PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews
Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and
the Life Writing by Daniel Robinson
(University of Iowa press, Iowa City, 2014)
and
Scholarship by Joe Safdie
Blazevox, Buffalo, 2014
William Wordsworth ranks in the upper echelon
upon the slopes of Parnassus. He’s generally considered to have written, along
with his pal Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the foundational texts of English
Romanticism marking the shift towards Modernism, The Lyrical
Ballads. The Preface for which, recognized to be primarily the work
of Wordsworth, calls for a poetry written in the language of the working class
(Wordsworth referred to the working man) and concerning matters
with which everyday regular individual readers would be able to identify. It
often sounds as if Walt Whitman stepped directly out from its pages as a poet
fit-to-order.
Joe Safdie teaches English at a small
community college down around San Diego. A former student of poet Ed Dorn, he’s
steeped in the lineage of American poetry that runs directly from English
Romanticism to Whitman and Dickinson on up through the Modernism of Pound, W.C.
Williams, and H.D. continued by Black Mountain College figures such as Olson,
Creeley, and Duncan onwards to its various manifestations in locales such as
Buffalo (Blakean Jack Clarke) and Bolinas (the ever present Joanne Kyger and
likewise mainstay Duncan McNaughton). Over the last forty years his poems
have appeared in numerous small press publications, including several
chapbooks, yet Scholarship is the first full collection of his
work.
Daniel Robinson’s Myself and Some
Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing looks at the composition
of Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic poem The Prelude which
spanned his entire writing life, undergoing three significant manuscript stages
and was only published after his death. Wordsworth completed the first, much shorter
two part version of the work now known as The Prelude in
1798-99 beginning his initial work on it nearly immediately after Coleridge’s
prompting, who urged in 1796 that, despite any substantial work as yet to
demonstrate it, Wordsworth see himself as “the best poet of the age.” In 1805
he finished a much expanded thirteen book version of the previously abandoned
work. Wordsworth’s The Excursion published in 1814 serves as a
kind of alter after-the-fact reverse-ur-text accompanying the ongoing
composition of the other poem. The Prelude conceivably
introduces the early life experience of the hermit-poet presented in The
Excursion. Throughout his later years Wordsworth repeatedly came back again
and again to The Prelude and composed a final fourteen book
version published in 1850.
Robinson, a former student of poet James
Dickey, utilizes his study of The Prelude to offer a supple
biographical sketch diving into Wordsworth’s ambitions as a poet and his
troubled relationship with Coleridge. He also takes the opportunity to discuss
broader ramifications for the role of the poet as maker of the work of art, the
interrelations between the poet’s life, his work, and his audience:
What the maker seeks to do is to find figures from his life that
will correspond with similarly peculiar ones from his readers’ lives and then
model for his readers what they can do with those figures, to produce creative
fruits of their own and to repair imaginations that become impaired during the
intercourse of everyday life.
Safdie is a poet straddling the hump between
the 20th and the 21st century confronting the
same desire, and accompanying problems, as faced Wordsworth two hundred years
before. Safdie’s “Watching Sports on TV” describes his struggle with writing
the poem at hand, “trying to make autobiography / into epic, like Wordsworth”
while simultaneously following a basketball game on television. Humor is
rampant in Safdie’s often lengthy digressively discursive poems wherein he
bandies about the weighty inheritance of poetic practice to which he’s albeit
an unacknowledged heir. He’s commonly found to be running through comparisons
between himself and poets of old, reconciling (or not) likes and dislikes.
my first insight – I hate Virgil
because I’m too much like him,
channeling the
heavens, surfing
the divine waves,
seduced
by the Father God into
thinking
there’s a plan instead
of just
letting things flow,
as Ovid did
(“Summer Reading (2011)”)
Safdie drafts his poems in clear dialogue not
only with past poets, but also with readers he’s well aware do not as yet exist
in any great number. Iowa is not knocking on his door offering him the next
visiting poet slot. Not that he doesn't recognize his own lack of interest in
attempting attain academic posts: “There was a job in Oregon I thought / I
could get, but I forgot to apply / by the due date” (“Saturn Return (The
Sequel)”) Yet similar to the Wordsworth who Robinson focuses upon—that is, the
young, unproven Wordsworth who only has his own inhibited ambition and the
backing of Coleridge to launch his grand poem The Prelude—Safdie
embraces the larger questions of the act of writing itself in his work.
Safdie proves himself the same sort of metaphysical
thinking-through-the-writing poet Robinson describes Wordsworth of being.
Although he never became the philosophical poet that Coleridge
wanted him to be, Wordsworth was interested in metaphysics. His thinking about
such matters tends to focus on how they relate to identity and self. He comes
up with a subjective metaphysics associated with poetics, with making, with
creating – both poetry and identity. Wordsworth’s chief subject – even before
Wordsworth himself – is the poem itself as a poem about the development of the
writerly self.
Safdie is interested in this same exploration,
pushing himself via his work to ask larger questions even as he understands
that ultimately he’ll likely have to settle for accepting much less than the rewards
of any sort of final summative answer: “What is poetry? I’ve been writing it
for a long time and I have no idea.” (“Afterword: on Scholarship”)
Despite the challenges not only of life but also the lackadaisical nature of
the inspiration offered at times from the work itself, ways of courting poetry
must be found.
later the Muse came
less often
no longer hiding in
the everyday
needing to be summoned
by odd rituals
marijuana
jazz the World Cup
(“Tribute to
Jack Clarke”)
Safdie demonstrates the same stamina Robinson
allocates Wordsworth to the dedication of a life practice in poetry: “If
there’s one thing that Wordsworth’s poetry shows, it’s that the writing of
one’s life may sustain the life writing it by giving a sense
of purpose, of being, of belonging – and of becoming.” It is the spirited zeal
to reach beyond one’s own self, to be guided by the Outside in practices which
develop the inside life. A set of principles Safdie discovers his own examples
of as every poet must.
…poetry
which has to come from sources
outside the
self as Spicer also said
still, it makes sense
to think of Jack as
Romantic
counseling concrete life
(“Tribute to Jack Clarke”)
As much as Robinson’s book is an introduction
to Wordsworth’s work, life, and poetics it is also a meditation upon the
working life of any poet practicing today. We’re all still Romantics, after
all, even those who would deny the Muse in their work. (Safdie: “We’re all
romantic / and all equally screwed.” (“Against Romanticism”))
When working through drafts of poems, even
those destined for recognition and study, there’s no fame that accompanies being
a poet. Wordsworth’s Prelude went overlooked his entire life
for lack of readers due to his own inert impulse to publish it. Robinson
remarks, “William Blake should have read The Prelude instead
of The Excursion, which gave him a bowel complaint.” Of course,
“like everybody else, he didn’t know it existed.”
Robinson’s book relates an image of Wordsworth
as the very practical-minded poet he no doubt brought himself into being as
opposed to the rather socially lopsided, opium-addicted Coleridge. Safdie is
somewhere between the two. While he maintains a steady source of income from
teaching he’s no academic and not at all averse to recognizing the hazardous
futility of the calling he’s willingly chosen. In the Poet Game, Safdie’s a
lifer: Whatever the consequences he’s all in.
I want to meet William
Blake.
Why not? When I was 21
I took acid
for the first time and
he addressed me –
“Now that you’re
here,” he said,
“what are you going to
do about it?”
I didn’t know what to
say,
much less what to do…
it’ll come to me or
not,
before that chain
rusts
(I’ve thrown away the
key)
(“What I want”)
That a poet such as Safdie goes
overlooked in our day and age doesn't bode well for him or anybody
else interested in poetry. I don't know whether Safdie has his own Prelude lurking
in a drawer or with suspended status of "in contemplation" somewhere
between his imagination and the page but given the range and depth found
in Scholarship I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover he
did.
*****
Patrick James Dunagan
lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson library for the University of San
Francisco. Many book reviews appear here and there. His most recent books
are A GUSTONBOOK (Post Apollo 2011) and Das Gedichtete (Ugly
Duckling 2013).
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