Since I was in Cleveland for a spell, instead of lugging there all my remaining essays from the Suzanne Gardiner Sarah Lawrence Essay class, I packed instead a bound book of essays from David Rivard’s class. Rivard was a visiting teacher while I was there and his poetry workshop included lots of rigor and readings (which is why that class was my favorite workshop at SLC). Anyway, since I was a young shit back then (grown-up from being a little shit), I didn’t find much to agree with in Rivard’s essays at the time. But looking back I like these essays much more than the ones from the students in the essay class. Oh, the happy surprises of maturity.
Anyway, this bound book of photocopies is a marvel in and of itself, back when the days teachers could make them, before copyright nailed their beleaguered asses to the overpriced textbook wall. I’ll be keeping this Rivard volume long after I throw all the other essays away. It has bootleg cred now.
The first essay in the collection is “Dull Subjects” by William Mathews. You can find a copy on JSTOR if you have a subscription or are a student: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40375714?seq=1
The jist of the essay is about how dull subjects can be transformed into amazing poems when handled with craft. He starts with a quote by Robert Creeley after someone once asked him after a poetry reading, “Are those real poems or did you make them up yourself?”
Oy. Mathews talks about the process of writing and how it helps us discover and transform ostensibly dull subjects. The essays starts ethereally by mentions of “ex-pressing” and making matter malleable and what the raw material "is" but then a “subject matter is chosen” and how pointless the subject matter really is. Consider, he says, trying to use an Index by Subject to find a poem.
(I actually find those moderately useful sometimes…”what was that poem about eggs that mystery guy once wrote?”).
Anyway, Mathews claims there are only four kinds of poems and maybe he’s right about that:
- “I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
- We’re not getting any younger.
- It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (2) with you, honey.
- Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and visa versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spend and on we know not what.”
That’s probably all you need to say in a poetry essay right there. But Matthews goes on to talk about the “ur-plot” for poems, kind of like an elevator pitch for movies and then he says even grammar has a plot: sentences open and they close, one line precedes another with “considerations of time and rhythm, which is to say narrative and suspense.”
Brilliant.
He then talks about “how provisional ostensible subject matter is” with examples from Wallace Stevens. He talks about the poem “Harmonium” and the mathematical nature of the first few lines. “Subject matter," he says, "…is often in poetry a place to begin.” He then talks about William Carlos Williams’ poem “Spring and All.” Poems about perception.
“It’s not only that dull or modest, or unassuming subjects provide a useful place to being, or that they can be in themselves a constraint against melodrama and easy grandeur….but may well…incite a poet’s suspicion of the perfected certainties or art in the face of a life—not the poet’s, necessarily, but anyone’s—that is unruly, unfinished, and unstoppable.”
He then talks about Howard Moss’s poem “The Summer Thunder” which seemed so apropos after January 6, 2021. I couldn't find it online, so I transcribed it at the time:
“The Summer Thunder” by Howard Moss
Now the equivocal lightning flashes
Come to close for comfort and the thunder
Sends the trembling dog under the table,
I long for the voice that is never shaken.
Above the sideboard, representation
Takes its last stand: a small rectangle
Of oak trees dripping with painted greenness,
And in the foreground, a girl asleep
In a field who speaks for a different summer
From the one the thunder is mulling over—
How calm the sensuous is! How saintly!
Undersea light from the lit-up glen
Lends a perspective to an arranged enchantment,
As peaceful as a Renaissance courtyard
Opened for tourists centuries after
Knights have bloodied themselves with doctrine.
Matthews says “syntactical discontent” causes “shifting barometric pressure.” He ends the essay with this:
“It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn’t dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it….Dull subjects are those we have failed.”
Amen.
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