It began with a premeditated assault outside the Hackney Empire two weeks ago. Not that knowing what caused me to write this article will make much sense to you, given that we’ve only just been introduced, but I do like to get to basics, as quickly as possible. You should know, for example, that I’m a male exotic dancer based in Bangor* and that I rarely get chance to visit London. Yet I jump – if not gyrate – at any chance I get to expand my horizons. That’s why I was quick on my well-oiled heels when I recently received an invitation to attend the annual meeting of the British Thong Society, that august body of men and women who, last month, voted me their new honorary chairman.
There was a beautiful dawn that day in early June when I set out for London. I arrived a little past ten in the morning, spent the afternoon at the A.G.M., and then had an enjoyable evening with my society friends before we concluded business with a few too many cocktails in the West End. I woke up in my hotel room the next morning, not a little hung over, with a feather boa tied around my knees, and feeling rather ashamed that I hadn’t made better use of my visit to the big city to do something more cultural. It’s why I was determined to use what time I had left before my afternoon train home to see the sights and how, at ten thirty, I found myself walking through Hackney.
I’d got as far as the Empire Theatre when the attack occurred. One moment I was enjoying my walk, the sensation of sun on my skin; the next moment I was hopping around like a man taken with an sudden obsession for doing the Lambeth Walk. The pain was unreal. Something sharp had cut across my flanks.
Now, before you get too concerned, this isn’t as rare an occurrence as it sounds. If often happens to those of us at home with our bodies. People often take offence at my walking the streets wearing only a thong and pair of cowboy boots. I turned around ready to defend myself from the usual red faced puritan type who usually launch these cowardly attacks. I wasn’t at all expecting to see a face I’ve come to know so well through her blog. It was Ms. Baroque, grinning widely and holding a garden cane which she had just put across my bare buttocks.
‘It is you, isn’t it Chippy?’ she asked, peering over her glasses in that way she has. Perhaps I’m not used to these big city welcomes but, to a simple boy from Bangor, I thought it a bit late for her to be doubting my identity given the lashing she’d just dealt out.
‘Ms. Baroque!’ I replied, not unkindly despite still smarting with a mild agony. ‘Imagine meeting you here! What can I say? It brings tears to a man’s eyes!’
‘Oh, sorry about that,’ she said, casting the cane back into the garden from where she’d snatched it from a pensioner’s display of prize sweet peas. ‘You know me… I do like to make a big first impression.’
‘Or a long and slightly red impression bearing a more than passing resemblance to a welt,’ I said, craning my neck to see the damage done to my immaculate rawhide. The last time something like this had happened was when Bryan Appleyard had ploughed into me while test-driving a G-Wiz through the city streets. Unlike that previous meeting with a famous blogger, this time I was sure there’d be no unhappy scenes involving an electric vehicle speeding off into London traffic while its driver screams ‘eat dirt, anti-rationalist!’ at me while giving me the finger à la Wittgenstein.
Instead, Miss Baroque and I slipped into a coffee shop where we spent the next two hours discussing the world of blogging and our mutual love for the written word. It was there that my dear friend first suggested that I provide some cover for her while she went into hospital to have her versification valves scraped, her metrical carburettor reshanked, or whatever else passes for a 10,000 mile service to these poetic gods.
‘Oh, Chippy, it would be wonderful if you could just write me a little something,’ she said. ‘Nothing too long, perhaps seven or eight thousand words. And make sure you get somebody to proof read it. You know the trouble you have with spelling... I won’t have mistakes like that on my blog. You know… this isn’t Chip Dale’s Diary!’
She was clearly referring to the incident when I wrote a stinging letter of rebuke to The Times about an article they’d printed about‘s Madonna ’deification’. I’d misread the headline and thought it about something much more interesting but far less sanitary. Unfortunately, the newspaper’s editor had seen fit to publish my letter and address. My name has been something of a joke among Madonna fans ever since.
‘Okay, I’ll write something not too long and arduously checked for spelling mistakes,’ I agreed, ‘but, my dear Baroque: what am I meant write about?’
She smiled, no doubt recognising me for the simple soul I am. She reached into her bag and handed me an old dusty volume of Wallace Stevens’ poetry.
‘Here,’ she said in that wonderfully dusky accent of hers, ‘just pick out a poem and talk about it. Only, Chippy, just for once, won’t you say something intelligent? My readers are a refined bunch. They don’t want those crass thong jokes of yours. You do know they can get quite tiresome?’
Never has a man in his weekday thong been so insulted. But I knew she meant nothing by it. I just put it down to her tricky gall bladder and I told her as much.
‘It will do you some good to be shot of the thing,’ I said. ‘And then you’ll be able to write a poem about it. Such a good word, gall. There’s sure to be plenty of words to rhyme with it.’
‘What about bladder?’ she asked, clearly less impressed by the lexical possibilities.
‘Gall is a ball but a bladder is gladder,’ I said, as quick as a flash…
Ms. Baroque’s silence was almost as thick as this one…
So, anyway… Here I am, ready to write something very meaningful about poetry. I’ve managed to open the book and I’ve thumbed through literally pages of the stuff until I came to something that took my fancy. I should warn you that there are no more thong jokes from hereon in. This is where I get serious. The poem is called ‘The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician’. And in the worlds of the late great ol’ blue eyes (Sinatra not Stevens), it goes something like this…
It comes about that the drifting of these curtains
Is full of long motions; as the ponderous
Deflations of distance; or as clouds
Inseparable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.
I hate to be reductive but there are, broadly speaking, two types poet. There are those poets who want to put things in a simple but elegant way (Pam Ayres springs unfortunately to mind) and those who aren’t happy unless they’re tying you up with riddles. So, for example, when Alexander Pope (of the first camp) said ‘Whatever is, is right!’ he summed up the whole of his Essay on Man in one simple phrase. If I’m honest about it,*** you can skip the rest of his Essay 'if you make sure you remember this one bon mot. Pope’s helpful in that way. It’s not at all like reading, say, Emily Dickinson. Once she starts harping on about horses having their head toward eternity you can get quite lost. Stevens is another in this second camp. He can also get a bit elliptical like Dickinson, only with much less fodder…
I suppose Ms. Baroque would not want me to go any further without mentioning that there are other types of poet but I’m not so sure. Like all kinds of art, you have to be careful. What begins as a bit of ambiguity ends up with you looking at a leaky bathtub painted purple and containing a large plastic cockroach. The less said about that sort of ‘art’ the better. For me, great art (and great poetry) draws you towards its structure, even if this means drawing you into formlessness in order to emphasise the importance of structure. Even Joyce, who wrote perhaps the greatest example of unstructured art in Finnegan’s Wake, was led by very deep structures. The ramble that is Ulysses draws your attention to the shape of the epic and the mysteries contained therein. Finnigan’s Wake does the same, painting the deep structures of language itself and of the deep cultural subconscious. Stevens too is always on about form in one way or another.
Take the first verb in our poem. ‘Comes’ is an odd one, which looks forward to the second line. ‘It’, ‘that’ and ‘is’ form the backbone of the opening lines, which leans forward, stretching for completion like the curtains, billowing out into the room with these graceful motions which have so enchanted the poet. The effect is enhanced by the two words ‘Drifting’ and ‘curtains’, which have to be read long, slow and unhurried. The long first line draws out time and the caesura of the second shortens it again. The effect is a physical one. The lengthening and then the contraction replicate the motions of the curtain, slowly rising as it catches the air and then, as the overlap of the curtains breaks opens at the height of the billow, the whole thing suddenly collapses, ready to rise again on the next breath.
Need I point out that the ‘ponderousness’ of the ‘deflations of distance’ is both directed to the image and the phrase? The alliteration of the hard plosive ‘d’ sounds encumbers the line, which is itself self-contained and trapped between two caesura. It is a baggy curtain on the page which marks the point where Stevens shifts from the small and to the grand scale.
This is, for me, the moment of brilliance at the heart of the poem. There are usually moments such as this when Stevens is on form, where the things that had previously seemed small to us, almost insignificant and domestic, begin to have larger significances beyond the normal. We get this when Stevens turns his attention to the ‘clouds are inseparable from their afternoons’. Moving from the room to the landscape, the poem is duly transformed from one about a domestic phenomenon to one about the universe as a whole. It’s very much like Stevens at his best, when the light of a single candle can illuminate a patch of ground in a valley and then suddenly dominate the whole of the landscape. It happens in an instant and he is sublime when making these switches from the specific to the universal.
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.
The ‘firmament’, here, is a word Stevens reaches for. It comes to us from outside the domestic language of the early part of the poem. It is in a sense ‘beyond us’ too, part of the attempt to objectify the whole universe which we now see breathing with the ‘up-rising and down-falling’. Even the coupling of the words, ‘up’ with ‘rising’ and ‘down’ with ‘falling’, seems deliberately structural. It repeats the pattern of the poem: the curtains and the clouds face off against the breeze and the afternoon. Again, it’s about cause and the effect. It is about the largeness, impossible to imagine, yet we can see at second hand, evident in the movement of a drape.
Stevens looks to the movement of curtains and sees the movement of the universe; a long chain of cause and effect. It is as simple as it is profound.
It is hard to say more because if we wanted to say more, it would be like moving from describing the curtain to describing the universe. It would be moving, also, from poetry to prose. Great poetry often abbreviates vastness, contracting a lifetime of understanding into a simple dense yet beautiful phrase. And causes and effects are too mysterious to follow all the way back to the origins. It’s like being assaulted in a London street two weeks ago and then finding yourself writing about a poem you’ve never before read.
It is just the sort of thing I think Ms. Baroque would really appreciate.
* To be exact, I’m Wales top male exotic dancer.**
** I feel obliged to use footnotes. I really don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just an accommodating soul and feel a need to honour Ms. Baroque in her absence.
*** I’m honest about everything. When you wear only a thong, you can hardly do anything but be honest.
