It would be better for the reputation of the poet, John Thompson, to have it discovered that his poems were only doodles, and that before he could throw them out, someone—an enemy—submitted them to the paper in the author’s name in order to discredit his good character. But these newfangled poets mean what they say when they write their meaningless, meandering verse. They believe that poems like these ought to use up paper and be dignified as parts of a book. If it were merely about the miscarriage of craft, poems like these would deserve a gentler return than inhospitable criticism. Anyone who has written poems has often missed the mark. Semel insanivimus omnes. (We have all played the fool once.) But poems like these—poems that insult our intelligence by communicating nothing more cerebral than a confession of mental derangement—are not fit even for lunatics to peruse. Off-the-wall writers of junk verse need to be shamed. Shame precedes repentance. Decadent writers need to be jarred into recognition of how mad their verses make them appear even to halfwits. The voice in Two Ghazals does confess to madness: “I’m quite mad: never see the sun.” But if Mr. Thompson’s intention is to write as a madman would, it’s not poetry, is it? And if this is poetry, the same thing can be said about it that ordinary people say about modern art: Anyone can do it, though most of us would rather do something constructive instead. No doubt, the author of Two Ghazals would have liked everyone to avow that this is poetry, regardless of what voice may be identified in it. No matter what praise this poet has been the recipient of, and no matter what progress poets of his school pretend to have made, these poems read like the reflections of a delusional soul. “If I wash my hands will I disappear?/I’ll suck oil from Tobin’s steel and walnut.” When men were more intelligent, though admittedly less advanced than we are scientifically, a person who uttered discordant speech from his imagination was evaluated, not by a literary critic, but by a doctor. From 1758: “Deluded imagination…is…an indisputable but an essential character of Madness” (W. Battie, A Treatise on Madness, pp. 5, 6.) Poems like Thompson’s Two Ghazals exhibit incongruity. Something that is made up of incongruous parts is called a chimera: an incongruous delusion. “The perception of Chimeras…exist no where except in the brain of a Madman” (Ibid., p. 42.) Is it not for our advantage that writings from the age of medical bloodletting may be used to shame our literary pretensions and daftest writers? From 1811: “Alas! not only darkness, thick as night, has overtaken them; they are bewildered in the imaginations of their disordered minds, and in the pursuit of fancied objects, or in the flight from fancied terrors, hurried into the midst of dangers” (Stevenson Maggill, On Lunatic Asylums, p. 11.) They are hurried into the midst of dangers—dangers like self-harm and suicide. Both Rothko and the author of Two Ghazals killed themselves. Poems like Two Ghazals convey less meaning than the medley of words that a person might remember from his last nightmare. It so happens that sometimes I recall sayings from my dreams and that sometimes I bother to write them down. For a teaching moment, I am fetching one of these right now. So in a dream, a woman said this to me: “When my world revolves around stories, I know I’m going to write one; when the world revolves around mine, I know I’ve written one.” This is a well-ordered proverb, notwithstanding the hubris of the ethereal woman who contrived it. Unlike the miscommunication in Two Ghazals, it is not only well-ordered, but discernible. Definite meaning may be gathered from it. The saying seems thoughtful enough to pass for the fruit of rumination. It is remotely possible that I subconsciously absorbed the proverb from a book or an audio medium and that it manifested in the unconscious state of my dream. I must say this because C. H. Spurgeon came by a whole sermon in a similar manner. But even allowing for this potentiality, isn’t it interesting that more meaning may be obtained by accident in the dream of a conservative Christian than can be found in poems painstakingly composed by a postmodern poet? This is so startling that it should be spine-tingling. What passes for poetry today bears the image of mental illness, the absence of pathology in the author notwithstanding.
I was going to say that there aren’t any gems to be salvaged from the rubble of these two poems and that by a random trip to an actual dump more treasure might be found. There is one gem, however, in the first line of Thompson’s second poem, about which Patrick Lane’s comments are appropriate: “Listen to that beautiful ‘bangs a tin wing in the wind.’ The line flies away from you as if it were alive; the sounds feel wonderful in the mouth and ear.” I agree. Even a groundbreaking (in the ditch) poet can’t resist saying something charming when a lyrical clang (like the sound of a shovel scraping between stones in the mud, for example) flashes through his mind. There may be an interspersion of assonance or alliteration or some other marvel in whatever any poet writes. Even a vacuum cleaner can leave a pretty pattern in its wake. One of the most beautiful designs I ever saw was in the lines that a vacuum cleaner left at the front of a church. An artist could not have drawn the female form any better. In his autobiography a man testified to being arrested by a similar sight in a cloud formation. Sporadic lines of graceful speech from a functional brain are not only likely, but inevitable. Any juggler of words will have serendipitous moments. Because of his commitment to the barren landscape that he believes he must paint, he might be trying to keep all flowers out of view. But a fortuitous vision of beauty is irresistible; and so the poet of dead words puts a tulip or two in his picture. How ‘tin wing in the wind’ came to be, however, is known only to the author of it. It might have, for all we know, taken days to compose.
