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Take Oil / and Hum: Niedecker / Bunting
- University of Iowa Press
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Take Oil /and Hum Niedecker/Bunting Here are two poems. Basil Bunting wrote the first, “Ode 1.7,” in 1928. The day being Whitsun we had pigeon for dinner; but Richmond in the pitted river saw mudmirrored mackintosh, a wet southwest wiped and smeared dampness over Twickenham. Pools on the bustop’s buttoned tarpaulin. Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Clapham, the Oval. ‘Lo, Westminster Palace where the asses jaw!’ Endless disappointed buckshee-hunt! Suburb and city giftless garden and street, and the sky alight of an evening stubborn and mute by day and never rei novae inter rudes artium homines. never a spark of sedition amongst the uneducated workingmen. (Complete Poems 103) Lorine Niedecker wrote the second in 1948. I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, willows, Peter Quartermain 272 | niedecker and company sweet green, noisy birds and frogs to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl in her diamond fronds. In aisle and arch the satin secret collects. United for life to serve silver. Possessed. (CW 170; see also notes 414–15 and NCZ 151) They’re such very different poets you’d never mistake one for the other. Niedecker’s language is unmistakably spoken, conversational, at times almost casual—don’t get me wrong, she’s an extremely careful writer of very great skill indeed—but she does not display her consciousness of her art. Bunting’s a different story. He started out as more-or-less a satirist, moreor -less focussing in his earliest Odes on social and political absurdities, the passage of time and how we waste it, his own desolate condition having turned his back on love. A bit of posturing about some of those earlier poems, something of the poète maudit, the doomed poet, a self-conscious literariness about it all. “Everybody says it is extremely disagreeable of me,” he wrote to Pound in 1928, “to be unpleasant about sunrise and the loud chorus of complaints encourages me to think that I must have done something of my own at last” (Yale).1 Four years before that he wrote the opening poem of the First Book of Odes: Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise mournful candles. Sad is spring to perpetuate, sad to trace immortalities never changing. Weary on the sea for sight of land gazing past the coming wave we see the same wave; [35.175.172.94] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:15 GMT) Peter Quartermain | 273 drift on merciless iteration of years; descry no death; but spring is everlasting resurrection. (Complete Poems 97) Could he perhaps be feeling a little sorry for himself, a little rueful, the last lines an attempt to lift the poem out of that particular rut? That depends at least in part on whether you read the opening sentence as imperative or descriptive. In 1970, he would point to this poem as an example of how to write in quatrains—instructive as a technical example. There’s a highly formal quality, almost oratorical, to his language—it may be, as he put it, words in their natural order (whatever that may mean), but it’s not the language of ordinary speech—indeed I’m not at all sure that the inversion of “sad is spring” doesn’t violate that natural order. Bunting ’s language—syntax and vocabulary—is more like that of formal public speech, though too compressed for that, and overall his poems have something close to the flavor of the periodic and balanced sentences of the prose writers he so admired, Halifax and Swift—satirists both. Perhaps there’s a touch, too, of the prose of David Hume’s essays. There’s a strong deliberative quality in his poems, purposiveness, control. In choosing which poems to put in Writing #6 in 1970 (it was a generous selection, twenty-two pieces altogether), he clearly had one eye firmly on their usefulness to young poets learning their craft. He chose three to demonstrate Technical: The Quatrain and three, Technical: Quantity.2 A year later (November 25, 1971) he talked about one of the “quantity” poems, the ode “To Helen Egli,” which has an almost display-case opening: Empty vast days built in the waste memory seem a jail for thoughts grown stale in the mind, tardy of birth, rank and inflexible: love and slow self-praise, even grief’s cogency, all emotions timetamed whimper and shame changes the past brought to no utterance. (Complete Poems 101) “Greater Sapphics,” he said...