On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

A few years ago, one of my teaching duties at a writing conference was to participate in a panel discussion among the poetry faculty. The topic was a promising one: each of us was to pass out copies of a favorite poem, read it aloud, and briefly discuss it. A Q&A was to follow. My colleagues spoke about their chosen poems with passion and engagement, and the poems they selected were for the most part iconic — work by Dickinson, Whitman, Neruda, and Akhmatova, among others. I was the odd man out, having selected a poem no one in the room had heard of, by a poet no one in the room appeared to have ever read, “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch” by the Scotsman W.S. Graham, whose work seems to me one of the indispensable treasures of mid- and late 20^th-century poetry.

The poem is a sly and bittersweet elegy by the deeply flawed, incessantly cranky, and hard-drinking William Sydney Graham, written for his great friend, the similarly flawed, similarly cranky, and even harder-drinking painter Roger Hilton. Graham received his dead friend’s watch as a gift, and this occasions Graham to muse on the nature of complicated friendships, twice noting in the poem that “we had some terrible times together.” Like many of Graham’s efforts, the poem seems to be set in the middle of the night, a time in which the poet oscillates between states of ecstasy and desolation. Mind you, the poem is not addressed to Hilton, but to his watch. Yet the sheer strangeness — and chutzpah — of that premise gives the poem its gritty authority. The tone lurches between the comic and the sacerdotal: “You told the best time / When he lifted you up / To meet the Hilton gaze. // I lift you up from the mantel / Piece here in my house / Wearing your verdigris …” Within a few more lines the poem’s moment of reckoning arrives. The poet admits that words have failed him: not in a fancy hermeneutical sense, but through some failure of talent or character. For Graham, who wrote a late poem entitled “What is the Language Using Us For?” and another called “Language Ah Now You Have Me,” the problem is never with the words themselves, but with our ability to wield them. Yet the poet can sometimes make a breakthrough, usually a makeshift and provisional one. And here that breakthrough is brilliantly cheeky: suddenly the watch is speaking, recalling Hilton with a rueful acuity, and via some bedazzling tonal shifts. Nobody but Graham could so successfully — or poignantly — find a way to commingle Homeric tropes with some deliciously godawful puns.

 

He switches the light on

To find a cigarette

And pours himself a Teachers

 

He picks me up and holds me

Near his lonely face.

To see my hands. He thinks

He is not being watched.

 

The images of his dream

Are still about his face.

As he spits and tries not

To remember where he was.

I am only a watch

And pray time hastes away,

I think I am running down.

 

I tried to make a persuasive case for the poem, though I may have over-reached, saying something to the effect that it might be— excepting, perhaps, Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” — the most innovative elegy in contemporary poetry. During the Q&A that followed, no one even mentioned “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch,” though one of my students later asserted to me that it was “pretty rad.” Another, however, questioned whether it was a poem at all.

None of this is really surprising, for Graham, who was born in 1917 and died in 1986, has been all but ignored in the US. Only three collections of his work have been published here. His first mature collection, The Nightfishing, was picked up by Grove in 1955. Ecco issued a short Selected Poems in 1978. And as of last year, at long last, American readers again have available a representative selection of Graham’s poetry, selected and introduced by British poet Michael Hofmann, who writes of Graham with his characteristic brio. Graham has had a few admirers on these shores, but not many, most notably James Dickey, who wrote a rhapsodic review of The Nightfishing, and whose syntactical inversions and galumphing anapests often come across as ham-fisted imitations of Graham.

For a long while, Graham was just as undervalued in the UK, although interest in his work has steadily grown there in the years since his death. Graham immersed himself in poetry with a bulldog tenacity, but almost never engaged in self-promotion or the niceties of po-biz. That refusal cost him any chance at financial security. He was born poor, in the Scottish seaport and factory town of Greenock, and he stayed poor all his life. He half-heartedly did a stint at an ad agency, taught briefly at NYU, and did a bit of commercial fishing, but for the most part he considered himself a professional poet. There’s no term more comically oxymoronic, and Graham’s adherence to his chosen profession could be obstinate to the point of masochism. By the mid-1940s, he had found a home of sorts in Cornwall, living in various locales around St. Ives, the fishing village and artists’ hangout where Virginia Woolf set To the Lighthouse.  He and his wife Nessie (the subject of some astonishing and unschmaltzy love poems) lived in dumps: a mobile home, a condemned coastguard house, and short-term stays in cottages provided to the couple rent-free by friends. Graham’s only modern conveyance was his typewriter, its keys chattering away past dawn, under the light of a paraffin lamp. Almost everyone who writes about Graham at one point or another cites passages from his letters (and he was a prolific and garrulous correspondent) that allude to his poverty. It’s not simply that he begs his friends for cash — never more than a few pounds, but lots of such begging — he also hits up his correspondents for used boots and pants.  Graham’s reports on his shabby state are always related with a studious joviality: “Soon I’ll be able to get seagull eggs, wonderful for omelets.” But his claims of indigence were sadly authentic. Fortunately, he’d sometimes get more than just a pair of wellies out of his entreaties: Harold Pinter was a loyal patron, as was the Canadian poet Robin Skelton.

That Graham received even these small kindnesses is something of a surprise, for during his lifetime his reputation waxed and waned. And, to be frank, Graham’s early work is for the most part unimpressive. Cage Without Grievance, his debut collection, was published in 1944, when the bloviating of Dylan Thomas was all the rage, and Thomas’ gaudy blather can even be seen in the poems’ titles — “Here next the chair I was when Winter Went,” “To Girls at the turn of Night Love Goes on Knocking,” “I, No more Real than Evil in My Roof,” and so on. When this kind of thing fell out of fashion, Graham did too, though not before catching the attention of T.S. Eliot, who published Graham’s third collection with Faber. Hofmann wisely chooses to include only three of these early poems.

The transition between the early work and the splendid later poetry begins to occur with the long title poem of 1955’s The Nightfishing. It’s the sort of lumbering effort to explore Big Ideas and out-allusion the modernist poets that was a kind of rite of passage for middle generation writers such as Graham. Hofmann likens the poem to John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” but it’s also reminiscent of a host of other efforts by Graham’s contemporaries: Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” and Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” for example, poems that are also replete with nautical themes. Randall Jarrell labeled this particular variety of late modernist lyric as hat racks laden with symbols, and there are symbols aplenty in the poem; it’s a fishing expedition in every sense of the term. But Dickey gets it right when he articulates the poem’s ultimate goal. “The ocean, to Graham, is a field of experience where only essentials have their being, in a kind of inhuman mystery in which the human ‘I’ is better defined than on land.” It helps that Graham knows the sea in a way that Lowell and Hayden did not. Half of the poem is burdened by passages such as, “It is this instant written dead. This instant / Bounded by its own grace and all time’s grace / Masters me into its measurement so that / My ghostly constant is articulated.” But its other half derives from experience rather than sophistry, and its language is terse but rhetorically charged in ways that prefigure later work such as “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch.” For example:

 

Far out, faintly rocked,

Struck the sea bell.

 

Home becomes this place,

A bitter night, ill,

To labor at dead of.

Within all the dead of

My life I hear

My name spoken out

On the break of the surf.

I, in Time’s grace,

The grace of change,

Am cast into memory.

What a restless grace

To trace stillness on.

 

The poem consists of seven sections, and passages such as this one, which appears near the end of the poem, also anticipate Graham’s mature prosody, which is oddball but sturdy. Some of the sections are written in long lines, loose pentameters and hexameters that still suggest Thomas’ florid inertia. The shorter lines are something else entirely. Like Lowell in the poems of his Life Studies — written at approximately the same time — Graham seeks to purge his lines of adornment. This is a speaking voice, albeit an eccentric one. The two- and three-beat accentuals suit Graham well, tamping down his declamatory tendencies, and gleefully violating all the prosodic norms: one is never, for example, supposed to end a line on a preposition, but Graham does it three times within the space of a dozen. From here on in, relatively few of Graham’s lines will stretch out to pentameter. And Graham’s scansion will get ever-more wiggy; the short lines will favor jackhammer spondees and jarring caesurae. Here’s the opening stanza of an uncollected poem that probably dates from the late ‘70s: “Straighten your face. Stand still. / Do not smile or blink your eyes. / These questions I will ask you you / Will not answer. I will answer. / You are not repeat not to speak.”  If these lines don’t grab a reader’s attention, that reader is probably comatose.

After The Nightfishing, Graham did not issue a book for 15 years. He published some in journals, but the weird guttural musicality he was now striving for was completely out of sync with the vinegary deprivation of Larkin and his followers, the lapidary surrealism of the Deep Image poets, or the pained self-scrutiny of the school of Lowell. In the mid-1960s, when the editor and critic Michael Schmidt tried to reach Graham through his publisher, someone on the staff at Faber informed him that the poet was dead.  It is altogether fitting that the title poem of the book that ended Graham’s long silence, Malcolm Mooney’s Land, is spoken in a kind of fever-dream by an arctic explorer. It is also a loopy ars poetica. Here’s a stanza from the middle of the poem:

 

   Out on the far-off edge I hear

   Colliding voices, drifting, yes

To find me through the slowly opening leads

   Tomorrow I’ll try the rafted ice.

Have I not been trying to use the obstacle

Of language well? It freezes round us all.

 

Of course we are tempted to read the explorer’s plight as allegory for Graham’s own career, but Graham is too slippery a writer to offer anything like strict symbolic equivalencies. It’s easy to regard the closing of the poem as a description of the speaker’s demise; we’re reminded of the dying Robert Falcon Scott, scribbling those theatrical self-justifications in his diary as the Antarctic wind pummels his tent. Any Brit of Graham’s generation would immediately draw a connection to Scott when reading the poem’s conclusion:  “I have made myself alone now. / Outside the tent endless / drifting hummock crests. / Words drifting on words. / The real unabstract snow.” But is the speaker freezing to death like Scott, or is he instead arriving at a state of mystical oneness with his world, of ego-loss, a condition where his words and the snow are equally tangible? I suspect it’s the latter. And to come to such a state enables him to endure if not prevail, although Graham would probably be wary of someone making such a highfalutin claim. Earlier in the poem, Graham references the Norwegian explorer Fridjof Nansen, who was practical, unflappable, and a marvelously deadpan writer. (He famously characterized “polar endeavor” as “about nothing, in nothing, for nothing.”) In one of his letters, Graham compares his impoverished state to “Nansen crossing Greenland,” regarding him as, so to speak, the polar opposite of Scott. Despite all of his romantic privileging of the mysteries of logos, Graham sides with Nansen.  He knows that the sort of oneness with language that he seeks can only be arrived at through persistence and survival skills. As he confronts the endless white expanses of silence, words are his parka, his goggles, his snowshoes, his pemmican, and his cutlets of slaughtered sled-dog meat.  There is some truth to the caveat Douglas Dunn expresses, in his introduction to Graham’s 2004 Collected Poems, that the poet’s “repetition of ‘language’ and communication as obsessive unfinished subjects can at times feel overdone.” But it’s important to remember that our obsessions choose us. Eclecticism was one of the many luxuries Graham could not afford.

Graham’s later work — included in Malcolm Mooney’s Land, 1977’s Implements in Their Places, his 1979 Collected Poems, and from two posthumously published volumes of uncollected and notebook poems (some of them as good as the work in his published books) — fall into three loose categories: poems that could be described as “descriptive” if they weren’t so damn eccentric; poems of memory and recollection; and those what-is-the-language-using-us-for opuses that Dunn cites, which often take the form of verse epistles.

Graham’s poems of description are more interesting than they are memorable. The title poem of Implements in Their Places, not included in Hofmann’s selection, is probably the best effort of this sort. In one of his letters Graham confesses to being more interested in talking with painters than with other writers, and he corresponded with several of the last century’s leading British abstractionists, most notably Hilton and Ben Nicholson. Like Gertrude Stein and Frank O’Hara, he felt challenged to apply some of the methods of non-figurative painting and collage to his own work. (Hofmann, with accuracy, compares Graham’s later poems to Joseph Cornell boxes.) “Two Poems on Zennor Hill,” is an engagingly peculiar example of this sort of thing. The first section is old-fangledly pastoral in the mode of someone like John Clare: “I climbed here in a morning of mist/Up over a fox’s or badger track/And there was no sound but myself/Breaking last year’s drenched bracken.” Section two of the poem gets much trickier, coming across as a Celtic-inflected take on Tender Buttons:

 

O foxglove on the wall

You meet me nicely today

Leaning your digitalis

Bells toward the house

Bryan Wynterlass.

 

I stand on the high Zennor

Moor and ling and sour

Grass and the loose stone walls

Keeping the weasel’s castle.

O foxglove on the wall.

 

There’s a lot going on in these ten lines: the disarmingly chipper address to the foxglove, the giddy enjambments that at first tempt you to read “ling and sour” as a pair of bizarre verbs, the use of sibilance that culminates so strikingly with “Keeping the weasel’s castle.” Who else would dare to write like this, let alone be able to get away with it?

As he approached his sixties, Graham began to revisit his childhood in Greenock and his youth. There’s nothing surprising for a writer of a certain age to attempt this, but Graham’s ambivalence toward Greenock, the place he escaped from as soon as he was able, eschews easy nostalgia. “The Greenock Dialogues” is the most visionary of Graham’s poems of recollection, but you sense that the poet’s linguistic sorcery is designed to allow him to forgive Greenock rather than to memorialize it. The poem has some uncanny parallels to James Wright’s “To The Muse,” in which the poet — also the product of working class impoverishment –offers a series of excoriating recollections of his hometown of Martin’s Ferry, a “scurvy / and disastrous place” that he can only come to peace with through the guidance of his muse figure, the prostitute Jenny. Graham’s choice of muse is the speaker’s “half-cousin Brigit,” a first love who rejected him, and who now, in the dreamscape of the poem, pilots him in a skiff around Greenock. But all the wish fulfillment is bittersweet:

 

Brigit, dear broken-song-tongued bag,

I’ll not be jilted again. I see

You younger now this morning, urged

Towards me as I put my back

Into the oars as I lean

Towards you feathering the dripping blades,

I think almost you are more mine

Than his who was before….

 

Brigit, take me with you and who

Ever it is who reads himself into

Our presence here in this doubtful

Curious gesture.

 

Passages such as “I lean / Towards you feathering the dripping blades” are of course exquisite, but it’s the grimy tour-de-force of “Brigit, dear broken-song-tongued bag” and the marvelously self-deflating “Our presence here in this doubtful/Curious gesture” that stick with you. And Graham’s self-mockery has nothing to do with benumbing expressions of knee-jerk irony upon which so much of contemporary poetry is built. The closing of “Night City,” another of his memory poems, is a case in point. Graham recalls a youthful trip to London. The poem begins mellifluously: “Unmet in Euston in a dream / Of London under Turner’s Steam / Misting the iron gantries I / Found myself running away / From Scotland to the golden city.” This is followed by a list of gaga enchantments, not the least of which is “I found Eliot and he said yes.” But in the poem’s final lines the spell is broken:

 

Midnight. I hear the moon 

Light chiming on St. Paul’s.

 

The city is empty. Night

Watchmen are drinking their tea.

 

The Fire had burnt out.

The Plague’s pits had closed

And gone into literature.

 

Between the big buildings

I sat like a flea crouched

In the stopped works of a watch.

 

A devastating image? You bet. A genius punchline? That too.

I’ve saved a discussion of Graham’s what-is-the-language-using-us-for poems until the end, partly because I feel so challenged to articulate what it is that gives these poems their rough-hewn majesty. It’s not that Graham’s aesthetic was particularly crafty or complex: a statement in one of his letters pretty much says it all, while at the same time invoking an odd choice of namesake: “One only tries to send a message, a note, however inadequate, from one aloneness to another. STOP, don’t let me sound like Billygraham.”  I am wary of glamorizing Graham’s determined loneliness — he seems, after all, to have also written a fair share of poems and letters in pubs. Yet it’s almost impossible to read the late poems without seeing Graham alone at his desk in a dilapidated cottage or that Coast Guard house; it’s always 3.a.m.; he’s swathed in the wan glow of his paraffin lamp, and he’s plucking words from the darkness like so many fireflies. Make no mistake, this is a companionable darkness, and the writer trusts that his words will at least sporadically reach their end point, although their journey will be preposterously long and its turnings always mysterious. He may as well be scanning the heavens with a radio telescope in search of extraterrestrials. He may as well be conducting a séance. As he writes in “Language Ah You Have Me Now,”  “I know about unkempt places / Flying towards me when I am getting ready / To pull myself together and plot that place / To speak from.” I’m reminded of some lines by Paul Celan, another writer convinced that words must travel immeasurable distances in order to legitimize and dignify themselves. Here is Michael Hamburger’s translation: “I know / I know and you know, we knew / we did not know / we were there after all, and not there, / and at times when / only the void stood between us we got / all the way to each other.”  In the following section of “To My Wife at Midnight,” the poem that closes Graham’s 1979 Collected Poems, the poet seems to be at once beside his beloved and speaking across the void to her. And the paradox seems not to bother Graham in the slightest:

 

Are you to let me go

Alone to sleep beside you.

Into the drifting snow?

 

Where we each reach

Sleeping alone together,

Nobody can touch.

 

Is the cat’s window open?

Shall I turn into your back?

And what is to happen?

 

What is to happen to us?

And what is to happen to each

Of us asleep in our places?

 

It’s the implicit dramatic situation of almost all of the later poems — they again and again announce themselves as Graham’s lamplit night thoughts, his projections across the void — that is ultimately the key to their success. The poet’s argument with language, compelling though it often can be, is finally ancillary to the tin-can-and-string telephone which he constructs from his aloneness to that of another. Sometimes the poem’s interlocutor is specific, as in a verse epistle to the blind poet John Heath-Stubbs. The poem’s closing lines are spectacular and goofy in a way only Graham can be: “I hardly see you nowadays./You hardly see me. / Could I clasp your writing hand/On this ridiculous darkening stage. / John, we are almost of an age.” Sometimes the identity of the addressee is opaque, but this does not diminish the poem’s sense of urgency. A late notebook poem, “On the Other Side of Language,” is a case in point, and deserves to be quoted in full.

 

Hitherto uncollected I proceed

As a shoal yet like iron filings

Made to beg to the magnet, I

Go in some almost-Victorian direction

Towards my fate, towards my fate.

O what, o what will become of us,

The heroine near to fainting cries.

I do not live in that book tonight

As the owl leaves the tree and takes

His fusilage in a few heavy

Slow flaps down to the little mouse,

The wood is quiet as I wander

Here on the other side of language.

Only a twig from the top floor

Seems to love another audibly

Leave it. It is only the other

Wind trying to disturb

The formal barrier between

You and I, wherever you are

Listening from, opening up

Your personal package to eat a sandwich.

 

Here I go on the other side

Of language and the great age

Of language floors me, what an old

Barrier having to do with every-

Thing that has ever been worth

Anything, surrounds me and keeps me cosy,

Tight, or dead if you want that.

 

Hello. Hia. Are you there? Can you hear

Me through the deafening silence as

It waves over the high-towering

Beeches? You are hearing everything

And that, Dear Sir, is your trouble.

What will you do? O do not ask

The poor man on the other side.

I am only trying to get home

And I mean that in my lifetime.

Please keep me from going quickly down

Into the manhole. It’s not my style.

Give me a hoot like a red Indian

From the north-west edge of the trees.

 

Who is being spoken to? Language? The reader? Some household god? The owl who first appears in line nine? We can’t know, though we clearly understand that the poem’s subject is mortality.  I think these lines also evidence something that Hofmann — whose criticism is marked by outlandish superlatives that somehow almost always seem to have the ring of truth — says at the close of the introduction to his selection: “I don’t know of anything like this in poetry.” That North American readers again have access to the passion and sublime quirkiness of William Sydney Graham is a matter of no small importance. Once you hear —faintly at first, but then insistently — his missives from the other side of language, you’ll not be able to get that voice out of your head.

 

[Published on November 13, 2018 by New York Review of Books/NYRB Poets, 144 pages, $14.95 paperback]