CPR - Letters to the Editor

Editor's Note
The Contemporary Poetry Review is pleased to publish selected letters to the magazine, some of which have been edited for content and clarity. The editor can be contacted here.

Concerning: David Yezzi's review of "At Melville's Tomb"

Mr. Yezzi,

Just a note to say I enjoyed and admired your CPR piece on Crane. And I think your reading of “At Melville’s Tomb” strikes the right notes. Two notions occurred to me as I reread the poem with your commentary. One is that Melville himself had written a poem called “Monody” for Hawthorne—a poem Crane doubtless knew. Crane is here explicitly placing himself in a relation to Melville like that which Melville bore to Hawthorne. Given that Melville and Hawthorne shared a close friendship, this might be seen as an act of presumption, or it might be simply an earnest tribute.

The other point concerns the word “fabulous” in the last line. The “fabulous shadow” is a shadow, or after-image, that is the stuff of fables, fictions, inventions. The sea may therefore be something more than death. It is the repository of spent life and achieved thought. That’s why Crane can speak in stanza two of “The calyx of death’s bounty giving back / A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph . . . .” The idea, not clearly spelled out, I agree, seems to be that human achievement flourishes and disappears, but may now and then be revived by a sympathetic spirit. In the more rational formulation of J.V. Cunningham,

Some man so deftly mad

His metamorphosed shade,

Leaving the flesh it had,

Breathes on the words they made.

Regards,

Dear Mr. Hilbert:

It was with something like delight and felicity that I read (and listened to) David Yezzi’s piece on Crane. I think it was Stephen Stepanovich who likened the enterprise (doomed, of course) of paraphrasing or explicating the meaning of a poem to the act of picking a Chinese water flower (they’re made of paper) from the water and attempting to examine how they work. In the end, what one holds in one’s hand is a wad of wet Kleenex, dripping, misshaped and unrecognizable as the thing it was while it floated so hypnotically in the water. The same goes for Shakespeare, Blake, Berryman or almost any poet for that matter. How on earth can you explain Eliot’s simile: “when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table.” How indeed can the sky be anything like a drugged patient? For that matter, take Burns’ “My love is like a red, red rose.” Women are not like roses at all, not in any way. And yet . . .”Remember this,” said Dylan Thomas: “every rose is wormy/and every lovely woman’s germy.” That’s the beauty and mystery of metaphor. Helen Vendler in Words Chosen Out Of Desire does an explication, a line by line exegesis, of Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream” which points out what a poor thing the paraphrase of a poem is alongside the original. Even take a deceptively easy and accessible poet like Stephen Dunn. The more deeply you try to say what one of his poems means is to completely miss both the music and the form the poem makes on the page. Indeed the Greeks dismissed poets and wanted them classified for making these things called metaphors. Plato exiles them for it from his Republic. Today, one of the reasons Franz Wirght is such an individual poet is because he absolutely defies this exegesis jazz. How can a cloud be the “color of a wolf’s desperation”? I don’t know but I have walked (with Wright many a time) beneath a cloud of that color. His translations of Char and Rilke are some of the finest we have because they are arrived at by a sense not everyone possesses, and that is the magic of metaphorical language. And because of our predilection to paraphrase, we often lose great poetry in the process. One of Hart Crane’s most famous lines is “the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.” Originally, it read “the seal’s wide findrinny gaze toward paradise,” which he changed because a friend told him he had made up the word “findrinny.” It is I believe from Moby-Dick and I still like it better than “spindrfit.” I take no umbrage with Yezzi’s article and commend him more than anything for bringing a great poem to light again and to a new generation of readers. I have “At Melville’s Tomb” memorized and my students are absolutely stupefied when I recite it for them. How can “the dice of drowned men’s’ bones bequeath an embassy”? I don’t know but I’m sure a happier human being because Crane posited the remark. Thanks and all the best. I look forward to getting CPR every month. Keep up the terrific work.

Sincerely,

James Kirk