American Poets Project

The American Poets Project, published by the Library of America, has made available "the most significant American poetry, selected and introduced by today's most distinguished poets and critics, in inexpensive, elegantly designed, and textually authoritative hardcover editions."  And how.  I picked up the Selected Poems of Kenneth Koch, edited and introduced by Ron Padgett, last night at St. Mark's Bookshop.  Padgett's introduction ably captures the many stages of Koch's poetry and life; a life which was "highly energized by the mystery and pleasure of being alive and by writing poetry that became a part of that mystery."  That must be the textual authority they were talking about.  I added to my purchase in a kind of "gee, look-what-I-like-to-read moment" the Times Literary Supplement.  I could tell that the cashier knew better.  After he waved goodbye to another customer, I put my things on the counter.  He looked down toward me, assuming an air of exhausted glumness that seemed to ask, "You're that kind of asshole, huh?"  The chauchy grin that had spread across my face answered him, "oh, why yes I am."  Still, they let me take the thing home after paying for it.  A review of Frederick Seidel's Selected Poems and Ooga-Booga confirmed some suspicions.  And beneath it was "Conversation", a poem by Nick Laird (a renaissance man for our times).  The conversation seems to be between two cultures.  American and British.  Not that the two sides are engaging each other directly, but that within the poem their fallible traits are represented by Laird's given specifics.

You can't believe the kind of thing
my kind go on about, and I in turn can't
understand the way your lot continually

shout, and shout each other down and eat as if
someone's about to lift their plate and smash it.

That's old news to us and not particularly thrilling.  But he saves the real observation for last.

I'd point out what we talk about we talk about

because we speak in code of what we love....

How somone else was nailed to a fence.
How they gutted a man like a suckling pig
and beat him to death with sewer rods.

Ah, so while yanks might lack some social graces, the impeccable restraint of the Brits has twisted them inwardly, gnarled their imagination around the violent and grotesque.  Or so I've taken it.  There's an incongruity in the level of insight offered by each description.  Americans are loud and eat lots.  Britains are buttoned-up psychopaths.  Maybe Laird just really wanted to express the latter and couldn't find a better place to start from.  Have a great weekend.

Comments

[Robert]

Laird's poem is not about the US and the UK; the conflict he describes is between the Nationalist and Republican communities in Northern Ireland, and the "sewer rods" murder is quite specifically that of Robert McCartney, murdered by the IRA (after the "ceasefire" and "peace process"). Laird was born in Northern Ireland, and the violence (on all sides) of that dirty, low-level civil war will have marked him. So don't worry - the poem isn't about your country at all!

[Mike]

Wow! Talk about having my mind stuck in a groove! Thanks, Robert.

[Mark F]

There's no such thing as "Nationalist and Republican communities" in Northern Ireland. Though there is a specific difference unique to Northern Ireland between the terms "Nationalist" and "Republican" (one meaning, in this context, in support of the use of violence in their cause (Republican) one not (Nationalist)). I think Robert may have meant something like "Nationalist/Unionist".

Laird's poem is probably intended as ambivalent as to whose community is speaking to whom. Whomever is "My" and "your" "lot" does not carry any specific traits unique to either community. Indeed, it may not necessairly be different "communities" but simply "families".