Desperate Housewives Bookclub: Leontia Flynn, Drives
by and published in Edition Five of Pomegranate
Bree van der Kamp emerged from the kitchen clutching a steaming tray of Herbal Essences muffins and a brace of perfect villanelles. ‘It seems so strange to be starting our poetry bookclub again after the death of our erstwhile mentor, Mary Alice’, she sobbed.
‘I think we all need a break from the succession of curious incidents apparently related to that mysterious suicide’, said Susan bravely. ‘What did everyone make of this month’s choice?’
It was Leontia Flynn’s latest collection, Drives. There were two major sequences in the book, shuffled together like a poker deck. One was a series of (what the blurb called) ‘elliptical postcards’ from various cities around the world, each journey representing the literal sort of ‘drive’; the other was a sequence of sonnets on various dead writers, analysing their ‘drives’ in the second sense of the word.
‘I’d call her a poet’s poet’, said Lynette. ‘To get anything out of the dead author sonnets, you’ve got to be pretty familiar with their work and lives. Looking after four demanding young children, as I do, it’s a mercy I was able to get most of the references.’
‘Still, I’m impressed she managed to say something new about Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell’, said Bree. ‘It’s not as if their own work isn’t suffused in biographical material already. I don’t like the Dorothy Parker one much, but…’
The gorgeous Gabrielle Soulis interrupted with a toss of her long black hair. ‘I think we should consider the book’s general themes before we get too bogged down in individual poems.’
‘Fair enough’, replied Lynette. ‘She brings a lot of very contemporary diction – advertising slogans, buzzwords, viral emails – into her poetry, but only to subvert it, to show it up as empty. Look at those two lines in ‘Belfast’:
What was mixed grills and whiskey (cultureless, graceless, leisureless)
Is now concerts and walking tours (Friendly! Dynamic! Various!)
I mean, her concern isn’t really with Belfast as a city but with the language being used to sell it to tourists.’
‘That’s a common strand throughout her travel poems, isn’t it? Look at ‘Rome’ and ‘Paris’. She never pretends to be anything more than a tourist. I like her honesty. A lot of poets tour round Europe for a week and then imagine they know what life is like absolutely everywhere. She’s clear about the limits of what she’s experienced.’
‘Me and Rex went to Copenhagen on our honeymoon’, said Bree, ‘and Flynn is certainly bang on the mark about that dreadful statue.’ She ran over the line from ‘The Little Mermaid’ in her head once more: ‘This is the worst tourist attraction, not just in Copenhagen / but maybe anywhere.’ Of course, Rex had had a migraine when they went to see it, which hadn’t helped matters. But all the same.
‘She’s very pessimistic, isn’t she?’ asked Susan, and read an extract from ‘Personality’:
…there isn’t much in my life I’d miss if it were over:
The weird cheerful meanness of people to each other,
About pay, status, odd grudges, responsibility;
Work’s meaninglessness – but its opposite, leisure’s abyss!
(…)
How do I cope when poetry is part of this bullshit?
‘I think the sequence of dead writer sonnets are an attempt to prove that last line wrong’, said Lynette.
‘I know what she means about “weird cheerful meanness”’, said Susan, who was worried that her love-rival Edie Britt had already asked hunky plumber Mike Delfino round for dinner.
‘I like the way “meanness” telescopes into “meaninglessness”’, said Gabrielle, who’d majored in English Lit. ‘And the half-rhymes and internal rhymes are smartly used. All those s-sounds really make you feel like you’re being sucked down into a whirlpool. And she’s found an absolutely natural metre in a conversational tone, which was Robert Frost’s idea.’
‘Conversational is right’, said Lynette. ‘It’s like you’re sitting at the table with her over coffee.’ (The publishers had obviously come to the same conclusion. The inside jacket showed a photo of the author smiling across a table, holding a coffee cup.) ‘I mean, she gets worked up about a lot of stuff – American foreign policy, suicide, flooding, ‘famine and war’, too much advertising – and you want to tell her to calm down, but you know you should be getting worked up about this sort of thing as well, everyone should be. And that’s how I think she proves that ‘Personality’ poem wrong – her own book shows how poetry doesn’t have to be part of the bullshit. But it’s still true that plenty of it rides on her personality.’
‘It’s political propaganda, then’, said Bree. ‘I’ll contact the school library and have it removed at once.’
‘It’s not propaganda’, Lynette disagreed angrily. ‘Often it’s just a cry of anger, like ‘Don’t Worry’ or ‘Washington’, where all her feelings about American foreign policy since the Second World War boil down to ‘Jesus fucking Christ’…’
‘I won’t have sass like that in this kitchen’, grumbled Bree.
‘I like the way that poem intertwines with Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’’, interjected Gabrielle quickly. ‘It’s another way of showing poetry transcending bullshit: her own inarticulacy in the face of the ‘wreaths to war’ is unimportant, because Shelley can speak for her. It’s a poem written from the reader’s point of view.’
‘She’s as much a tourist in literature as in her cities!’ said Susan excitedly.
‘That wasn’t exactly what I meant, but I suppose it’s true in a way’, replied Gabrielle. ‘Certainly she seems to find reflections of herself in a lot of her writers. Everywhere she looks she looks are mirrored surfaces. Her concern with a lot of modern discourse, I think, is that there isn’t anything underneath the surface.’
‘Enough of this obscure literary theory’, cried Lynette. ‘As I said before, I’ve raised four demanding young children. I can’t be expected to read acres of crit as well as all the poetry. Besides, I don’t get the feeling that Leontia Flynn is particularly fond of theory either: look at ‘Belfast’ again, where the language of contemporary criticism is suddenly full of uneasy associations with the Troubles:
…men are talking of Walter Benjamin, and about ‘Grand Narratives’
which they always seek to ‘fracture’ and ‘interrogate’.
That’s what I like about her best – she has a wonderful ear for hypocrisy. She’s less satirical and much more downright angry, but the tone is pretty close to early Peter Porter, and that’s something we need more everyday these days. There aren’t many writers at the minute pricking the balloons of pomposity with such surefire accuracy and sincerity.’
‘I still think she’s too pessimistic’, said Susan.
‘Well, there’s a lot in the book we haven’t talked about’, said Lynette. ‘There’s poems about her parents – especially her dying father – ‘on their thresholds / of pain and love’, which is brilliant; and there’s some much quieter narrative poems, all connected in some way to the title. A bus accident in Turkey, a child hopping freight trains to see the ocean before he dies…she has a very adaptable gift.’
‘It still sounds pretty bleak to me’, said Susan, ‘and you haven’t mentioned all the suicides.’
‘It’s helped by her sense of humour. When things get too grim, she either laughs, swears or shuts up; and all of those are healthy alternatives for poets. As for the politics, I’m sure she’ll cheer up when Obama gets elected.’
‘Don’t jinx it’, whispered Susan mechanically. ‘Just don’t jinx it.’
Drives, by Leontia Flynn. Published Jonathan Cape, £9.00
Product Placement, by Bree van der Kamp. Published by Herbal Essences, $10.00
John Clegg
John Clegg was born in 1986 and studies for a PhD in Durham. Some of his poems are featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets, as well as Succour, The Rialto, Mercy and online at Pomegranate. His e-chapbook Advancer is published by Silkworms Ink, and a full collection is forthcoming from Salt.