Pumpkins and Ghosts

“The Pumpkin at Halloween” by Jane Duran
and “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens


The Pumpkin at Halloween

My niece carried a pumpkin
down the supermarket aisle.
She rolled it and bumped it
across the night for fun,
down the sticky rain streets
though it was very heavy,
churning and charming as it was
with seedlore and threads,
held it in her arms
staggering slightly
under a streetlamp
and put it down
outside some council flats
and sat on it. At home
she dug the pumpkin out,
peeked into its mathematics,
its seeds interminable,
its double dealing,
its wild lapping inner walls,
tugged at its sunk city,
jolted days and weeks out of it,
tipped the darkness
from its eyes and mouth.
In the middle of a sunset land
We lit a candle for the pumpkin,
Its forgotten trails,
Its medallion oceans,
Pored over the long words
It released on the wall.
Once the pumpkin lay in a field,
Edible and quilted,
Chiming softly.
Now it burns in a child’s autumn,
ferocious and hollow.

From a purely formal perspective, Jane Duran’s poem is characterised by its lack of structure. The lines, though mostly short, contain 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9 syllable lengths. Rhyme is absent, though it is rich with sound through the relation of words. There are no divisions of verse, but the poem suggests natural pauses and breaks. A poem such as this reflects the poetic innovations of the 1920’s onwards; the openness of form and thematic freedom emphasises an alternative to fixed structure and formal delivery. But this hardly means it is less poetic, indeed one could argue that it becomes more so. Formality in poetry is like formality in other communicative contexts – a set of recognised rules that smooth the exchange of information according to certain assumptions, whether they are social, intellectual or even political. Open forms actually intensify the world of the poem because such assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. Rather than being “spoken to” we find ourselves listening in, as with eavesdropping, it is not always clear what is being said or whether it concerns us. The absence of a clear relationship between writer and reader has the effect of foregrounding the poem itself, which is perhaps why a lot of post 1920’s poetry is about poetry. I think what emerges from “A Pumpkin at Halloween” is a celebration of imagination rather than a poem about Halloween, or even childhood. This “ordinary” object (the pumpkin) is made a little less ordinary due to its annual use as a lantern but in the mind of the writer it becomes transformed into another world and a voyage of discovery. Children, by nature – and poets, through an act of will, are adept at making such a journey. In a few lines the Pumpkin is given its own, secret knowledge of “mathematics”, a mythology in the invented word “seedlore” – the presence of underhand “double dealing” – it passes on towards destruction, the “sunk city” becoming a “sunset” land, like the remnant of a lost civilization, it is finally a place of “forgotten trails” and “medallion oceans.” These are just some of the rich and strange vocabulary Duran uses and the urgency of the lines suggests there is a lot more that could be said. In a world where even imagination seems to be most valued as a commodity (the fairly recent commercialisation of Halloween is a good example) the poem reminds us of transforming power of creative thought.
If any poet of the Twentieth Century epitomises the kind of poetry about poetry mentioned before it must be the American writer Wallace Stevens. With the tentative link of Halloween I have chosen his “ghost” poem, “Large Red Man Reading.”

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected
more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the
poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
reality,
That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the
frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was
ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple
tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its
Laws:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, spended hearts,
Took on colour, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

In the same way that Duran’s poem is not about a pumpkin, this isn’t about ghosts. “Life as death,” for Stevens, is where one is denied the experience of “things as they are,” the ghosts seize on “what was ugly,” or what they had thought was ugly - pots, pans, thorns. The (uncommon) word “spended,” means suffering a loss of blood (the bloodless ghosts) , but is so close to the sound of “splendid” that it completes the transformation of reality the poet speaks – as his book turns from blue to purple as the red of his being invests the objects with meaning. The title sounds like the title of a cubist painting, the colours reinforce the visual, painted quality of the words. The reality we assume we know, Stevens implies, is, as it was for the Cubists, something false and unreal, the “outlines of being”, elsewhere, hidden, and poetry a way they might be revealed.

Poetry for the week. "Everything Changes."

“Everything Changes” by Cicely Herbert
“Everything Changes” (Alles wandelt sich) by Bertolt Brecht.

At a recent poetry discussion meeting these two poems were mentioned. I have always been interested in examples of how poets are aware of writing and traditions that may belong to a very different time or place, and how individual poets create a kind of dialogue with other writers and texts. Cicely Herbert explicitly acknowledges Bertolt Brecht in the title of her poem, which is the English translation of his poem Alles wandelt sich.

Everything Changes

After Brecht, Alles wandelt sich

Everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later
but what’s happened has happened,
and poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again.

What’s happened has happened.
poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again, but
everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem was written in the 1940’s in the USA, during his exile years from Germany. The following is the English translation by John Willett from Brecht's collected poems.

Everything Changes.

Everything changes. You can make
A fresh start with your final breath.
But what has happened has happened. And the water
You once poured into the wine cannot be
Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water
You once poured into the wine cannot be
Drained off again, but
Everything changes. You can make
A fresh start with your final breath.

If we are familiar with Brecht’s career – his commitment to political and social causes, his Marxist driven concepts of “dialectical theatre” and unwavering insistence on the need for art to foster political action, this may seem to be a surprisingly personal, reflective poem. Herbert’s poem, in contrast, may seem the more “political”, taking as a central image the pollution of the oceans - the destruction of the environment- against which the willingness to plant trees without the purpose of personal gain reflects the hope of responsible choice. Herbert is clearly attracted to the shape of Brecht’s poem. The German poet’s skilful use of repetition and counter-balance held together by apparent contradictions (nothing can be done but you can start again with your last breath, everything repeats itself but everything changes). Herbert’s green poem, like much green rhetoric, tend to emphasise the big picture and deal in general concepts. Brecht seems somehow more human, more intimate. Perhaps it is the use of water and wine, their suggestion of the everyday and domestic, or perhaps part of the poem’s impact is the notion of someone being so determined to work at life and get it right that they are open to change even at the point of death. Personally, and even given the impoverishment of translation, I prefer Brecht’s poem. For a writer who was so determined to write to the intelligence he has an ability to move and engage readers that put him alongside the greatest poets of the Twentieth Century. If anything, Herbert’s “Everything Changes” is more a homage than a re-writing, a homage to a poet who can fuse fatalism and hope, resignation and determination.

Poetry for the week

“Wild Fruit” by Elaine Feinstein
“From A Shropshire Lad by A.E Houseman



Wild Fruit

Yesterday, I found an over-ripe quince,
wrinkled and yellow, on the tree
and the sweet flesh smelled of
stored apples in a half-remembered room

from a childhood as far off as another country,
where the light was golden as
weeds by an autumn waterside, and all
that pungent garden entered the house

and breathed its warmth in fruit. And I
held to the memory all afternoon, even though
the whole fen sky glared white,
and the thin November air tasted of snow.

In Feinstein’s poem the scent of quince makes a powerful connection to memory and childhood. Of all the senses, the olfactory sense is the one most strongly linked to memory. Most of us will have experienced being strongly reminded of someone by a perfume or a place by the smell of food or plants. Feinstein’s quince would have ripened in the early autumn and is now “over-ripe” as the year slips towards winter. The parallelism of this with her life is implicit – childhood is “far off” and wintering age approaches. Feinstein seems to echo the opening of L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between”: “The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there.” This feeling of otherness and distance can occasionally be closed by the power of memory – in this case triggered by the smell of the quince – and the poet is flooded by a sense of the past.
In “Wild Fruit” Feinstein is aware of several traditions of English poetry. One is the country house poem – a classical, public verse form of the 17th and 18th centuries, though here it is adapted to the intimate and private world of the writer where fruit signifies not the proper management of an estate but the presence of the past. Another influence is the kind of nostalgic, elegiac country poetry exemplified by the poet A.E Houseman (1859-1936).
From A Shropshire Lad
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue-remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Feinstein’s poem (though unrhymed) is even similar to a typical Houseman poem in structure. The ideas – and imagery overlap in several places: “half –remembered” and “blue-remembered”, “another country” and “far country.” For Houseman, the sight of the countryside opens a door on memory, the visual sense rather than smell, and his main concern (which produces the grater melancholy of the poem) is as much with the distance of time as the proximity of memory. Feinstein’s quince memories are far more reconciled to the inevitable patterns of change and age; their warmth can be held against the onset of winter.

NOTES

Language Notes:

Fen: Lowland wholly or partly covered in water, typical of parts of East England.
Yon: This is an archaic or poetic form of “yonder “ or “beyond” that would only be used today ironically.

GENERAL NOTES
Although they are not grown commercially in Britain, quince trees are not uncommon. The quince has seen renewed interest in recent years and is recovering some of the popularity it enjoyed as a Victorian garden tree. If you want membrillo in England you’ll probably have to make it yourself or patronize Harrods’s Food Hall or a similar establishment, unless you have it sent from Spain. Quinces are the golden apples of mythology, and have a rich history. Jewish lore suggests the serpent tempted Eve with a quince rather than an apple, and they are praised in the Song of Solomon. Ancient Greeks believed the trees sprung up wherever Aphrodite stepped when she was born from the foaming sea, thus linking the fruits with love and fertility. And quinces have featured in Persian cooking for at least 2,500 years, both in meat and sweet dishes.
The quince has made some odd appearances in poetry and popular culture, appearing in Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” when the enamored animals “Dined of mince and slices of quince/ Which they ate with a runcible spoon.” More recently, in The Simpson’s episode “Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part1”, Mr. Burns and Waylon Smithers end up eating an entire box of chocolates in one sitting, leaving behind and discarding only one piece – the sour quince log.