TOP56-DES53
This Old Poem #56:
Henry Taylor’s Hawk
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 5/30/03
Henry Taylor
is not a bad poet- but not a particularly good 1 either. He’s also a bit of an
odd duck. If you check out his home page you’ll see what I mean:
http://www.american.edu/academic.depts/cas/lit/lit-fac/htaypage.htm.
Note the HUGE photo. Go Google the man as well- there is his photo again &
again. If narcissism were not enough there’s also his lone contact with me-
wherein the man posited the death-defying query- ‘Why do you spell the word
alot as 1 word & not a lot?’ You see, to 1 as rote-minded & gray as HT
such a thing as personal preference is not an option. Thus the word generic can
be applied to HT in a guilt-free manner. At that same website you can glean
assorted other info on HT, like:
Henry Taylor is Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC. His third collection of poems, The Flying Change, received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; his first two, The Horse Show at Midnight and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards, have been reissued in one volume. His translations from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies; he has also published translations from Greek and Roman classical drama. His most recent collection of poems, Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996, appeared in 1996. He has received Fellowships in Creative Writing for the National Endowment for the Arts (1978 and 1986), a Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980-81), the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1984), and the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association (1989).
Someone explain to me why a poet would need a ‘research grant’? Oh well. As for his poetry HT has mastered the dull narrative, especially of the page or more length. It’s not so much that his poems are clichéd, as they are dull- although clichés can abound. Witness this opening stanza from a typical HT snoozer:
Cold light on rock would call his hands to work
when pot-buoys leapt and wavered in first light
and men who rose in dark, slickered for work,
drew close to shore, abstracted in their work
of hauling pots, indifferent to the cold.
He watched them, insulated from such work.
He traced the essential motion of their work
against a solid backdrop wall of rock,
seeking the line between motion and rock,
and strained to feel what drove men to the work
of pulling food from waves. He watched their hands,
ashamed of his thin wrists, his artist's hands….
Note how it starts with clichéd phrases & tropes, then lulls itself to a stupor with repetition? Even worse are those little enigmatic (or attempts at enigmatism) poems that are supposedly ‘brutally honest’, such as this 1:
So huge he couldn't reach below his
belt
(he'd been a sideshow fat man for a while),
Mr. Shipman always kept a boy with him
whose job, whenever he was called upon,
was to unbutton that enormous fly,
reach in and grab, then stand aside and aim.
Once, behind the grandstand at a ball game,
while Shipman shifted his impatient flesh
from foot to foot, the boy groped in the trousers
and said, "Mr. Shipman, I can't find it." "Well,
God damn it, boy, you the last man had it."
Are you
snickering yet? This ranks with Jane Kenyon’s abysmal ‘The Shirt’ as 1 of
the worst ‘humorous’ published poems of the last few decades. This attempt
at Barnumesque blueness fails for so many ways- the most obvious being there are
no logical reasons for the line breaks- the poem is not ‘metered’, not does
it hew a syllabic count, not acquiesce to rhyme- so what is it for? There is no
revelation, no humor, no reason except to fill space- &
how’bout them Yankees!
So anomic is
HT that his only passable poems are those where stricture dictates he cannot
veer too far off in to infinite dullery- like this sonnet:
At the Grave of E. A. Robinson
Decades of vague intention drifted
by
before I brought small thanks for your large voice–
a bunch of hothouse blooms and Queen Anne’s lace
and four lines from “The Man Against the Sky.”
My poems, whatever they do, will not repay
the debt they owe to yours, so I let pass
a swift half hour, watching the wind distress
the fringes of my fragile, doomed bouquet.
I beg your pardon, sir. You
understood
what use there is in standing here like this,
speaking to one who hears as well as stone;
yet though no answer comes, it does me good
to sound aloud, above your resting place,
hard accents I will carry to my own.
Still a snooze, too obviously a fey copy of the dead man’s. There is almost a bathos- but not quite, only because in order to impart bathos you must have an awake audience. Still, the off-rhymes at lines’-end make this 1 of HT’s better efforts. But, without further wood sawing, let’s take on the poem in question:
Hawk
Last year I learned to speak to a
red-tail hawk.
He wheeled above me as I crossed a field;
he screamed; I pulled a blade of grass, set it
against my lips, and started screaming back.
We held that conversation for half a
mile.
Once in a while he calls me out of the house
and I comb a border for the right blade of grass.
I used to wish I might learn what it is
we mean to one another; now, I keep
the noise we've mastered for itself alone,
for glimpses of his descent toward dead elms,
and a heart that will not mind when I am gone.
This might be the simplest TOP rewrite to date. This poem is strictured by its quatrain form. It’s lone problem is that it is 1 quatrain too many:
Last year I learned to speak to a
red-tail hawk.
He wheeled above me as I crossed a field;
he screamed; I pulled a blade of grass, set it
against my lips, and started screaming back.
We held that conversation for half a
mile.
Once in a while he calls me out of the house
and I comb a border for the right blade of grass.
I used to wish I might learn what it is.
End the poem here & you may not have a Jeffersian feel nor import to the poem, but you get a solid poem- & 1 that has an intriguing end- just what is the thing that might be learned? In the original this is answered- it’s the hawk & speaker. But, look at how the last stanza then descends into its own idea of ‘deep image’:
we mean to one another; now, I keep
the noise we've mastered for itself alone,
for glimpses of his descent toward dead elms,
and a heart that will not mind when I am gone.
Bubby Bly would probably have his hands down his pants over this poem’s
end. Nonetheless, & excuse me for that imagery, the poem’s simple ejection
of stanza 3 nicely rescues a bad poem in to passability. & that’s worth alot!
Final Score: (1-100):
Henry Taylor’s Hawk: 60
TOP’s
Hawk: 75
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