Blog112

Daily Notes on Poetry

23 May 2004.

The Human Sacrament

Is nothing new sacred? The book, the sky,
The women on the blue and red screen
Painted in Japan about five hundred years ago. Someone
Has tipped the screen over. I'll set it back up
Putting all the emotion in the thing felt at the thing done. A mirror can be clearer
Than a dog, but a small dog can run. Sacred
Is perhaps the relation that caused
My daughter to be born. Yet is she sacred?
She is a woman with someone's arm
Around her shoulders. She is of this world
The way that pipe is, that goes from the well to the house,
And the way the grass is that at this season leaps about up and under it,
And as the cigarette is that the gardener throws in the grass.
Has it a sacred flame? The pipe going to the house. Later, who knows?
The sacred is the sacrament. And it is what
We wanted once to be--
Give me some more coffee,
Some more milk, some more bread, some more breakfast!
Is nothing new sacred? The screen is standing up.
My daughter and her baby come for tea. The baby comes for milk.
They're here in time.

--Kenneth Koch. Straits. Knopf, 1998.

Forgive yet another of my acts of literary terrorism (I really like that characterization!), but I want to say that I think the above an excellent Iowa Plainlay. Yes, it's different from the majority of such poems in that it is more explicitly and thoroughly meditative. It is also on the edge of being what I've just now decided to call a sidewalk-talk plainlay for the kind of conversational poem the "New York School" of its author (and Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery) was noted for. It's a close call, but I (subjectively) deem it Iowa because it only has one jump-cut, the one from the narrator's setting the screen back up to the description of the mirror--a non sequitur I frankly don't get. Everything else is a flow of thoughts about a single quotidian suburban scene, as is the general case in Iowa plainlays.

I have not made a methodical study of it, but my impression is that New York School poems are breezier, more urban, more pop and high culture, more gossipy, than Iowa plainlays. They are mainly distinguished from them, however, by the prominence of their jump-cuts, which are rare in Iowa plainlays.

Hmmm, my latest name suggests "parlor-musing plainlay" as a new name for "Iowa plainlay" that would be companionable with "sidewalk-talk plainlay." Parlors can be in the big city as well as in the suburbs, or farther out, which is appropriate. Koch's poem could be set anywhere. I've been wanting to lose "Iowa," anyway.

Now, I'm starting to wonder how many significantly distinctive kinds of plainlays there might be. One would be the "imagist plainlay." H.D., Williams at his best. Its main difference from a parlor-musing plainlay would be its being in the third-person, and without editorializing. Then, there's the "contra-genteel plainlay" that Bukowski brought to its coarsest excellence. I'm not sure what I'd call the plainlays of the objectivist school (if I even have that school's name right). Don't know them well enough. Zukofsky is probably too burstnorm to worry about here.

What about the work of Stevens? Dylan Thomas? T.S. Eliot? "High-Art Meditation Plainlay" for Stevens's freeverse poems. Probably just "songmode poetry" for Thomas's. That's a different category from "Plaintext Poetry," the rubric plainlays come under. Eliot's technically interesting work is in the jump-cut category somewhere in Burstnorm Poetry; his other work is probably straight songmode poetry. Okay, this is rough, but I'm only now considering the various kinds of knownstream poetry there is. I've spent most of my critical life thinking about burstnorm poetry, which needs discussion much more than knownstream poetry does. I hope to get help with my names, and notified of kinds of plainlays I've missed, but--from past experience--don't expect to.

To begin clarifying what I mean by "parlor-musing plainlay," let me return to Kenneth Koch's poem--which, by the way--I like a good deal. Its clearly free verse and using techniques standard in American poetry for at least fifty years, so is a plainlay. I bracket it where I do because:

(1) it is about subjects that might come up in any average parlor conversation

(2) its diction is conventional, flat

(3) it has a (wonderful) concluding epiphany, or blossoming expression of a kind of high understanding of the moment the poem is most deeply about, or mainly about--"They're here in time."

(4) its equaphoration--i.e., similes, metaphors, and the like--is minimal; it is, to put it simply, straightforward

(5) it is personal, told in the first-person (although the narrator is less overtly emotionally involved than the narrators of most parlor-musing plainlays)

(6) it is uncontroversial--i.e., unpolitical, not sectarianly religious, not moralistic or dogmatic

(7) it is unintellectual--although intellectually deep

(8) it is predominantly anthroceptual--i.e., about people (though domestic objects are more overtly present)

I can't think of any other elements of the parlor-musing plainlay it has, but suspect there are others. I still haven't made up a full list of such poems' usual (but not obligatory) features. I hope in the months ahead to occasionally analyze a poem I consider a plainlay as I have here, and gradually firm up my concept of what each kind is.

Before leaving Koch's poem, I want to say a little more about my opinion of it. I admire the way it quietly breaks out into epiphanies, one after the other, about--well, blessedness. Things in their right places. The miracle of the pipe going to the house, connecting. The world--family and simple family utensils, and grass--is sacred. The final cliche that I believe all poems worth attention find a way to making fresh. Then the continuation of the speaker's affectionate, easy-going humor to its peak in the pun about his daughter and her baby's being here in time: in Time, the way the figures on Keats's urn were, but also at the right time: ready for the contents of the appropriate pipe, to continue the connectedness the poem is in the last analysis about. All this makes the poem a very superior one, I believe--one I would be proud to have produced.

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