Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling

Introduction

ix Introduction One of the archetypal characters of the modern imagination is the impeccable but threadbare man glimpsed moving through the crowds, scarcely a shadow, or walking along a wall, nearly merging with the twilight: a mysterious character who, if encountered, reveals a combination of the aristocratic mind, the man of honour, and the poet. This is the figure that the verse of George Fetherling raises in our hearts, which then are made to become the cityscape he crosses and goes to ground in, in which he’s almost an alien and an outcast but which strangely he possesses more fully than do the solid citizen, the politician, the technocrat, the business person. The alleys, the poor rented rooms, the minuscule dramas or expanses of noia passing under weak, acidic light in abandoned precincts, move forward and take their rightful place as facets of the city equal to any others. Better than equal: the repositories of the reality that belongs solely to poverty and struggle, and that has been removed from the artificial world of technique, publicity and wealth. Hence, these lost zones display their symbolic character as images of the truth of many an experience that would seem to be their opposite, occurring in the busy plazas and shopping districts and splendid towers and clubs, in the midst of crowds intent to enact in some cases a businesslike, in others a manic, satisfaction: a truth that irrupts only when suffering and isolation penetrate this bright facade, as inevitably, for everyone, they must. This haunting and haunted character permeates Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling, and in this the poems selected reflect the temper of his eleven volumes of verse, from Our Man in Utopia (Macmillan, 1971) to The Sylvia Hotel Poems (Quattro, 2010). In the first poem here, the singing voice identifies with an alley cat, and lyric imagination follows the small beast, returned by night to freedom, wildness, and vulnerability. Its nocturnal patrol of images has something to do with the poet’s human experience, something to do with his observation of urban cats, and something to do with the generous library of fictional and filmic precedents he carries inside him: Simultaneous with this writing the dull salutes of keys on paper I live again like an alleycat silent on bricks and concrete nimble on ledges and fire escapes x / Introduction Back of the Yards crossing the street only when necessary and then very quickly . . . And in the second-last poem chosen,“Mappamundi,” the poet wants to summon “all the travellers / passing through” to have them experience their ultimate distance from the smallest, most essential versions of an integrated society, couples who reply “to either’s silence with the silence of the two together.” In this poem we glimpse the human environment of the isolated speaker as he registers his separation from the loved one. She is a specific woman, but in the context of the book she converges with humanity, as represented in its most cherished productions, especially the modern city, its home. In this home, the singing voice has a poor room, so it somehow has a place there yet it is far separated too: Cracks in the ceiling plaster are the rivers of your body. In the patterns of the mutilated lino I find faces, yours and those of saints and everybody’s favourite sacred parent. Fetherling has always had his own characteristic understanding and version of this modern archetype, which emerges as early as the original picaresque, Lazarillo de Tormes (in the person of Lazarillo’s second master, the impoverished knight), is fully realized by Poe (in the narrator / subject doppelganger of “The Man of the Crowd” and in Poe himself), and thence passed on to Dickens, Melville, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Kafka, and many others. We thus can find Fetherling related to the early Eliot, but he has found ways to escape Eliot’s domination, both in the texture of his verse and more particularly in his dramatic approach. The first lines of “Alleycat” identify the poet’s feline wanderings as a simile for his shaping and vivifying his experience in the creation of poetry: “Simultaneous with this writing / the dull salutes of keys on paper / I live again . . .” The separation of the third line into two halves,“I live again / like an alleycat” allows the poem to start with a grand upthrust of assertive energy in three words before it falls to rehearsing the poor appearances...