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| Robert Pinsky |
Abandonment and Identity in Robert Pinsky’s new book At the Foundling Hospital
article
by Michael Todd Steffen
In Robert Pinsky’s new collection of
poems, At the Foundling Hospital, we
get timely expressions of doubt, about facts, about information, the language that
attempts to manage facts:
It’s
not
Exactly
our fungicides killing the world’s bees.
The
theory is, rather, the fungicides make the bees
Die
from our pesticides, otherwise harmless. Or,
Maybe
it’s the other way around, who knows?
Pinsky has elected to title the poem
“CUNNING AND GREED” after bits of dialogue inserted in the poem from Dickens’
novel David Copperfield, resonating
with the theme of the book of poems, with its title designating special
hospitals or shelters (comemorated at the Foundling Museum in London, which
also includes an impressive collection of 18th century art work) where abandoned
infants, or orphans, Dickens’ heroes, could be left to be cared for.
Near
the end Uriah Heep says, David
Copperfield,
I’ve always hated you, you’ve always
been against me.
Copperfield
retorts, As I’ve told you before, it’s
you,
Heep, who have been against the
whole world…
Your artful greed and
cunning—against the whole world.
And never yet has there been any
greed and cunning
That did not do too much and
overreach themselves…
It is interesting that the poet for his
title has inverted the accusing words from the passage, greed and cunning, to “CUNNING AND GREED.” Language is easily
manipulated, even the words of Charles Dickens. It is a fact that undermines
all “facts,” not threatening to poetry whose domain is the imagination, yet bothersome to the social as well as
natural sciences that use language to assert truths about humanity and the
physical world. So the confusion is permitted as to what is killing the bees,
the fungicide or the pesticide which makes the fungicide deadly… Or, “who
knows?”
Poetry is hard enough to define. Some
like it for its strangeness and riddlesome quality, for its ambiguous
utterances producing irony or mild double-entendre, conveying two or several
meanings simultaneously. “CUNNING AND GREED” serves as a good example of this,
one of the many ways Pinsky’s poems can step beyond just pleasing us to
dazzling, while they instruct—or rather, bring up things we perhaps need to be
concerned with. We are not in the age of Lucretius or Pope where didacticism
goes over with appreciation. So Pinsky defers ideology and the sermon to quotes
from Dickens, managing to avoid any obvious banner-waving about a troubling
environmental phenomenon (the spreading death of honey bees, thought by
Einstein and other leading scientists to herald the end of our natural food
chain) by leaping from the passage in David
Copperfield to the mention of the bees. This way, he has called attention
to the plight of these beneficial creatures without too much souring our
pleasure at the reading, without getting in our face about it. The Dickens’
quotes are like old museum pieces. The “who knows?” protects us with its mild
indifference or nonchalance. Though we have more and more cause of it, we don’t
appreciate alarm. We may have just picked up on the bees themselves in the
passage, which quietly appears to be about the confusion between fungicides and
pesticides. The real problem gets lost in the debate. The passage mimes somewhat
the national debate, about bees and everything else, about our being.
The thing about “information” these days
with the Internet in everybody’s palm 24/7, there’s no shortage of it. For this
reason, bringing up the threat to the bees gets a little more focus by its being
showcased in a book by a nationally honored poet, not the vast anywhere of
cyberspace that allows everything and anything. Among all the grave subjects he
could take on, Pinsky’s discernment and delivery distinguish his poems. We may
pause to remember the poem doesn’t place the national debate at its center, or
bees, or David Copperfield. It holds up some weighing ideas in the title,
“CUNNING AND GREED,” which are not directly addressed in the poem, while it
sings and interweaves these various concerns, perhaps softly ruing some facts, disowned
children and their agencies, a threatened environment, in a palatable way that
is like simply giving voice to these pains and anxieties, singing the blues, as
poets and singers do.
This is present in the flower at the
beginning of the poem. The peculiar orchid is an example of cunning, or
artifice, artfulness, in one of many deception strategies we recognize as
intelligent in nature:
An
orchid that mimics an extinct female bee survives
Persisting
for generations with untouched pollen
Stagnant
inside it: an unmated simulation becoming
A
funeral portrait. Floral, archaic as rhymed verse.
It is a self-reflexive trope for the poet
to announce that “rhymed verse” is “archaic.”The poem on the previous page,
“THE WARMING,” also on an anxiety of the age, chants in rhymed couplets,
bemusedly in the opening about the sexual origin of song, the symbiotic partner
of the poem, the lyric:
Young
men like my uncles in olden times would “croon”:
Walking
or at work, a musical inward groan:
The blue of the night meets the gold of the
day.
Ramona. Dance, Ballerina.
Too-ra-loo-ra-lay.
I
asked my mother, why did they sing like that?
Her
enigmatic answer: They’re in heat.
Stopped
at a light just now a guy in his van
Their
same age, sound system blasting, windows down.
We
men like sounding hot. Or warm and charming—
Even
folk singers who rhyme about global warming…
Music has long been a key topic in
Pinsky’s poetry, whether it’s a “Song of Porcelain,” “Louie Louie,” or a canto
translated from Dante. The theme pulses with a strong vein in the new
collection in titles like “Mixed Chorus,” the jazz rhythm poem “Horn,” in a
recitation game called “Baseball” in “The City,” or in “Glory” evoking an ode
by Pindar reminding us of the power of verse to celebrate and to be remembered—for
over 2,000 years! If poetry is memorably significant, though, it is also as we
find it in the title poem, “THE FOUNDLING TOKENS,” a lot of spare reminders and
wishes in the way of personal keepsakes, scribbled notes, identifiers:
At
the Foundling Museum
A
wall displaying hundreds
Of
scraps, each pinned once
To
some one particular infant’s
Each
with surviving particulate
Ink
or graphite in studied lines
Betokening
a life…
Like the debate about fungicides or
pesticides, rhyming poetry and rhyme’s archaic quality, music and poetry are
both poignant and wondrous but also frail and evanescent.
My
friend was in a coma, so I dove
Deep
into his brain to word him back. I tried
To
sing Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So
in
Ray
Charles’s voice. Of course the silence grew.
I
couldn’t sing the alphabet song. My voice
Couldn’t
say words I knew: Because I Could
Not Stop For Death, He Kindly
Stopped For Me…
(“IN
THE COMA”)
(With the reference to “the alphabet
song” perhaps we get a glimpse at a former poem that was very popular for
Pinsky about ten years ago, “A, B, C”—“Any body can die…”)
Curious as the sound of a musical
instrument being played, the opening poem, “INSTRUMENT,” makes a myth of the making
of the first lyre out of a tortoise shell and strings of rabbit gut. We
normally think of cat for the gut of stringed instruments. The rabbit in this
poem perhaps brings an allusion to the fable of the tortoise and the hare, reminding
the reader of the distractions, frustrations, impatience and ultimate slowness of
the victory of finding music. The process involves the work of “a little
newborn god” (Love, portrayed as a child god?—or perhaps left—“newborn”—at a
foundling hospital), in an effort to sound the mystery of the—
Sweet
vibration of
Mind,
mind, mind
Enclosed
in its orbit…
Louise Glück has praised Pinksy’s “taste
for assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions.”
So the solution to “Instrument,” as an
artifact of the thinking triadic Mind, mind, mind itself:
The
newborn baby god—
As
clever and violent
As
his own instrument
Of
sweet, all-consuming
Imagination,
held
By
its own vibration:
Mind,
mind, mind pulled
Taut
in its bony shell…
Thrumming
from here to there
In
the cloven brainflesh…
With
its blood-warm channels…
Thought for the poet is like the hum of
music. A stringed instrument may be as adequate a model of our psyches,
language and of meaning (another of Pinsky’s curiosities) as theories by Freud
or Jung, religions or philosophies.
An astonishing leap occurs between the
first poem, “Instrument,” and the second, “Procession,” that reminds me of the
leap in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey, between the stone-age ape bone tossed into the air and its
correlative image of a spaceship navigating to the moon in the space age. From
the birth of consciousness and the invention of the primitive tortoise-shell
lyre, the second poem in Pinsky’s new book shuttles us to the dominance of
scientific instruments observing the planet and worlds beyond and within:
At
the summit of Mount Kea, an array of antennae
Sensitive
to the colors of invisible light. Defiling
The
sacred mountain, they tilt and sidle to measure
Submillimeter
waves from across the universe:
System
of cosmic removes and fine extremes
Devoted
to track the wavering nature of things.
That is de rerum natura, the nature of
things pervasively from the core through the sphere, “wavering,” between this
and that, denoting a divide: it is a long and vast way to come from “the cloven
brainflesh” in “Instrument.” If the national debate is split between fungicides
and pesticides, the pattern for that division has been deeply established and
is widely resonant. We didn’t make this up any more than it makes us up. Yet we
are caught in this circle of ourselves.
Only recently John Koethe released his
10th book of poems, The Swimmer.
Including his most recent Selected Poems,
At a Foundling Hospital makes this
Robert Pinsky’s 10th collection of poetry. Who said the 9th is always the most
masterly? This is as curious, fun and moving a collection as he has put
together. It sings and dances with humor, surprise and assurance and here and
there draws across deep cello chords for our fears and sorrows, giving credence
to the miracle of forging identity and culture out of human leftness,
abandonment, witnessing the strange (self?) destruction in the wake of our
inventions.
At
the Founding Hospital
Poems by Robert Pinsky
Farrar Straus Giroux/New York
ISBN 9780374715472 (e-book)
