A very kind LH reader sent me a copy of John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (thanks, Michael!), and I’m slowly making my way through it — each chapter discusses one or two poets, and I enjoy taking a break after each to digest the poems and Burnside’s thoughts. At the moment I’m reading the chapter called “A Very Young Policeman Exploding,” about Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas (you can perhaps see it at Google Books; the title is from Thomas’s description of Crane’s his own early poems, “with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding”). Crane is the first of the poets Burnside covers who is essentially alien to me; as a young man I tried to make my way into his work but gave it up on grounds of incomprehensibility, as I did with Jacques Derrida. Burnside makes an impassioned case for him that convinces me he was up to something real, but my little Doubleday Anchor Complete Poems may well go another decade or two without being opened again (I must have had it for half a century now). At any rate, the poem he focuses on is “The Wine Menagerie,” set in a bar (necessarily, in 1926, a speakeasy, as Burnside points out), and it begins:
Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
A leopard ranging always in the brow
Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.Then glozening decanters that reflect the street
Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow
Applause flows into liquid cynosures:
— I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow.
(Burnside says “‘Mustard scansions’? Did that mean something? Anything? In literal terms, I didn’t think so…”) Leaving the general phantasmagoria aside, what strikes me is the word, or alleged word, “glozening”; it appears to exist only here in the entire corpus of the English language. It seems to be Crane’s extension of the verb gloze “To minimize or underplay” or “To use flattery or cajolery,” originally the same word as gloss “brief explanatory note or translation” (from Greek glōssa ‘tongue, language’), but why? If your poetic vision insists on your using a phrase like “mustard scansions,” fine — at least we can try to make our own sense out of those violently juxtaposed concepts — but what’s the point of making up a word that just (as far as I can see) adds to the general sloppiness? Is it to suggest the drunk’s creative language use? All I can say is, it doesn’t work for me.
While I’m on the topic of the Burnside book, I’ll mention a couple of errors that are unimportant but that amused me. In the introduction he writes:
[…] poetry is a way of ordering experience, of giving a meaningful order to lived time – and that that process of ordering could be summed up in a phrase from the Old Irish, a phrase that is first found in a tale of the Fianna-Finn, who, during a break from hunting, begin to debate what might constitute ‘the finest music in the world’. […] Finally, they turn to their chief, Fionn, and ask him what he would choose, to which he replies: ‘The music of what happens … that is the finest music in the world.’
A lovely sentiment, but as soon as I read it I thought “that can’t possibly be Old Irish,” and sure enough it seems to have been composed by James Stephens in 1920. And earlier in the introduction he discusses Lev Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, saying “Anna Akhmatova survived, but the regime punished her indirectly by persecuting her son with Gumilev, Lev Nikolayevich, who would spend the best part of eighteen years, off and on, in Stalin’s labour camps.” Understandably but hilariously, the index includes an entry “Nikolayevich, Lev, 3.”
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