Notebook (Denise Riley, Louis Zukofsky, &c.)

Denise Riley

Scrubbed-down skies and cold, what slid in behind yesterday’s rain. Stuck, walking the dog, with Wallace Stevens’s line “the pleasures of merely circulating”—“that things go round and again go round / Has rather a classical sound.” And with the poignant way Denise Riley so pertinently (and casually) allows rock ’n’ roll detritus into a poem, material deposits of lyric vocables simply put down. The poem a lightning rod, grounding stray bits of lingo, the straggling common signifiers of one’s “era.” Thinking particularly of “Rayon”—out of Riley’s the Selected Poems (2000):

The day is nervous buff—the shakiness, is it inside the day or me?
Perhaps the passions that we feel don’t quite belong to anyone
but hang outside us in the light like hoverflies, aping wasps and swiveling
and lashing up one storm of stripes. In tiny cones of air.
Yet you enact that feeling, as you usually bzzzzzzzzz get to do it, while I,
I do this. If it takes me all night and day. Oh Carol.

Riley’s note: “‘Rayon’ ends with the line sung by Neil Sedaka.” (For me, what wells up out of that final line of deadpan lyric-speak—half-scorn, half-glad—is the Rolling Stones, off some nameless bootleg . . .)

—

Louis Zukofsky, out of Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), quoting James Russell Lowell out of a piece called “White’s Shakspeare” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859:

          ‘So soon as a language has become literary . . . so far as poetry is concerned . . . (as in writing Latin verses) . . . a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar . . .
          ‘Shakespeare . . . found a language . . . not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers, a versification . . . which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory feet that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges are insensible . . . poetry had not been aliened . . . by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables . . . the living tongue resembled that tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves were languaged—and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression . . .’

And Zukofsky points to both William Carlos Williams’s “The Botticellian Trees” (“The alphabet of / the trees // is fading in the / song of the leaves”), the vigors of speech (“song”) being thwart and witness to the seeping-in of bookish inconsequentialities, Latinate sediments. Zukofsky’s argument (put succinctly here: “in Shakespeare, seeing is pleasure: for wisdom sees”) tends to make tongue secondary to eye, whose pleasure (Zukofsky quotes Aristotle out of Nicomachean Ethics: ‘For an activity is intensified by its proper pleasure, since each class of things is better judged of and brought to precision by those who engage in the activity with pleasure . . .’) and sight he determines to suffice. Zukofsky:

          Free-born reason freed from Aristotelian demonstration shut its eyes on the Philosopher’s ‘sure’ sense of sight . . . and like the seventeenth century ode became increasingly tongue: grew men who are part poets by virtue of their ‘chop-logic’ . . .

(Wordsworth, he of “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure” is quoted in Zukofsky’s Bottom precisely once: “‘And often eyes’.”) Comparing Zukofsky’s Lowell excerpts with their originals,* one notes how much of Lowell’s essentially Wordsworthian emphasis—lamenting any “gap between the speech of books and that of life”—is stripped out. Here, Zukofsky’s famous integral “Lower limit speech / Upper limit music” is substituted by the Zukofskyan proportion “love is to reason as the eyes are to the mind”—a formula that leaves the tongue lolling, wordless. Zukofsky senses the inertia of the proportion (“logic always asserts identity or says something like the theological carol: ‘One is one and all alone.’ To avoid circuity is to say instead: No tongue! all eyes! be silent. But no artist in words dares act the six words of this command, unless he desires not to exist.”) Quoting Prospero in The Tempest. So: “things go round and again go round . . .” Oh Carol.

* The pertinent originals:

So soon as a language has become literary, so soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of life, the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression and even in thought. For words and thoughts have a much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary.

And:

Shakespeare, then, found a language already to a certain extent established, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary- and grammar-mongers,—a versification harmonized, but which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson’s satire upon Marston’s neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak as his country nurse might have taught him. It was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue resembled that tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves were languaged,—and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human nature.