Red Letter Poem #221
Severity and Invention
What [A] finds so admirable about [S]
is his severity as well as his invention
of a technique that provides music
with an alternative to tonal harmony
and to classical inflection, color, rhythm.
––Edward Said
Severity and invention—
how the v’s in the middle of those words yoke together
opposing impulses
how the yoked wings levitate and hover
over inflection, color, rhythm
like the revenant crows
over the late v-ridden wheatfield of van Gogh’s:
V after dark V darkly arriving, revving—
making everything veer and waver:
the vibrating grain, the brush, the path, the wind—
making the visible reverberate
and the buried invisible—
the vanishing point—
infused in the very canvas.
Also, unhinged, set free:
available if one is able
to flutter over the void
at eventide
and find in the vanishing light
some wavelength of necessity and delight.
––Jennifer Clarvoe
[Note: the epigraph is taken from Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. “A” here is Adorno; “S” is Schoenberg.]
My commentary in Red Letter #218 was instigated by a question, posed to a small group of friends, by the estimable Askold Melnyczuk: novelist, editor, educator, activist. He challenged us: “what role can poetry continue to play in a world so riven by violence?” In my first consideration of the question, I found myself speaking about art-making as a confirmation of the very conception of we, the communality we cannot help but share (even when so much surrounding us seems hellbent on negating that perception.) This week, I’ve been trying to come to terms with what I find so admirable in this new poem from Jennifer Clarvoe; and I realized her work was clarifying a second aspect of my thinking: the indomitable need to create, and the intrinsic power of beauty. Even amid a world of widespread brutality, beauty ennobles us––and yes, I realize some will think that concept dated, revealing only my naiveté. But beauty coaxes us to experience once again that primary delight we felt when we first came to understand that, despite our worst fears, we too are undeniably beautiful (within and without), derived from and embodying the nature of this marvelous existence. How could we ever stop attempting to recreate that feeling?
Jennifer starts us out with an epigraph from Edward Said, the acclaimed Palestinian-American philosopher, literary critic, and political activist. Said was writing about the late works of great artists and what they reveal about the tension between hard-earned knowledge and "intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.” Does the clear-eyed severity of the critic counter or support the persistent impulse to bring something new into being? I sense Jennifer’s keen intellect wrestling with that idea––but almost immediately, once the pen is in hand, the creative part of the poet’s word-weaving brain latches onto what might seem at first a trivial perception: those two V’s within the contrasting concepts. And when those “yoked wings levitate and hover/ over inflection, color, rhythm”, suddenly they morph into a vision of the crows in Van Gogh’s wheat field (yet another ‘late’ work of art, by the way), while the verse is seemingly animated by Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg’s liberating atonal and rhythmic experiments. Now, V after fricative V begin to mount within the poet’s lines, like vigorous daubs of color on a canvas. But they also feel like the aural representation of a psychic passageway, opening into the poet’s own memory––and don’t we all, at some point, remember contending with the mystery of visibility and invisibility? The material nature of our world versus that daunting question about what exists beyond it? After all, poems seem to arrive out of nowhere; and, taking shape (in the mind, on the page), we can be excused if we think we are participating in something (here comes that naiveté again) almost transcendent.
In case any are unfamiliar with this fine poet, let me mention briefly that Jennifer is Professor of English, Emerita, from Kenyon College; the author of two marvelous poetry collections, and scores of poems, essays and reviews featured in journals far and wide; and the recipient of more awards and honors than I’ve space to detail. Today’s poem will appear in her forthcoming collection, PIANO PIANO. And, if I may add a personal observation: having experienced the passionate intensity with which Jennifer speaks about poetry, she is the very sort of teacher each one of us dreamed of meeting in our classroom (if our literary stars were perfectly aligned.) And so, with each reading of “Severity and Invention,” I could feel those countercurrents colliding within the poet’s consciousness––but I was delighted to sense how, in the end, the creative impulse seems to have assumed the upper hand. What might have begun as a playful investigation––of how sound triggers thought which, in turn, conveys unexpected meaning––ends up feeling like a poet’s psalm. Plucking V after V on her invisible harp (I counted no less than 27 instances within the body of the poem––and that’s not including the title nor that final bit-lip required to pronounce the poet’s name,) Ms. Clarvoe reflects on how poetic invention culminates in the sort of vigorous delight (now she’s got me doing it!) which, looking up from the page, makes even this ordinary Friday seem a Red Letter day (if you’ve the heart to embrace it.)
