Prompt: Letters Never Received

I was teaching Melville's story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which concludes with the revelation that Bartleby used to be a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington DC. Melville uses this setting as a metaphor for mortal hopelessness, misdirected communication, and loneliness.

I thought I knew of a poem about a dead letter office, but I could not find it. What I stumbled upon was the brief anonymous text here.

I found the letter I never gave you
and wondered if anything
would have changed if I did.
The paper felt lighter than I remember,
like time had taken some of its weight away.
I read it again
and so who I was back then
ready to be honest,
just not brave enough to follow through.

I don't know if it was intended as poetry, but it seemed to be a poem the way it appeared online. And that got me thinking about letters that are never received or never sent.

I thought of Emily Dickinson's letter to the world.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

There are a variety of epistolary poems in the form of letters but the ones that interest us this month are ones that never were sent or received. The reasons why vary. Here are a few examples

"Letter to N.Y" by Elizabeth Bishop is a letter you couldn't send.

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you are pursuing:..

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann:
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?

It is about gun violence and school shootings, and the title and opening lines invoke Miłosz’s poem “Dedication”, both poems attempting to bridge historical atrocities with modern, senseless acts. Who is it addressed to? All of us.

A famous letter poem is Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors in her rejection of male control.

Looking at her poem led me to her poet husband, Ted Hughes. His poem about a letter and his correspondence with Sylvia is contained in "The Last Letter." (More about that here)

For our September issue, we are looking for poems that are letters never sent or never received, or poems about letters never sent or received. They might be in the form of a letter, but that is not a requirement.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: AUGUST 31 

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Last Letters: Plath and Hughes

Hughes                                       Plath

In writing our prompt for our September issue about "Letters Never Received," we referenced a very famous letter poem by Sylvia Plath - "Daddy."  This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and also her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors. 

That poem might also lead you to look at another poem by her husband, Ted Hughes. His poem, "The Last Letter,' is another poem never sent. 

It is about his correspondence with Sylvia. His poem was withheld from the original 1998 publication of Birthday Letters, but it was discovered in his archive and published posthumously in 2010 by The New Statesman. The poem deals directly with the final physical letter he received from Plath right before her suicide.

It details the final three days of Plath's life and a specific letter.  Sylvia had mailed Hughes a letter that effectively served as a suicide note. However, due to a mailing mishap, the letter arrived early—while she was still alive.

The poem details Hughes rushing to her apartment after reading it. He finds her seemingly fine, and she burns the letter in front of him, leading him to think the danger had passed. He returns to his own flat, only for her to take her life shortly after.

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To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme. That Is a Question.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos was defending major layoffs at his Washington Post, and when asked why, with all his money, he wouldn't just subsidize the paper, he argued payment was a “signal” of relevance. “If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product […] It would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy.”

The analogy was mocked almost immediately, including by a former Washington Post literary critic who imagined Poetry magazine rejecting T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" for insufficient rhyme.

An article at theconversation.com took off from there and reminds us that English loves a rhyme. Because rhyme is so audible, some have decided it must mean the poet is Working Very Hard and Being Serious. Which is funny, because for a very long time nobody could even agree what it was called. In Middle English, "rime" could mean rhyme, but it could also mean meter, or just verse in general. 

And unrhymed poetry?

1. Beowulf. No rhyming couplets about Grendel's bad manners. The Old English poets had a completely different sound system. Heavy stresses, a big dramatic pause in the middle of the line, and lots of alliterative beats like a drummer 
   Rhyme only really moved in after 1066, when the Normans arrived with their Frenchified vowels and their Frenchified taste for everything to match. Rhyme is memorable, teachable, and you can hear it from the back row without really listening. So naturally, it staged a hostile takeover and started pretending it was poetry.
2. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, containing all of Creation and the Fall of Man entirely without rhyme. He even added a passive-aggressive preface explaining why. Rhyme, he said, was "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse." What bothered Milton wasn't just the ding-dong-ding, but that rhyme tempts you to sound finished before you've actually finished thinking. He calls it the "jingling sound of like endings" and "the troublesome and modern bondage of riming." 
3. Mr. Shakespeare, when he actually needs to get something done, like, say, invent interior consciousness and run a five-act tragedy, he doesn't rhyme. His plays are built in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The music comes from the push and pull of the rhythm against the sentence, not from two words kissing at the end of a line. Rhyme is saved for when someone is falling in love, being witty, or about to exit with a flourish.

T.S. Eliot wrote in "Reflections on Vers Libre," that there is “no freedom in art.” No rhyme does not mean no structure. Rhythm, word order, line, repetition, and other devices become more exposed.

I think that writing poetry without concern for rhyme does feel easier at first. Rhyme is a very visible kind of difficulty. Some poets wrestle with it and if you get something that doesn't sound like a greeting card or children's song, you get a dopamine shot of accomplishment. Rhyme tells you when a line is over. It tells you where the next line has to go. It even gives you a cheap way to sound musical when the rest of the line is prose. 

Writing unrhymed (blank verse, or free verse) is hard because you have to build the music out of other things. Poets learn to use the weight of stressed syllables, the length of the sentence against the length of the line, alliteration, vowel echo, the caesura. Many readers can't point to why-this-is-a-poem. It may read to some like broken-up prose that is quietly asking to be put back together. 

Most of the poets who last — O'Hara, Milton, Williams, Bishop — can do both, and they choose the tools for the job.  

 

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Poems at Lunch with Frank

I read an article in The Times a few weeks ago that suggested Frank O'Hara as the perfect poet for my lunchtime reading.

"It's my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk..." wrote O'Hara in his Lunch Poems. It's a small book from 1964. Frank would have turned 100 this year, but the poems don't read like an old man. They are un-intimidating, and feel a bit like he was writing them at the table across from me outside on this July afternoon as the world passes by my cafe table.

 

The small book was published by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series with their unassuming covers (as with Ginsberg's Howl) and was edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his The New American Poetry. 

O'Hara studied at the New England Conservatory when he was a teen. Concert piano. But he traded that for words. He moved to New York in 1951 at 24. He took a no-pay "job" at MoMA so he could see the Matisse and eventually became a curator there. He championed Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and the rest of the Abstract Expressionists, and he was writing art criticism.

He was a lunchtime walker, and that was where many of the Lunch Poems came into being. They are formally inventive and casually composed. He wrote in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime, and on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading.

He belonged to the New York School quite literally. He hung out with painters and poets in the Fifties and Sixties. Pollock, his old college friend John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Jane Freer and they traded studio space, gossip, and line breaks. 

"How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swing Time..." he says to the city in begins "Steps." The poetry lesson here includes his idea of the importance of place. And specific places - Bergdorf's, Christmas trees being hauled down Park Avenue, "cool graced light" hitting the enormous glass towers of midtown. You probably haven't lived in NYC. Either have I, but I get it. 

In the final scene of the opening episode of the second season of Mad Men - the TV series set in the world of NYC advertising in the early 1960s - we see the show's protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O'Hara's poems (Meditations in an Emergency from 1957). Don recites the final lines from "Mayakovsky." It fit in quite well. 

I know so many poets who bemoan the lack of time they have to write. O'Hara says you don't have to wait for some weekend retreat or a residency in a mountaintop cabin. It happens while eating lunch, on a walk, between errands.

Reading poems on your lunch hour is a particular kind of pleasure. You've eaten, you're sated, and if the poet has done their work, you're sated in a second way too — that small, lit-up feeling that says: go write something, go read something, go look harder at the street for the rest of the afternoon.

Lunch Poems is, in the best sense, pure Americana. Lunch, for one thing, is literal. O'Hara really does eat his lunch in these poems. There are chocolate malted milkshakes and cheeseburgers and sweating bottles of Coca-Cola, all recorded with a kind of sensual delight in abundance that feels utterly American. And then there are the movies. He has a great appetite for them.

"Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies! /It's true that fresh air is good for the body / but what about the soul / that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images..." ("Ave Maria")

I wish the end of O'Hara's own story was more like these poems. In July 1966, on a dark beach on Fire Island, he was struck by a jeep. He was 40. His funeral on Long Island was a who's who of the New York art world. They gathered for their friend whose poems never really believed in tragedy.

Rather, let us end with walking with Frank at lunch.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look 
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust...
           from "A Step Away from Them" 

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