Outstanding poems, and Jarrell's gunner

Having been involved with a few online poetry workshops for the past four years, I can think of exactly one poem posted online which I would venture to say was a truly outstanding poem. That isn't to say there aren't others, or that I haven't read others, it's only to say that I can think of only one at this point in time. Every once in a great while someone posts a poem to one of these forums which receives a great amount of praise; but in almost every case the excitement does down, the poem crawls down the board and slips quietly into oblivion.

I think it's possible that a poem which strikes a chord in readers almost immediately will end up going the way of the dodo bird when all the fanfare quiets down. It could be that a poem that is rewarding at first sight is at risk of not being revisited over and over by a great number of readers. I think the poems that truly become a part of us, as any outstanding poem will inevitably do, are those that take their sweet time unfolding themselves to us. They may have even looked awkward and ugly when we first read them. I wonder how Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream" would fare if it appeared in a poetry forum today? I sincerely doubt that it would be met with a barage of flattery. That particular poem became a part of me for two reasons: one, because not understanding it forced me to read it a hundred plus times over the course of the years; and two, because Stevens had a great ear and such a coy, seductive style.

That isn't to say an outstanding poem has to be mysterious. Take Robinson's "Richard Cory", for instance. I probably read that poem fifty times before I realized just how good it was. I probably "got" it early on. I mean, it's about as subtle as a punch in the throat; but some things you just don't really "get" when you're eighteen or nineteen. Robinson's poem can be appreciated at first reading but in a certain sense it can't be fully taken in until one has lived long enough. I love how the ideas are set against eachother in Robinson's poem: that we ought to appreciate what we have, a simple and ordinary plaitude which is suddenly rendered flimsy and trite when followed by the somewhat existential and fearsome thought that we might not ever be happy with what we have.

It's obvious that poems about death will have more impact than poems about, say, fishing or sex. Louise Gluck finishes one of her poems with the line: "The love of form is a love of endings." This line has more and more meaning for me the older I get. Someone once said, "everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian". Absolutism of any kind is anathema nowadays and saying this kind of thing wouldn't go over very well with most people, but I believe it's essentially true. I think Gluck's line rests pretty squarely in the Aristotelian camp, in that it's a nod to the theory of art in the Western tradition. There has been, of course, a huge shift away from this time-honored tradition to the point that art no longer requires any formal structure whatsoever, need not be linear or coherent in any way, and in some cases doesn't even have to make sense or mean anything at all.

As much as I flirt with the exciting possibilities that modernism and/or post modernism seems to offer, I think I'm strongly rooted in the Aristotelian camp myself, in that I think poems ought to have a point to make, a view to share, an experience to offer. To however remote a degree, most poetry, if it can be called that, will have some association with death and dying, and it will have this association due to it's having a beginning, a middle, and an end. We can bypass this by beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, after a journey through nowhere, but we only do so at the risk of wasting our own time and the reader's time as well.

I think Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" is a good example of an outstanding poem. Certainly this seems to be the common view. But I wonder now if I haven't been taking it all wrong? As usual with me, I seem to approach the poem as I do most everything else: ass backwards. What I mean is, I never come away from the poem without thinking that its subject is deserving of the utmost respect. I am simply unable to view the gunner as a helpless victim of the State who somehow inadvertently and tragically wound up manning the guns in a ball-turret on a bomber plane. To take this view, in my humble opinion, would be a concession to everything that is rotten and misleading about determinism. But when I examine Jarrell's poem and read some of the noteworthy commentary about it online, I see that this view could very well be the one which Jarrell actually intended for the reader to take.

The gunner falls from his mother into the State, as if his entire life in between his birth and becoming a combat fighter is irrelevant. In fact, the poem erases this entire period, and so what we have is a person with virtually no name, no real identity; a person who made no choices at all and is merely a marionette being played upon by external forces, primarily, in this case, the big evil force of the State. Actually, I always had trouble with that word for this poem. It blanks out the very crucial and relevant fact that the Allied forces during WWII were at war against what was arguably the most powerful and dangerous manifestations of collectivism ever known. They were at war against Statism itself (I don't mean to sound like a flag-waver and I'm certainly not trying to stir up any kind of nationalistic fervor in my fellow Americans. For the record I think our current war is an absurdity and our current President a theocratic, crusading jack-ass. I do have respect for the U.S. soldiers themselves, however).

By depicting his gunner as a helpless pawn of the State Jarrell is guilty of a huge historical and philosophical error; but nonetheless his poem forced me, over time, to come to terms with exactly what a ball turret is and with the brute fact that human beings who were sometimes not even out their teens had the sheer balls to crawl into one of those things and stay there, in combat, for as long as nine hours at a time, in sometimes below freezing temperatures, cramped into a fetal position and skillfully operating equipment, and all the time risking death and very often meeting their deaths. Nothing I have ever done in my life up to this point has been anywhere near as dignified and honorable as cramming into a ball turret of a bomber plane and flying into combat in defense of human rights and political freedom. At this point in time I would no sooner be able to do that than to loose a flock of geese from my rear-end. Perhaps when I was younger, and if circumstances were drastically different... I don't know. I'll flatter myself with that thought for a while, even though I know it won't last.

And what of that whopping final line? To me it has always pointed to the ultimate tragedy of war, and to what seems at first glance as a complete waste of a human life. But isn't it shamefully ungrateful, at least for some of us, to regard Jarrell's dead gunner as a faceless pawn of a military machine who served no greater purpose than to be washed out of a ball turret with a hose? I think it is. Doesn't that final line trivialize the debt a great many of us owe to people like him, and to the fact that millions of people honor his memory to this day? I think maybe it does.

I can't say that I wish the poem had never been written, though I do wish it had been written differently. The poem is certainly outstanding, but maybe it's outstanding for the wrong reasons?

Ball turret gunner

" 'It's hard to imagine a worse place to go to war in then the ball turret position of the B-17 Flying Fortress,' begins one history. 'Isolated from the rest of the ten-man crew, the ball turret was extremely cramped quarters and required a man with a slight build. In almost every case, there was not enough room for the ball turret gunner to wear a parachute.'

Colonel Budd J. Peaslee, a noted Group commander, remarked, 'It is a hellish, stinking position in battle. The gunner must hunch his body, draw up his knees, and work into a half ball to meet the curving lines of the turret. The guns are to each side of his head, and they stab from the turret eyeball like two long splinters.'

The Sperry ball turret was designed not for comfort, but for the defense of the underside of an aircraft. It hung from the bottom of the belly of the B-17, a tiny, self-contained, womb-like aluminum ball, bristling with two 50-caliber machine guns. On most missions, the ball turret gunner remained cramped in the fetal position for as many as nine hours. Functions as simple as eating, drinking or going to the bathroom became impossible. Temperatures plunged to more than fifty degrees below zero.

If the plane were hit, the gunner was completely dependent on someone up in the main fuselage to open the ball and help him out. If those above were too busy or incapacitated, he rode the ball to his death." from "Untold Valor" by Rob Morris

Aiming for plain speech

I've been sort of fixated lately on a period when I was mainly imitating the voices of other poets rather than trying to find my own. What I was doing at this time, which was roughly 1999-2001, was trying to incorporate my worldview into my poems in a way that I never had before. In this period I was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism; and I obviously felt that the content of my poems was of far greater importance than the form or style, since the poetry itself, if it can be called that, which came from this period in my life was obviously nothing more than blatant imitations of Shakespeare and Milton, though I'm not sure I recognized that at the time of composition.

With the poem "Wallace", however, I was definitely trying to imitate Stevens, who I believe perfected IP to the point that he represented the logical progression of Shakespeare and Milton (and, to slightly lesser degrees, Tennyson and Keats) into the modern age. My ultimate goal I think was to arrive at some kind of stately formal style which was an amalgam of Shakespeare, Milton, and a dash of Stevens, with which I intended to pontificate and moralize in high-style. A modern day didactic poet with a mission.

What I wound up with, or course, was some unbelievably bad poems. Luckily for me, I didn't have a computer at this time. I did send a few of the poems out to magazines but none were taken, and no wonder. In July of 2001 I discovered PFFA and the following was the second poem I posted there. The first was a little piece which was ignored in General C&C; this poem was posted to High Critique, in the days of yore when the forum which is now called Advanced C&C was split into two fora: High and Merciless:



ODYSSEUS (FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH)

Hell take the ships that were exalted shapes
On the canvas of your mind's eye, heroic vessels
That crested mountainous waves, that flew
With sails full blown in wind and rain:
All finery of a poet's vision, a blind
Fireside singer who, by immaculate singing,
Held my name from oblivion and turned
My deeds to legend. Now to the ash pit alarums
And clash of shields, the brazen shouts of war,
To Acheron the blood, the bristling of swords,
The heap of bodies in the languor of death,
For here is the matter in plain speech: I sailed
And battled with man and beast, redoubtable
In valor, braved the ire of jealous gods
On land and sea, knocked pell-mell like a doll;
But this is merely prop and scenery,
Superfluous adornment, artifice.
Pray, when you speak of me say this: he was
A soldier and seafaring gentleman.
Forget the empyrean lineage, forget
All talk of body's prowess, strength of sinew,
All incidental by-the-ways that gild
A common story. When you speak of me,
Recall I had a wife, a son. Say this:
He was a simple and self-centered man
Who strove for nothing but his hearth and home.

?/99


The poem was critiqued by Dunc and Bela, and the comments were accurate. Dunc suggested I find a voice rather than borrowing someone else's, and Bela smartly advised: "Dump the superfluous adornment, aim for the plain speech." I took the advice and have been working on writing poems ever since.

Because I have something of a masochistic streak running in me lately, I want to show you three other pieces written from this time period. After getting the advice from Bela and Dunc, and after taking the time to examine what I was doing and seeing how artificial and contrived some of my poems were, I quickly took these three pieces out of my main body of work and put them somewhere dark and secure. I forgot about them for a while but when I was going through my things recently I found them, along with "Lorca" and "Wallace", and I thought it would be neat to put them up here.

I am trying to be humble, despite that by my own definition of that word any attempt at humility has its source in that which is the opposite of humility; but whatever. I no longer think of myself as an Objectivist, although in terms of metaphysics and epistmology there is very little I find disagreeable in that system of thought. I am still an atheist but one who talks with God almost every day: which means I address the only concept of God which I find is deserving of worship: which means my concept of God in all Her supreme beauty, benevolence, and love (I don't use the feminine pronoun as a concession to political correctness at all. It's just that when I was composing a fictional story which delineated my personal concept of God ["Embers of Servetus"], I discovered that my concept of God was overwhelmingly female. I also discovered that the narrator of my story was female during the process of writing it, which wasn't what I initially intended, what with the title and all).

What I didn't know back when I was writing these poems was that there were quite a few Objectivist poets around (refering not to the old "objectivist" school of poets but to Randian Objectivists). I believe that Mike Farmer is one and I spoke of the issue of being an Objectivist poet with him via email. Unfortunately, most of the stuff I've seen from them is pretty lousy. Not nearly as lousy as the three following pieces, but pretty dang lousy.

***


TO ONE WITH ADAM'S CURSE
(They understood that wisdom comes of beggary. - Yeats)

To speak so well of beggars, to applaud
the practice of beggary, albeit Christian,
dilutes the freshets of Pieria, refutes
at once all Apollonian testimony.
That wisdom comes of beggary? Better say
that knowledge is born of ignorance, that light
is born of darkness; let us claim, moreover,
that poetry, rather than an act of making,
is the inactive issue of idleness,
the insipid progeny of indolence.
We would placate the haters of poetry
thereby: irreverent men, the word be-mockers,
and do injustice to what monuments
our kindred made on hallowed Helicon.
That mendicants exist is true; yet though
they are accorded a type of blessedness,
an impotence that ravishes the heart
and frailty akin to piety,
we need not take them as a sign or blessing,
for little or nothing comes of beggary.

4/99


TESTAMENT FOR A DEATH-BED

I would with devils in Abaddon dwell
than hymn forever on green hills in Heaven,
inhabit darkness and, in adamant chains
transfixed, in contemplation think for aeons;
albeit time become irrelevant,
eyes obsolete, and flesh inured to torment,
accosted in bleak perpetuity
by hideous and unconscionable furies,---
and yet a grave were better, or such fire
as turns the sinew to inanimate dust
and makes a paltry powder of the bone.
Better the mercy of oblivion
than be mere parcel of a throng that trills
in sycophantic everlasting. Come,
sweet consummating flames, finish by fire
days lived in joy, untrammeled by hosannas.

4/99



THAT OLD SAW
(And there shall be beautiful things made new... - Keats)

Beautiful things made new? Furnish a sty
with cleanlier muck where swill recidivous swine,
wallowing, slothful, unrepentent beasts?
Better to ford them over Acheron
A succulent fodder for the tines of furies
or supple fat for talons fain to rend.
Our house is built upon a clasping loam
that draws us ever deeper into mire.
Knock the house down, or suffocate in flame
the flagging timber, dress the walls with fire
that they may dance into oblivion
as bright as high-born women at a dance,
resplendent in annihilation. Build
(again, with trowel and sword in either hand:
that old saw. Though you've heard it often enough
it bears repeating) over solid ground.

4/99




I warned ya.....