J. D. McClatchy as Editor: "Uncensored Note to Auden" [by Jane Mayhall]

 

 

 

In a year of losses we lost a mainstay of the poetry scene yesterday when J. D. McClatchy (pictured at left, with James Merrill) succumbed after a long bout with cancer. Of his poems he wrote this In 2009: 

<<<
Poems accumulate--or mine tend to. Tremulous globules . . . an image, a phrase, a feeling . . . begin to condense on the pane of a larger idea. Proximity encourages their combination into something larger, moister, more glistening. Even so, there are times when some bead or other doesn't join, is left at the edge. Most are then merely shaken off. Sometimes, one is transferred to the notebook, a note too sharp or flat to go with the rest. I noticed a few of these, and strung them together as "Lingering Doubts," the title pointing to their common occasion. I might have let each stand on its own, but the age of the epigram seems to have passed with J. V. Cunningham. Hence this small suite of doubts, their tone of voice shifting from the ironic to the embittered to the plaintive. >>>

The occasion was poem Sandy wrote that David Wagoner selected for The Best American Poetry 2009. The richness of metaphor, the elegance of composition, were the virtues of McCatchy's prose, which was itself continuous with his finely wrought, formally ambitious  poems. McClatchy did so much so well -- he wrote libretti and taught at several major universities -- that I would point to one area for which he has not yet been fully recognized. He was a tireless editor -- of books and collections of poetry, of anthologies and, for a quarter of a century, of The Yale Review. I love literary magazines and know how much work goes into editing an issue, let alone four of them in a year.I was thinking of some of the pieces Sandy published and remembered a day in 2008 that was brightened by my reading of The Yale Review. -- DL

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During the summer I like picking up an old literary magazine lying around from some previous season to see what I might have missed the first go round. To the hammock today I went with the October 1999 issue of The Yale Review (vol. 87, no. 4) smartly edited by J. D. McClatchy. There's a nice little piece on Auden by a Cambridge Fellow, Ian Sansom, and a very fine poem on the same subject by Jane Mayhall, which I am going to type below. In Mayhall's poem I admire the way the writing -- the line-lengths even -- approach prose but turn back at the last minute into the terrain of verse. The landscape imagery is sustained and given a biographical edge ("the wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face") and the diction moves from high poetic ("madrigal sunlight") to academic vernacular ("radically moral score-keeping") in a single bound. I think Auden would have liked "the dreamy / semen of a distinguished flotsam." It's a line he might have written, but he would have revised it out of a subsequent reprinting of the poem.

-- DL

Auden in 1970
(photo credit: Tyrone Dukes / New York Times)

Uncensored Note to Auden

To bask in your intelligence, when the wither
and time-gaps are stalking around me,
when the literal husks and brains never tried are
going to steer me off the road, I service
myself to the faint yellowed pages of this book, its
tiny lighted torch figure,

the running insignia on the spine of
a 1958 Modern Library Edition, and I come to whatever dense
trilogies; compassion, spirited wit, wide-reaching
intellect, emotional power. These obviously
unstable and ridiculous concepts given
over to donkeys, ("some great

gross braying") predicaments out of date -- in these
I would take long breaths of pure joy. The madrigal sunlight,
roboust willows of your radiant, asymmetrical
and radically moral score-keeping. The dreamy
semen of a distingushed flotsam. I need
that satirical pastiche,

against the false simplicity
your imitators have become.
The wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face gives me that
wreath, infinitude; the tropics and winter of
the real world, you have reproachfully
left us.

-- Jane Mayhall

>>>
From our archives. Originally posted August 4, 2008.

Comments

[sally]

David-do you know what the reference is for the following from Mayhall's poem,particularly my quote within the quote?

"These obviously unstable and ridiculous concepts given over to donkeys, ("some great
gross braying") predicaments out of date"

-sally

[Laura Orem]

David - I have a vivid memory from about 1995 of sitting downstairs in the Commons at Bennington with Liam Rector, Don Hall, and you, and reading an article in the Boston Globe about the effects of smoking on the smoker's skin. The author used a picture of Auden's "wrinkled Grand Canyon" as an example. As we were looking at the picture, Maria Flook walked by, peered over my shoulder, and said, in a voice loud enough to be heard in Ulan Bator, "THAT didn't come from smoking; THAT came from blow jobs!" Ah, grad school!

[DL]

Laura, what an extraordinary recollection! I'd quite forgotten that scene. I believe WHA likened his latter-day face to "a wedding cake left out in the rain."

Sally, I wish I knew where the quoted phrase comes from. It sounds like a Marianne Moore moment: meaning the phrase could have come from anywhere, a magazine article included.

[Stacey]

Do you remember that popular song McArthur's Park, with the refrain, "someone left the cake out in the rain / I don't think that I can take it / 'cause it took so long to bake it / and I'll never have that recipe again." I've often wondered if the songwriter had WHA in mind when he wrote it. The words do seem to apply to Auden.

[Laura Orem]

I remember two versions of that song: a really corny version by, of all people, Richard Harris, and a disco version by Donna Summer. I did some fancy steppin' to the Summer one back in the day, usually while dressed in spandex on a floor that lit up. I always wondered how a cake could get left out in the rain, though. Unless there was a picnic and a thunderstorm came - but then, wouldn't you have cut the cake into slices ahead of time so it would be easier to eat at the picnic? Then, when the rain started, you could just throw the slices back into the picnic basket. If you just forgot a slice and it got rained on, that would hardly seem to be worth a whole song about loss and the passage of time. This doesn't have anything to do with Auden, but it's kind of fun to think about.