Beyond the Sublime: Reading James Liddy

Beyond the Sublime: Reading James LiddyAuthor(s): George StanleySource: Irish University Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1998), pp. 92-109Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484763 .

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George Stanley

Beyond the Sublime: Reading James Liddy

Reading James Liddy's poems, which often seem to originate from the

daily (or nightly) occasions of their composition, the reader, as with

Whitman, realises that he or she is meeting a person, not just a subject of

autobiography. Liddy's poems do not merely refer to incidents; there is a deeper level. Liddy's is a poetry of which "The material is already

given",1 and returns for acknowledgement in the fresh circumstances of

later poems. Later material has to bend, or give way, or settle around

what is brought forward. St Augustine wrote that time exists because

everything cannot happen at once, but in Liddy's poetry often everything does happen at once. What happens most intensely, shining through all, is the recurrent vision, the aisling:

In childhood the theme forms In what glows from the shadow of one's mother

As she thinks in her armchair. ...

Light not of a Beatific but of a Beatrice vision Which with time

Becomes so rich and unclear.

In, I think, an un-Dantean way, this "unclear" vision leads him away from knowledge:

We do not know And there are no answers, no words

Its development will not be into "aphorisms/ Out of hints how the

human heart beats", but in search of

the hour for spontaneous pledges Beyond easily made friendships For those kisses that cannot be analysed2

Liddy's is not a poetry of emotional analysis or synthesis, or of what

Jack Spicer,3 following Charles Olson, used to refer to slightingly as

"wisdom as such". It is a poetry of experience, and it is also a poetry of

1. James Liddy, Jim Chapson and Thomas Hill, Blue House: Poems in the Chinese Manner

(Honolulu: The Nine Beasts Press, 1968), p. 36.

2. Ibid., p. 37.

3. US poet, 1925-65. For his influence on Liddy, see below.

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BEYOND THE SUBLIME: READING JAMES LIDDY

piety, "dutifulness ... esp. to parents" (OED) ? in "Epithalamion",

written on the fiftieth anniversary of his parents' wedding:

I learnt to sing (thank you) and I sing before the painted

marriage chamber door

and of transference, to later incarnations of the Beatrice vision:

The initiation is to transfer sexual

purpose ?

everything that is energy ?

into the creative not the sublime.4

The sublime would be a lot more orderly. The person of the poet would

disappear. But Liddy 'pops up' out of the bricolage of poem after poem ?

magister ludi, confidant:

If I were you I'd take the merry ghost of Tom Moore out to dinner; I am a merry Dabbler myself,

so take me out to

Dinner and listen.5

rhapsode, philosopher, party animal ? but most often lover. These are

not social roles, but new selves, sensibilities; like Beckett's Malone, each

is just 'another' in the sequence of selves. Liddy eschews the sublime

because it would take up time. No heavy weather (as in Turner). Love is

the theme, but it is not outside time, it is in the present, it is the responsive side of time, topos of those unanalysable kisses. From the beginning,

The Dispensary House ?

Virginia creeper ? the doctor's beautiful wife drinking

inside ?

the doctor's son kissing

someone ? (CP, p. 36)

*

In Blue House, written in San Francisco in the late nineteen sixties, James

Liddy first addressed his debt to and love for his friend and mentor, Patrick Kavanagh;

I can only burn candles before anyone's arrogant acceptance

Of the void All seasons.6

4. James Liddy, Collected Poems, introduction by Brian Arkins (Omaha, Nebraska:

Creighton University Press, 1994), p. 173. As Kevin T. McEneaney has pointed out

(Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1995, p. 34), this collection is "significantly

abridged". In particular, all of Blue House is omitted, as are some of the best poems in A White Thought in a White Shade (see note 5). Future references will be incorporated in the text as CP.

5. James Liddy, A White Thought in a White Shade: New and Selected Poems (Dublin: Kerr's

Pinks, 1987), p. 36.

6. Liddy, Blue House, p. 42.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

I was once looking through Kavanagh's Collected Poems for a favourite

poem, but couldn't find it. The reason was, it was one of Liddy's ?

"Preferably Chinese" ? which has the Kavanagh-like lines:

It fatigues me a lot to contemplate the industry Of those who do not hear life's message Of eternal

unimportance.7

That dandyish insouciance was a gift Kavanagh (quel dandy!) had given him, and part of the gift was isolation:

There are no ancestral voices calling Come home and be The Bard?

For Liddy the unimportance applied also to the isolation. In the memoir,

Homage to Patrick Kavanagh, he wrote:

The real sin of most of the Gaelic poets is their dependence on the audience, an evil legacy still in Irish poetry.

... I absolutely do not

expect to be listened to by anybody outside the Orphics, and I love it*

He would "prefer"

To be released from Effort

Finding gay and courageous friends And being generous with time which we call love.10

When everything happens at once the reflections or refractions of love can be foregrounded and superimposed on the landscape (but which

underlies which?), as in a poem recalling a friend of Liddy's father,

Eugene Connolly:

He seemed to me in childhood to possess a curving

beautiful face, soft as a hill in his district with

moonlight falling on its few roofs. His smile through uneven hedges. Small decimal change you might say but there rests in the shadow of his funeral car silence and forgotten aspects of crumbled down

? or

enlarged, unrecognisable ?

cottages. What happened in

those small places, that his car drove narrow lanes up to, has never been discovered.

I'm happy to be lost and feel his shade (CP, p. 45).

7. Ibid., p. 35.

8. Ibid., p. 44.

9. James Liddy, Homage to Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: New Writers' Press, 1971), p. 3.


94




The lines get crowded with the real, and objects seem edged towards a

third dimension ? a heightened reality. The hedges, cottages, are felt as

such. Or an object breaks in two:

Let the priests cure cows, he dropt his heart in a cup and ate it like soup. The spoon was covered with

the likeness of the devil. Drop yourself into it as if you do not want to see any part of yourself. Heart

remnants squirm away (CP, p. 49).

Images have to share the space but they don't jostle. I think this casual

cohabiting is Blakean, anti-sceptical. The real refuses to submit to the

schema, the length of time in the line. Images come faster than they can

be accommodated; the charge is to grasp the moment in its flight, "Snatch

out of time the passionate transitory".11 But the poetic line has its

prerogatives, too. In a game of musical chairs where everyone gets a

chair, the most flexible syntax, the entailments of the lexicon, may yet have to loosen further.

I mentioned this aspect of his prosody to Liddy once in a pub in

Arklow (or maybe we were walking over a field). I called it "your cubist

syntax". "Oh yes," he said, "Cuban syntax."

The poem is true to experience, to the mundane. Kavanagh told him:

"Write of what's in front of you. That bottle of stout on the table there.

That's it."12 What is "there" for Liddy is others ? many others (I would

rather not say 'The Other'), Joycean throngs, but more urgently, friends,

lovers, avatars of the Beatrice-figure, Clare, his mother. To him as a child

she

held out the love that fucks the heart day in day out and that with passion winds raves the mind.13

To admit them, the poem opens outward into the world, thus allowing the incarnate (opposite of virtual) object to be subject, the Christ to our

Antichrist. Love (time) has no privileged centre:

The ultimate bitchery is to be cold in the poem. It is a form of jealousy to try to hold on to poetry for oneself, and kills the poem that might come in others.14

This commitment of Liddy's is most clear in the book15 "In the Slovak

Bowling Alley", where the hero, Holden (borrowed from Salinger), enters

the poem and writes it.

11. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (New York: Devin- Adair, 1964), p. 153.

12. Liddy, Homage, p. 1.

13. Liddy, A White Thought, p. 29.

14. Liddy, Homage, pp. 1-2,

15. In Jack Spicer's sense of a "book", which is generally coextensive with a "serial

poem" (see note 23).

95




What gets left behind completely, behind even the sublime, is

'seriousness', the exclusion or foreclosing of real possibilities in the name

of theory. Though Liddy is not above aphorisms, just those that would

claim, po-faced, to be veridical. He has some lovely mocking ones in the

book "Art Is Not for Grownups". Here's one:

See-Through

Yeats is the Hemingway of Ireland You can see through the hair on his chest (CP, p. 252).

What he is down on is "wisdom as such", or, as Kavanagh put it,

We want no secular

Wisdom plodded together By concerned fools.16

*

For Liddy, in Dublin, there had been the contrast between the "telling of

the Irish experience... in the decorative academic poem" and Kavanagh's "Arcadian laughter which is not necessarily Irish at all".17 But in San

Francisco the enemies of poetry were political:

Voice of the San Francisco poetess Who has stayed up late to write

about Watts

Heavy in commitment to something not her death or

being near death ...

No one writes poetry I say Yet it is dictated to a few

not polite at parties Praise to that power in whose integrity

you drown for good.18

In San Francisco Liddy encountered the ghost of Jack Spicer. That

"No one writes poetry" responds to Spicer's ambiguous "No/ One listens

to poetry".19 "No one writes poetry... Yet it is dictated". Spicer's idea of

poetic dictation came from Yeats's automatic writing; in Liddy's version

(referring to Kavanagh) it is "a sweeping power which chooses you as

oracle or vehicle, and for which you pay a price between poems".20

Integral to Liddy's poetics is his dismissal of the "ordinary poem":

16. Kavanagh, p. 155.



19. Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Robin Blaser (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975), p. 217.


96




Remember the ordinary poem is written at

No particular time and though it has a German or a

Spanish ancestor it never

Laps at the shore of objects that might Be heavenly or at least real like

Bumper to bumper down Wexford's narrow

Streets (higher hill tops, a spire, trees).21

Spicer's absolutely unsystematic (dictated) prosody had opened up a

way for such an "object that might be heavenly" to exist in the poem, not just as reference but as incarnate presence:

How difficult to take a boy in a blue bathing suit that I have watched as

casually as a tree and to make him visible in a poem as a tree is

visible, not as an image

or a picture but as

something alive ? caught

forever in the structure of words.22

Liddy saw this way, and followed. He began to write the serial poem

(the form invented by Spicer and Robin Blaser23). In his first serial poem, "A Munster Song of Love and War", the visitor, or hero, Donough, "local

fairy king" of Doonbeg, County Clare,24 demands entry into the poem ? but at the cost of his mortal life:

The hounds can't

Come in

The steeds can't

Come in He tries to come in The music of the erotic chase sounds

But the cap on his yellow hair gets knocked on the floor.

Young men with yellow hair lift him over the furniture. Their tears

That want to come into the poem Freeze inside love (CP, p. 57)

The poet (or the poem) address Donough as "kid". The entire poem is

reminiscent of Spicer's "Billy the Kid", the incarnation of whose hero is

William Bonner, shot down in New Mexico. For Liddy it is Michael

Collins, shot at Beal na Blath, County Cork:


22. Spicer, p. 34. 23. US-Canadian poet, b. 1925. Blaser describes the genesis of the serial poem: "Jack

began to construct a poetry that was not lyric but narrative. This narrative, he came ?

'jokingly/ he said ? to call 'the serial poem'. It had to hold on to a motivation

that was not strictly his own." (Robin Blaser, "The Practice of Outside", in Spicer, p. 273.) Robert Creeley adds: "Together they (Blaser and Spicer) proposed a 'serial

poetry' far more the fact of what might now happen rather than any presumed method for gaining generalised continuity, however defined/' (Robert Creeley, Foreword, Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993), p. xiv.)

24. James Liddy, personal communication.

97




We saw the star of knowledge

(He was) Coming into the mouth of the flowers Above all the Gael as the sun Is above the moon ...

He'd be alive today if he wasn't pretty He was gorgeous. His beauty

overcame his enemies and the

enemies of Ireland

and it was jealousy of his prettiness that has laid him

On the floor with his head open (CP, pp. 62-3).

The abrupt line breaks give space for the mortal hero/fairy king/visitor to exist. Spicer:

What I mean is I

Will tell you about the pain It was a long pain

About as wide as a curtain

But long As the great outdoors.25

In Liddy's serial poems, the Spicer poetic, with all the space in it ("the

great outdoors"), makes room for the other person ? be it Donough, be

it Clare, be it God ? to exist temporarily in the poem. As if part of the

poem were intentionally left unwritten. (As well, it relieves the pressure of the Joycean throngs, clamouring like the dead in The Odyssey for a

taste of the poem.) I believe Spicer's poetic was the lifeline Liddy grasped to escape the trammels of the literary and the 'ordinary'.

"A Munster Song" is largely imitation, but in "Corca Bascinn" (a serial

poem made up of serial poems, like Spicer's "The Holy Grail"26) there is a huge expansion of territory

? of landscape and meaning. The tidal

shoreline of Corca Bascinn (Gaelic for West Clare27) is visible, like Spicer's

boy in a blue bathing suit, a magic land in a real, non-hallucinated

universe. (I think sometimes both Spicer and Liddy reverse Marianne

Moore's dictum, placing their imaginary toad (prince)s in real gardens.) It calls for the presence of the fairy king, Donn, of youth (his youth), as

youth seems to slip away from the poet, unmoving as a cliff. There is so

much alive in this poem:

25. Spicer, p. 80.

26. Ibid., pp. 187-213.

27. Liddy, personal communication.

98




Wonder Land of.

Swaying in the water Dark olive or

yellow in deep water or the

jointed juice-branch like bottles of red wine. Old

Magic with a branch of blossoms The boys and girls

wear green cloaks

With some kind of a fringe And soft yellow hair

(By wonder of his hair). Living flowers And whether they are real kids Or we're real doesn't matter

You've come to adore

The beach really exists in the poem; it's not just about the beach:

Ourselves alone

Like hermits going in

Going out of water and sand

Beach so lonesome we died and walked Out on it

In the "Sandhills" section, the poet, lost in midlife, asks

How to embody anonymous post sexual

Magic in your life (CP, pp. 69,73-4)

(Post sexual: that's Liddy's version of postmodern.) Spicer came to this

point and found

The self is no longer real It is not like loneliness

This big huge loneness. Sacrificing All of the person with it.28

But Liddy is not going to sacrifice any of the person. His generosity (so different from Spicer's gnosticism) extends, naturally, to himself. In "Art

Is Not for Grownups", a decade later, he will write (parodying W.S.

Landor):

Alcohol I loved, and next to alcohol youth ?

I flirted with all, for all were worth

my time; the pulse of hand and loins does not die down ? and I am not ready to go (CP, p. 243).

In "Corca Bascinn" the incarnate vision is seen over against him:

28. Spicer, p. 87.

99




I imagine the kids abide there Silver leaves in their hair

Dancing to the new number ...

(Silver, a note of the faery)

Our youth returned.

And then the impossible command/invitation/plea:

Relive.

Open the door I swear I am servant of

Everlasting pleasures,

Shining Donn, Lemme in ...

You're throwing a

party tonight... I'm going to drink your

drinks Be introduced to your Beautiful guests.

And, by God, Donn lets him in:

By God's wounds Give me Mick Jagger's fag Dancing (CP, pp. 77,79,82).

To ask the question, how to embody magic in your life, is to risk the

magic (and the price between poems). In these Donn poems a crisis is

passed, a crisis of what meaning love can have when the world, at midlife, inverts itself, and the real is seen through the fretwork of the symbolic: that bleakness. But by magic the poet can "relive", without a doubt. And

now he can speak in new tongues, as in the gorgeous lament, "Wild

curlew whistle I offer my death to":

Wild curlew whistle I offer my death to Take me out of these false shadows

First heard

Night's vault made sweet

Above orange lights along the canal

Now more thrilling For his death which turns my love As it should be turned To death

This is my love story My dead friends All my friends will die Love signal

100




Head raised Bill upwards

With the mandrils wide open It gives a series of languishing cries

Long liquid babbling cry for you, Paddy, Among the true shadows

OfKilkee Love love love love love

For the only immortality I know The world after this one (CP, p. 83)

Post sexual means no longer scattering seed, but remaining in place, "love ... turned to death", heart forever at Donn's party. As Eugene

Connolly's smiling face is "a hill in his district", the cliffs of Corca Bascinn

stand, finally, and are the poet:

At castle shadowed mouth of the

Doonbeg ...

I'm happy on the cliffs 'Above the real'

Because they last with slight modif ications the way they

are

How wonderful to be around so long

(which reminds of Beckett's Belacqua ? or even Malone)

Walls

Rising to starry peaks Not a

scattering of flowers.

Below No dulse.

Sheer

Unrolling Smooth as ballerina satin

Dark gods, Gods above drowning men,

Danaan gods and

True

Thousands upon thousands years ancient and

sublime.

I forget the shit Leave hunger You are the future.

Say never ending Masses, fishes.

Put a cowl on me, Brother storm.

Sing low with me, Sister waves (CP, pp. 89-90)

In which he is the cliffs, is and is not the drowning men. Donn and the

fairies and the cliffs are the future. *

101




If "Corca Bascinn" presents a struggle with time, ageing, the 'post sexual', and its resolution, the lyrical opening gained by the 'turn to death', "A

White Thought in a White Shade" is paradisal, unquestioning poetry ?

it is unquestioningly poetry, that thought in the shade that is also light. Now there is almost too much "passionate transitory" for the lines to

take, so the images break up, double, show through one another, like

transparencies, or overlap, as in the poem, "Saint Orpheus":

Orpheus shifted

dragging wild beasts along with the

strings of his lyre that seemed lights to a

drowsy or drowned soul...

Our lives add up like a sandwich white bread enclosing the body meat, or like semen the snowy edges along fields, white trees white flowers of your spring, Persephone. (CP, p. 139)

"Drink of the Queen", the poem says: kiss death(as opposed to kiss of death). So the knowledge won (imposed) by supping with fairies is not

forgotten, the "price between poems". The light of "A White Thought in

a White Shade" is the northern lights, Aurora Borealis, northern dawn, seen from a Milwaukee park by frozen Lake Michigan (and this is the

beginning of Liddy's Milwaukee poetry) on a walk with a friend, "the

painter Bruce Pattison". The language is painterly:

ice-sky filtered with pink filaments a punk snow dazed bleak pink and creams that are fished out

twig-branch framed

of the lake's ice bucket dark sounds of a saga passing

(my own Canadian hearing of the lights says, that's just right)

black lace with blue behind a tablecloth out of nature ...

there can be no going no death

the Northern Lights are that pure

Now a tutelary androgyne goddess appears ?

Marilyn Monroe

and we come to the transfiguration

(of Jesus?)

Marilyn Monroe high in her moon

absorbing all earth-ice (CP, pp. 141-42)

(an androgyne trinity?Jesus, Monroe and Persephone ? no old man).

102




In "A White Thought" Liddy is no longer tied to the courage of

Kavanagh or the language of Spicer. But the "already given" persists:

As I move around Milwaukee in taverns and classrooms young Germans follow me, from Mount St. Benedict that

is not in the past. Constant transference!

Perpetual bright house! (CP, p. 54)

In his introduction to the Collected Poems, Brian Arkins praises the

poem "Love Is a Good Read in Bed", but, unaccountably, it is left out of

the collection (did someone at Creighton University Press ? Jesuit

?

have cold feet over a phrase like "bare chest"?). Arkins calls it a "sexual

poem";29 it is more accurately of that nervous endorphined moment

when it's clear sex is on its way:

the sight of your bare chest

green-tingled light ordinarily blond blue parfait Marilyn Monroe

Jean Harlow, pyjama shepherd transformed in light to god-goddess tone. I barefoot in preliminary terror

Post sexual philosophy ensues:

The Phaedrus read by the red-haired man.

Charmingly unmarginal: you're in love like one that has caught a glint (disease)

in the eye from the glinting eye yearning

as yearned for but in a weaker

way, preserving lust-spirit in man-animal.

His power is a wilderness of starry bars.

(are we lost in the stars? or in the bars?)

In love with what is in love with that.30

And "that", I take it, is the last head-word, 'wilderness', that is, world.

Or is it 'power'? Swift said our love of life is a passion, irrational. But is

it both rational and irrational when it is loved in the love of another?

That would be heaven.

(It is time to note that these "sexual poems that are directly personal"31 owe something to Frank O'Hara's poetic of "personism". But Liddy, with

his Fine Gael taste for the authoritarian, might call that "Peronism".)

29. Brian Arkins, "James Liddy: The Irish Donne", in Liddy, Collected Poems, p. 12.

30. Liddy, A White Thought, pp. 19-20.

31. Arkins, p. 12.

103




In "From This Distance: The Last Poem of the Clare Bards in Praise of

the MacDonnells of Kilkee", looking back to Clare from Milwaukee, the

appearances of Eros, "snatched out of time" (and logic), tumble gladly:

love, the mermaid-daughter, the model

of God, heavenly fern or flagstone, fringed with rain and song, actuaring nectar of

the streets down from the vanished castle, walls ripened by drifting starfish and anemones

inspired and blossomed by Cupid's ozone missiles in this our West of West

our sea garden, language of bed lovers,

the whisper of the garrison officer harbouring the servant girl innocent and naughty like the

body embers of the Milesian race, stammering

again, trick treat and kiss: the script that is never dried by any wind. We have nothing to offer presence but presence.

Which is a restatement of the theme: no time for the sublime. And then, almost as an afterthought, a bow, the poem concludes

That the people's lilt had been the soul of everything (CP, pp. 152-53).

"Epithalamion" begins, Arkins writes, with "Liddy and his sexual life, which is to invert the usual topics of the epithalamium."32 It's a

recollection of boyish eroticism, a superimposition of adolescent

horniness on a pastoral literary landscape, that of Hopkins's homoerotic

poetry. The poet identifies with the "crumpled grassy white/ bank of

the Inch river", defined as "the racking songs of sense love", and with

"a man coming out of bush buds ... in/ Fr. Hopkins' poem ... the

stranger" to discover "Adorable limbs of fisher trees". It's

a piece of

hot fairyland, a shrine of smooth green desire imagined by popes

but, Liddy notes, the "stranger and the village boys" do not, as in

Hopkins's poem, "strip to the butt". Yet "the indispensable factor" is

"The body in genuine human experience" (CP, pp. 167-69). Desire for

the boys plus the reading of Hopkins create a situation where a more

repressed gay poet might strike a note of idealisation. Liddy, instead,

lays out the whole scene in reminiscence (with the details tumbling as

willed by involuntary memory) including his frustration. Like Kavanagh, in "Living in the Country:II", he gives us "the womb of the poem".33

The section ends with the odd word "Longanimity", which on first sight

32. Ibid., p. 7.


104




might seem to refer to enduring strength of purpose, but in fact means

"extraordinary patience under provocation of trial" (Webster's Third International Dictionary).

Then comes the rejection of the sublime, as if this excursus into

adolescent memory has taught him that eternal desire cannot shield the

shame of its earthly frustration; that would be but an exercise in what

Blake calls "single vision". Rather, the poem must show the full course

of desire's struggle for generation; it must

transfer sexual

purpose ?

everything that is energy ?

into the creative not the sublime.

To be-bop more of a lover as you

incarnate better the poet. To be flowing more of a river sensualist (CP, p. 173).

That "flowing" is a good place, though, to sink time's arrow.

*

The prose elegy, "Clare, the Butterflies", recreates the person of Liddy's mother in her world and in her dying days.34 The poem, again, is crowded

with the real. Everything has to find its place. This time I think of Klee ? each shade or facet of an image is placed (noticed) in its just relation

to the living moment ? Clare's consciousness. Then the moment moves

and the other elements move as well, dragged along by it, turning,

unpredictably, like leaves, falling away or looming in her (his, our)

thoughts. Clare dying is an island:

the white wall and white pillow of Clare Island ... She began to lurch in the warm stonewall breeze, the window-flutters of July

or

August. The country of no come-back ...

The butterflies (the first one "start(s) out of the side of her mouth")

carry the son, himself a dependent object, away from her bedside, into

his past:

A mortal creature begins to count them early ... saw a

white and yellow one on Sutter Street in San Francisco and it was your first new world summer ... Before that a red

and black specimen on a Palma terrace ... and the countless

wing-flutter in honey-pot out in the garden childhood ...

and back, again to her:

Her soul, this time (CP, p. 205).

34. It also calls to my mind another great elegy in contemporary Irish poetry, Thomas

Kinsella's "The Messenger", on the life and death of his father; Thomas Kinsella, Blood and Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 1-15.

105




The poem's progress is like sea motion: there is surface wave activity, this way and that, over deep underlying surges, carrying Clare ever away. So what is hidden by a wave one moment is visible again, farther away,

retreating or approaching, retreating. A butterfly, dying

flies near the beach which is a suburb-eternity with the sound of water on it.... The beach is very stony now, not

a soul on it except this soul. Hair of the head stand

up and pray at the spectre. A speck in the distance ...

What does soul do before being wave-topped away from deserted beach? Looks for last company; wild flowers, sea

pinks, yellow low lying furze in near-pasture,

tangled briar, hedge blossoms. Anything, anything ...

What does soul perform before approaching funeral ship?

The butterfly cuts to her hand, the surge returns to the room:

She puts out her hand, she twirls it backwards and forwards, up and down, over the top of the sheet, over the white wave

settling on the beach, the longest beach. Her hands could be seen from the distance of the door.

(The son dumbly gazing.) Metaphor heals, momentarily, by naming: death, the sea, the "funeral ship", "ghost ship"; life, the beach, the white

sheeted bed. At this equipoise the living person can appear, dressed in

the symbolic, in the son's mind's eye, but each phrase is preceded by "never":

... she will never be in County Clare again, never go west of the

Shannon to meet the spirits of her people, never with her mother's ghost again along the sea wall talking to

everyone, never again in Scott's to order a 'half and

half... (CP, pp. 206-07)

The dying-room awaits its Tennysonian relief:

Build your room-tomb before the ghost ship dips on the window-horizon: red Chinese scarf-like vases,

moustached yellow Stuart lions that were English kings with French faces and rosaries hidden under Protestant

pillows, vases again of various hues of blue, Chinese

bowl the same colour as her eyes ...

Yet the "room-tomb" is too wide. The poem, the true, is forced back to

The mouth and forehead, recreation of ears and calves,

their ditches and gates. Mortal, it begins, ends,

begins, ends. Harvest is the mad keeper of what

struggles up embarrassed in fits and starts (CP, pp. 209-10).

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A Beckett-like line. There is no simple summation, only her gentle

resignation and his inescapable self-deception, even as he knows it:

You tease, you try to get her to look, to smile, to pieta you when you should be saying goodbye to her body (CP, p. 211).

*

In "Art Is Not for Grownups" Liddy stares down the work of age, and

his job as a professor:

Poet

I am getting old I want to teach literature

I think students need it I am getting old.

I think students can still make love with poetry

I am getting old.

I think theory is a failed revolution because it's puritan I guess literature is all about kissing (CP, p. 254).

He dismisses "theory" for the same reason that he rejected the sublime:

they are blind alleys (even though apparently leading upward). The

insistence on either categorical understanding or blissed-out awe

distracts from experience and the creative ? from the world (and the

language) the students are born into ? from the risk of the kiss.

The cult of theory (which, as is well known, is endemic in North

American English departments) appeals to a sceptical cast of mind that

would know the world before deigning to touch it (or be touched by it), that would found it in reason before finding it. (As Stanley Cavell has

written, "I take it (scepticism) to begin as a wish not to reject the world

but rather to establish it.")35

"Theory ... is puritan"; it shares with puritanism an obsession with

transcendence (if only to deny it), a distaste for the physicality ? the

sexiness ? of creation, and a dread of its contingency (but is not the

whole notion of the contingent a corollary of the craving for some cog nitive foundation for reality?)

Literature is all about kissing because it is all about education. Liddy has said: "The poet has a particular duty: he has to create other poets.

35. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press),

p. 138.

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We cannot let talent die without waking."36 "The poem that might come

in others" is at stake. So he would convey to the young some of the

urgency of his own poetic education:

What looks on faces outside bars, I remember, As I see what my dreams of youth were Made of: not the mean burn out of old age But madness out of book-kisses, mouth-kisses, Postman's bags. Yes, we were the beats and punks And we read. Eamonn, remember how we

Used to dance all around Ireland in

Brightly coloured cars and bars.37

In his most tender book, "In the Slovak Bowling Alley", Liddy creates

(bears witness to the self-creation of) Holden. Like Donn, Holden is a

mortal hero, a celebrant of life, the poem opens out to make room for, but he is also a Christ-figure:

Holden

He dipped the host of his house in the wine of the street. He gave sanctuary to the human race in the church of himself.

He blessed everyone who never blessed anyone (CP, p. 220).

Or is Christ a Holden-figure?

All right, I have

brought Christ into it, what did He say:

"They shall be saved who also did nothing, they shall be last who said more than they should have on an

ordinary day, no

forgiveness inside their tongue or mercy hidden in their cheek. Besides they did not get going during the festival." (CP, p. 225)

God, too, is a visitor in this book, but He comes without transcendent

attributes. Rather, He plays the part in creation of a musician at a party:

humming in the wood, over

his accordion.

The wood where

they have picnics, alcohol, dope (like Big Sur), women get high (CP, p. 224).

This is Kavanagh's immanent God, "The One":

36. Brian Arkins and James Liddy, "From McDaid's to Milwaukee: Brian Arkins

Interviews James Liddy", Studies, Volume 85, Number 340, p. 338.


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God is down in the swamps and marshes ...

beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God ...

breathing His love by a cut-away bog.38

In resisting the tug of the sublime, or theory, Liddy discovers in poetry

you must love what

you love without understanding (CP, p. 221).

The following quotation from Novalis (which I found on the wrapper of

a piece of candy purchased at the Vancouver SeaBus terminal) expresses this perfectly: "We will never fully understand each other, but we will

be able to do much more than that." The poet may lack understanding, but his luck or fate is to be "in love with what is in love with that", with

a human being ? or God ? who belongs to, and loves, the wood, the

world.


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Beyond the Sublime: Reading James Liddy

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