I
The two women, French and American, wrote books that respect the fourteen lines of the sonnet but omit meter and rhyme. The line can be short or very long, if you still call that a line. Are they still sonnets? Only sort of.
Oxota: A Short Russian Novel was published in 1991 by “The Figures.” King of a Hundred Horsemen was published en face with the French in Marilyn Hacker’s translation by FSG in 2008. I’m drawing on their methods here.
I’m also drawing on my friend Geoffrey Hill’s The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin. I say “my friend.” Ha. I knew him a little, long ago. Hill doesn’t restrict himself to fourteen-line passages, but he writes in the same spirit as Étienne and Hejinian. His “lines” are sometimes longer than any of theirs. You could call this Hill’s late style.
Think of all the rigorous true sonnets written by Hill.
The thirteen sonnets of “Lachrimae, or Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans” are his best in the Petrarchan mode. But the blank verse sonnets of “Funeral Music” are still the ones I like best.
They simply take your breath away. (What a cliché.)
Hill loosened up when he came to America and took SSRIs for his depression. He revealed this himself in an interview. Can one call The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, and The Orchards of Syon drug induced?
Not really. Oh, maybe Speech! Speech!
I imagine I take more drugs than he did. More about that later.
I don’t know if Lyn Hejinian or Marie Étienne took any drugs.
Lyn Hejinian signed Oxota for me in 1996. She signed it “Love, from Lyn,” though I don’t think she really loved me. I was meeting her for the first time. I have never met Marie Étienne or Marilyn Hacker. The blurb says that King of a Hundred Horsemen involves “a complex but playful reinterpretation of the sonnet form and moves from the jungles of Indochina to the Atlanta airport.”
I’ve never been in the jungles of Indochina.
But I’ve been lost in the mazes of the Atlanta airport.
This is line fourteen.
II
Hillish, not hellish. You may have missed that. Early on he references both his difficulties figuring taxes owed for, it must be, whatever year corresponds to the composition of his section 99, and his “logical dyslexia.”
Regarding the latter, does he mean just formal logic? The kind taught by philosophers like our mutual friend Stanley Rosen? Or does he mean he just gets all messed up in a sentence like a dyslexic kid who, basically, can’t read at all. Certainly that’s not the case. He can even write. But we’ll let it stand, along with the problem of dating the sections of this long poem.
Hellish enough is our realization that Hillish speech! speech! in the book is intended to end only with his own death. He would not, he did not, see the book into print. Sections were sent in the mail to Kenneth Haynes, who took them in the order received and made the book. So Hill knew he was writing posthumous work.
Kenneth Haynes is writing his biography. It’s quite possible that the lives of Marie Étienne, Marilyn Hacker, and Lyn Hejinian would be more interesting than Hill’s and therefore make for better biographies. Hill was a dusty scholar type, burning his candle at just one end. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay who burned her candle at both ends, or said she did. Lyn, Marie, and Marilyn led and still are leading more cosmopolitan lives, not always in the context of the pedagogical imperative. Don’t forget that problem with taxman. If he’d not taught at Leeds and Cambridge and Oxford and Boston, he’d just pay a working stiff’s minimum. His student Tony Harrison actually wrote in “poet” where it asks for a profession on a UK passport.
Is poetry a profession?
A line can have as few as just four words.
Or just three.
Or two.
One.
Hill says he has become “approximate” and “hexed.” Then he says he finds that “shamming.” Upon which realization he’s prone to “slip into something comfortable, such as self-harming.” Indeed he says, “the crassest form of self-harm, that I have long practiced, is the poem.”
That doesn’t make the writing of poems sound like a profession.
And yet he was even Oxford Professor of Poetry.
The job’s not entirely honorary, but it’s badly paid. His half-deaf friend thought he heard GH exclaim, “I’ve been appointed Oxford Professor of Perjury.”
It’s true; he had.
III
But then everybody lies. Sometimes at least.
Oxota is subtitled: A Short Russian Novel, its sonnets meant to rival Pushkin’s in Eugene Onegin. But it’s not written in Russian, and it’s not a novel. I wonder if Hejinian read Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, published five years before her Oxota. It’s a real narrative, it’s a sequence of real rhyming sonnets, it’s more Pushkin than any king of any hundred horsemen might have been in French.
And I can relate to its acknowledgments:
My debts are manifold and various:
First, Stanford University
Where, with progressively precarious
Nature, my tardy Ph.D.
Has waxed, and waxes, lax and sickly
Second, to friends who’ve read this, quickly
Advised me to desist and cease,
Or burbled, “What a masterpiece!”
And that’s just the octave. The Golden Gate really translates Pushkin into Californian, a language spoken in that book by an Indian. Did he ever finish his Stanford PhD? I never finished mine and once lied that I was on the verge of doing so to get a job. Perhaps lied is too strong a word. I was living in London with my housemate Igor Webb and my soon-to-be bride Diana Adams. She attended the Russian Orthodox Church and studied the Russian language at Holborn College. She read me Pushkin in bed, start to finish, in that phantasmagoric year when everything seemed to be, well, phantasmagoric, as I said (thinking of H. James). We’d go to the Russian embassy for Stalinist musicals and vodka; we’d watch the old émigrés play chess; we’d go together through the list of questions provided to an applicant wanting a menial position with MI5. In those days her Russian was an asset. No professor of perjury like Geoffrey Hill, but still stretching the truth, I told the chair
Via a rare
Transatlantic phone call (June 1967) that indeed my dissertation was “almost done”
IV
When in fact it was hardly begun. And you can do enjambment even when you’re lazy and write your sonnets in prose.
Where was I? Diana. Russian as an asset.
A useful or valuable quality, person, or thing; an advantage or resource:
proved herself an asset to the company.
- A valuable item that is owned.
- A spy working in his or her own country and controlled by the enemy.
- That doesn’t count as a line. Just putting my cards on the table.
But was Arkadii Dragomoshchenko an asset for Hejinian in Oxota? I think so, as she thanks him in a note and quotes him in her chapter 109. According to the first definition. He was a valuable person and his Russian an advantage and a resource you can be sure, a man with useful qualities. She “owned” him in the sense that she acknowledges his being and his help. I own it too, so help me, that Diana was my own amanuensis now and then, in Russian and in truth. Something analogous you’ll find in most professors of perjury.
But what about “A spy working in his or her own country and controlled by the enemy.” Perhaps the enemy of Russian is my English. Perhaps in Ukraine it is Ukrainian.
(Writing this in 2022, I find we’re told by some to stop reading Russian books. You mean we can’t have Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy? Not without a touch of Putin, say the fiercest of the most committed faction.)
As I type this out, I’m listening to Valentin Silverstrov’s piano works performed by Jenny Lin. His “Duet with Silence” has almost no notes at all. There’s a note. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, but, but, but…and there’s at last another. I put the CD on as Silverstrov is Ukranian.
But back to 1991. It seems so long ago.
Quoting by translating and, she says, by mistranslating, Lyn writes as Lin plays a few more recorded notes of the “Duet with Silence” in my room.
And for me, in defiance of the laws governing the despondent progression and movement of days…
The unbearably white sun hangs immobilized in a strontium-turquoise dusty sky declining imperceptibly toward some boundary that is too speculative to allow one to differentiate anything from anything else…
A juggler is discovered in a church juggling fruits because he has no other “language”…and a sense of insane optical clarity alternates with the flashing heat of his hands moving in a predatory measured pace toward some materialization that is like…
That is like?
Like when I stood beside Diana in the London Russian Orthodox church and marveled at her beauty and her grace. It was an Easter service, and one stands throughout. One stands a very long time. I longed for something I could almost reach…something I might juggle as I could not speak…oranges, perhaps.
V
What Hillish meds did they feed you there in Boston, Geoffrey? I’m surprised that, with your reticence about your private life, you admitted to any at all. There’s a Boston poet whose dad I understand was your shrink, and I’m told by an informant (spy?) that you liked his institution well enough that you wanted to stay when they wanted you to go. You enjoyed all the board games and pickleball.
For me, the psych ward felt like being lost in the jungles of Indochina or the mazes of Atlanta’s airport: Entre le peur du bout et elle de maintenant, la hâte extreme de présent, se succèdent les peurs, celles de morts possible. Between fear of the end and fear of the moment, the terrible swiftness of the present, fears follow on each other, the fears of possible deaths.
Although I didn’t die, my wife Diana did. Far away from me and in another’s care, as I was no longer fit to serve.
I’d quote something in Russian here but haven’t got Cyrillic on my keyboard.
But I can write Cymbalta, mirtazapine, olanzapine, lorazepam, and several other words that signified for me no cure. I take them still, though only out of habit. Maybe what I’m typing here’s a talking cure.
In your poem to our mutual friend Rosen, you write in “Discourse”
Arbeitsknecht1 by adoption, I never
Hurl down advice, even to shake the building…
You’re magisterial in judgment’s gorge
Where the rocks are at all angles and the stream
Huggers its way through…
Bugger that, I thought when I read it—but then went on to this:
You’re magisterial in your own conviction
And a clown with it, and a judge of clowns.
1 Arbeitsknecht, German: gruntboy
A gruntboy is a rugged and exciting young man from the northeast of England who is outrageously foul-mouthed and toilet-humored on the outside but surprisingly sweet, tender, and devoted when he becomes your friend.
VI
Arbeitsknecht! Moi? Personne ne voit personne.
De temps en temps, quelqu’un va jusqu’au fond, on ne s’en remet pas, il a touché, mais quoi?
It’s hard to imagine GH posing as a gruntboy, even if Professor Rosen was magisterial in his own conviction and a clown with it. (See footnote to part V.) But first be certain that you’ve taken all your meds. It’s almost a poem if you count it out in lines:
Cymbalta
Mirtazapine
Olanzapine
Lorazepam
There was a time a few months ago when I would try to comfort myself by reciting the poem that was Diana’s English home:
Cherry Tree
Hacheston
Woodbridge
Suffolk
Take three of one, half a dozen of the others. I loved the place. Wrote about it many times in poems that worked for me like dowsing rods that hovered over secret wells. They allowed me to imagine green pastures when I was in the gray cities. Even though “the Hebrew is uncertain” I was comforted “in places of repose.” I dislike the alternative translation for what follows and think that you will too: “All the fat men of the earth shall eat.” What about the thin ones? Sends you back to the King James Version even if you’re not a royalist.
That second line above: From time to time, someone goes all the way to the bottom. No one can get over it. He touched something, but what?
John Matthias has published some thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and literary criticism, including his three-volume Collected Poems (Shearsman). His most recent books include Acoustic Shadows (Shearsman) and Living with a Visionary (Dos Madres). He is professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
