Ted Hughes Author(s): DAVID PORTER Source: The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (September/October 1975), pp. 13-18 Published by: American Poetry Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27775040 Accessed: 02-01-2016 07:18 UTC

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This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Departure At Dusk:

The Airport Corridors, The Late Autumn Plane

Goodbye friends inyour hiding places Ha! Already I can hear you walking away inmy memory wearing your coats of skins and looking to the sky. like the echos of a lost watch. Autumn to has disappeared the south and you The delicate trail fades and disappears are settled into hawthorn thickets growing smaller like a vapor path across the night sky. ? holding hands with your sexy girlfriendthe night. You migrate, you hibernate or you die how can I love you so much when you can't even Over the ridge, over your eyes caged in branches understand nature's simplest laws? enormous black flights of birds are coming in low the ? crossing stream just north of you No Don't you dare wave to me! Goodbye where ? the dead sheep fade into the soil you ridiculous fast-breathing padded bones fade away to bones and thick white coats I can no longer bear saying goodbye to. and sink into the layers of earth beneath them where the slow hearts of moles beat

in controlled death down the long corridors of sleep.

David Porter pho to by Ma

In the of Ted like killer The poetry Hughes predatory, sharks. Hughes, is immediate: to keep all Yet no poet writing today is we are the death of a sea to he witnessing pulls everything pieces, the sensibilities intact. How, af more deeply endowed by the familiar but now has its increasingly written, "except killers, ter all, could the studied moder English literary inheritance than irrelevant aesthetic. Simulta alert and Thus shapely." poems nist styles ofEliot and Auden and Hughes. To say what others have we see in the must be the neously emerging instinctively about their followers perceive today the not yet ventured these days about work of this a new of English poet business, Hughes says, simultaneous meaning of Disney a new language, a new poet, and a idea of an enor the dif poetry involving managing practical World, tiger cages, and new poetry in deep reconcilement mous acceleration of ? of intake ficulties survival. This radical thalidomide except pretentiously with the consciousness of our age, folk ad means two basic myth, epic, cycle, comics, conception from a great distance and he involves us not only in his own vertising, TV, the other pop things: poems inhabit the same the of books? and in the microcosm of ? through spectacles poetry and world as assassinations and must a disposables aggressively "When he lay in doorway and England today, but also in reconciled to the consciousness of not allow themselves to be made watched the bullets lifting the English dialect and in the projec a culture. His ob trivial post-literate by comparison; poems cobbles out of the street beside ts of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas is is make the essential jective poetry that equipped thing happen, him,,, so Hughes has written of and Keith Douglas, of Emily for life. rescue us from inanition. they the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, of The old dominated This is their totemic value as the aesthetic, "he realized that most poetry is Yeats and Jung. In addition, he by the Americans Ezra Pound main regenerative acts of the not equipped for life in a world makes an aesthetics out of the and T. S. seems in this new human Eliot, psyche. where people actually do die.'' lives of beasts. to an light have been static, Hughes's mode is no sweet new In Ted Hughes's work, ac or elegant urn, simply diffuse and style, but rather wily, elemen cordingly, are early signs of a rose self-consciously erudite ("the tary, and attacking like an deep geological shift under way in I. The Present Age in the steel dust"; "medallions / animal. It is not the twitches and English language poetry. The The dominant fact of our age, to Theirs was a of forge Achaia"). rustles "confessional" poets slide is away from poetry that is according to Hughes, is that vulnerable its passive, aesthetic, out of university writing classes. predominantly isolated, in Western men have lost contact fragilitythe subject of much of Least of all is it like that of his dividual, inward-turning, and with the raw dream of their their Robert Lowell ex of poetry. generation writers in England, self-indulgently hallucinatory origins. They are partial men, in tends their in his whose someone has called assumptions poems toward works which, in Hughes's capable of mastering the brute balanced meditations. over of laboriously mournful mouthings pints words, are in tune with the rhyth beauty of their lives. Thus Hart Crane Forty years ago beer, soiled sheets, and garden ms of the people in a direct and Hughes conceives an exemplary in a distilled the presiding idea implements. Hughes's style is dynamic way, that is, toward counter-thrusting poetry which, on the gloss poem "Chaplin conglomerate, ravenous, drawing poetry that is folk-oriented, hawk-like, attains the powerfully the human in to esque": "Poetry,' everythingfrom Old English radically political. The resulting balanced exertion Hopkins called so feelings, the kitten,' is shamanism to pop. His imagined separation is Hughes's poetics mastery. Animals and other of the a over crowded out humdrum, poet is scavenger all the from the old familiar tonalities ex creatures are equipped by sinew mechanized scramble of today mishmash of the globed junkyard, plains why he is thought to have and instinct for such life. When that the man who would preserve hardly the archetypal figure barbarized the vocation of poet this happens in poetry it is a mat them and saw as must duck camouflage James Joyce the God of and to have forsaken his ter of language. Though in for dear life to them or him keep creation, indifferent, paring his humanistic obligations. Ian consistently attained, that is self from annihilation.'' fingernails. Hamilton, the English poet and Hughes 's considerable goal: a The new of Ted poetics Hughes The crucial objective in our critic, says stiffly that Hughes poetic language resourceful conceives as to poems hard and wasting culture, according simply ismistaken. enough to assert itself amid the

September/October 1975 Page 13

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions terror crushing banality and cal (I960), Wodwo (1967), Crow Hughes's condemnation of fashions. He calls his fellow poets our for which which are the terms of times. 11970), and Selected Poems 1957 civilized stupor brushed even to a more difficult role times are his His own language at 1967(19721 Sophocles, whose moral the East Europeans to seil achieves, as he says of equations and formal finish seem paradigms. "They refuse the of to to out ... in order to with Shakespeare's, aspect II. The East European to him not reveal but hide escape a of some some being invented in state crisis, Poets the bloody root of Oedipus' suf fragmentary sense, of self for a terribly urgent job. Poems fering. It is, he believes, by abstract badge When Hughes reads his poetry a from the cycle Crow (1970), for groping in those pits opened estrangement, into popular to in public he leans slightly, as if in example, range from lyric beneath the rhetoric that we membership safety." Every man, to a chronic Yorkshire wind or, or devotion to street curse, com grasp our basic fable and con whether he likes it not, says better, as if away from the sensed his as in the poem "A devise our salvation. Hughes, is a micro-model of pacted of a cliff. He once sequently Horrible Error": overhang But words from the old lexicon nation but it is the poet who must Religious face that described the rock no are no the streets where the When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel longer draw blood. They find loomed over his Yorkshire on. brown, match for Crow in Hughes's shooting is going "One atom this way: "Something it is From the hatched birthplace surrealization: imagines," he has said, "that its alibi twisted around it about the clouds and the in With self light, Words attacked him with the glottal only those poets whose make-up or some ? clination of the season, bomb somehow coincides with the vital Lifting a long neck of the overnight strengthening He wasn'? listening. of their times who are And balancing that deaf and mineral over impulse ? earth, has reared it right Words surrounded and over-ran him to come to real stature stare ? able you, and you feel to be in the with light aspirates more The sphyjix of the final fact when poets apparently mouth of a vast cave, in He was dozing. dripping ? wither Words labials naturally gifted simply And flexing on that double flameflicker some He bends to infiltrated guerilla hopeless age/' away." Crow clapped his beak, scratched it. tongue his reading, head tilted, as if the Words him with consonantal A syllable like the rustling of the were a or as if he swamped light slight glare masses ? spheres were in that Yorkshire valley Ill* Poetry Must Seek Crow took a sip of water and thanked where there shone as he "a Blood Roots God's grimace writhed, a leaf in the says, heaven. furnace slightly disastrous, crumbly, grey (Crow, 22) Poetry equipped for lifemeans sunless and too light, yet clear, East are exam not moralizing poetry but rather And man's and woman's knees melted, European poets like a still from the documentary ples for us particularly in their poetry equal by the breadth of its they collapsed film of an accident." own it Their neck-muscles melted, their brows rhetorical honesty and incredibly special knowledge (call The Yorkshire cliff of and to what A. bumped the ground Hughes's fine monitoring of faint signals. cunning) integrity childhood looms for him as the Alvarez has called the destructive Their tears evacuated visibly Their helplessness in the cir ''Your will is our emblem of our present age. It "has realities we inhabit. It means a They whispered" cumstances, Hughes says, seemed to him raised a instructed in ex peace, against purged them of rhetoric. They poetry fully to the south and in passage sym cannot falsify their experience by perience from Olympic murders But Crow only peered. bolic of the life: "while effort to it. Munich to Miss America TV Then took a step or two thinking any hopeful change out to east and west, Their is a of It is a wary of forward, distractedly poetry strategy pageants. poetry we were stuck snares, able to sniff and Grabbed this creature by the slackskin valley-dwellers making audible meanings despair, into the dark hair wall of to nape, looking without disturbing the silence, an wise the sell-out. Hughes as it was Scout Rock, called, and art of homing in tentatively on describes the Yugoslav poet Beat the hell out of it, and ate it. the final sensation was of as having vital scarcely perceptible signals, Vasko Popa's poetry spare, (Crow, 34) been The link is direct no of false ideas and safe trapped." making no mistakes but with stripped Magnificent images seem from that Yorkshire en ex supposed hope of finality, continuing to casually expended: "dull gunshot to 's intuitive trapment Hughes plore. Finally, with delicate and its after-rale/Among of en understanding the political maneuverings, they precipitate in Ex conifers, rainy twilight." trapments enforced since 1945, out of the world of malicious junctures of sen in East of cruciating particularly Europe, negatives a happy positive." The JOHN "Trembling featherless the sort has since sibility: Solzhenitsyn deadly serious caricature of that elbows in the nest's filth." Sud The Ar disclosed in Gulag commitment is Hughes's folk den out: "crow, of East profundities open chipelago. With the poets hero Crow, who is the poet of our KFATQ'Q a black rainbow/Bent in ? emp Popa, Holub, Herbert, After an murder in Europe ? age. ordinary tiness/over others emptiness/But Milosz, among Hughes the adjoining parking lot, when into PORRIDGE flying" ; "stars, fuming away has located explicit terms of the for someone the trees closed the mushrooms of the our black, deprived human situation in forever: Victoria WScCabe, editor their nothing forest, clouding age: "They have had to live out, And the streets closed forever spores, the virus of God." in a vision which for ar What are the favorite actuality, on recipes Cartoons cut dogma in a And the body lay the gravel through tists elsewhere is prevailing of Marge Piercy, Charles kills Of the abandoned world a poem about how truth of but Caro shape things only brokenly abandoned utilities Wright, James Dickey, the clutter of Among everybody: ? glimpsed, through to Kizer, and Donald Justice? he Exposed infinity forever lyn The ankle of a rising, fiery angel our civilized liberal confusion. held it must be reckoned among Crow had to start searching for John Keats's ? he held They Porridge presents Christ's hot pounding heart to eat. the purest and most wide awake something the favorite recipes of 115 con it (Crow, 10) of temporary American poets in The earth shrunk to the size a hand living poets." of Survival breeds beauty, ad Hardcase Survival Pinto Long before itwas fashionable, cluding grenade has its revelations. In and Gaides Piiafi. he held ithe held itand held itand saw the versity Bean Sludge And Hughes inescapable to of Hughes's world one wants go This collection is a celebration BANG! prospect: "The Soviet vision on The scramble to sur of the .happy activity of cooking He was blasted to nothing. ^ the future," he wrote in the 60's, existing. (Crow, 71) a kind of street and an of the not differ vive is fighting expression kinship "does fundamentally a Hughes offers a radical ? but it human definition: between the creation of good ? from the American one both yields liberation in substance, "It is the and meal and the making of a poem. ? are barren and are now in only precious thing, and voice from the in accord with the whole The recipes for soups, salads, viewpoint, seen to be so." designed the con creasingly entrees, and desserts were aS! subjective plaints of Universe. Designed, indeed, by To Hughes, authoritarian sup tested by the poets and the edi fessional poets and their tin-pan the whole Universe. They (the pressions have their bloodless tor. Over half of these were a East are not the counterparts. Hughes perceives in the European poets) chosen because the to parallels withering they keep tougher instrument adequate brats of civilization disap inanities ofWestern society. Like spoiled poet full for a long time at little the corrosive realities of our age. of and unreal D. H. Lawrence, he loathes pointed impossible cost. like Brecht a of the Consequently, at the expectations and deprived civilized abstracting price "This good anthology of recipes generation earlier, he transmits revelations of necessity ... They of blooded nature. He decries is as satisfying to this reader as an audacity that is breath have managed to grow up to a "the oppressive deadness of a good anthology of poems, for stopping in an age otherwise blan view of the unaccommodated civilization, the spiritless after all, all recipes are poems to ched to indifference by im Universe, but it has not made Cole materialism, of it, the stupidity of the hungry man."?William and them still like it and poverishment brutality. TV us con cynical, they x it." Movies and give September. 120 pages. 51/4 8, The chronicle of this stub keep all their sympathies intact. stant but unacknowledged read Paper, $2.95. is have back to the bornly honest engagement outs of our vacant They got simple morally of Iowa Press scattered in his drama, fiction, animal courage of accepting the University familiarity with the monstrous: and criticism in various odds and have rediscovered the Order Department shooting somebody through the midriff of it frontier." 17West Street periodicals. The major poetry Was too like striking a match College PoOjj He little with con Iowa Iowa 52242 is in five important books: The Too like potting a snooker ball has patience City, Hawk in the Rain (1957), Luper fCrow, 15) temporaries who retreat into

The American Review Page 14 Poetry

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions dispositions. "No is more whole poetry populations sit slumped in He felt the restorative to no myths tions and, like Crow, himself a difficult outflank, yet it is in front of TV their sets, feeding hid through his Yorkshire surroun kind of with a sense defensive. His poems are den dreams of poet necessary Gomorrah. In this as the dialect and a to find out what does dings, particularly courage crafty catechism, trying exist, rapt "We paralysis, Hughes says, transmitted energies of the will also pass his test at the and what the conditions really are a dreaming perpetual primitive deities, as he calls them, womb-door: are. He never loses his massacre. deeply And when that leaks out of "an instinct and ancestral ingrained humour and irony: that into what to be Who is stronger than Death. up ought morally memory/' Renewal of the hope? is his of on to his ... Who is stronger than the will? way hanging responsible art then the critics will come as language it Death. human wholeness," and convert it to evidence pounce, penetrates to those Wholeness demands again origins. Stronger than love? Death. poetry in a sociological But the study." "One has only to look at our than Death. alert to all the encounters beneath stink will not down. Stronger life? Though you vocabulary/' says Hughes, "to the shell of rational skin the But who is performance. poet, his sucking truth see where our real mental life has stronger than death? "To live removed from this inner will weasel up somewhere else: Me, its roots, where the paths to and evidently. universe of experience," Hughes Pass, Crow. They nailed to a door from our genuine imaginations says in his poetry primer for (Crow, 3) run, clearly enough/' The Anglo young people, "is also to live The stoat with the sun in its belly, But its Saxon, Norse, and Celtic gods are removed from ourself, banished red unmanageable life IV. of not obsolete: are the better Poetry Balance from ourself and real life. The Has licked the stylist out of their skulls, "they our A positioned balance is Has sucked that age like an egg and part of patrimony still locked deeply struggle truly to possess his own the structure and source gone off up." Poetry alert to the old primary experience, in other words to of in dialect root-sounds can open integrity Hughes's poetic regain his genuine self, has been Along ditches where flies and leaves consciousness. is paths back and down to our "Poetry man's principal occupation, Overpower our tongues, got into some he not ... the ? beginnings, to sources of nothing/' says, "if wherever he could find leisure for grave primal ? brute men record of just how the forces of since he first this enor Not a dog to follow it down being uncrippled by it, grew the Universe try to redress some mous Emerges, thirsting, in far Asia, in talizing. surplus of brain." If the balance disturbed human Brix ton. " by England ruled by sacrament and error. fLupercal? 16) ceremony interested Eliot, it is is forth in The blood-roots of our lives Equilibrium imaged primordial England when in his The water where the cessantly poetry. cut the Thames and myth-stoat makes his ? sturgeons lily like a man's like a passage can sustain us in our ? head, wolves crossed the moors that holds its face to state of civilized and poem upward Hughes summons. These are far depletion, while the under roots no amount of civilized litter will light part starker realities than Wallace in the bottom slime where: choke out deep Stevens cast for when he said: their vitality. Prehistoric bedragonned times To mind, "Nothing illustrates the im Hughes's Dylan Crawl that darkness with Latin Thomas had set out to reach that portance of poetry better than the names. realm of sustenance beneath possibility that within it there deep (Lupercal, 29} the surfaces. "He made a may yet be found a reality polite The balance holds in dop half-conscious to take on adequate to the profound attempt pelganger themes in Hughes's all the life that the necessities of life today or for that underground tales, where protagonists are colonial matter any day." upper-crustish, militant, divided between human and cast of the Hughes would have poems suppressive English bestial or mythological shape. send their words to feel the intelligence excludes.'' The poems work less has to recover pressure that levels mountains Hughes sought schematically, seeking the vast this lost life which death sub and. to clutch the life that escapes novelty of the dark world under tracts. It is the vital force that out of dead pigs and skinned the world, and taking momentary haunts the that turn weasels and haunts the grey photographs grips on its mystery, as the otter in the His use an tones of photographs of soldiers up repeatedly poems. (to image of Hughes's) of the dead stalks the long since buried. poem pig takes a stolen hold on the bitch absent life-force that had heaved otter in the field. The second book What humbles these hills has raised beneath the factual hide: of poetry, Lupercal, like its name, The arrogance of blood and bone, Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes. is a of the bestial for And thrown ike hawk upon the wind, summoning Its trotters stuck straight out. The passage to that dark And lit the in the ces to vivify life, to make the fox dripping ground. realm must in renewing go women and to have (Lupercal, 14) Such weight and thick pink bulk fertile, the directly and by imagination demons out of Whatever falsifies instinct, as Set in death seemed not just dead. their holes again. was through the wilds of the mythic does rhetoric, blocks visitations It less than lifeless, further off. ? Poems stalk that experience: tales or through poetry. The from the elemental world. The A remembrance of a greased These feet, deprived, much acclaimed poem "Pike" is are or loss is the loss of our pig chase at a fair to Disdaining all that caged, deepest begins enact restore to the carcass the lost fur Hughes's quintessential storied,or pictured, beginnings, Hughes's poems ment of that adventure. After the and the true words around those lost nace of life: Through throughout deploy world search Its was coolly terrifying description of origins. squeal the rending of metal. the "submarine For their vanished head, for the Now the pike's delicacy mind's wandering world Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like and horror," the poem concludes: elementals, ovens. A pond I fished, fifty yards across, Ousted from the traveller-told ? Vanished with the head, the Their bite is worse than a horse V? Whose lilies and muscular tench teeth, the quick eyes ?. a clean out. Had outlasted stone Unapproachable islands, They chop half-moon every visible eat dead cats. ? (Lupercal, 13} From their heavens and their They cinders, Of the monastery that planted, them burning obsession with sheer underworld, fLupercal, 41) Hughes's The same of Stilled legendary depth: force is from his Wait dully at the traffic crossing, gorge life, what is inseparable It was as as It held over now deep England. of conditions of Or lean headlines, taking nothing cleaned up, mentalized, ab courting Pike too immense to so immense in. and labeled stir, equipoise. in the stracted, "Diony and old "Repeatedly (Lupercal, 20) is what's behind poems the imagination hauls up sus," missing Thai I dared not cast past nightfall the to Reviewers, minds congealed by the present English exterior, wards, following hawk, decorous But cast and reach 44the master-fulcrum of banalities, react with killed finally, Hughes believes, by silently fished cries of With the hair on head violence" as "paranoia!" to glimpses the Puritan slaughter of the in frozen my Hughes calls the in his poems of that murderous stincts in the Seventeenth Cen For what might move, for what eye point of balance in 'The Hawk in might move. the Rain." churning world under us all. Yet tury. That is the in The on still splashes the dark pond, tersection of intense forces ? whether in a life or in a ? Owls hushing the floating woods poem the between Frail on my ear against the dream point what raises up THE NEW MOON Darkness beneath night's darkness had and what destroys. Each poem is A a the bar on that Magazine of Poetry freed, position along Editors: Thai rose towards me, Michael LeFabre and David Whitehall; David M. Marovich, Associate Editor slowly watching, fulcrum, separate occasions SPRING 1975 features E. G. ^Lupercai, 57) the force of intense Burrows, Thomas Brush, Danny Rendleman; also jack marking op Anderson, R. P. The in our as Dickey, Wild, Goldbarth, Glaser, Fox, Scott, Hewitt, Etter, McKeown, poet day must, position. As in the hawk poem, others. here in Pfingston, Stap, Hughes's poem, call up that high risk leads to the AUTUMN 1975 features Mark Robert Vander Albert the counterforce to McCloskey, Molen, Goldbarth; civilized laboriously, violently even, at also Don Stap, M. R. Bond, Le others. Doty, Cooley, Novak, Mon, LeFabre, many debilitation and savageness. His tained of coun Published twice yearly $2.00 a copy; Bulk and trade rates. Your place equal manuscripts?poems, takes a wiliness. The short prose, translations and moon poems?are welcome. job tough terforces. At the point of that 2147 Oakland survivor Drive; Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008 poet, withstanding the balance, in unfamiliar space, rests and ordinary inevitable destruc the life principle, "the diamond

September/October 1975 Page 15

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions point of will." the fox, the otter, the pike, and Hughes has written on Now I came a bit later. I hadn't from that are of we are Always, soaring the crow, part what Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, had enough. I was all for opening a fall is or ex when the feat, imagined hamburger bars, Yeats, Keith Douglas, Dylan negotiations with whatever hap For is the failed perienced. that snowmobiles, plastic wrap, and Thomas, and Sylvia Plath, pened to be out there." Thus or the are task, the fooFs overreach, coming-out parties sub locating in each the deep-diving, Hughes's encounters are with error in the universal structure It is a fad tracted. anything but conjuring, soul-restoring creatures quite unlike London that must then again be dish primitivism on Hughes 's shamanic power. He finds them clerks: redressed. The poise unbalances, part. Rather, shamanism all gropers in the pit. He sees At nightfall as the sea darkens, a A darkness the weather turns, the soaring provides him with model for the parallels between the psychotic depth thickens, mustering hawk original poetic act. It also ex state and the shaman's plunge, from the gulfs and the submarine suffers the air, hurled upside plains the kinship between his both being breaches in the hum badlands, To the sea's To with down, poetry, folk-epic, plays and his drum which lead to openings of edge. begin It looks like rocks Fall from his eye, the ponderous verse uncovering, children's and stories. terrifying disclosure. The poet's shires crash on him, mangling their pallor. Hughes wrote in 1964: "The craft is to make words enact those the round the the tide The horizon trap him; initiation the Gradually laboring of dreams, general disclosures. Of Sylvia Plath, he Falls eye back from its productions, angelic schema of the shamanic has she "had free and con Smashed, mix the heart's blood flight, said, Its power slips back from glistening and the and adventures trolled access to with the mire of figures depths formerly nacelles, and are not a shaman the land. they encounter, reserved to the primitive ecstatic they are crabs. /Hawk, 11) monopoly: they are, in fact, the priests, shamans and Holy men, Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring basic of the more inland The core figure of balance experience poetic and recently flung open to we call 'romantic'." Like a packed trench of helmets. structures Hughes's ex temperament tourists with the passport of such on In a he con as LSD." (Wodwo,21) traordinary essay the central shamanizing" society, hallucinogens Dylan 'Venus and Thomas's death of alcohol fable in Shakespeare, whose tinued, Adonis,' Creature and human merge in he sees as a microcosm of some of Keats's poems, in New poetry longer poisoning York, Hughes Hughes's vision, as do creature 'The of 'Ash as a final shamanist the momentous counterforces Wanderings Oisin,' interprets and poem. The obsession attends within Elizabeth would all Thomas of the warring Queen Wednesday,' qualify summoning by his remarks on Popa, whose their authors for the drum central life out of his own and in her times between satanic magic brain words, he writes, "test their way the while the actual stem. "What he was necessities and heavenly (of shaman); really forward, sensitive to their own The balance rests in lies behind and with aspirations. flight perceptibly waiting for, coaxing errors, dramatically and in terms, and as of the best and wrote "was the sexual finally, many fairy tales, alcohol," Hughes, timately alive, like the antennae as those of Hughes reads Shakespeare, the behind myths such Or delicate cerebral disaster that of some rock-shore creatures central fable the and Herakles, and behind demolishes the old self for engages mystery pheus good, feeling out the presence of the sea of man's the of and with all its for integrating psychic epics Gilgamesh crushing and the huge powers in it... There wholeness. A similar balance bet It is the in and leaves the atman Odysseus. outline, tifications, is a primitive pre~creation at ween the rational and dark sides of the Heroic The a clear field." fact, Quest. mosphere about his work, as if he own central shamans seem to at will stands in constitutes Hughes's undergo, Shakespeare were present where all and at and mind as uroboric fable. phenomenal intensity, Hughes's pre-eminently dynamisms and formulae were with results, one of the the the shamanic practical poet enacting ready and charged, but nothing main dramas of the excursion. Of cen ? Vo Shamanism regenerating Shakespeare's created or only a few frag human psyche: the fundamental tral obsession with the body-mind ments/' The primary analogue of poetic event." antagonism in "Venus and Hughes's enterprise is Probes to the underworld We note particularly the idea Adonis," Hughes says, "it is a shamanism. It is a basic allegory, must, in our post-literate culture, of For is not of the ancient the dream of two worlds. "What practicality. Hughes perfect example be fashioned from a vast field of a mystic, but rather a man shamanisic dream of the call to am I?" the poem cluttered and vernacular ex Hughes begins the most sort of the or life ... It em its title an Old making practical poetic holy To the con "Wodwo," for perience. Hughes claims poetry. "Shamanism," bodies the biological polarity of a serious English word he translates as "a temporary poet is thus he said, "is not a but a the life of the and archaic sort of half-man half-animal religion, body scavenger. The litter of his world technique formoving in a state of nervous system and the life of the spirit," Defining a man's whole includes surreal experience: ecstasy among the various reflexive cortex. In more concrete nature, the enigma Hughes dreams, nightmares, madness, spiritual realms, and for generally form, the fable contains hints of describes as the powerhouse at terror, bestiality, automatism. dealing with souls and spirits, in a atavistic memories from earlier the center of Shakespeare's mind, We come upon Hughes himself practical way, in some practical times, resurfaeings of rituals and is his also. It is the sphinx's rid ransacking the movies, animated crisis." This is a shamanism of symbols of which Shakespeare dle, and inspection of the vast cartoons, birthday card greet useful transport, treating real cannot have heard or read.'' lower realms is thus thrust upon folk songs, montage delusions. ings, the poet, as upon the shaman. overloading, children's fables, had his own VI. The Poet-Shaman Hughes's selections from Hughes practical whatever comes to the hand in a crisis to W. S. Shakespeare, (1971), extracted early, according The procedures of that wasting culture where ad whose account of it from their contexts, reveal that Merwin, puts discovery in poetry today demand vertising has replaced literature flesh on this central fable: the confrontation mystical passage. a broad-sensing creature-poet, as the imagination's image-pool or between Venus and Adonis, that Merwin, in 1959 1960, had sent able to traverse what Hughes has and TV talk show-hosts are the to is, between the hidden and the his poem "Lemuel's Blessing" called the realm between our or models of intellect. Hughes's to read. rational. In that selection, Hughes Eight years dinary minds and our deepest life. scavenging of the languages of all Merwin wrote: Hughes says, "We see quite new later, The data field, consisting of the these media produces a boggling When I'd finished the ... I things a new teeming of poem signal-laden air and the image mixture of tangent literary for showed it to Ted It was the possibilities, as we look through Hughes. cluttered landscape of experience, ms: heroic epics, folk epic, myth, last winter that he and Sylvia were them into our own darkness." The surrounds the poet. Reality cycles. lyrics, chants, in living around the corner from us in dark revelation re-enacts the everywhere gives its lessons: cantations. London. He told me a story. At Cam shamanistic flight to the demon Its mishmash of scripture and In this way, leaves the bridge he set out to study English Hughes the and physics, radio receiver turned on and world, monomythic entry literature. Hated it. Groaned having to return on the heroic "You With here, brains in hands, for exam quest. write those essays. Felt he was dying dutifully makes all the visits, see an in ple, very well," Hughes told of it in some essential place. Sweated standing "respectfully, hat in And there, legs in a tree top. terviewer, "where Nietzsche got late at night over the paper on Dr. hand, before this creation, ex ? (Crow, 14) his Dionysus. It was a genuine Johnson et al things he didn't want ceedingly alert for a new word.'5 to read. One vision of something on its way night, very late, very The field of data includes We see this new type picking over tired, he went to Saw the door back to the surface. The rough sleep. Belfast and King Kong and John the debris, turning up the open and someone like himself come in beast in Yeats's All that Milton. the collec dismembered corpse in the gar poem." with a fox's head. The visitor went over Everywhere energy and violence in Hughes's tion is no can. We see him crouched to his desk, where an unfinished essay purposeful; experience bage first book of seem now in is outside the In for cover in the Or we poetry was lying, and put his paw on the poet's territory. doorway. this to have been an in conceives himself see him on the ridiculous light papers, leaving a bloody mark; then he deed, Hughes verging for the demons stinctive ambush came over to the bed, looked down at as a sort of cosmic signalman in that extraordinary fable of the of life. Ted and said, "You're killing us," and taking up his post in the beach poet Crow. The figure is hardly The shamanic experience lurks went out the door. bunker after the armistice papers decorous. Crow, a survivor, in all the images of the hunter, the Hughes switched to an have been signed. He said of seated we may believe in some caged animals, and the other thropology at Cambridge! The ac World War II soldiers: "All they cartoon pub, launches his pop creature-confrontations. His count records an early working wanted was to get back into civ Homeric epic: "There was this animals locate our beginnings, out of Hughes's compulsion, no vies and get home to the wife and terrific battle ..." and so on. the irreducible being, and the doubt with suggestive con kids for the rest of their lives ... But the portrait of Hughes's stubbornness of life. The hawk, nections to Jung's experience. They'd had enough sleeping out. new poet also takes form in those

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This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions lines of Jocasta to take it magnificent whatever position must, whole crush and cramming throw (part of the utility) to its fullest in all alert. (from his translation of Seneca's ways away expressiveness of it was power. There are in that play as The animal Oedipus), the bloody knot in figure together right at the heart of its dialect/' passages simultaneously or with of of the bessemer furnace of the Hughes's idea the reach Hughes has reconnoitered the dinary and ruthless, sounding (to dialect in his of world's body: merge description arcadias and alleys of our use Hughes's terms) a ritual in blood toes ends the of from my my finger style Keith Douglas (1920 available language. For Crow to tensity and a full passion. blind blood blood my gums It could he said from 1944). deal, articulate the ache of love, the Jocasta's lines reach with simple and eyelids in an "with whatever early essay, Crow-Bard has available the directness to the dark mysteries: blood from the roots of my hair it came a up against, versatile, lexicons of detergent ads, the when I carried my sons blood from before direct not limited ruthless, style military, government releases, any time began I carried them death I car to certain subjects in certain for it into the knot his King Kong movies, industry ried them the flowed of bowels, moods. It is a for throne into the utility general board rooms, and urban knot politics. I carried them for the final purpose as for instance of his muscles style, Hughes scoured his language of disaster when I carried the was; a that knot of his brain Shakespeare's style the early accretions: Yeats, my first son womb tied combines a readiness my everything together colloquial Joyce, Lawrence, and Dylan did I know what was coming did comer and with a every of the variety poetic Thomas ("we ran out, mice in our I know earth and the heavens a ritual and breadth; intensity pockets and straw in our hair,/In and trickle the dead an what ropes of blood were twisting every of past music of exceedingly high or to the darkness that was avalan twisted it all into beside me together what bloody footprints shape der with a clear wholehearted to horses/And a of what was he what wasn Y he ching quake were hurrying together in my body passion." hooves" 21). The Crow the question was unasked (Lupercal (Oedipus,22) for directness poems chronicle Crow's survival fOedipus, 23-25) Hughes's regard Perhaps nowhere else in con and is rooted in his and us the versatility ap give stripped language temporary poetry is there of of that and preciation Shakespeare's survival, rough ready, language to surpass the brute VII. A New Unlike the to all the Language language. atrophied equal life, knowing strength of some of the The writer does not wrest of bleats hears in a con-man's system Hughes angles, leering, way, recitations in Hughes's Oedipus, from silence as we are told yet to in speech contemporary England, singing, library street, Creon describes how the priest in he the we pious literary hagiographics, Shakespeare's language, says, contemporary rhythms called up the creatures of the un a as our ?- says Roland Barthes, but "in "has the air of being invented in recognize lives. derworld death and hellish and how much more ar state of crisis, for a There are in Crow, too, mo ? versely, terribly dogs, Tiresias until King Laius more and less a ments of the ritual duously, cruelly urgent job, homely spur-of-the conjuring rises to the surface, a specter he detaches a secon moment out of we associate with the gloriously, improvisation language summoned up from the world un from the slime of whatever verbal to shaman's Some of it dary language scrap happens preparation. der the world (the passage has afforded him be and this is exac the book: primary languages lying around, begins direct ties to the poem "Pike," the his exist what real is." He finds Black was the without by world, history, tly speech eye more than a decade earlier): ence." Hughes has been intent on a similar colloquial scavenging in Black the within tongue Black was the heart it its and I extracting just such an exact Emily Dickinson's language, a lifted face Black the liver, black the lungs Laius speech congruous to the con "Shakespearean texture ... solid recognized Unable to suck in light. Our King Laius he pulled himself up sciousness of the late twentieth with metaphor, saturated with (Crow, 1) it was He calls this extraction the homeliest and ex century. imagery him his whole was a body plastered "utility" speech; that is, perience." What Hughes In his adaptation of Oedipus with blood his for whatever ex in Crow is this same from language ready develops Seneca, Hughes had already hair beard face all one terrible wound comes a perience up, agile enough language "super-crude": "the raised this incantatory language mash of

Ino series of worm, Donald Davie, one of One acclaimed young personal recollections, today's most distinguished poet explores another novelist ond publisher poets and critics,draws on poet's life.This provocative D.M. Davin has drown personal memories of his work "evokes the period, tellingly human portraits of country's land, history,and the ideology and the seven of the great fellow society ina series of background fromwhich writers who were among poems. He has described Owen came with some his friends: JulianMaclaren this collection?a poem for thing like the fullness and W. ? Ross, R. Rodgers, Louis each county of England the deliberation with which MacNeice, Enid Starkie, as "mostly amiable and Lawrence and Joyce wrote Joyce Gary, Dylan Thomas, nostalgic" up theirown early years.'' and IfzikManger. ?Times Literary THESHIRES Supplement (London) CLOSING Donald Davie WILFRED OWEN TIMES Illustrated, $7.95 D.Ni. Dovin JonStallworthy With 80 illustrations. $ 17.50 Illustrated, $12.95

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September/October 1975 Page 17

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sat, 02 Jan 2016 07:18:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions mud brains blood drive for the instinctual center. raise against him. He embodies we see another angle of the utility 52) (Oedipus, The aim is a serious gaming with the instinct in all of us. God is language. "The air of trial and This is a an utility language doing life, a folk-loring of it, a Popa some executive, a kind of fum error exploration, of im it also has rough job; starkly izing of it. The trick is to hold bling division sales manager or provised language, the attempt to delicate moods. mad Jocasta, contemporary experience in the chairman of the board. Crow is get near something for which he dened her look into truth's by terms that can contain it,without stark, sinewy, undistracted by is almost having to invent the socket, to after he a for steps Oedipus losing the evidence of its density thoughts of a purpose. He is the words in total disregard has out his gouged eyes: and its contradictions. Crow primary engine. He is the poet poetry or the normal conventions what can I call you now what stands as a present culmination of and the poet's poem. Against the of discourse, goes with his habit He shall I call you Hughes' s shamanic deep-diving mystery of his existence, momen of working in cycles of poems. you 'remy son shall I call you for totemic powers to balance tarily he defines (in one of the few will trust no phrase with his son or my life's horrors and im passages where he speaks) the meaning for more than six are you ashamed a he poverishments. prophecy that grimaces inside seven words at time before you are my son I lost you The poet is no longer simply him. It is to be inside the corrects his tack with another you 're alive I've found you a watching, but has identified him mystery, to be inside his exist phrase from different direction. speak to me self as man and with this ence ((AS INSIDE MY OWN In the same way, he will trust no show me your face poet black bird. As he said with his for more turn your head toward me show scavenger LAUGHTER/AND NOT poem meaning of than fifteen or so before he me your face Popa's survival method, games STARING OUT AT IT lines, can tries from a dif (Oedipus, 87-88) grasp by their simple terms a THROUGH WALLS/OF MY again totally deeper than ordinary reality, "as EYE'S COLD ferent direction with another Given the rudimentary in QUARANTINE" puppets are deeper than our {Crow, p. 11). poem. Each cycle creates the tensity of language that Hughes human reality: the more human The terms of Hughes's un terms of a Universe, which he can achieve, measuring the power they look and act the more dertaking in Crow are derivable then explores, more or less he means to make it discharge, elemental they seem." from the terms by which he in methodically, with the terms." and sighting the other world he terprets Vasko Popa's later work. intends to exhume along its path, Crow entertains us even as it it is little wonder that he has IX. To Conclude hauls us along the way stations of sought to close completely the cir man's and The common element in these cuit between and the suffering, stupidity, language of one of is the need of men to world under the world. His recent longing. Hughes says techniques to life grimly-playful poems: "It face practical crises, make aim is a language absolutely of Popa's is all the fusion to the surface accretions. This is there, surprising manageable by clinging a of unlikely elements. The simple structures of it. The possible only by distilling to philosopher is also shaman's aesthetic penetrates previously unavailable purity of sophisticated a primitive, gnomic spell-maker. those brute simplicities and hauls expression. Hughes attempts this The desolate view of the Universe them back to the surface. The in Orghast, a play written in a opens eyes of childlike poet tries to reach beginnings made-up language of the primary through and moody oddness. also, seeking the raw dream in man. The premise, according to simplicity The wide perspective of general simple fables, summoning Tom Stoppard in an interview elemental and biological law is shaman-like the dogs of energy up with Hughes, is that "the sound out with folklore through the interstices in the of the human voice, as opposed to spelled and mon civilized is of hieroglyphs magical pavements. language, capable projecting sters. The whole is mar The of radical sub mental states." style language very complicated cut of vellously effective artistic in traction is the real What we have in Orghast is the vention. It enables Popa to be as Hughes's undertaking. shamanic hope of raising the un abstract as man can be, yet Sometimes super-crude, it is a derworld up the surface through as and en to undertake a remain intelligible language ready Babel by conjuring language VIII. New Folk Forms or and as fully human as anything human creaturely. devised as a game of sounds. In tertaining Fabling, like mathematics and ifhe were telling a comic story.'' This is Hughes's great triumph, other words, Orghast (play and mythologies, supplies the terms reducing language to its stark in language) is the product of the He calls Popa's mode the a and the strategies for managing strumentality. The result is merging of the shaman and the surrealism of folklore, and the that realm between our ordinary poetry of practical activity, the gamesman, the one attempting to discriminations he makes help us minds and our life. Crow, out of the tribeagainst the raise the raw dream of the un deepest to the radical character of fitting for all his as a fable grasp elaborate of existence. simplicity in hostility derlife and the other to give it this new poetic consciousness wor figure, initiates profound Like his Tomcat made of voice. Stoppard quoted Peter Hughes himself.The little fables car associations. He is, by a fresh ds, his poems prowl the slick Brook, the director: "Orghast or visionary anecdotes of Popa's, ingenuity, related in Hughes's pets of our above-ground lives aims to be a leveller of audiences he says, show us "most clearly mind to that chap Hamlet who and make our ignorance edgy. by appealing not to semantic his shift from literary surrealism also found himself directly in the They are about their business of athleticism but to the instinctive to the far older and deeper thing, our 1 practical business of surviving. trying to manage practical recognition of a mental state' the surrealism of folklore. The says was in difficulties. within a sound. One can Hamlet, Hughes, distinction between the two hardly serted into the conflict in a bolder to the mythic seems to lie in the fact that imagine challenge mind limits of narrative." Shakespeare's represented surrealism is con the literary always What does the word by deposed Goddess-figure nected with an extreme remove Orghast Elizabeth and the "new Jehovah" mean? It is the product of two from the business of living under The second collection James I. Hughes describes roots, "or^g" and "ghast," which, practical difficulties and suc Hamlet: ''Mother-wet, weak of poems by the author according to Stoppard, Hughes cessfully managing them. The legged, horrified at the task, has to the of his con mind, abandoned the ofComing Close "pulled top Crow's cathechism at having sciousness to sounds for boggling." with circumstances and provide the womb-door is Hamlet's struggle 'life' and 'spirit, flame,' respec consequently lost the unifying soliloquy for our own age, in con tively. 'Thus orghast,' Hughes focus that comes of that, has lost 'is the name for "the temporary utility language: morale and surrendered to the ar explained, Who owns these fire of ... and questionable of the dream being" ' so, brains? Death. bitrary imagery Some flow. Folktale on the metaphorically,"sun." All this messy blood? Death. surrealism, where between sun and life other is These minimum-efficiency eyes? hand, always urgently and spirit the Middle English Death. connected with the business of word aghast floats up, too, ac This wicked little tongue? trying to manage practical dif tivating another layer just below Death. ficulties so great that they have This occasional wake our consciousness. What's the fulness? forced the sufferer temporarily Death. point? Hughes's remarkable ex out of the dimension of coherent demonstrates the im of periment stolen, or held reality into the depth Given, pending STONES possibility of escaping totally trial? imagination where understanding CASTING from semantic habits without Held. has its roots and stores its X POEMSBY HELEN CHASIN in simply writing noise-music; (Crow, 3) rays." Winner of the other he has set a marker Crow is also more than Hamlet The of frames that words, linkage Yale Poets Series at the outermost boundary of because he is less. He is not an comprise the cyclic form of Crow Younger that ismade of words. idealist come to a time out communicates its own poetry adjust meaning, $6.95 clothbound,$3.50 an a on too. on paperbound Like Orghast, Crow is of joint, but creature intent Hughes's remarks Popa LITTLE, BROWN inevitable stage in Hughes's surviving whatever the times clarify his own procedures, and

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