On Completism

TLS October 12 2012

from Graeme Richardson's review of Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems, edited by Emma Mason:

A weighty Collected Poems can be many things: a monument to greatness, like a Pyramid; or a record of significance, like a Presidential Library. It may be the retiring poet's carriage clock; it may be their concrete overcoat. A poet's complete works, handily gathered, should ensure they continue to be read. But the typical Collected might not help with that: unless every piece was a masterpiece, the good can be buried in the indifferent, repetition can dilute what in small doses is powerful and original, and what was a well-practiced craft starts to look automatic. 
Completism might be justified if a poet lived so tumultous a life that changes of place or mind might need to be tracked. That is not the case with Elizabeth Jennings. She was born in 1926 in Lincolnshire, her family moved to Oxford in 1932, and in that city she spent most of the rest of her life. She never married or had children; she was troubled and repelled by sex. Her Catholic upbringing could be blamed for that; but she remained a faithful Catholic throughout her life. Her faith was inseparable from her writing, and is often its subject. In early adulthood she worked in oxford City Library, and then in publishing. For 1960 onwards, her mental and physical health began to break down. For a time, she was institutionalized in a mental hospital: but the poems she wrote never sensationalized her illness. With a typical generosity, she often wrote of other patients, or her nurses. She became an alcoholic. In later life, she had a small income from reviewing, from her poetry (which sold well) and from the sale of her manuscripts to American universities. But her appearance was borderline-destitute; she lived in cluttered chaos, among thousands of toys and trinkets.... She died in 2001, and was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, only a couple of miles from where she grew up. It is not a wide-ranging or especially eventful biography. 
It may be, then, that the tribute of completism could be paid to a writing career grand in scope and ambition. But Elizabeth Jennings had modest aims and a shrewd understanding of her limitations. She returned again and again to the same subjects--frustrated love, family conflict, craft and art, living by faith--with the same sort of negative theology.... Despite some experimentation in the middle of her career, she wrote mostly in traditional forms, with conventional rhyme schemes and metres.... She rarely wrote a poem longer than fifty lines, but her reticence serves to beckon the reader closer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more