The Best American Poetry

“PEACE AND WAR IN AMERICAN POETRY” by David Lehman

 

"daybreak gray and dim . . . "

The US Library of Congress invited David Lehman to contribute to a series of essays by leaders in the literary field, including former Poets Laureate and Consultants in Poetry, that illustrate how poems by Americans helped define the country. This presentation aims to complement conventional historical texts and showcase poetry’s place as an essential tool for recording our nation’s past. The authors are expressing their own opinions in these essays, which may not necessarily reflect the position of the Library of Congress. Here is David Lehman's contribution:

 

Peace and War in American Poetry

War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience — or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.

War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliadknew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace – whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.

In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities – one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest – the fruits of peace.

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A Long Poem [by Lera Auerbach]

 

I’ve grown too impatient to read long poems.
After a while my eyes start shifting like dancers
who’ve missed their entrance cues. I find  –
I am reading a different poem all together
than the one on the page. I close my eyes.
The letters are dancing and chewing my eyelids,
like tiny caged rodents, sharp teeth protruding,
their round eyes almost blind,
their whiskers trembling, trying to smell through.

This new poem I am reading in my mind is related
to the one in the book, but as a distant cousin,
the family ties are vaguely remembered,
some childhood memories, a gray photograph,
taken at some forgotten occasion,
but not much else ties them together.

The long poem is starting to look like a shopping list.
Each item is a new line, the stanzas form departments,
where all the words are labeled and neatly
packed in rows on parallel shelves.
I’m forever lost in its aisles, in the endless labyrinth,
where each detail is screaming
to be noticed and appreciated.
I am taken hostage by the advertisements,
the cleverness of its commercials,
coupons, attractive packaging,
already forgetting what was on my list.
What was that I was looking for
when I started reading, and feeling –
oh, so, so inadequate.

The long poem turns into a dark ancient forest
and I am a child lost in its meanings,
the unfamiliar verbs are howling like owls,
announcing the arrival of the twilight time.
It is not yet the night, but it’s chilly already
and the long arms of the shadows are touching my feet.
Alarmed and still hoping for a last minute happy-ending miracle
or at least for some understanding or a familiar sight -
I rashly turn pages, feeling slightly embarrassed
of my impatient flight, and vaguely suspecting
that some part of me is still lost in the maze
in the complex associations and hidden meaning
of that long poem, in its hostile branches and roots
of incomprehensible words, and that small part of me
may never be rescued from its crowded pages,
and I will never know what happens at the end.

 

Part V, Affective Poetics and the Narrative Need: Toward a Revaluation, by Leslie Heywood

In my last post I talked about the mechanics of memory, and the way those mechanics take a narrative form.  I traced the ways affect potentiates memory, and the way both affect and memory effect perception and the interpretation of  stimuli an organism encounters at a later date.  According to Louis Cozolino, a psychologist whose work integrates neurology and psychotherapy, the implication of this is that “our past then [has] . . .an inordinate impact on our present.”[i] This is the case because of the interaction between explicit and implicit memory, which is part of the interaction between affect and cognition, and it is implicit memory that has the most powerful structuring force.  In Cozolino’s words:

• Explicit memory describes conscious learning and memory, including semantic, sensory, and motor forms. These memory systems allow us to recite the alphabet, recognize the smell of coconut, or play tennis. Some of these memory abilities remain just beneath the level of consciousness until we turn our attention to them.
• Implicit memory is reflected in unconscious patterns of learning stored in hidden layers of neural processing, largely inaccessible to conscious awareness. This category extends from repressed trauma to riding a bicycle, to getting an uneasy feeling when we smell a food that once made us sick.
• Explicit memory is the tip of our experiential iceberg; implicit memory is the vast structure below the surface. Many of our daily experiences make it clear that we have multiple systems of explicit and implicit memory.

It is primarily the systems of implicit memory that a creative writer accesses:  it is implicit memory and the affect that informs it which makes writing “creative” as opposed to expository.  Expository writing, by definition, tends to access more explicit memories and cognitive functions. It is more factual, “dryer,” less memorable.  It is those things in the affective register we remember best:  it is affective response that signal that yes, this, this thing, this moment, this scene, this experience is important, is what means.  Affective response signals to the right neurons to encode:  “the sort of scenes that stick in our minds are those that, for one reason or another, were experienced in a state of emotional excitement” (Carter, 164).[ii]  In a state of emotional excitement, the intensity of perception is increased, and long-term memory potentiation is enabled.  These are precisely the kinds of scenes that the narrative poet encodes.  These are the scenes that have shaken us, and situated us, and given us a way to understand our positions in the world.  In his poem “In the Marsh,” from At the Bonehouse, the poet Jack B. Bedell encodes this kind of moment:

Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part IV: The Function of Memory [by Leslie Heywood]

In my previous posts, I discussed the role of autonomic nervous system response and primary process affect in the brain’s initial stages of information processing, and how poets demonstrate this processing in their work.  In this post and in my final post tomorrow, I will focus on the role of memory in information processing, and how its insistently narrative form is reflected in the ways the poets Jim Reese, Vivian Shipley, Jack B. Bedell, ,and Gary Soto use memory in their poetics.  Again drawing on the work of science journalist Rita Carter, whose Mapping the Mind introduced the complications of brain process for a non-specialist audience, I will now discuss some of the basic functions of memory and how narrative is an innate part of its structures, and the implications of this for poetics. [i]

Memories are groups of neurons that fire together in the same pattern each time they are activated.  The links between individual neurons, which bind them into a single memory, are formed through a process called long-term potentiation (LTP) (Carter 160).  The following are the different types of memory):

• Episodic memory—retains a sense of time and space, sense of being there, recollection of state of mind when the memory was set down.  Personal `filmic’ sense of memory that represents past experience.  Encoded by hippocampus, stored in cortex.  Retrieval depends on frontal cortex.  This kind of memory is more associated with emotion.
• Procedural memory--`how to’ memories like how to lift weights or ride a bike.  Stored in the cerebellum and putamen.  Deeply ingrained habits (as opposed to simpler movement instructions) are stored in the caudate nucleus.  These memories are unconscious and automatic. Deeply ingrained habits (as opposed to simpler movement instructions) are stored in the caudate nucleus.  These memories are unconscious and automatic.
• Fearful/Traumatic memory—this includes phobias and flashbacks, and is unconscious (based in survival reactions connected to the autonomic nervous system).  These memories generate very quick reactions in response to environmental cues that sometimes seem to be an overreaction to those cues.  These memories are stored in the amygdala.
• Semantic memory—store of things we `know’ independent of our personal relationship to them—“useful facts” stripped of personal associations.  Information is registered by the cortex and is encoded in the cortical areas of the temporal lobe, and retrieval is carried out by the frontal lobe.  This kind of memory is more associated with “rationality” (Carter 161-2).
• Short-term memory—information from the very recent past
• Long-term memory—that information memorable enough to get retained and stored.  The process of laying down long-term memory takes up to two years, and until then these memories are fragile and can be easily wiped out.  If emotional excitement is initially experienced with the sensory stimuli, this pattern is much more likely to become a long-term memory. 

In addition, memory is characterized by the following processes: 

• Consolidation—the replay from hippocampus and back again that turns fleeting information into long-term memory (164).
• Covert recollection—unconscious memories (174).
• Priming—unconscious recognition of a stimulus or prime.  The prime is the stimulus itself, something like a previously encountered face (174).
• Prolonged exposure to stress hormones damage the hippocampus and therefore memory recall and consolidation (174-5).

The different types of memory are located in the following brain structures:

• Temporal Lobe (cortex):  long term memories;
• Putamen:  procedural memories, like riding a bike;
• Hippocampus:  memories are laid down and retrieved here, particularly personal memories and memories related to finding your way;
• Amygdala:  unconscious, traumatic memories are stored here;
• Caudate Nucleus—genetically encoded memories (instincts) are stored here.

Affective Poetics and the Need for Narrative III [by Leslie Heywood]

Yesterday I discussed how the poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Joe Weil enact what I am calling an affective poetics: a poetics that demonstrates the bedrock of our affective response outlined in the work of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose empirical work in affective neuroscience has established the basis for emotional continuities across species. Panksepp’s seven affective systems, which he represents in all caps to indicate their primary process nature, include SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, JOY, CARE, LUST, RAGE, AND FEAR. These systems are situated sub-cortically in the brain, inform and serve as the building blocks for cognition, and represent one of the first levels of response to stimuli. Today I will discuss how behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, which articulates a level of affective response to stimuli that is an elaboration on Pansepp’s seven primary process systems, and occurs at an even deeper level, itself contributes to an affective poetics as seen in the work of poets Kate Gale and Bruce Snider. While Panksepp’s work lets us understand neural circuits between higher brain structures and those in the brainstem; Porges’s work allows us to understand the neural circuits between the brainstem and visceral organs: “neural circuits mediating the reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures, which impact on the availability of these affective circuits” (The Polyvagal Theory, 258). The main postulates of the Polyvagal Theory are the following:

• Emotional regulation and social behavior are psychological processes that respond to events, environment, and people. They shape our sense of self, help form relationships, and determine whether we feel safe in various contexts. Neural circuits are bidirectional, biobehavioral processes that mediate reciprocal communication between body states and brainstem structures: psychological processes influence body states, and body states influence psychological processes like perception (Polyvagal Theory, 257, 259, emphasis mine).
• Polyvagal Theory provides the context for cognition—the bodily states it describes make cognition possible or impossible.
• Neuroception—the unconscious perception of safety—triggers a response according to these systems, starting with the social engagement system (SES) and ending with the “freeze” behaviors as a last resort. It precedes perception.

• “The evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system provides the neurophysiological substrates for affective processes and stress responses”
• We react to real-world, environmental challenges with three neural circuits, in this order:
• 1) We react with our evolutionarily newest system, the Social Engagement System, a parasympathetic neural circuit that is expressed in the newer myelinated vagus nerve that “functions to facilitate pro-social behavior and to maintain calm behavioral states” (265-66).
• 2) If this doesn’t satisfy our quest for safety, we react spontaneously with the older, sympathetic nervous system that supports fight/flight behaviors.  This system mediates between the two vagal circuits.
• If fight/flight fails, we resort to the oldest vagal circuit, a parasympathetic circuit expressed in the older, unmyelinated vagus nerve  that inhibits motion and is linked to disassociation in response to trauma (playing dead, and having the sensation of floating out of your body).
• Pathways regulating the striated muscles of the face and head and the myelinated vagal fibers regulating the heart and lungs” (270).
• The SES calms the viscera and regulates facial muscles, “enabling and promoting positive social interactions in safe contexts” (270). 

• Porges calls this the “brain-face-heart circuit,” and is both a stress reliever and responsible for the pro-sociality often exhibited by our species.
• “Specific bodily states foster different domains of behavior” (Porges, 278). 

The phylogenetic stage of the autonomic nervous system determines the behavioral, physiological, and affective features of reactivity to things in the environment.  Physiological state limits the range of adaptive behaviors and psychological experiences (265).  Trauma can limit an individual’s ability to engage the vagal brake associated with the SES because trauma victims often  have faulty neuroception and become hypervigilant, always reacting to the environment/people as though they are a threat.

The SES helps detect and express signals of safety in the environment—it “distinguish[es] and emit[s] facial expressions and intonation of vocalizations . . . By calming the viscera and regulating facial muscles, this system enables and promotes positive social interactions in safe contexts” (270).  In other words, it helps us read body language, which is what dogs do as their primary modality of communication, and which is what we do when we are using our pre-conscious neuroception. 

Implications of the Polyvagal Theory for poetics include the following: 

• Affect is primary process and occurs before and informs cognition
• Polyvagal response in the CNS & ANS inform affect
• Both are evolutionarily earlier processes linked to survival value.

One of the main implications for poetics is that if we understand the affective basis of memory and cognition, our poetics will proceed from and value the “bottoms up” approach to information processing as do all our affective and cognitive processes.  Again, these processing levels are bi-directionally linked and indissociable, so even if affect triggers other processes, it is still informed and shaped by secondary and tertiary process memory and cultural learning.  Language and its effects are not primary, or secondary, but rather part of an integrated circuit in this approach.

We can see these patterns of bidirectionality as they are informed by  Polyvagal Theory and its systems of response in the poem “Hotel Room, Patterns of Light” by the poet Kate Gale, from her aptly named book Mating Season (Tupelo Press): 

HOTEL ROOM, PATTERNS OF LIGHT

And now you whose face I have nearly forgotten
Remember how you said you would change the world?
Remember how you smoked weed and drank tea and told me 
in one hotel room after another how glad you were 
you knew your purpose?
Remember how you painted me a picture on birch bark,
a canoe paddling upstream carrying light in the stern?
As if one canoe could make a difference.
Remember how you went to Flagstaff to visit your mother?
When you came back you said, I slept with this hooker 
over the holiday, Sweetness, had to see what it was like 
to order a woman around.
I remember the pattern of light on the hallway floor
shadowed with these little slivers of darkness
that kept disappearing. I opened and closed my mouth 
several times without speaking. Like a fish I was.
Before I left, I dropped the birch bark on the floor.
You left it there, sat rocking back and forth.
Don't go, you said. But you looked all hollow to me.
I could see the door right through you. 
Your voice sounded faraway, like a radio station 
you can never tune in. I walked out into the cold air, 
open sunlight. Last I heard you were in furniture sales.
Measuring success one couch at a time.

Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part I [by Leslie Heywood]

The recent “neuro-revolution” in poetics has tended to replicate the privilege granted to cognition over affect in other areas of neuroscience.  What is most important, from this perspective, is the prefrontal cortex and its attendant brain systems:  those most linked to tertiary processes, the “higher” forms of reasoning that are unique to the human brain, the kind of meta-critical capacity that distinguishes us from our dogs and dolphins, elephants and apes.

Research in neuroscience has been guilty of the same biases until recently.  The term cognitive neuroscience was often taken to describe all brain processes, as if all brain processes were cognitive, primarily because of the assumption that emotion is regulated by cognition and that cognitive processes occur first, structuring the emotion in fundamental ways.  “Cognitive gating mechanisms” were seen to inhibit emotion and determine its expression, thus representing emotion as raw material that is only given its form through cognitive processing—emotions are viewed in cognitive terms.

 This is called a “top down” model of information processing.  However, the most recent advances in neuroscience tell a different story, one that makes a convincing argument for a “bottoms up” model, and one that has wide implications for poetics and the value we have granted to the cognitive over the affective.  Any such attempt to purge affect and narrative is doomed to failure, since it ignores the indissociable relation between affect and cognition, emotion and reason, biology and culture, the brain and the mind.  As current neuroscience has spelled out in some detail in its theories of “functional connectivity,” the one is not possible without the other.[i] 

Instead, “brain-behavior processes” are the products of interaction effects between each, neural circuits that include the control functions of the primary process emotional states themselves.  In fact, recent advances in affective neuroscience argue for “more realistic models that incorporate dynamic properties and bidirectional interactive multi-way communications.”[ii] Instead of occurring through a top-down hierarchy in which cognition occurs first and is the controlling mechanism, neural activity has recently been shown to occur bidirectionally in multiple regions. Furthermore, as the phylogentically oldest part of our brains, the affective systems are most linked to fundamental survival mechanisms that “provide a necessary foundation for higher functions to operate” (Cromwell and Panksepp 2032). 

Crucially, these are the systems shared across all mammalian brains, and point to an affective experiential universality across all mammalian species, including humans.  From a neuroevolutionary perspective, the affective remains fundamental.  It is not a matter of cognition always generating a behavioral response, for instance, such as reader response.  In fact, quite often, it is the more fundamental processes that inform behavior, those “from the gut” responses linked to the embodied, “so powerful it gives me the chills” effect in aesthetic response—a response in the autonomic nervous system triggered by adrenaline. 

With this new information, it’s time to examine the interaction effects, the feedback loops between affect and cognition in poetics.  An affective neuropoetics would, like Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, proceed from the bottom up, locating the roots of our motivations and aesthetic response in the primary affective processes. 

A wonderful example of what I am talking about is Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poem “Watching the Pelican Die,” first published in Prairie Schooner and forthcoming in The Silence in the Empty House (NYQ Books. 2013).   The embodiment of what I have posited here as a site of the interactions between the affective and the cognitive, the poem enacts what, in her own aesthetic theory, Gillan has termed the dialogue between “the cave” and “the crow,” which are the metaphorical representations of affect and cognition.[iii]  For Gillan, the privilege historically granted “the crow”—the social discourses and systems of valuation associated with scientific rationalism, tertiary process cognition, and the masculine—has served to devalue the embodied, the feminine, and the emotional that represents “the cave”—precisely those primary process affects that Panksepp has empirically situated as the very basis of and possibility for the cognitive.  The “cave” in Gillan is the equivalent to affective brain processes in Panksepp, and is similarly fundamental:

Watching the Pelican Die 

On TV, I watch the pelican with its mouth wide open,

its wings and body coated with oil.  Is it screaming?  I do not hear

the sound and since this is a photograph, I don’t know if it was caught

in that mouth-stretched howl when it died or if it’s howling

in recognition that it cannot survive the thick coat

of oil that bears it down. 

 

The ladies who take care of you when I’m gone tell me you

are having trouble.  “His hands,” they say, “his hands.”  When I

come home, I see that your hands have turned black

at the tips and I see that the ends of your fingers

have been eaten away.  I watch the dead bird in the Gulf

floating on top of the water, its legs stiff and straight in the air,

its body drained of all motion, all light.

 

The next day I take you to the doctor; he tells us he will have

to operate to remove the gangrenous flesh.

 

The announcer on CNN says BP didn’t want the photographer

to take pictures of the dying birds covered as they are

with the black slick of oil.  “They were hoping,” he says,

“that the birds would sink and the evidence

would be swallowed by the ocean.” 

 

In the late afternoon, I hear my daughter cry out. I rush to see

what has happened, and you are stretched out on the bed,

your body so thin you look like a boy. You do not move. 

I call 911 and the ambulance takes you to the hospital. 

 

BP is trying to put a cap on the spewing oil rig; the CEO

keeps saying, it’s no problem. Clumps of oil wash ashore

and float on the surface of the water.  The beach is littered

with dead fish and birds. 

 

At the hospital, they want to know whether we want

extraordinary measures.  “No,” I say.  “He has a living will.” 

We hover around while they admit you.  You have forgotten

how to speak.  Mostly you lie in bed, staring into a space

above our heads. 

 

In my mind I see that screaming bird, its mouth wide open,

a picture of torment and despair. 

 

I reach out to hold your hand, stroke your forehead. “Dennis,”

I call out, “Dennis.”  You do not hear me.  The doctor comes in

to see you.  “Well,” he says, “he should have been dead five years

ago.  What did you expect?  You shouldn’t have taken such

good care of him.” 

 

“We did everything we could,” the BP president says, looking

directly at the camera.  “It’s not such a calamity,” says

the governor of Louisiana.  “We don’t need to stop

deep water drilling.  Our economy will collapse if we do.” 

We stand around your hospital bed.  My brother comes in

and says he’ll try a stronger antibiotic.  “It’s bad,” he says,

but he waits until we are in the hall to tell me.

 

The social worker says, “You should put him in a nursing

home.”  My brother says, “You kept him home all this time. 

If he gets a little stronger, I’ll let him go home and he’ll be

around the things he knows.” 

 

The doctor comes in and says, “He’s not going to make it.”

The social worker admonishes us with her bag

of common sense.  She does not love you.  We take you home. 

I sit next to you and hold your hand. 

 

The MSNBC reporter stands on the beach in a hurricane

and picks up a huge glob of oil with a stick.  “Look,” she says,

“look,” and drips the oil on the white sand.  She is shaking

with fury at such destruction. Dead birds float behind her. 

 

“I’m in so much pain,” you say, though you have not complained

before.  Althea feeds you a jar of baby applesauce.  You open

your mouth and accept the food.  When I see the pelican

on TV with its mouth wide open in horror, I remember you

as you lay dying.  On the Gulf, the earth and the sea

are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that finally

defeated you after you struggled against it for all those years. 

 

Some things are bigger than all of us.  We cannot defeat

them.  If there is enough carelessness and greed in the world

even the ocean can be destroyed, and you, who fought

against this illness with such courage, even you

cannot survive, the blackened tips of your fingers, the oil

heavy on the birds feathers, the birds dead and floating on

the surface that gradually sink and disappear. 

 

Astonishing in the depth of its representation of the levels of brain processing, “Watching the Pelican Die” moves from affect to emotion to memory to cognition and back down the chain, establishing the affective basis for human behavior and relations and showing how cognition, when detached from the other levels of processing, can be responsible for destroying the very things it relies upon most—the basic attachment mechanisms of relationships (Panksepp’s “CARE” system), on the one hand, and the biology of ecology, and the relationship between the basic levels of the ecosystem, on the other.  The movement in the poem between the grief the narrator experiences (the basic affective system that Panksepp terms Panic/Grief) and the ways that grief resonates throughout the larger cultural landscape of destruction and loss is a quintessential example of a narrative poetics that embodies and demonstrates the principles of affective neuroscience. In Gillan’s poem we have one of the most bidirectional representations of the relationship between affect and cognition, the cave and the crow, that I’ve seen in contemporary poetry.   As Gillan puts it, “poems hide in a place deep inside you that I call the cave . .  . In the cave are all your memories . . . Every person you’ve ever known or loved or hated everything you are afraid of in the world and in yourself.  In the cave is your rage and your fury and your passion” (Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, 13).
 In neuroscientific terms, Gillan’s “cave” is affect, the primary process affective  brain systems that underlie secondary processes like memory and cultural learning.  Affect is the bedrock poets draw upon, and it is informed by the reactions in the ANS & CNS that neuroscientist Stephen Porges, in his "Polyvagal Theory," calls “neuroception.”

Tomorrow I will discuss the seven basic affective systems in further detail, especially as they are instantiated in the work of the poet Joe Weil. Later posts will explore Polyvagal Theory, its concept of “neuroception” and the vagal ventral complex that links the heart, face, and brain.  Using this work from affective neuroscience, I will discuss the movement from neurophysiology to affect to aesthetics by way of Panksepp’s seven affective systems in conjunction with the Polyvagal Theory and its implications for memory and how creative writers use it via the work of poets Gary Soto, Bruce Snider, Jack Bedell, Vivian Shipley, and James Reese.  The work of all these poets and the affective neuroscience that helps explain their aesthetic projects will be linked to the need for narrative poetics, and narrative as one of our most interactive, bidirectional brain processes.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Human Bondage)

Larkin wrote this poem -- which he characterized as a "cri du cock" -- in 1943, when he was 21:

I would give all I possess
(money, keep, wallet, personal effects, and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King's High School.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Donald Davie)

To the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do," this 1974 epistle (unsent) to Professsor Donald Davie:

Davie, Davie,
Give me a bad review;
That's your gravy,
Telling chaps what to do.
Forget about style and passion,
As long as it's in the fashion --
But let's be fair, it's got you a chair,
Whcih was all it was meant to do.

The last lines are the poem's weak link and Larkin 's friend Kingsey Amis suggested that he change them to "But it's got you a chair, hich, let's be fair, / Was the most that you had in view."

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Love and Marriage)

 Love

Not Love you? Dear, I'd pay ten quid for you:
Five down, and five when I got rid of you.

Marriage

'My wife and I -- we're pals. Marriage is fun.'
Yes: two can live as stupidly as one.

Editor Archie Burnett dates these to December 1953 and January 1954, so no allusion is intended to the Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn standard "Love and Marriage," which it pre-dates.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Frank Kermode)

Philip Larkin in private was a frank curmudgeon, as these lines show:

If I could talk, I'd be a worthless prof
Every other year off
Just a jetset egghead, TLS toff
Not old toad: Frank Kermode.

The poem dates from 1978. Editor Archie Burnett recommends reading this poem alongside one beginning "A Lecturer in drip-dry shirt arrayed" with its sardonic view of jet-setting professors teaching creative writing in the States.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.