collection, The War of the Secret Agents
and Other Poems (1966). The only allusion I hear is Homer:
“It will be
summer, spring, or fall—
Or winter,
even. Who would know?
For no one
answers when we call
Who might
have answered years ago.
“The harvest
will be in or not;
The trees in
flower or in rime.
Indifferent
to the cold, the hot,
We will no
longer care for time.
“Mortal, of
ivory and of horn,
We will
become as open gates
Through
which our nothing will be borne,
By which all
nothing now but waits.
“It will be
summer, spring, or fall—
Or winter,
even. Who will care?
We will not
answer when you call,
For nothing,
nothing echoes there.”
Coulette
values durability, a poem that will adhere for the long run. A poem ought to be
at least a cunningly made as a chair – a heretical thought for a poet in his
time and ours. If his work is suffused with melancholy, it also cheers us with
plain-spoken eloquence. In a suite of sixteen epigrams, Coulette writes in one
titled “The Collected Poems of What’s His Face”:
“Sixteen
thousand lines, give or take sixteen—
And no two
lines that you can read between.”
Honest
readers will fill in the blank. There’s much to read between Coulette’s lines.
Here is the final epigram in the series:
“A one-eyed
cat named Hathaway on my lap,
A fire in
the fireplace, and Schubert’s 5th
All silvery
somewhere on a radio
I barely
here, but hear—this is, I think,
As close as I
may come to happiness.”
In a 1983 interview, Coulette says of his friend J.V. Cunningham, the master epigrammist
of the last century: “My whole notion of what literature is about derives from
him, that a poem is in a sense a statement, that the problem of reading
somebody’s poetry is a simplified version of the basic human problem of trying
to understand another without imposing your personality or beliefs upon
another. But to really hear them and to really understand them. Now that’s the
human problem.”
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