This is adapted from emails I wrote in 2022 (on February 10 and July 16 and 17). I post them now, because I have been updating the “Directory” of documents that I have saved on this blog, other than as posts. I could not remember why I had saved an “Annotation” from Harper’s, until I found the reason below. I take up poetry by T. S. Eliot, E. McKim, and Robinson Jeffers, in addition to the one I first quote.
An email friend shared a poem called “Merrymakers” (from “Four Poems,” London Review of Books, 9 May 2013), by Charles Simic:
A troop of late night revellers,
most likely shown the door
at some after-hours club
or a party in the neighbourhood,
still whooping it up
as they stagger down the street
with a girl in a wedding dress
walking pigeon-toed far behind them,
and calling out in distress:
‘Hey, you! Where the fuck
do you think you’re going?’
The poets sets us up, sort of the way young Eliot does in “Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table …
The shock from Simic is not in image, but in meter, which one might have expected to continue iambically:
A troop of late night revellers,
most likely shown the door
at some old after-hours club,
continued with their roar,
forgetting sensibilities …
As it is, the poem gets prosy. The lines are pretty much just units of speech, “end-stopped,” never “emjambed,” at least until the end.
Just printing the vignette as poetry makes us pay attention in a certain way. Art is everywhere, if we know how to see it. The other day I was walking by an ugly old electrical box on the street, covered with remains of old posters, and I thought it could be spruced up with a small brass plaque, as if it were a sculpture.
Polytropy 