Re: JDS the Poet
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Tue, 16 Feb 1999 12:01:01 -0800
"Poetry is rubbish. Even boys at school ought to be whipped for writing
it."--Dostoevsky.
Yes, it does seem that many writers, in their early years, are drawn to the
poem as their preferred genre. And many, it seems, outgrow it and move on
to more *mature* modes of composition: the novel, the short story, the
play, literary criticism (essay or book format), the book review (just
kidding with this last one).
But even such an *adult* writer as Samuel Beckett, a personal heartthrob of
mine (*his* first book was, yes, poetry--and, after that, a volume of
criticism, then a volume of short stories, and then another volume of poems
[still no play or novel]) reverted (regressed?) to poems for a time in his
40s and 70s, and even his very last creative effort, at the age of 83, was a
poem. So: that JDS was writing poems in his 20s and into his 30s is
interesting, that he was bombarding The New Yorker with them during WWII is
more than interesting, and that he makes Seymour Glass a poet, and quite a
poet at that, takes us to another paragraph.
My contest question re JDS writing poems (possibly Seymour's poems) is more
than idle speculation. [Camille, thanks for your reply. I agree: *if*
there are poems, they will be S.'s. And what a volume *that* would make as
an addition to the Glass Saga Jigsaw Puzzle.] It is also a literary, or
writerly, question. If S. is, as Buddy contends in S:an I, to join the
"three or four *very* nearly nonexpendable poets" America has had, they had
better be pretty damn great poems. Bananafishers, don't you feel that every
time JDS has Buddy reproduce Seymour's *actual* words, there is a craftsman
holding his breath? For, these are the words of "our blue-striped unicorn,
our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable
conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet ... our rather notorious
'mystic' and 'unbalanced type.' ... [the words of] a *mukta*, a ringding
enlightened man, a God-knower." After that statement, *any* words of
Seymour's is a pretty tall order. Let alone, poems.
Please recall that Buddy gives us *prose synopses* of several of Seymour's
last poems, including the suicide poem on the desk blotter in the hotel
room. I contend it's not that Muriel hasn't given Buddy permission to
quote the poems. It's that, well (am I being just cruel here?), JDS, at
least in 1959, wasn't up to writing the poems himself. Writing poetry of a
Seymour Glass-level is a daunting task. I mean, if Ray Ford of The
Inverted Forest is a combination of Coleridge, Blake and Rilke and more,
whose names do you string together for a Seymour Glass? Which is not to say
that JDS has *not* written Seymour's 184 poems (*as Buddy reads them in that
notebook*--or even at a slightly lower level of achievement) in the last
forty years since the publication of S:an I.
I guess what I am arriving at is, that I think JDS the writer--*even
after* the classic Catcher, the writing-workshop-exemplary 9 Stories, and
the beloved-but-vulnerable-to-critics'-sneers Glass Stories (*my* personal
favorite)--would be pretty proud to knock off those 184 poems *himself*.
(Okay, I recall Seymour to Buddy re pride. And, yes, I know that it was a
character in The Inverted Forest who calls Ray that poet combo, and not the
narrator.) But I will still say it: Even more proud than another prose
piece of the Glass Saga Jigsaw Puzzle.
Or so thinks (calmly) this reader.