On Tony Towle's “Late Sketches & Studies” [by Martin Stannard]

“Late Sketches & Studies” by Tony Towle, pub. Kulvert Books, 48pp. £12.99.

Let’s begin this with a quotation:

          you come by to type
          your poems and write a
          new poem instead on my
          old typewriter while I sit
          and read a novel about
          a lunatic’s analysis of
          a poem by Robert Frost
          it is all suffocating
                         Frank O’Hara, from “The Light Presses Down”  (July 26, 1963)

and point out that the “you” O’Hara is addressing here is Tony Towle.

Follow it with this:

          I know from Frank O’Hara that the poem and its setting
          are completely at your disposal,
          from Kenneth Koch that the resources of language
          are greater than oneself and thereby liberating,
          from John Ashbery that the mysterious and beautiful
          are still supremely possible,
          and supremely inspiring–
          and James Schuyler’s blinding exactitude of observation,
          its serene and tremendous burden
                           from “Addenda” (1971)

— this being from the poet under review here, once described as “a lyrical poet with a taste for the surreal”¹, a description I have no idea if Towle would go along with, and one about which I have some reservations. But let’s get to the main event:

In her Introduction to Talking To The Sun, the anthology of poetry for young people she edited with Kenneth Koch in 1985, Kate Farrell wrote that “Every good poet writes a kind of poetry that is new and different from the poetry of any other poet, because it comes from an imagination that isn’t like anybody else’s.” Those are my italics, by the way, because the good there makes all the difference: without it, the statement would be nonsense, because it’s a truth not universally acknowledged that quite a lot of the time one finds oneself (unless one is very careful) reading some poet or other who sounds much like a lot of other poets, and it can be dreadfully dispiriting. And although we might remark, in our wisdom, that what Farrell says is stating the obvious, it really isn’t, because we cannot be reminded often enough that one of the things that makes good poetry good is that no other poet could have written what that poet wrote. Some like to call it voice.

The reason I mention this is that I happened to be browsing the anthology (I am a young people, though actually I had just bought a copy as a birthday gift for my granddaughter) at the same time as I was reading Tony Towle’s new little book, and my longstanding admiration of and fascination with Towle’s poetry is due in no small part to the fact that the poems take one to places no-one else is ever going to take you, by which I mean places conjured from the Towle imagination, not somewhere you’d find in an atlas. And while I’m well aware that I could say much the same thing about every poet I love – and at the risk of going around in circles and rewriting my first paragraph in different words – I have to say I have no idea why I should think to say this particular thing about this particular poet and his poems when I could have said it any number of times about other poets I love who make me want to be alive. Perhaps I just needed to say something about the imagination to kickstart things (again) . . . Let’s face it: if we knew what we were doing all the time, this poetry lark would be dull, wouldn’t it?

Towle is now in his mid-80s, with an impressive body of work through some 60 years or so that, if you don’t know it, you really should. And, all cards on the table, I should say that I’ve known him – albeit not closely – since 1984 when I met him with Paul Violi and Charles North in New York, and we have a (very) intermittent and friendly relationship via email. I’m only going to mention in passing his friendship in the 1960s with Frank O’Hara, and his subsequent part in the history of New York School poetry. All of that is well-documented, and I take it as a given. You can look it up. John Ashbery has said – and it’s quoted on the book’s rear cover – “Tony Towle is one of the New York School’s best-kept secrets”, though he’s no secret to anyone who knows anything about this particular area of American poetry beyond the usual suspects.

Given all that, “Late Sketches & Studies” is an age-appropriate and, as significantly, a typically elegant (and painterly?) title (a title continued within, incidentally, as “contained between apocalyptic parenthetical ‘covers’”) for this little collection: 20 poems, prefaced by a “Global Prelude (Front Cover, opened)”, and followed by an “Annulment”, a “P.S.”, and rounded off with a “Universal Postlude (Back Cover, closing”), and the whole dated “2019-2024”. Towle actually sent me a manuscript of the text at the back end of 2023, though it’s undergone a few edits since then, and to me it’s interesting to see how long this work has been in the making and evolving, through time and in spite of often trying personal circumstance.

The 5 italicized lines of the aforementioned “Global Prelude” might go some way to justifying that “lyrical with a taste for surrealism” tag I mentioned earlier, but surrealism (capital S?) these days is too often used lazily to describe some imagery or linguistic strategy that might be considered a bit wacky, and I have discussed with my therapist over and again the question of what constitutes the lyric in 21^st century poetry, and she tells me that she’s discussed it with countless other sad people and has come to no real conclusions. Anyway, here are those 5 lines:

          “Now get going, Bigshot,”
          whispered the louche enchantress
          to the prime minister of the elements
          she had nursed back to savagery,
          deleting the extraneous moons from our eyes . . .

The colloquial first line followed by 4 lines that might be described as elusive (or perhaps ‘disorienting’ would be a better word) is something of a characteristic Towle move that I’d argue is engaging and intriguing, and keeps the reader on their toes, and the reader really must stay alert, as the opening poem proper (“Recreation, or Re-creation”) over the page makes clear:

          Listen carefully: All that was imagined
          you must now reimagine, or you will never
          reach the next level,
          and you must reach the next level
          or you will remain on this level
          bereft of reimagination until the end
          of an empty, monoplane existence.

The poems that follow, as one familiar with Towle’s poetry might expect, are laced with autobiography (“Now 81 years young, as the Euphemists would have it”); with the (for want of a better word) inventively exotic (“the Three Graces: / Gossip, Revision, and Ambiguity”); with popular culture (“When Clark Gable delivers the line. . . “); with history, a long-standing interest of Towle’s (“Apropos the Holy Roman Empire . . .”) . . .

 . . . but wait up! This list of “ingredients” threatens to become a tedious read, and it could go on for a bit, because the poet has the world to use, and a list of this sort risks boring you (the reader) as well as me, along with tending to paint the poet as concocting his poems much like a chef creating a dish using a list of strategies he has in the cupboard, which may or may not be an apt analogy but it sounds condescendingly and unnecessarily reductive. It is, as ever, too easy for so-called critical writing to descend into self-satisfied jibber-jabber, a long way distant from describing the experience of reading the poetry itself.

A few years back, writing about Towle’s friend Charles North, I spoke of North’s poetry as making one feel intelligent just by reading it, by which I meant that involving oneself in it, taking pleasure in the ideas and the language, the play, the erudition, the emotions, and never feeling at all talked down to by someone more erudite than you – the entire artistic pantry, if you will – in short, the poetry as a rewarding aesthetic experience . . . and I shall allow that sentence to wander off over the horizon, because it occurs to me that I would like to point out how the Three Graces on page 12 are so wonderfully echoed a dozen pages later by “the Three T’s: Terror, Trauma, and Tendentiousness”, which I just love, and among everything else the poems have to offer it’s moments like that, of sheer and sharp delight, that melt me.

At back of all this lurks Towle’s dry and wry humour, and I’m tempted to use the word “sardonic”, which I thought perhaps I should check on its exact meaning, one of the definitions I found being “disdainfully or sceptically humorous”, which I think is not too far off the mark, though I won’t be surprised if Towle emails me to put me right.

David Shapiro, in conversation with John Tranter², said that “There’s an awful lot of content in New York poets — in a way they’re very figurative and imagistic.” After reading that, I went looking for a quotation from these poems to see if I might illustrate the point, but I couldn’t find one, because it’s not about a few lines here and there, but that here is a poet who has always paid attention to all and any- and every-thing, and all and any- and every-thing is available to the poem as, to refer to Shapiro once more, the New York School poet makes ”the decision not to make merely personal confessions . . . [and] to press forward with some openness to humour.”

           This is your brain on autocracy:
           smooth and unfurrowed
           like a species of melon, but harboring
           seeds of resentment, complaint
           and sarcasm — don’t neglect sarcasm

When I interviewed Towle in 2016 and asked him what, for him, makes a poem “pass muster”, he said “If it’s really good, an aesthetic pleasure starts to spread over me as I read, in a way that is subtly physical as well as intellectual.”³ This “physical as well as intellectual” pleasure is what I get from these poems. It's a pleasure and an experience that does not – cannot – be explained away by a neat paraphrase of a poem, or a formulaic analysis of what the poet is up to. Rather, one has to settle (settle!) for saying that the poetry is so welcoming and the experience of reading so pleasurable (not something you can say about loads of poems, and I don’t care that I’m over-using the “pleasure” word here, because it happens to be the correct word) that you want to go back and experience it again, and it won’t disappoint you, because it’s rich enough to offer more than a single moment of pleasure, in illustration of which I give you “Here & Now”:

          Before you leave, would you like to know
          how much your credit card is worth in gold,
          or in spontaneous luminescence, or in idolatry?
          Seek the answer to the first from the mysteries
          on the commodities exchange; the second, through
          discovering the miraculous app; and the third,
          by traveling through the dark processings of
          your ancient soul, which you ransack against
          your will under the fullest moon.



Notes

1. Andrew McCarron in “3 New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle, Paul Violi” (Station Hill Press, 2015)

2. The conversation is reprinted in “You Are The You (Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School)”, by David Shapiro, edited by Kate Farrell (MadHat Press, 2025). The book is excellent, and there is an equally excellent review of it here: https://artsfuse.org/310866/book-review-life-in-a-state-of-sparkle-the-writings-of-david-shapiro/

3. The full interview is online in Issue 2 of Decals of Desire: https://decalsofdesire.blogspot.com/

Comments

[Terence Winch]

Martin Stannard---and, of course, Tony Towle---are always a pleasure to read.