Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling

Afterword

Afterword Kenneth Rexroth made a statement in an essay of his that I don’t seem able to pinpoint right now in any of his numerous books. As it is an observation I’ve always admired for its wisdom and insight, I will assume the risk of paraphrasing it as accurately as I can. He said that when African-American musicians travelled inexorably and inevitably up the Mississippi Valley from New Orleans to Chicago, they were also moving away from blues and towards jazz—in the same way that the Russian intelligentsia, following the failed revolution of 1905, abandoned naturalism for the occult. In both instances, he went on, the people involved were seeking a language they knew the police couldn’t possibly understand. I once read the exact quotation to George Woodcock, the anti-authoritarian philosopher, critic and sometime poet at his home in Vancouver. He laughed a wonderful laugh that until then I had never heard him emit, because he was hearing the words of someone who had arrived at the same conclusion as himself, but through a different cultural lens. For it was Woodcock who had commented, repeatedly, I believe, that the making and consumption of poetry slows during periods of peace and political freedom but rises significantly during times of war and repression, when free speech and other civil liberties are most in peril. Both figures knew whereof they spoke. Rexroth was an American, born in 1904; Woodcock, a Canadian, born in 1912. They reached literary adulthood during the 1930s. The betrayals of the Spanish Civil War affected them deeply. Both were conscientious objectors during the Second World War and victims of McCarthyism not long afterwards . Rereading most of my published poetry now, I see the same principle, the same argument, replayed through the filter of a later generation’s voice. It seems to me that the desire to create new codes of hearing—as it were, to address the equivalents of the jazzers and occultists while sidestepping the cops—is one of the two strongest elements in my work. At certain periods, it has been the dominant one. The outlook I describe seems especially suited to my long strings of urban haiku, such as those that make up Rites of Alienation (1988). Many other instances of this openly intensive manner can be found in The Dreams of Ancient Peoples (1991), Madagascar: Poems & Translations (1999), and The Sylvia Hotel Poems (2010). The last of these shows my other mode as well: what I call writing-to-heal. 57 In this second manner, I find myself, as many poets do, working through some of the tragedies, entanglements and insoluble misunderstandings that cause so much stress, remorse and grief. In making this selection, A.F. Moritz, I believe, has shown a strong preference for the first kind of voice over this second, or perhaps it’s simply the case that the healing poems have a tendency to go on too long. In any event, readers of this sampler will still hear this second poetic get to its feet from time to time and clear its throat. It often speaks in an elegiac accent. Indeed, one of the relevant books in this category actually is an elegy. A few words about how it came to be written might cast light on the strange ways in which such poems are composed, as when a memory, experience or emotional reaction has been under the skin for so long that it must one day get squeezed out onto the page. I once met a famous novelist and former war correspondent who had walked about for decades with a piece of shrapnel from the Vietnam War still embedded in one leg. It kept showing up on X-rays. Then one evening it simply worked its way through the skin and fell out onto the dance floor as he and his wife were celebrating their wedding anniversary by performing a vigorous tango. My book Singer, An Elegy is the poetic equivalent of that occurrence . In 1994, I published a memoir entitled Travels by Night. Once it was out, I began to realize that there were many things I still wished to say, and to understand, about my father, who had died young. I recalled a cinematic dream about his life that I had while travelling in western China. I struggled with the poem somewhat discontinuously, for the material was painful to the touch. The completed work finally appeared in 2004, exactly ten years...