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I must have
read the title poem a dozen times. No, more. Without needing puff or blurb,
the dust jacket of Adrienne Rich's new book simply has that poem printed on
the back: you can't not read it when the book's lying around. It's a spare
poem, stripped down. You could it read as a credo. It's also a big poem
(though not long) that asks its readers for a close reading of how its made
and what it proposes. And since that's what I've given it, the book itself
has remained unopened many times.
Tonight I
think
no poetry
will serve
is the poem's turning moment between personal recollection and the conduct of
war. From its opening lyric address, you've no idea where the poem will go:
'Saw you walking barefoot / taking a long look / at the new moon's eyelid'.
Nor do you expect how it is going to sound after these flowing or longer
lines like 'sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair'. (Some commentaries read
this opening as addressed to a lover in the past tense; I'd rather think of
it as addressed to a younger self.)
But you have to open the book to be reminded of how that word 'serve' might
operate in the poem: the book's epigraph is a dictionary definition. 'No
poetry will serve' (that is: be sufficient, join the military, be a servant
and so on) for what comes next - 'will serve / / Syntax of rendition', and
its change of register to where
verb pilots
the plane
adverb modifies
action
which appears simple enough ('noun is choking') until you think about how
language serves to describe 'rendition'.
How do you write about war anyway? 'No one writes lyric on a battlefield' is
the response to that question given by 'Quarto'. But Adrienne Rich goes ahead
anyway: 'I think I can do it if I just lurk / In my tent pretending to /
Refeather my arrows'. Through myth might be another response: in 'Reading the
Iliad (As If) for
the First Time' the focus turns to horror:
'Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze / /Horses turn away their heads'. And inevitably
it comes into the strong chant of a list poem titled 'Ballade of the
Poverties':
Princes of
weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are
poverties and there are poverties
There's the
poverty of wages wired for a funeral you
can't get to
the poverty of bodies lying unburied
The book ranges much more widely than this though, and backwards in 'Axel
Avakar', a section addressed to a 'fictive poet, 'counter-muse', which I've not
fully grasped yet. Perhaps inevitably since she's now over eighty, age and
death and illness have their pages too, illness registering as 'hell' in
'From Sickbed Shores' because she finds it 'exemption from feeling', or
--surrender
to un-belonging,
being-for-itself-alone, runged
behind white
curtains in an emergency cublicle, taking care of its own
condition
If 'being-for-itself-alone' is Adrienne Rich's hell, she doesn't stay there
long, even though in 'Powers of Recuperation'
She's old, old, the incendiary
woman
endless
beginner
because she is 'A woman of the citizen party', always engaged, and thinking
out into the world.
By chance I read Derek Wallcott's White Egrets just before Tonight No PoetryÉ and I can see that points of contrast
with her writing are determining how I read them both now. He and Adrienne
Rich are of an age; he too considers age, death, illness - but in taking
stock Derek Walcott is looking backwards; Adrienne Rich, forwards. Their
styles are as different as could be, Derek Walcott's full, ornate, and highly
coloured, a rich dessert compared to the minimally punctuated, stripped down
language Adrienne Rich uses. There's much more space for the reader in
Adrienn Rich's book - which you have to enter to come to terms with the
poems. Which is why I'm still thinking about them.
©
Jane Routh 2011
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