News: S. Matthew Biberman

The honorarium wasn’t much, and worse, we wanted him to teach a master class in the morning.  Frank Bidart is not a morning person.  The titles alone of his three long poems—The First, Second, and Third Hour of the Night—tell you that. But it is difficult for Bidart to say no.

Even that night, after his reading at the Louisville Conference, when the spotlight lends a poet some power, here he was sitting at a table with his hosts.  It happened in a season before the current hiring freeze and budget cuts, but even then the University was far from generous.  Hearing that I could only put his meal and mine on the conference tab, Bidart pulled out his credit card and insisted on paying for the entire table.  I begged him to submit it with his expenses when he got back to Wellesley and he said he would but I knew better.

We talked about reggae.  He had just read a long poem with a title swiped from the great dance hall master Desmond Dekker.

 Music Like Dirt · Desmond Dekker Anthology: Israelites 1963-1999

Once a teenage rude boy, I had cued up in my head as I sat in the hall and listened to him read “Music Like Dirt”  and I was still mulling over the two rhythms—Bidart’s and Dekker’s—while we enjoyed our Yucatan fare.

The thing about Bidart is that once you hear him read, you possess a key to making sense of his idiosyncratic versification. As in “To the Dead”:

The caps denote a certain voicing that you hear again in your head when you are alone reading the poem.  As do the dashes and the ellipses…

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--

. . . for, there at times at night, still we

inhabit the secret place together . . .

Is this wisdom, or self-pity?--

The love I've known is the love of

two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.

I told Bidart this and he seemed pleased and honored to know that I had reserved a voice track for him. We talked about another Cambridge fixture—Allen Grossman, also obsessed with using words to mark out platonic architecture, what Grossman calls the Great Room in the Great House. Like Bidart, more than once I have heard dueling Grossman imitations, a true parlor game among east coast poets of a certain age.

Then I told Bidart that his work reminded me of David Ferry’s and in truth I thought the two very similar. Ferry was his chair at Wellesley. This two men knew each other intimately.

Bidart couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Evidently, it was settled doctrine to stress that here there where only stark differences.      

I was pleased that he found my claim odd. I didn’t back off and Bidart quieted the table so that I could make my point because this, he wanted hear.

I said it wasn’t in the music, but in the willingness to risk everything on a single image in a poem. 

Here is Ferry:

A bird cried out among the first things of the morning.

I dreamed about murders all night long.

It was the bird’s cry that startled up the stone.

The stone changed color among the shadows as the sun came up.

“A Morning Song” (full text of poem)

Here is Bidart:

Dip a finger into the River of Time,--

It comes back

                           STAINED.

(from “For Mary Ann Youngren”)

Bidart looked at me as if I had just pointed out a fundamental truth that had been there in front of his face and never before had he seen it.  

NOTES

1) Consider Bidart on form vs. free verse:

“I think all of us on the panel, when we first heard about the panel on form, rued the prospect of one more rehearsal of the arguments about free verse versus formal verse. That's a barren distinction. The modernists did not understand their project as constituting a rebellion against formal verse or form itself. It was a far more complicated and fundamental issue. They had the consciousness of making a revolution, and the fact that our nation is founded in revolution, founded in transgression, seems to me a fundamental, recurrent theme in America's use of form.

I think you can argue that another major innovation happened with confessional poetry, both through Allen Ginsberg in Kaddish and Robert Lowell in Life Studies, and this had to do with taking seriously and incorporating into the very texture of poetry the psychoanalytic model of the search for meaning.”

Q & A American Poetry: Frank Bidart

2) Bidart’s “Music Like Dirt” was later published as a chapbook by Sarabande, the Louisville-based press run by Sarah Gorham and Jeff Skinner.  The book was later short-listed for the Pulitzer and is the only chapbook to have earned that distinction.