Burning Bright

It’s a long time since I fell in love with a writer.  I mean the real thing.  Having to get every book and read and read , then read the biographical stuff alongside the work.  I did it with Hermann Hesse and Francoise Sagan when I was 15, and D.H.Lawrence (don’t tell anyone…), Wallace Stevens, Mr Charles Dickens, Sylvia Townsend Warner in my 20s and T.S.Eliot.  For a long time my unassailable passion was Robert Lowell especially because he was mad as well as brilliant.  But something changes with study and research that destroys the oxytocin surge.  We become not only ‘dear readers’ but tyrant F.R.Leavis’s (especially if you’re my age) – maybe tyrant Terry Eagletons would be more of the moment?  Any way, just for the record it’s happened again.  The love thing.  With books.  The discovery of someone who is saying really important things in a vital way – in difficult ways.  You will probably know his work already.

Frank Bidart‘s prosody is ferocious.  This is a poet who will takes years to get a line right, who rejects traditional formalism to create a new measure of voice and line, syntax and action in poetry.  He has a wonderful way of juxtaposing the autobiographical and psychological case-history to make poetry that speaks the existential torments of the twentieth century. He deals with desire, with Cartesian Dualism and guilt, why art matters, anti-poetry, faith, death. All the good stuff.  He also returns to his previous poetry as his life experience so that, for example, in his latest collection Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) the poem “Writing Ellen West” revisits his experience as poet and maker, as well as son, when he wrote ‘Ellen West.’   If you’ve never read Frank Bidart before start with this poem:  Ellen West

When I first read the poem Herbert White just a few months ago I felt as though I had been hit in the chest.

Bidart was recommended to me – although I was advised “You’ll hate the poem.”  This is a reasonable caveat given the poem is about a child-murdering necrophiliac.  Talking recently to a friend she mentioned her fear of poetry “that lives in gent’s toilets”   and I was expecting something of this in ‘Herbert White’ and found instead a writer who is prepared to seek the truth of human experience for art, whatever the cost.

Pauline ♥ Frank.