Source of book: I own this
I first discovered Richard Howard quite recently - earlier this year - when I read his translation of Spleen and Ideal, which is part of Baudelaire’s anthology, The Flowers of Evil. It seemed particularly to capture the music of the original, so I decided to see what I could find from Howard. I purchased a used hardback at low cost, and decided to read a bit of it this month.
Richard Howard was known for a variety of writing: essays, translations, poetry, criticism. But it was his poetry that won him a Pulitzer in 1969. I chose to read a different collection, just because.
Howard had an interesting childhood. He never knew his birth parents, or his original last name, only that they were poor and Jewish, and that he had a sister that he never was able to meet. When he was an infant, his adoptive parents divorced, and his mother changed both of their names to “Howard,” which was apparently an anglicized version of one of her other ex-husbands’ last name.
Howard was openly gay, and LGBTQ themes often appear in his later works. There is a particularly amusing anecdote about a conversation he had with W. H. Auden, a friend (and also gay), where Howard complained about a colleague using homophobic and antisemitic slurs. Auden reportedly quipped, "My dear, I never knew you were Jewish!"
I also found it fascinating that Howard was renowned for his huge collection of books - the walls of his NewYork apartment were lined with them. I kind of aspire to that, and have a pretty good start.
His poetry tends toward longer forms, particularly the “dramatic monologue,” a form that Robert Browning particularly used. I can see some definite parallels. Another throwback technique that Howard used extensively is the literary reference. He quotes and repurposes lines from Shakespeare, Henry James, and many others throughout his poems.
I would say that his poems require a solid background in literature, art, philosophy, and ideas to fully appreciate. The Easter Eggs are hidden everywhere, ready to be discovered by anyone who knows what they are.
Because many of the poems in this collection are on the longer side - several pages, typically - they aren’t quite as quotable in full as many of the poets I feature on this blog. Rather, I mostly noted excellent and memorable lines within the poems. This doesn’t mean the whole poems aren’t good - they are - but just that quoting them in full would take too much space and time to type out.
There are a few, however, that I definitely want to use in full. First up is the title poem, which I think is amazing.
Like Most Revelations
It is the movement that incites the form,
discovered as a downward rapture—yes,
it is the movement that delights the form,
sustained by its own velocity. And yet
it is the movement that delays the form
while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact
it is the movement that betrays the form,
baffled in such toils of ease, until
it is the movement that deceives the form,
beguiling our attention—we supposed
it is the movement that achieves the form.
Were we mistaken? What does it matter if
it is the movement that negates the form?
Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,
it is the movement that creates the form.
Lovers of philosophy will of course see the argument between Plato and Aristotle. Is the nature of the universe the eternal unchanging form? Or is it change itself? Howard leans toward Aristotle, but it is more complicated than that, isn’t it?
This is my favorite poem in the collection, and honestly, one of my new favorite poems of all time. The repetition, the use of form along with motion within that form, the way the form and the meaning and the movement all are connected and inseparable. That’s true genius and craftsmanship.
The other poem I decided to quote in full is, unexpectedly, a tribute to Robert Phelps, an editor and writer who seems to have been well known in literary circles, and not so much out of them. I mean, you can find his NYT obituary, a book about his (possibly romantic) correspondence with James Salter, and a handful of articles in literary publications, but he doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia. (A mathematician of the same name does…)
I hadn’t heard of him either, but looked him up. In any case, he is immortalized in a particularly excellent poem. Contained within are nearly as many biographical details as the obituary, but told with true personal affection, good-natured humor, and insightful observations.
For Robert Phelps, Dead at Sixty-six
The Times reports six years in Elyria,
browbeaten suburb of your childhood
before my own had begun in Shaker Heights,
the brighter side of Cleveland’s tracks…
years I never took into account, nonplussed
by your habit of addressing me
- or any other man you regarded as
Worthy of the gaudy attention
to bookish leanings and upstanding looks
you were gaily ready to bestow -
as “my dear boy,” “my son” and “my child,” although
you were clearly the one to be raised
- or lowered - to the permanently askew
level of our promiscuities;
it became entertainment, “telling Robert”
last night’s scurrilous episode
and watching your vicarious blush appear,
followed by the squeal of gratified
incredulity which greeted each disgrace…
Oneself is always an abstraction -
le concret, ce sont les autres. To which end
you listened more intently, waiting
like some credulous minotaur in his cave
for Theseus to arrive, whereupon
you became Ariadne, eager to oblige.
What can we relish if we recoil
from vulgarity? Not your problem, was it?
Masterpieces you called “strenuous,”
and were satisfied - or so you asserted -
with patching up Colette, endless
apprenticeships to other men’s disclosures,
Jouhandeau, Wescott, Cocteau - not “works”
but the launching-pad that sends the rocket up;
how gleefully you would disparage
or dismiss the monuments I so envied,
standing emulously in their shade…
What you wanted - it amounted to addiction -
was life recounted without design,
without that tyranny - just “the real thing strange”:
letters, diaries, secrets written down,
and not having to dilute or deprave them -
better one bold astronomer
than any number of big decorous stars!
Even silence can be indiscreet,
and not everything we make up is a lie.
About a thousand book reviews
made you too familiar to care much for Fame -
what you liked was how others were moved,
strangers. Your own maneuvers you confined to
the background - more room there than up front
where the young struggle and sweat for their applause
Lovely, though, those intervals of flesh
under hot lights! Such was your gran rifiuto:
I wonder if the delicacy
of your domesticities (that son unseen,
that wife dedicated to her art)
made your love for men the mirror type
of mine, you the critical voyeur
resisting “production,” I proliferating
among nameless bodies, finding soon
how many were dying who never used to…
Granted: you would not write. Then your hand
began to shake so, you could not write. It was
Parkinson’s, as we would discover
but was it not at first a failure of your will?
Those years you passed off as “successes,”
triumphant manipulations of decor;
I recall seasons when you devised
“literaries” - a noun, voyons - for our latest
Mme. Verdurin. Besides the fun,
she paid far better than mere authorship, since
the rich, my dear, are always with us.
I sat at those tables with you, glib, grinning,
ungainly, so greedy for limelight
on my terms and abashed by your forbearance,
those evenings of unavailing skill.
Silence = Death, according to the slogan
broadcast for AIDS. Yours was another
silence, as you said with an absurd chuckle;
a guy can’t go on living all the time.
At least it was not the plague, not our plague, only
Parkinson’s, only cancer. You smiled,
invoking plausible pretexts - embarrassed
(such was your humility) to die
among the victims, to benefit even
erroneously from emotion
reserved for the unwarrantable dead.
Forty years out of Cleveland, we live
and die in the same Village now, Robert dear,
and Shaker Heights seems quite as good
a place to have gone from as your Elyria.
It was the wrong family member
you summoned up: you are the man I should be
if I had not been the child I was;
not son, not father either, but - I know it now -
the lost brother found, Vale frater.
There are quite a few things worth mentioning about that. First, Shaker Heights, where Howard grew up (his grandmother was wealthy), is quite a story in itself - and the setting for Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. I talked about the place a bit in that post.
I also LOVE this line:
better one bold astronomer
than any number of big decorous stars!
Even silence can be indiscreet,
and not everything we make up is a lie.
I also noted the reference to “delicacy of your domesticity.” Phelps was married, with a kid, but, as the poem indicates, he was probably gay. Not that uncomment back in the day for a man to enter a marriage with a woman (and vice versa) with the understanding that there would be sex on the side with same sex partners. Preserve the appearance, gain the benefits of children and family.
And, like so many of Howard’s later poems, the specter of AIDS haunting everything. Also that line, “a guy can’t go on living all the time.” Such great sardonic humor.
The rest of the lines I want to highlight are just moments from longer poems. The first of these is from “Occupations,” which is essentially a dramatic monologue. “Essentially,” because it isn’t clear to me if the prose sections that are scattered throughout the poem are responses from another character, or memories of past conversations.
The poetic parts are set in the form of a letter by an unnamed author to the painter, Matisse. The poem discusses (with a tremendous amount of wit) various impressionist and post-impressionist artists, art criticism, and a bunch of other related topics. It really is a lot of fun, particularly if you love art.
(I recommend What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz for a better understanding of modern art - it really helped me understand the stuff in this poem as well as making my visits to modern art museums much deeper.)
The one line I wanted to feature is one in a discussion of Picasso and his unnatural colors, particularly as ripped by a critic who perhaps didn’t get the point. Quoting the critic:
If he looks long enough he’ll wind up
adding a little yellow, instead
of deciding what color
the sky really ought to be.
Is that painting? No,
that’s taking advice
from Nature, asking
her to supply you
with information.
The next line is from “Poem Beginning with a Line by Isadora Duncan.” I am not entirely sure I understand the poem, but what I can make out is that it is about a love affair with a man - and not a particularly great one. The details are the difficulty - one feels like inside information would be helpful. The sex is described very obliquely, as poems are wont to do, and with a wry humor. In or out of context, there are a pair of lines that are just great, no matter what.
Laughter has no erectile tendencies
And:
My resistances, as I have called them, were
no more than submissions
to Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Realms -
flower, dog, druggery.
I’ll end with a line from “For David Kalstone.” Kalstone was another gay writer and critic, who died of AIDS in 1986. It is another touching obituary, but one tinged as well with anger at the horrifically inhumane response of the Reagan administration and the government more generally to the health crisis.
This passage really stood out to me: the opening of the poem.
My own stake in his story had been pulled up
years before such benignly recounted
elemental emptyings, comminglings; and
wisdom asserts it is delusional
folly to dwell on the past. Well past sixty,
I know little more about wisdom now
than we did at thirty, but lots more about
folly, and of course I tell what I know -
This really resonates with me these days. As I approach 50, I don’t know how much more I know about wisdom than I did at 30, but I have seen such folly on display - indeed flaunted proudly as if it were an honor - in the Trump Era, that I can certainly say I know more about folly now than I did then. The amount of moral stupidity that is celebrated by my former religious tribe is astonishing and horrifying, but there you have it.
Richard Howard’s poems are not much like other ones I have read; they have a unique style, a blending of old and new, a formality, and a unique focus and perspective. I look forward to reading the rest of his collections.
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