{"id":72,"date":"2013-09-24T20:42:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T20:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=72"},"modified":"2017-11-14T19:53:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T19:53:36","slug":"toads-and-all-this-fiddle","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=72","title":{"rendered":"Toads, and All This Fiddle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poems<\/strong><\/h2>\n

“Toads, and All This Fiddle”<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Each of the poems discussed in the following article is available on this website.\u00a0 Please follow the appropriate links to read the poem.\u00a0 Links are provided at the poem to return to this page.)<\/p>\n

When asked his definition of a good poem, Howard Moss, the great poetry editor of The New Yorker<\/i>, was purported to have said, “One I like.”\u00a0 Which is maybe what it comes down to.\u00a0 Of course,\u00a0 Howard Moss’s likes and dislikes were informed by his vast reading, and by his own experience of\u00a0 writing poetry over a lifetime. Now, faced with selecting my own “best” poems, I find myself\u00a0 falling back on the simple criterion of<\/a> “ones I like.”<\/p>\n

One poem that both Howard Moss and I have liked (it was originally published in The New Yorker<\/i>) is “Oranges.”<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, as is often the case with my best work, I remember vividly the circumstances surrounding the writing of the poem.\u00a0 It was 1975.\u00a0 I was on leave from the University of Wisconsin, writing a book on humor in American literature and working on my first book of poetry.\u00a0 My wife, Peg, and I had only been in Wisconsin for three years, having moved from St. Louis where I grew\u00a0 up, to take a job teaching creative writing.<\/p>\n

It was a bitterly cold winter–the kind one never sees in St. Louis–and I had just bicycled home from my office.\u00a0 The wind off the lake was fierce, my eyes were watering, and my eyelash\u00a0 had frozen to my parka hood zipper–I had to stop and warm the eyelash between my thumb and\u00a0 forefinger to free it.\u00a0 When I arrived home, my wife was out, and when I sat down to write about the ride and the cold and the eyelash, the image of an orange came to me, and the poem took off, seemingly writing itself.\u00a0 I remember saying a little prayer, to God or the muse or my subconscious or whatever was generating the poem, to let me finish it.\u00a0 Just then my wife walked in downstairs and my heart sank.\u00a0 Would she interrupt me?\u00a0 Would I lose the poem?\u00a0 But what happened instead\u00a0 was that she walked into the poem, which became, in effect, a love poem to her.\u00a0 Rather than\u00a0 interrupting the poem, she pointed it in the direction it wanted to go.<\/p>\n

Part of what I like about the poem is my sense of its communal generation–my wife, the weather,\u00a0 the conventions of poetry, and I all came together to produce it.\u00a0 Partly I like its celebratory\u00a0 nature and its sensory quality and the fact that, even after the poem was published, it continued to surprise me.\u00a0 As I was closing the poem I was thinking more of tactile and olfactory than of\u00a0 visual imagery–the touch, the smell, of oranges on the lips. It wasn’t until a reader later pointed out the visual image of the ending–lips look like orange slices–that I saw that element of the poem.<\/p>\n

“Oranges” was a gift, a poem that seemed to write itself, that was “inspired.”\u00a0 Of course, it was also the culmination of years of work, reminding me of Dylan Thomas’ observation that although\u00a0 he only wrote when he was inspired, he found that the more he wrote, the inspireder he got.\u00a0 Did\u00a0 “Oranges” take thirty minutes to write?\u00a0 Or thirty years?<\/p>\n

“The Facts of Life”<\/a> also seemed to come effortlessly.\u00a0 Having explored the brief sensory lyric in my first book, I found myself moving toward narrative and humor in my second.\u00a0 Humor has been a\u00a0 defining characteristic of American poetry since Walt Whitman, with his hyperbolic self-celebration, and Emily Dickinson, with her witty self-deprecation, provided the models for subsequent generations of poets.\u00a0 When my six-year-old daughter asked where babies came from, and my wife, having read\u00a0 an article in a popular magazine recommending full disclosure, began telling her the whole wonderful story, it seemed more awkward and embarrassing than funny to me.\u00a0 But as I began writing about\u00a0 it later the situation seemed funnier and funnier, and even the rhymes participated in the joke\u00a0 on us.\u00a0 What starts as a free verse poem shifts to the surprising couplet in the middle (“penis,\u00a0 vagina, sperm, womb, and egg.\/ She thinks we\u2019re pulling her leg.”) with its near rhyme of “penis va-“\/ “She thinks we\u2019re” and its exact rhyme of “egg” and “leg”–wordplay that always evokes laughter at a public reading.\u00a0 Like “Oranges,” “The Facts of Life” is a love poem, in this case the humor leading us to an\u00a0 embrace of the “truth” of metaphor, symbolism, and tale, over the “lie” of literalism.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I feel a special affection for these two poems because they are personal (though I hope\u00a0 not private) poems drawing directly on my own intimate experience. “At Chet’s Feed & Seed”<\/a> is,\u00a0 perhaps, less obviously personal, being more an observation of a public scene.\u00a0 But, like “Oranges” and “The Facts of Life,” it is a kind of love poem, drawing on humor and sound for its effects.\u00a0 Sound has, in fact, been a central element in my work–often words, or lines, or entire poems\u00a0 are generated more by sound than by sense.\u00a0 In Alice in Wonderland<\/i> Lewis Carroll has\u00a0 Humpty Dumpty advise Alice to “take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself”\u00a0 (a play on the English maxim, “take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves”).\u00a0 Robert Frost similarly insisted, “subject matter is important, but sound is the gold in the ore.” One of my earliest influences, in addition to Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas, was Gerard Manley Hopkins who argued that you should read a poem not with your eyes but with your ears.<\/p>\n

“At Chet\u2019s Feed & Seed” was written with my ears.\u00a0 The rich variety of sound–alliteration,\u00a0 assonance, consonance, internal rhyme–is meant to evoke a sense of buoyancy, exuberance, and\u00a0 sufficiency in the scene, and (as a kind of in-joke on the chicken man and myself) aurally to\u00a0 reflect the animal imagery. The repetition of\u00a0\u00a0 “t”\u00a0 “ch”\u00a0 “k”\u00a0 “b”\u00a0 “blk”\u00a0 in words like “each,” “scratch,” “clabber,” and “scutter,” suggest a chicken\u2019s clucking to me,\u00a0 while the vowels in “stupid,” “approval,” and “do,” suggest a cow\u2019s “moo.”<\/p>\n

The reference to the Vietnam War in “At Chet’s Feed & Seed” introduces a political\u00a0 dimension into the poem.\u00a0 “The Hell Mural”<\/a> presents an even more clearly political agenda, using\u00a0 the rigid, repeating form of the sestina to explore issues of nuclear armament and the ethics of\u00a0 mass annihilation.\u00a0 The poem had its genesis in a short documentary film I saw about Iri and Toshi\u00a0 Maruki, two Japanese artists whose life project has been to paint what they call “the bomb,” by\u00a0 which they mean all evil and war and atrocity.\u00a0 They paint in the nude, on huge canvases on the\u00a0 floor that are displayed in a museum dedicated to their work.\u00a0 Their statements about art were\u00a0 very moving, including, among other things, the idea that they wanted to pass their work on to\u00a0 others who would keep it alive in different forms.\u00a0 The form I decided to pass their work along\u00a0 in, the sestina, seemed especially appropriate for reflecting their method.\u00a0 The six stanzas and\u00a0 envoi consider the repeating end-words from multiple angles, which is what the Maruki’s art\u00a0 does–looks at the same horrors from every angle.\u00a0 I was active in the nuclear freeze movement,\u00a0 and “The Hell Mural” was my attempt to contribute to the on-going political dialogue.<\/p>\n

As “The Hell Mural” is my best effort to depict hell, “In the Amish Bakery”<\/a> is my best\u00a0 effort to depict heaven.\u00a0 The image of the staid Amish family jumping on their trampoline is what stays with me here, the various incongruities in the poem evoking the kind of surprise and\u00a0 whimsy and humor that would have to be present in any heaven I’d want to spend the afterlife in.\u00a0 When I was writing the poem I really didn’t know the answer to the question I opened the piece\u00a0 with about why the image of the trampoline came to mind in the context of the imagined deaths of\u00a0 my wife and daughters.\u00a0 I’m still not sure I know, though it probably has something to do with\u00a0 the power of celebration and humor and memory and sensory evocation to provide Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion” in the face of loss and mortality.<\/p>\n

My speculations on heaven and hell and mortality began at an early age, generated in part by my father’s illness.\u00a0 Paralyzed with multiple sclerosis for most of my life, my father appears in each of my books, often in multiple poems.\u00a0 When my first book was accepted and I realized\u00a0 that my father would be seeing the poems about him for the first time (and they didn’t always\u00a0 present him or our relationship in the best light), I asked him, in the nursing home where he\u00a0 spent his last years, whether he’d prefer that I remove them from the book.\u00a0 He said something\u00a0 that has been very important for my writing.\u00a0 He said, “I’ve felt so useless to anyone over the\u00a0 years that if I can be of some use to you in your writing it would make me happy.”<\/p>\n

Appropriation of other people’s stories, and the exposure of friends’ and family’s lives, has\u00a0 always been a vexing problem for writers, so my father’s permission was liberating. In the poem, “Hardware,”<\/a> written after my father\u2019s death,\u00a0 I acknowledge his importance for me as a kind of\u00a0 “tour guide” and “translator” of the foreign country of adulthood, suggesting that no words are\u00a0 finally sufficient to accommodate the enormity of his loss.\u00a0 Faced with such sorrow, the heart\u00a0 has only “doohickeys and widgets, watchamacallits and thingamabobs” with which to try to make do.<\/p>\n

Two other poems about my father, “The Friday Night Fights” and “Fielding,” are from the\u00a0 title sequence of my book of one hundred sonnets, The Uses of Adversity<\/i>.\u00a0 The book resulted from my decision to write a sonnet a day for a year, a project which was an outgrowth of my\u00a0 interest in traditional forms and their revival in recent poetry.\u00a0 Although I wanted my sonnets\u00a0 to be fairly rigorous, with a clear gesture, at least, to iambic pentameter, to a consistent\u00a0 rhyme scheme, to a structure built on a central contrast whether in the Petrarchan octave and\u00a0 sestet or the Shakespearian quatrains and couplet or in some hybrid, I also wanted the sonnets to read as conversationally as free verse, employing common diction, slant rhyme, speech rhythms,\u00a0 and a liberal use of <\/a> enjambment and caesura.<\/p>\n

“The Friday Night Fights,”<\/a>\u00a0 perhaps more accessible to older readers who remember the ABC\u00a0 sports show from the 1950s, aims to explore the affinities of conflict and caring, how even fighting can be an expression of affection and love.\u00a0 “Fielding”<\/a> aims to fix in the memory a moment of\u00a0 happiness and exhilaration before a lifetime of frustration and struggle ensues.<\/p>\n

Ever since its invention in 1230 by Giacomo da Lentino in the court of Frederick II of Sicily,\u00a0 the sonnet has, in its length and intensity, leant itself to serious poems about love and death\u00a0 such as these.\u00a0 It has also, in its structural resemblance to the joke (the Shakespearian couplet can be something of a punch line), leant itself to humor.\u00a0 “The McPoem”<\/a> draws on Donald Hall’s\u00a0 humorous label dismissing the kind of poetry sometimes referred to as “the workshop poem”–“the\u00a0 McPoem, fifty billion served.”\u00a0 My answer to Hall echoes, of course, Marianne Moore’s poem\u00a0 entitled “Poetry” that begins, “I, too, dislike it.\u00a0 There are things that are important beyond\u00a0 all this fiddle” and ends by defending poetry as an art that can “present for inspection imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”<\/p>\n

Burgers and boxing, oranges and eyelashes, good fairies and God, Hell murals and Amish bakeries,\u00a0 conflict and affection, watchamacallits and thingamabobs–these are some of the things that\u00a0 poetry can incorporate and celebrate, and, if the poems are good poems, translate from the\u00a0 commonplace and the mundane to the miraculous and the extraordinary.\u00a0 Even a list of clich\u00e9s,\u00a0 like those in my recent poem “Blessings,”<\/a> can have their day.<\/p>\n

Are the poems included here good poems?\u00a0 I guess it’s not up to me, finally, to say.\u00a0\u00a0 I do know that I like them.\u00a0 But then, I also like toads, and all this fiddle. –Ronald Wallace<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article has been excerpted from Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes<\/i>. To access the poems, please choose Selected Poems<\/a> or follow the individual links above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poems “Toads, and All This Fiddle” (Each of the poems discussed in the following article is available on this website.\u00a0 Please follow the appropriate links to read the poem.\u00a0 Links are provided at the poem to return to this page.) … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":41,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-72","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/72\/revisions\/132"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}