Pinks #15: I Absolutely Insist
Musical commas / Faber poets / Royal photos / Floral t-shirts
As more readers find and subscribe to this newsletter, it’s been nice to get more correspondence about its contents, and also to have more time to research them. So this issue of Pinks — which is the free-to-read version of Some Flowers Soon — is a round-up of bonus material related to recent posts.
First, the hot topic of the last Pinks: commas. Many thanks to Robyn Marsack for the picture below of a postcard featuring a comment by Baudelaire on the proofs of his poem “Au Lecteur”:
Je tiens absolument à cette virgule
[I absolutely insist on this comma]
By chance, I then came across this poem by Piotr Sommer — translated from Polish by the author and D.J. Enright — which offers a counterpoint to Baudelaire’s impassioned correction:
Don’t worry about commas, all these
punctuation marks, colons, semi-colons
and dashes which you so scrupulously
specify will be, thanks to a proof-
reader’s inattentiveness, left out; the rhythm
of your sentence, your thinking, your language
will prove less important than
you expected, or maybe than you wanted.
That was nothing but wishful thinking —
you won’t be read to the music of speech
but to the hubbub of things.
That phrase, “the music of speech”, took me in turn to this extended musical analogy from Theodor Adorno’s essay on “Punctuation Marks”, as translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson and submitted for the Some Flowers Soon comma anthology by Harry Gilonis:
There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are punctuation marks like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon.
Finally, while I was browsing the critical essays of Clark Coolidge — whose “abstract” poetry I wrote about last month — I found this reversal of Adorno’s analogy in a discussion of the improvisational jazz of Miles Davis:
Bebop time opened a wide totally fluid space, even at speed a thoughtful space, allowing Miles to speak “in long sentences like Marcel Proust” (as Jack Keroauc heard it). You can almost see the commas and periods in Miles’ solos of that time.
In a post from January about the Faber & Faber poetry backlist, I wrote that
In the 1990s, I remember an ad in Poetry Review which was simply famous Faber names in Roman type — T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott — with the strapline: “The list goes on…”
Well, I found it — albeit with a different strapline to the one I remembered (echoing Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”) and a distinct lack of Roman type:
The ad appeared in Poetry Review Autumn 1994, so the phrase at the bottom may allude to the fact that Faber published a number of poets from the famous “New Generation” group of that year (Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, Don Paterson, Susan Wicks).
Some of the names here are completely new to me. A bit of Googling, however, suggests that Sue Cowling and Norman Silver came aboard as part of Faber’s brief period as a publisher of new poetry for younger readers — which reminded me of this nice recent post by Victoria Moul on Philip Gross’ 1989 collection, Manifold Manor:
One Faber poet from my “Six Books” post, though, is missing-in-action: Lynette Roberts.
Last week, I wrote about the poetry of Lilian Bowes Lyon, whose reputation as a poet, I suggested, may have been overshadowed by the fact that she was first cousins with Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, The Queen Mother.
As a correspondent from the National Portrait Gallery pointed out, however, I accidentally perpetuated the problem by illustrating my post with a photo of… Elizabeth Bowes Lyon (above). I’ve now corrected this irony:
In my defence, I found the picture attached to the entry for Lilian Bowes Lyon in the encyclopaedic Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, which describes itself as a “textbase [that] has grown taller and stronger with each passing year” like “the enduring oak tree in Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography”. Hopefully the next revision of Orlando will correct the mix-up, too — and one day Lilian Bowes Lyon may even feature in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as founded by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen.
Finally, thanks to Ben Phillips, who told me the story of how he read John Ashbery’s poem “What is Poetry” — from which Some Flowers Soon takes its name — to a summer school class of American teenagers. It obviously made an impression, as they later emailed to say they’d had commemorative t-shirts made. And here’s the proof:
Who says “In school / All the thought got combed out”? (John Ashbery, that’s who.) For more on the poem, and its final line, here’s a post featuring a reading of it by Matthew Bevis: