I'm Okay, I'm Just Floundering

A snippet of a quite engaging and sensitively written review by Conor O’Callaghan on Louise MacNeice called, quite badly, “His Master’s Voice” in Poetry, posited a curious idea that has been riding me since. Here is O'Callaghan's statement:
“The received thinking has long been that MacNeice hit a drab spell during the late forties and early fifties. Apart from those odd bright spots, it is true. Most good poets recognize the corked wine and fall silent. MacNeice was one of those who, floundering, write more than ever. Autumn Sequel, the most commonly cited example, is a jaded updating of its earlier, more energetic cousin. Never less than competent but seldom more than terminally dull, it is probably the kind of overworked, underinspired landfill Hopkins had in mind when he used the term ‘Parnassian.’”

The comment, taken out of context, sounds quite harsh, but since O’Callaghan manages to restore MacNeice to a state of grace by the end of the piece, I will only assure you that there is redemption, at least in O’Callaghan’s eyes, for MacNeice at the end of it all. But this idea of the poet who, for some reason, has lost his way, or lost his groove, or lost his jump shot, or lost his swing made me wonder whether there are other writers that I could identify as having gone through similar periods.
The headache is that such an assessment can only come long after the fact, when we are reviewing the poet’s larger work. Surely, it would have been hard for anyone to have determined that MacNeice in the late forties and early fifties had lost his mojo and would have been better off accepting the "corked wine" and going quiet. And even if there were a few prescient folks capable of doing so, surely MacNeice himself, could not have known that he had lost his “inspiration” or that the solution would be to stop writing. After all, to stop writing would have had to have been a rather permanent solution. For a poet to say, “I have nothing more to say”, or “I am saying everything so badly,” and then conclude that the solution to this is to stop, would seem like a quite mature and faith filled act. Panic, I can understand, and trying to write one’s way out of the morass, I can understand, but silence?
O’Callaghan seems to suggest that it is possible to see this pattern of waning skills in most poets. I am trying. It is easier to identify quite dramatic changes. Some have spoken about the difference between the Eliot of The Wasteland and the Eliot of the Four Quartets—a difference that has made people speak of Eliot as many hardcore reggae fans speak of Bob Marley: Only the early pre-Island Records stuff is any good, the stuff he did after that was just weak, commercial stuff—not roots, not edge. Conversion, it is said, killed Eliot’s mojo. But few would call the quality and substance of The Four Quartets “landfill” at all. Different, surely, but not “Parnasian.” Eliot, I am sure, did not think for a moment that he had lost it (except in those dark nights of terror when he looked at the blank page [smile]). In the same way, I suspect that MacNeice thought he was onto something. Indeed, according to O’Callaghan, Eliot may have been partly responsible for what he sees as a misguided effort to achieve greatness of purpose and scope in MacNeice's verse that failed so woefully. The question is whether silence would have been the most useful answer for MacNeice.
Most poets have silence imposed on them, but there are a few poets who are well-cared for by their publishers, poets who have become darlings of the poetry establishment, and who have earned, by the strength of their earlier work, something of a right to do all kinds of things with their poetry under quite prestigious imprints. There is a lot to be said for that space and freedom that such fortunate poets are granted. All poets should be granted that latitude. I think of Kevin Young, a clearly impressive poet whose first collection, Most Way Home, was heralded as the arrival of a great voice. In volume after volume after that, Kevin Young published massive collections and each of them attempting something quite grand, quite ambitious, quite different and often flawed. The brilliance was always there, but he was taking chances that the promise of his first volume allowed him to take. He would have to have known that Black Maria, a clever attempt to use the film noir aesthetic as the shaping framework for a collection of poems, was not just a risk, but a collection that he would have never gotten published were it his first book of poems. But I am convinced that Jelly Roll, and To Repel Ghosts, all complex and monumental in their ambition were necessary noises for him to make before For the Confederate Dead, his last, and seemingly most lyrical volume since the first book. This book is the most satisfying work of his that I have read. The truth, however, is even from my current vantage point, I don't think I have the distance to form a perspective from which to assess the relative value of these books that I am not entirely certain about. Perhaps it takes death, and a long period during which one’s legacy is shuffled around until it settles into place for such assessments to be made. This is why I wonder whether silence is an especially useful option.
Kamau Brathwaite, who, to my mind, is a genius of a poet has been publishing steadily for nearly fifty years. In that time he has experienced some remarkable and dramatic shifts in his work that we are only beginning to come to terms with, those of us who are interested in understanding his work as much as we love it. Many people only know Kamau Brathwaite’s still monumental, and as it turns out, most accessible trilogy of poems which were collected in one volume in 1971 as The Arrivants. If that is the only work by him one knows, one could do worse. The three movements are a lesson in the grand experimentation of sound and rhythm, in the force of history as the foundation for the poetic imagination, and genius of his use of multiple voices to create a striking work of epic proportions. After The Arrivants, he published another trilogy of poems, Mother Poem, Sun Poem and X-Self, each published during the late seventies and early eighties. These were more complex collections, more challenging, more difficult in the play with language, in the dismantling of the linear and in the sophistication of his mythic coding. (The three collections were collected in one heavily revised volume six years ago under the title Ancestors. Tellingly, the revisions reflect the new shift in his writing style.)
What followed the three individual publications culminating in X-Self in 1987 was a period that a reviewer like O’Callaghan might not call “drab” or “dull” but might well call inexplicable or puzzling or, at the very least strange. Such a label would make sense if, in fact, one was of the view the circumstances of life, if they become quite overwhelming and traumatic, and if they seem to be guiding the poetics of the poet represent enough of a caution to actually lead to silence. Brathwaite’s output during the eighties and early nineties engaged something he called the Sycorax mode of writing—an aesthetic that combines bit-map fonts, a complex of typological accidents and inventions, and hints of concrete verse, combined with a greater and greater shift towards a sometimes invented Caribbean “creole” or “patwa” to produce dense, intellectually challenging, emotionally raw and complex, works that blurred the line between history, memoir, poetics and theoretical texts. For many people the work of that period represents the zenith of his artistry, while for others, it is an inexplicable body of work that, they are sure, will have to be explained away when the grand assessments are done. Those were tough years. His wife died. Hurricane Hugo destroyed much of his private archives and his home in Jamaica. He was robbed at gunpoint in Jamaica in a traumatic incident that he would write about in his work. He wrestled with the peculiarly moribund university system at the University of the West Indies that found his “dabbling” in poetry a distraction for his appointment in history. Eventually, he would leave Jamaica, return to live in Barbados and at the same time, take up an appointment at NYU.
His more recent work, including, Words Need Love Too, and the quite stunning new volume, Born to Slow Horses, are far more accessible and seem intent on reminding us of Brathwaite’s singular gift which is to engage the world as we encounter it with the clarity of a prophetic voice wholly committed to the task stretching the language to its limits. The question is whether he should have remained silent in that in-between time. The answer, I am convinced, is no. Floundering, it seems to me, is better than silence for the writer.
In his chronically ambivalent (“No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered.”) review of Derek Walcott’s new Selected Poems, while William Logan does not suggest silence when things do not seem to be clicking as well, he does identify, in this retrospective that seems completely unsure of whether to dislike Walcott’s work or to praise it to high heaven, what he calls “Walcott’s most fluid and achieved work”. He declares that it “lies in the books from Sea Grapes (1976) through The Arkansas Testament (1987).” Since then, he sees Walcott as having lost something. Perhaps this is the moment of floundering. It could not help that in his last two or so volumes, Walcott has somehow hinted at the need to stop writing—one is not always sure whether it is fatigue he is alluding to or an anxiety about mortality. But in this later work—and we are talking about Omeros, The Bounty, Midsummer and, most recently, Prodigal--Logan seems unimpressed and deeply doubtful that they will remain with us as memorable works. Surely, Logan would not recommend silence on those fronts. One senses, though, that Logan’s ambiguous epitaph for Walcott is premature, as premature as his assessment. Curiously, Logan does not seem to recognize a curious way in which the volumes he praises are the most American, the volumes most clearly shaped by Walcott’s American sojourn. Still, that is not my issue here. I am interested in this idea of silence—self-imposed silence in the poet, in the writer.
Such an act must have its uses. George Lamming, a great West Indian novelist published his last novel in the early seventies. Altogether he published six novels all of which are now classic Caribbean novels. Since 1972 he has given talks, taught, been involved in trade union work and much else. But he simply says he had said everything he needed to say during the twenty years he was writing as a novelist. He chose silence. Is Lamming the wise one? Did Lamming attempt new novels and found them wanting or found himself repeating himself? Did Lamming know, the moment he finished the last book, that he was done—that his labors in this area were over?
There are no useful answers here. But I am drawn to this idea because I have come close to this decision. My father stopped writing poetry because, he claimed, he had “outgrown” it. He turned to fiction. He wrote only two novels, but he had hoped to write more. Ralph Ellison, at least according to the brilliant new biography by Arnold Rempersand, was too challenged bt the reception to The Invisible Man to muster up the gumption to follow it up with another novel. It never quite happened. He, too, went silent, but was this silence imposed on him? For my part, I have asked myself whether there is just a time when silence is what is required. I have told myself that when I go dry, when nothing fresh seems to come from me, I will stop. But I don’t believe myself. I don’t because I have to ask what is at stake. My legacy? I can’t devote my life to trying to define the shape of my legacy—that whole idea is clearly a curious one to me. I believe that legacy is what is left, everything that is left. There are things I would love to discard, but I don’t have the energy to do that. I will never know when I was floundering, but I suspect that for me, the floundering would be the last indication to me that I am still alive, that I still have something to live for, that it is not all hopeless.