a heart eaten in the first stanza is an exception

From a 2005 interview in Bookslut with Frank Bidart, whom I saw read last week:

When “The Third Hour of the Night” (about Benvenuto Cellini) appeared in the October, 2004 issue of Poetry, readers seemed to react only in one of two ways: awe or outrage. …[another] complaint was that the poem read too much like prose, or was too obscure or esoteric or whatever. The final complaint was something like revulsion. The poem contains disturbing scenes of murder and some sort of ritual/sexual violence. These complaints beg a couple of questions: “How much of a long poem can actually consist of ‘poetry’?” And: “These poems really are very violent. Why?”

If a poem is any good, I don’t think of some parts as “poetry” and other parts as “not poetry.” Each line has to be written with a feeling for its place in the shape, the pulse of the whole: if it does that, it is authentically part of the whatness of the thing. It then has its own eloquence.

Here’s the really good part:

I think the question of violence is only a question because people think of poetry as lyric poetry. In lyric there is often a great deal of psychic violence, but usually little (say) murder. (Even in Browning’s lyrics.) A heart gets eaten in the first sonnet of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” but that is the exception.

For example, murder. I like how his read of the Dante/Béatrice story is not restricted to love eternal, as flesh aspires to divinity, but also comprises straight out of the gate heart-eating.

I saw him read last week, thanks to my friend E the poet. There isn’t the right clip on YouTube, or I would post, because he was a riveting and transporting reader; every iota of breath goes into the sentence as it comes out. He does a lot of character poems, only some of whom are “I.” It’s very passionate without being lyrical and all self-enclosed, which I like. I find many New England poets provincial; they can’t seem to locate themselves in a “tradition” outside of a few anglo hermetics who, interesting as they are, are treated as freeze-dried and the only stuff on the shelf.

I like going to poetry readings because I like seeing what makes something move and transpire in an audience sitting still. And what kind of reading produces a good provocative question, as opposed to gush; these are good for teaching. I also like hearing how people make the rhetorical moves of written things available to the ear. Some readings feel like spinach, or church.

Here is one of the early ones, or the first few passages, Ellen West, from Ploughshares. It’s one of the anti-confessional first-person ones. 1975, 12 years after The Feminine Mystique. This is a subject I have more vexed by the oftener I think about Mad Men, and talk to my friends about how claustrophobic it is, and why the Betty character seems so smug but bereft in the mid-century dollhouse, until she snaps with hysteria and takes after the birds with a BB gun. I leave the graphic design, because layout and the splattering of space is often important in his poems.

Ellen West

I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream . . . But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT . . . cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife.

The combination of purity and obliviousness is quite compelling. The rest of the poem has excerpts from the “case” of Ellen West, in the voice of the physician.