And that's what leads her to her last line, when she's there in the boat, and the fish is gasping and-ploosh-"I let the fish go." Because that's what you have to do. You take the moment, you do your best to describe it, it fascinates you, and then when you've done your best to give it to people on some printed page, then you have to let it go.
For the rest of her life, when she was asked to give a reading, they wanted her to read that poem. Till she completely lost track of the reality behind it and didn't want anything to do with it and wished the anthologists would pick something else.
And if you listen to her reading it, you'll notice that there's a tiny moment just after she says "And I let the fish go" before the tape hiss stops. In these old poetry recordings, the audio engineer always pulled the level down too soon, immediately after the last word, without any mental reverb time, and oddly enough it works beautifully. You hear "Ffff, and I let the the fish go, ffff-" and then silence. You're in the empty blankness before the next poem. The black water. The fish is already gone, out of hearing. Even the hiss of the tape, the water in which the fish swam, is gone. You have to return reality to itself after you've struggled to make a poem out of it. Otherwise it's going to die. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long. She knew that. The fish slips away unrhymed.
I think I'm going to go to RiverRun Books and look at the poetry shelves. When I see new books for sale there that I already own, it makes me happy. It makes me feel that there's part of the world that I really understand.
10
Thomas Edison's people convinced Alfred Tennyson to chant the "Charge of the Light Brigade" into a microphone. You can hear it in a BBC collection, and you can hear it in a CD that comes with a book called The Voice of the Poet. Tennyson sounds like this:
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
Hobble leg, hobble leg,
hobble leg owhmmm!
Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
But under the static of the wax cylinder, did you hear what Lord Alfred was up to? He was using the regular four-beat line, but he was using triplets within each beat. One-two-three, one-two-three:
That's how he reads it, with the triplets. Triplets are called dactyls or anapests in the official lingo, depending on whether they start with an upbeat or not. But those words are bits of twisted dead scholarship, and you should forget them immediately. Put them right out of your head. Wave them away. The poetry here is made up of triplets.
Triplets are good for all kinds of emotions. People think they're funny-and they are. They work in light verse and in limericks. "There was a young man from North Feany-rest. Who sprinkled some gin on his weenie-rest." Dr. Seuss uses them: "A yawn is quite catching, you see, like a cough." Ya-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, tum. Light.
Or you can use them for a love scene:
That's by Mary Louise Ritter, a forgotten poet, out of an old anthology called Everybody's Book of Short Poems, which once sold thousands of copies.
Or you can use triplets to dispense advice:
That's a poem by Alice Carey that was very big a century ago. If you read it aloud, you might feel yourself declaiming it too bouncily. But if you sing it, you'll find that you slow down and you begin to hear the wisdom in what she's saying:
James Fenton-who is the best living love poet-uses this same triplet rhythm, with the same end-rest on a four-beat line and the same warningness: "It's something you say at your peril (rest) / It's something you shouldn't contain (rest)."
And you can mix triplets together with duplets. Swinburne was the great rhythmic mixmaster, and before him Christina Rossetti. And Vachel Lindsay was good at it, too. Vachel Lindsay was a chanter and drumbeater. In the twenties, for a short time, he was probably the most famous poet in the U.S.A. Listen to what he does.
Now what has he got going there? He's got triplets in the first part of the line-"factory windows are"-and doublets in the second part-"always broken."
Bumpada, bumpada, bumpum, bumpum
Bumpada, bumpada, bumpum, bumpum
Factory windows are always broken
Diddle a diddle America
We want to live in America.
It's everywhere.
And sometimes the rhythm isn't a double or a triple, it's a quadruple rhythm. In other words, sixteenth notes, not eighth notes. And sometimes, often in fact, it's a quadruple rhythm made up of an eighth note plus two sixteenth notes that lead you into the next eighth note. That sounds complicated, but when you hear it you'll recognize it as obvious and familiar-something you've been listening to for your whole life. "Death comes with a crawl, or he comes with a pounce," as Edmund Vance Cooke said.
I'm dancing around the barn with my new broom. Dum deem, deedledeem, deedledeem, deedledeem!
WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE nobody mentioned Vachel Lindsay. Not even a whisper of his name. I heard a lot about Pound and Eliot. We had to read "Prufrock," which is a lovely poem, and "The Waste Land," which is a hodgepodge of glummery and borrowed paste. And I heard about the Spoon River Anthology, and the Black Mountain poets, and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, of course, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and end of story.
But Vachel Lindsay, in his day, was big. He went around doing a kind of vaudeville act using poetry. A one-man minstrel show. He was famous for it.
And one day on one of his tours he came to St. Louis, and there he met Sara Teasdale.
Sara Teasdale was a much better poet than Vachel Lindsay was, and he recognized that, and he fell in love with her and chanted his poems to her and beat his drum for her, and later he dedicated a book to her. And eventually he proposed to her.
She didn't marry him, because basically she saw that he was a lunatic. Very unstable and he had seizures from time to time. But they corresponded for years. And as his fame dimmed and people forgot about him, he got crazier, and he began to threaten his wife-he'd married a young teacher- and he began to have paranoid thoughts that her father was after him. His wife became terrified of him. They had very little money. And when he would go onstage at some provincial women's club, they always wanted him to do his old stuff. "Do the stuff where you bang the drum and sing about Bryant and the Big Black Bucks. Not the new stuff. We don't want the new stuff." And one night back at home he had a fit of rage, and then he calmed down and went down to the basement. His wife called down, "Are you all right, darling?" And he said, "Yes, honey, I'm quite well, thank you-I'll be up shortly."
And then in a little while she heard a sound, blump. And she sat up: something is not right. She rushed downstairs and there was Vachel staggering up from the basement, going erp orp erp. Obviously in extremis. And she said, "Darling, what's happening?"
And he said, "I drank a bottle of Lysol."
Seriously. He died of it, in agony. And it was good that he died because he could feel that he was getting violent. His time was over. He had contributed what he had to contribute. He could sense that. His kind of poetry, which was so performable and so immediately graspable, had fallen out of favor. People like Ezra Pound-who was even crazier than Vachel Lindsay was, and who also, by the way, beat a drum sometimes when he gave readings-were laughing at him. They thought he was a joke. Modernism was winning its battle with rhyme, and he didn't want to be around when Pound and Williams did their victory dance. So he left the scene.