Robert Pinsky Reads Samuel Beckett's 'Cascando,' Disagrees with Paul Muldoon

At Slate, an argument between Robert Pinsky and Paul Muldoon about Samuel Beckett's love poem, "Cascado," is brewing. While Paul Muldoon writes "this is truly dreadful stuff" (as referenced in our recent Harriet post), Pinsky observes that Beckett's love poem is "clear-eyed yet passionate, personal and impersonal in ways I admire" in this review at Slate. From Slate:

The poem’s intensity and misgivings are epitomized by the invented word at the end of its first stanza. “Wordshed,” on the model of “bloodshed,” generates associations of violent conflict; from another associated word, “woodshed,” gush other associations: drudgery, storage, punishment, and (maybe anachronistically) the jazz musician’s verb for practicing one’s art, woodshedding. And opposite to that practice-time in art, the simple meaning of shedding words: falling silent.

The poem’s erratic, doubling progress follows those conflicted energies as it oscillates, I think frantically, between the two magnetic attractions of abundance and of silence. The traditional lover’s uncertainty or agony has, in this poem, a rhetorical counterpart in the struggle between embracing traditional eloquence and rejecting it. For instance, “the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want” is a line of iambic pentameter as regular as anything in Shakespeare. The reckless, hyperbolic eloquence of the images—those eye-sockets and the “black want splashing their faces”—collides with the flatly corrosive, meaning-dispersing, adverbial “all always is it better too soon than never.”

For me, that hovering, back-and-forth movement between passion and reservations, need and doubt, images and disavowals, creates a strong emotion. The feeling gathers force from the poem’s argument with itself. That self-exasperated, needy argument embodies my respectful disagreement with Paul Muldoon’s reference to the poem, in his review of two new collections of Beckett’s work, one of letters and one of poems:

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

Muldoon says: “Why go to the effort of establishing the metaphorical system of churning butter and then appeal to the quite different system of ‘pestling’?” My answer is that this poem, restlessly undoing and redoing itself, decidedly does not establish metaphorical systems. The “churn of stale words” creates and sheds, rehearses and shreds, pumps away and restores, actual feeling— the product and also the antagonist of the pumping heart or churn or pestle. The mixed metaphor, if that is what it is, expresses a tormented way (or whey) of feeling, disavowing, and needing love. [...]

Learn more at Slate. And participate in the discussion underway!