January 22, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:I'm about to get shot, but. . .
Harold Pinter's latest is not a bad poem. The intellect it betrays is, of course, shallow and nasty and trapped in an adolescent attachment to utopian power-fantasies, but the poem itself is not bad; better than much of Pinter's work.
It's not all that good, either, mind you. For one thing, it goes from not-so-cryptic Crusade imagery, tied into "Praise America's God", to an extended singing metaphor without a direct reference to hymns. It hurts the poem. A one-line reference would both round out the poem, and make it immediately comprehensible in the way that a poem needs to be to be great. Mind you, the best poems are layered and textured -- but the surface of a poem must immediately strike you and grip the mind, or else the layers never work their way into your heart. The lack of an obvious transition loses the momentum he builds up with his striking introduction, and he never gets it back. The sharp contrasts he tries to draw don't make the emotional impact he's trying for because you've just spend three seconds out of the poem, wondering how we got from a to b, before your brain said "Oh, right, hymns" and moved on.
Most of his images are, alas, thoroughly recycled, but his writing is terse and workmanlike. I've read a great deal many worse poems.
I suspect that Pinter couldn't wait to get this out there. He will regret it; the poem betrays the hurry. It will last longer as a political curiosity than as a poem, which is always regrettable. Of course, if he waited much longer, and America invades Iraq and comes back with pictures of tortured baby Kurds from the Saddaam archives, the poem might not go over so well. As we learned in business school, often time-to-market trumps quality.
And doesn't that really tell you all you need to know about the effect his politics are having on Pinter's poetic legacy?
Posted by Jane Galt at January 22, 2003 11:23 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksAll things considered, he's as good a poet as Ezra Pound.
Much in the same way Hitler's drawings are critically admirable.
It's a shame that monsters can still remain partially human, no?
I was having a conversation about Pound the other night, in which was quoted someone (I can't recall who), who said: "I tell my friends that I've stopped reading Pound because he's anti-semitic. It's easier than telling them I've stopped reading Pound because my doctor finally started prescribing stronger sleeping pills."
To be perfectly honest, this poem turns from criticism to praise for certain definitions of "America's God". If you recognize that as "freedom", then there's no need to mourn the dead who are "refusing to sing". They are tyrants like Saddam, and are properly disposed of.
I wonder what it is that Pinter thinks is "America's God". Does he think that Bush's few pale words about good and evil make him some kind of crazed religious fanatic? This certainly seems to be popular in some circles. Or does he think it's "empire"? Or oil?
You're right. You are about to get shot.
Just kidding. But I find it hard to believe this is some of his better work. Maybe I'm just biased, but most of the anti-war poetry I've seen is just bad. The phrase "tin ear" comes to mind.
I think you're unjustly maligning Pinter. His play "Arcadia" is a very interesting and thought-provoking play and the screenplay for "Shakespeare in Love" is terrific. The poem's content is fatuous and ridiculous, of course. I won't deny that for a second.
"Better than much of Pinter's work"? That's savage. You can see my own theory about all these bad poems, including Pinter's here:
http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/January2003_3.html#jrm581
Deliberate sabotage by agent "Pentameter".
I hold it as an incontrovertible axiom that any poem that features the lines:
"Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead"
cannot possibly be good. Andrea Harris pointed out the execrable use of the word "pong" which, as far as I can tell, is simply the name of an archaic video game.
True, it's not as bad as some (perhaps even most)of the other antiwar poetry out there, but it's pretty abominable.
Uh, JT, you are thinking of Tom Stoppard. Pinter has never written anything as good as Arcadia. In fact, I believe that few have.
First, about "pong": evidently (via Infoplease) it's an informal British synonym for "stink," as in very bad smell, or smell very bad.
Second, I agree with Jane G. that the (idiotic) poem has some artistic merit. I'd edit it to this:
--
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chant their ballads of joy
Clutch their scything whips
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God
--
Why I've bothered to do this, I have no idea, unless it's that I don't watch sports and nothing good is on tv to battle the Super Bowl.
Comments are Closed.