Drag Me Home Alive
What I’ve Been Reading: Sharon Olds knows how to swear. She has other talents, of course, but for me, someone who loves poetry that can best be described as ‘rude’, it is exhilirating to encounter a writer who knows when to drop a good “fuck”. Consider this section of ‘Love’, one of the suite of poems called Stag’s Leap that recounts the breakdown of a thirty-year marriage:
“I let him go, I lay and stretched on love’s
fucking stretcher, and let him wander on his
own the haunt salt mazes.”
“Love’s stretcher” wouldn’t work without that “fucking” in the middle of it, the thin patch of ice that will drop the unaware into cold water. Olds’ is a precise art — her poems are mostly about family, and death, and trauma, and abuse, and she navigates such horrifying terrain with a striking ability to put one foot after the other — but not a fragile one. As soon as she seems to be straying too close to the prosaic, she flips her head from side to side and lets her gaze settle on something new; often something hideous.
Take, for instance, ‘The Last Hour’, in which Olds’ ex-husband clumsily attempts to embrace her, a poem both funny and deeply, darkly sad.
“Suddenly, the last hour
before he took me to the airport, he stood up,
bumping the table, and took a step
toward me, and like a figure in an early
science fiction movie he leaned
forward and down, and opened an arm,
knocking my breast, and he tried to take some
hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,
and then we stood, around our core, his
hoarse cry of awe, at the center,
at the end, of our life. Quickly then,
the worst was over, I could comfort him,
holding his heart in place from the back
and smoothing it from the front, his own
life continuing, and what had
bound him, around his heart — and bound him
to me — now lying on and around us,
sea-water, rust, light, shards,
the little eternal curls of eros
beaten out straight.”
Olds’ gaze is scattershot. At times, she slips into a pocket of rhyme — “around our core, his hoarse cry of awe” — only to distract herself with repetition — “at the center, at the end, of our life.” Her verse reminds me of that old Raymond Carver quote about getting in, getting out, and leaving nothing behind. Olds is interested in a technique for the precise amount of space that it allows her to communicate something, and then she is interested no longer. And when her interest wanes, it is usually accompanied by a flash of something ugly: that little ‘tut’ people make at the front of their mouths when they are looking to move on.
Sharon Olds
And then there is the ugliness of what she seeks to express. Stag’s Leap, which she sat on for ten years, worried that the emotional content would hurt her children, let alone the husband that left her, is filled with a trembling, sometimes overwhelming sense of shame. Olds is first and foremost embarassed about being the spurned woman. She hates that she has been wronged, and she hates what the wrongness does to her, but she does not appear to hate the person who has wronged her. Her gaze goes inwards. In ‘Known to be Left’, she enviously wonders how other people go on; how they bounce back from pain.
“Sometimes
I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this …
I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.
I am so ashamed before my friends — to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best.”
Such willingness to embrace the unpleasant — to go against what some might consider poetry’s prime directive; to expand the world — reminds me of the work of Robert Lowell, a poet whose gaze I never truly escape. Like Olds, Lowell sits uncomfortably under the tag of ‘confessional’ poet, even though his book Life Studies is largely seen as beginning the sub-genre.
Robert Lowell
But he is too messy, too antic, to be considered merely a silver-tongued man on a therapist’s couch. He too has a ceaseless eye, one always hovering on the horizon, and his best work flits in and out of comprehendibility and the nets of ‘structure’.
Consider, for instance, ‘Skunk Hour’, a poem that begins with a description of his New England home and then swerves sideways into suffering.
“One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town…
My mind’s not right.”
Even when Lowell seeks to be at his most direct, as in ‘Man and Wife’, a paean to his wife Elizabeth Bishop who held him through the worst days of his mania, he cannot stay on a straight path.
“All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad —
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye —
and dragged me home alive…”
Metaphors bump up against clean admissions of want; clarity is submerged by ugliness. This is the poetry to show to those who imagine that verse has to be clean, and simple, and descriptive. As good as Olds is at swearing, Lowell is just as talented at interrupting himself.
“Dragged me home alive,” has rattled through my head a lot over the last few weeks. It has been a strange time. I am building things, and I am knocking things down. I am an antic-church planner, throwing skunks into the baptism bowl. It’ll get better — it’s getting better every day — and verse like Olds’ and Lowell’s helps a lot. That and the people I love, and who love me.
I make no promises, but we’re hopefully at the stage where this newsletter will go out weekly again. I hope you have been well. I’ve missed you.
Three Good Things on the Internet: My friend Jared Richards has just started a Substack. It’s great news for two reasons: Jared is a fantastic writer, and the more of his content we get the better. Secondly, I like the Substack model, despite my suspicion regarding any form of content distribution based on the often exploitative “flexible work model” of companies like Uber. “Be your own boss!” is just a way of saying, “underpay yourself” these days. But in a media landscape that sometimes falls back on old habits, it’s nice that writers now have the freedom to pen literally whatever they want, and have that content find an audience.
Speaking of which, I’ve also been having a wonderful time with Evan Williams’ Sentences that Have Stuck With Me, a Substack newsletter that does what it says on the tin, breaking down often one or two lines of poetry or song at a time. I blame Williams for getting me totally wrapped up in the world of James Tate again, and from there hopping over to Bill Knott. Speaking of, here’s my favourite Knott poem, which is called ‘Security’:
“If I had a magic carpet I’d keep it
Floating always right in front of me,
Perpendicular like a door.”
Hey, you know that David Lynch guy? The other day I stumbled across a one hour loop of the Twin Peaks creator sitting in a shed, smoking, listening to rain, and talking about art. Is this ASMR? I guess this is ASMR. Watch it and become calmed: