A VALENTINE FROM FRANK BIDART

 

photo by Ted Burke

An interesting poem, bearing the name “Valentine”, I suppose, because so much failure to keep solemn promises, lies, thefts and endless manner of behavior that wind up harming those close, beloved, trusted equally rationalized with the evocation of “love”. What we come to read is an emerging realization that the most intimate term of selflessness and dedication to other people is used to keep wives, husbands, children, and generations, latched to and lashed by psychologies that do them ill and rob them of what they can become. It begins in youth, a young man experiencing duplicities in the name of love, and in the righteousness of untested conviction makes a pledge, he says , my case will be different: 

How those now dead used the word love bewildered

and disgusted the boy who resolved he

would not reassure the world he felt

love until he understood love

Conviction gets tested in intervening years and, finding that experience won’t conform to the dictates and conditions of theoretical idealness, the protagonist discovers the need to invent new definitions for old words, that meanings are subjective and change, colored by experience and coined from reflex; he uses love in situations he thought he’d never find himself in, he uses a term he had wanted to keep personally uncorrupted.

Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found

within his chest

something intolerable for which the word

because no other word was right

must be love

must be love 

The hardest task in the world one lives in with others is explaining oneself, of getting across the nuances and finer points in the terms they use; meanings and context get larger, less focused, the ground rules one has set for themselves for authenticity are negotiated, compromised. How one thinks of love becomes private, internal, a condition of being that’s rare and precious and finally incommunicable in terms that are not false. “Love” becomes a short hand for any impulse one has, any obsession that forms and becomes malignant, harmful.

Love craved and despised and necessary

the Great American Songbook said explained our fate

my bereft grandmother bereft

father bereft mother their wild regret

How those now dead used love to explain

wild regret

Banged about, exhilarated, betrayed and betrayer , the protagonist shoulder’s his abused idealism, attempts to be stoic about the pragmatic choices he’s been forced to make with his idealism given a life that took it’s own course despite his plans to discover the meaning of “love” and so use the word unambiguously. But ambiguity is all there is here, and he becomes cynical, debasing and expanding and modifying his beloved term to the degree that words and actions are not coherent and congruent. It’s a sad sequence of snapshots Frank Bidart has given the reader, a compressed tale about the making of cynic who couldn’t sustain a passion for life beyond the disabusing of his optimism. This is compression at its finest, and the sentences take odd turns and twists of implication without an overgenerous supply of biography; this is writing Don DeLillo, who writes the best sentences in American English, would enjoy. Like DeLillo, the history of a particular word is traced and its modulations are succinctly characterized. One may lack a name, one may not know anything in the way of biography, but what makes this poetic is the beauty of the revelations; it unfolds like a bright conversation you’re overhearing where you’ve pieced together the scenario although you lack the back-story. The effect is that you recognize something you’ve seen elsewhere. It is the shock of recognition.

POE

It would be a mistake to approach Edgar Allan Poe with the expectation that there’s a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. In any case, I think it is a mistake to approach Poe with the expectation that there’s a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker.

He was a virtuoso of leaping rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could suggest the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. (One does admit, though, that his dissociation of sensibility in the sheer sensory overload of decay that made his metaphors and similes ripe with rot likewise sacrificed sense and logic and as often as not became a species of hackwork. An exercise in hackwork, the writer of which tried to elevate to greatness by extreme bouts of overwriting the same limited scale of ideas.) “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for depressives. Explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough.

Poe was a precursor of decadence to come, through which beauty had been redefined as something being achieved only at a living thing or object’s point of decay. Poe’s poetry (and stories) gave rise to the notion that funeral detail and a desire for the last nap called death are attractive and to be desired. Suggesting that the dark side was actually a means to achieving a higher aesthetic being. Poe’s work is about disintegration in all manner, where expertly honed rhymes and rhythms of his writings disguise but then reveal the burning, churning glory of pure form, energy, freed from the bondage of corporeal existence. He wrote quite a few essays outlining these ideas, particularly “Eureka” and “The Philosophy of Furniture”. In his fiction, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is his most vivid and brilliant realization of his idea of metaphorical entropy. He was a virtuoso of rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could submit the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough.

In one of his essays, Edgar Allan Poe summarizes one essential element of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with “the memory from before birth”. A slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing like distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous or devious; only half alive (if “alive” at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stressless state; perhaps even return to the womb. In any event, his misgivings were a desire for sleep from which one needn’t wake up from; death, in other words.

Received message. Here is the corrected text: It would be a mistake to approach Edgar Allan Poe with the expectation that there's a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. In any case, I think it is a mistake to approach Poe with the expectation that there's a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems. He might insist that there is, in his essays like “Eureka” that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. He was a virtuoso of leaping rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could suggest the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. (One does admit, though, that his dissociation of sensibility in the sheer sensory overload of decay that made his metaphors and similes ripe with rot likewise sacrificed sense and logic and as often as not became a species of hackwork. An exercise in hackwork, the writer of which tried to elevate to greatness by extreme bouts of overwriting the same limited scale of ideas.) “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for depressives. Explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough. Poe was a precursor of decadence to come, through which beauty had been redefined as something being achieved only at a living thing or object's point of decay. Poe's poetry (and stories) gave rise to the notion that funeral detail and a desire for the last nap called death are attractive and to be desired. Suggesting that the dark side was actually a means to achieving a higher aesthetic being. Poe's work is about disintegration in all manner, where expertly honed rhymes and rhythms of his writings disguise but then reveal the burning, churning glory of pure form, energy, freed from the bondage of corporeal existence. 

He wrote quite a few essays outlining these ideas, particularly “Eureka” and “The Philosophy of Furniture”. In his fiction, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is his most vivid and brilliant realization of his idea of metaphorical entropy. He was a virtuoso of rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could submit the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects. But he was also a genius of mood, despair, and obsession. Much of the time, what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision. “The Raven”, “Lenore”, “Annabelle Lee” are fairy tales for explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough. In one of his essays, Edgar Allan Poe summarizes one essential element of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with “the memory from before birth”. A slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing like distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous or devious; only half alive (if “alive” at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stressless state; perhaps even return to the womb. In any event, his misgivings were a desire for sleep from which one needn't wake up from; death, in other words.