Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell. Random House, $29.95, HC, 298 pages, ISBN: 0375504834

W.G. (Winfried Georg) Sebald was a novelist in the hermetic tradition preferred by most writers before corporate publishers began touring them like pop music acts to market their books: A German born in the Bavarian town of Wertach-im-Allgaeu in 1944, who wrote principally in German, lived from his twenties until his untimely death in 2001 (at age 57) in England, Sebald’s own agent never set eyes on him. Though he was removed from his nation of birth, cultivated no public persona, as such (Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger have made “images” for themselves by remaining virtually anonymous), he was entirely, almost exclusively occupied with his heritage. His subjects can be divided into two areas: the first consists of a wide array of historical and cultural phenomena, all set to quietly correspond in some representative way to the second, which is the mental state of his characters, the mutable shadow of memory, the crisis of origin and identity, and, sometimes crushingly, German history and the holocaust. Though he chose to live in exile, he was as German a writer as Theodore Fontane or Günther Grass, describing his relation to German history as “a terrible burden.”

His novels include Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, translated 1996), Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn, translated 1998), and Schwindel, Gefühle (Vertigo, translated 1999, though the phrase can as easily be translated as “feelings of swindle”), all of which were met with considerable praise, winning him the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Heine Prize, and the Breitbach Prize. Austerlitz continues the seriousness of the former novels. The reader’s initial tendency upon learning the title is to think of the battle of that name, where Napoleon inflicted an astonishing defeat over the combined Russian and Austrian forces. While the battle, or rather thoughts of the battle, come into play, Austerlitz is most importantly the name of the once-removed narrator, who struggles over decades to understand his true heritage and identity (one important aspect of his development is his learning of the name-sake battle when a boy in school). Through the labyrinths of historical records, he gradually constructs a grim picture of a forgotten past in which he, as a child, was sent away to England, then Wales, by his Austrian Jewish parents on the eve of Holocaust (with the Kindertransport, a lifeline to Britain of about 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children in 1938-1939).

A dusty sadness prevails in the stories that emerge from the sepia-tones of memory, related by the soft-spoken and intensely-focused Austerlitz to the novel’s narrator. The two meet, sometimes by chance, over years. On each occasion, Austerlitz gathers up and seamlessly continues his narrative, as if not a moment, much less a decade, had passed. The eerie inward lucidity this bespeaks also determines the overriding tempo of the novel. There is no action as such, unless one counts two men sitting over coffee. Sometimes, a story is related from a twice or even thrice removed source, as Austerlitz tells a story told to him by a speaker who in turn was told the story from another, who may have lived it. Far from the frustrating, static nouveau romans of experimentalists like Alain Robbe-Grillet (such as La Jalousie or Dans le labyrinthe), Sebald’s stillness creates what could be called a hyper-realism, in which a single object inspires a story, and a new set of seemingly boundless connections loom (shades of Marcel Proust’s madeleine soaked in lime-blossom from A la recherche du temps perdu as well as Jorge Luis Borges’s “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” are in evidence). In surprising ways, such figures as Napoleon and Darwin move through each “scene”, which is never set in one place for long but softly gives way to another. What fills each scene are delicate patterns of detail that come to resemble the lepidopteran quality of Vladimir Nabokov’s in their elegance. These details and, later, quick insights, are borne along a current by the agile prose constructions of Anthea Bell’s English translation, perfectly suited to the exact weight and motion of circumstances:

So I went round the exhibition by my self, said Austerlitz, through the rooms on the mezzanine floor and the floor above, stood in the front of the display panels, sometimes skimming over captions, sometimes reading them letter by letter, stared at the photographic reproductions, could not believe my eyes, and several times had to turn away and look out of a window in to the garden behind the building, having for the first time acquired some idea of the history of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now, in this place, surrounded me on all sides. I studied the maps of the Greater German Reich and its protectorates, which had never before been more than blank spaces in my otherwise well-developed sense of topography, I traced the railway lines running through them, felt blinded by the documentation recording the population policy of the National Socialists, by the evidence of their mania for order and purity, which was put into practice on a vast scale through measures partly improvised, partly devised with obsessive organizational zeal.

Thus an image of the vast, determined cruelties forged by the Nazis is conveyed in merely two sentences. Such long, cultivated designs in English, perfected by Henry James and Thomas Hardy a century ago, made nearly grotesque by practitioners such as Thomas Pynchon in the 1970s, are lately discouraged and have gone nearly extinct at the hands of self-righteous copy-editors and “creative” writing teachers. Austerlitz contains no paragraphs (at first a very testing proposition) and, like his previous novels, is filled with uncaptioned black and white photographs, which furnish the novel with a documentary texture; he admits that he was influenced by 1970s German documentaries, which he felt to have great literary merit. He preferred his British readers to his German ones, and he never had much to say about American ones. He was particularly deluged with letters concerning his German language book Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature, 1999), in which he finally ruptured the German silence over the Allied bombing raids in the Second World War). He may have been Germany’s greatest contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature at the time of his death, and one hopes that American readers come to his work.

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Just how seriously the New Critics took poetry, and how much subtlety and conviction they brought to reading it, can be seen on every page of Praising It New (Swallow Press, 332 pages, $18.95), an excellent new anthology of the New Criticism, edited by Garrick Davis. Mr. Davis, too, is both a poet and a critic—before joining the National Endowment for the Arts, he was the founding editor of the magazine Contemporary Poetry Review—and his introduction and notes testify to the zeal that the New Critics still inspire in their intellectual descendants. This zeal is all the greater, perhaps, because an interest in the New Criticism is so completely unfashionable in the academy and the institutional poetry world. Among professors, the kind of close reading they practiced has long since given way to the phantasmagoria of theory—structuralism, deconstruction, New Historicism, and so on. Among poets, the taut ironies the New Critics valued have been displaced by other values and habits—from the confessional onslaught of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath to the postmodern diffuseness of John Ashbery.

Read the full article here.

Click on the book cover below to purchase from Amazon.com.

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The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery, by Marit J. MacArthur. Palgrave Macmillan. Published: August 2008. ISBN: 978-0-230-60322-6. ISBN-10: 0-230-60322-X. Trim: 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches. 272 pages.

Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery stand out among major American poets—all three shaped the direction and pushed the boundaries of contemporary poetry on an international scale. Drawing on biography, cultural history, and original archival research, MacArthur shows us that these distinctive poets share one surprisingly central trope in their oeuvres: the Romantic scene of the abandoned house. This book scrutinizes the popular notion of Frost as a deeply rooted New Englander, demonstrates that Frost had an underestimated influence on Bishop—whose preoccupation with houses and dwelling is the obverse of her obsession with travel—and questions dominant, anti-biographical readings of Ashbery as an urban-identified poet. As she reads poems that evoke particular landscapes and houses lost and abandoned by these poets, MacArthur also sketches relevant cultural trends, including patterns of rural de-settlement, the transformation of rural economies from agriculture to tourism, and modern American’s increasing mobility and rootlessness.

“MacArthur’s book is striking for its scrupulous research. She makes the figure of the abandoned house surprisingly resonant and timely. She gives new vitality to biography as an approach to poetry, in part because she eschews psychoanalysis for a more common-sense phenomenological approach that proves especially apposite and challenging in her approach to Ashbery’s work.”—Charles Altieri, Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair of English, University of California, Berkeley

“The eye is the first circle, Emerson declared. Americans are always on the move, pushing ahead toward new horizons. Yet modern American poetry is also strewn with abandoned houses, pulling us back into their stories and mysteries. MacArthur offers the first broad reading of this push-pull trope, showing its permutations in three of the twentieth-century’s most important writers. The book blends fresh critical readings with original research into the biographies and landscapes of these poets, to remind us that the imagination finds its source and its renewal in experience.”—Bonnie Costello, Professor, Boston University and author of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry

“This attractive and interesting book speaks to our deep longing for home, and our nostalgia for what cannot be regained. MacArthur’s study is focused on the poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery—three of our most compelling poets—but she casts a wider net, locating in the image of the abandoned house a kind of total symbol, one that pulls into its longings a sense of the consequences of historical patterns of American migration and casual exploitation of the nation’s natural resources. This beautifully written book should attract a wide audience beyond the usual boundaries of criticism.”—Jay Parini, D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing, Middlebury College

Marit J. MacArthur is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield. She is a contributor to the Contemporary Poetry Review.

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The Battle by Patrick Rambaud, translated from the French by Will Hobson; Grove/Atlantic, $25.00, Hardcover, 320pp., ISBN: 0802116620. Reviewed by Ernest Hilbert

Throughout history, a panoramic view of the battlefield has been the dream of the field commander. Through his spyglass, he can see the development or failure of his strategy, alleviate in some small measure what has come to be known as the “fog” of war. This arrangement of elevation has also come to imply a moral superiority. One immediately thinks of the epigraph: “They have the numbers; we, the heights” from Thucydides, spoken by the doomed Spartan commander at the pass at Thermopylae. Critics such as Harold Bloom have seized upon this for their own rear-guard actions, and though the development of satellite and spy-plane surveillance may have made the analogy an anachronism, it remains well understood by every boy thrown down into the dirt playing King of the Hill to this day. Attempts to capture the sense and scope of a battle on the page have traditionally been the preserve of the historian. How does one sift through the records of first-hand accounts, the distortions spread before and after the battle by both sides, the archeological evidence left behind, the smashed skulls and broken weapons, and emerge with an accurate account? When one reads through Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, one will ask: how seriously are we to take an account of the frontier battles from what is a very Roman (and self-promoting) version provided by the future emperor himself? One suspects that Vercingetorix would relate a very different version of events over his wine at the corner taverna. John Keegan changed the way battles were written about with his classic of military history, Faces of Battle, taking as his subjects the soldiers at Agincourt, Waterloo, and The Somme, three very different battles freighted with considerable symbolic import for the English. By drawing away from the strictly strategic and logistic considerations that preoccupied traditional historians, he provided a “photographic” account of the battle, addressing conditions for the foot-soldier, his religious disposition, his health and enthusiasm, his prospects of survival on the field. In short, he wrote through as well as across the battle. While the historian may raise his pen in objection, the novelist and even the poet have lifted their standards in this domain. One of the first great histories of war was a poem, The Iliad. One recalls the famous set-piece battle scenes in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the penetrating intensity of a Second World War Pacific battle described in Norman Mailer’s precocious (he was only 26 when it was published) Naked and the Dead. Booker Prize-winner Barry Unsworth recently abandoned an attempted biography of Admiral Horatio Nelson and used his historical research to construct the psychological novel Losing Nelson (an otherwise brilliant book with an absurd and self-defeating conclusion).
A panoramic view of the battlefield is also the dream of historical novelists, though they seek their vistas across social strata as well as landscape. Patrick Rambaud, a noted figure in his native France, cofounder of Actuel in 1970 and author of over thirty books, has picked up the unfinished work of one of the great masters, Honoré de Balzac, who gathered notes toward an historical novel on the 1809 Battle of Essling. Rambaud completes the vision of Balzac and does so in a manner in which, one would like to believe, the master would approve (one thought of Balzac gazing down contemptuously in Rodin’s masterpiece bronze would put most novelists off the task altogether). To continue the work of a historical literary figure, on an historical subject, is in itself a very exciting and exacting task. Even so, the Battle of Essling seems a strange battle on which to base a novel. It was more or less a draw between the French and the Austrians, and it was presented by Napoleon’s enemies as a defeat (it wouldn’t have been his first; every schoolboy knows that the Siege of Acre, in 1799, against combined British and Ottoman forces, left Napoleon with his first bloody nose). Although it deposited 40,000 dead in the field, Essling yielded no strategic resolution. As was often the case in the age, both sides were waiting on allied armies marching overland from different corners of the continent, so they both pulled back to await reinforcements after two days of pounding each other to pulp.
Rambaud paints a broad picture that takes in more than simply the battle; in the foreground are private conflicts, loves and hopes, in the far smoky background lies the cultural and political history of Europe itself. Franz Josef Haydn, 77 at the time of the battle, takes to his bed in Vienna, sick with the thought of Napoleon occupying his land, rising only to play his Hymn to the Austrian People. The Imperial Guard crosses the Danube to a march written for them by composer Luigi Cherubini (to the music hall of the empire what Jacque Louis David was to the art salons; one must still acknowledge today the cool grandeur of his rarely-performed Requiem and In Paradisum). A 26 year old Stendhal swoons with ludicrous pangs of poetic infatuation with an Austrian beauty; peasant boys, accustomed to long days and back-breaking work, face death with no less equivocation than the generals themselves, phasing through bravado, courage, piss-draining fear, and finally cold numbness of exhaustion.
In the spring of 1809, at the time of Essling, Napoleon’s Imperial army was made up of troops from all over Europe, including many unqualified and unwilling younger recruits. Rambaud relates the peasant tactic of pulling their own teeth out in order to make themselves unfit for combat; one needs teeth to open the powder cartridges for a musket. He also compares the multi-national French army with imperial Roman armies that fought across the same landscape many centuries before. Gone is the patriotic younger army of Napoleon’s Italian Campaign and the majestic Grand Army of Austerlitz. No longer is the army advancing (at least notionally) with the Civil Code held before them. Gone is the army of swift maneuvers and stunning surprise, gone the Pratzen Heights and Marengo, Ulm, Jena. In its place is a more disorganized, less committed force, one not terribly different in kind from the Austrian Archduke’s army opposing it higher on the plain. Although Napoleon’s star still shone, so to speak, and he would in July of that year finally break the Archduke Charles’s forces on the Wagram plateau, his greatest battles were behind him (it helps to know this before reading the novel, since Rambaud, as an historical novelist, assumes that his readers will be familiar with the larger history). Ahead lay the magnificently bloody draws of the Russian frontier, Borodino and Berezina, followed by the devastating retreat through the Russian winter as Moscow burned (Napoleon had intended to make an example of Tsar Nicholas for breaking the continental blockade with Great Britain; Napoleon set out for Russia with over 600,000 men and returned with only 80,000). After that, the crushing defeat at The Battle of the Nations, Leipzig, then the brief return from exile on Elba, which ended with one of the most famous battles of all time, Waterloo, where Napoleon and his remaining marshals were brought low by Lord Wellington’s tough Brits (and later in the day, Gebhard von Blucher’s black-coated Prussians, eager for revenge against the French). After that, the sad exile on St. Helena, one of the most barren and remote places on earth, the depressions, the long baths, the insanity, and finally the lonely death of the former Emperor (the British governor of the island insisted on calling him “general”).
Rambaud mentions none of this. His concerns begin on 16th of May, as the Emperor gazes over the Danube and considers his chances against the Austrian army waiting somewhere on the far bank. Almost the entirety of the novel is devoted to the 21st and 22nd of May, as French forces move onto the plain between the towns of Aspern and Essling, on the northern bank of the tempestuous Danube. Napoleon is fatter and less agile than when younger, and his men are less devoted. The prosperity promised by the early campaigns has led only to more war. They are beginning to realize that, after a decade of nearly incessant conflict, Napoleon only understands one method of governance: intimidation and despotism. Rambaud excites the reader with the clamor and color of the battlefield. He also horrifies with unsparing accounts of the gore and suffering that take place as roundshot and saber work their way with flesh, and then the surgeon’s table, the hacksawing of limbs and cauterization of nerve-endings before gangrene sets in. The battlefield comes alive, and death stalks the wheatfields and town squares of Essling and Aspern. While some feign death among corpses, others take their own lives after nearly two days of ceaseless (and apparently senseless) slaughter. Others face their lot, continue to bash away at the white-coated Austrians and Hungarians. The reader realizes that only years before, the forces arrayed against each other could have easily been allied (in the future, Napoleon will marry the daughter of the Austrian Emperor and thereby form a shaky alliance, but that is another story).
The Napoleon of The Battle has grown more philosophical, though no less superstitious and arrogant, in his older years. “What thread did victories hang by? A delay, a gust of wind, the whim of a river.” Napoleon, now the Emperor of the French and most of Europe (a self-made Emperor at that, one will remember, a brassy move for a former artillery lieutenant from Corsica), employs a familiar Machiavellian tactic; he drives the generals of the Empire, and anyone strong enough to oppose him, against one another, in order to prevent them from conspiring against him. The Byzantine quarreling that results does not, however, guarantee continued loyalty to him:

“Tell His Majesty . . .”
“Yes?”
“What you have observed.”
Lejeune spurred his horse into a full gallop and rode off down the main street. Boudet watched him depart, muttering, “Tell His Majesty to go to hell . . .”

Yet Napoleon still believes in his “star”, the guiding force of his destiny. He insisted that destiny flowed through him, and so far as we can tell he meant this. He saw himself as an instrument of history, a man driven to conquer and rule with his fist.
Rambaud could not gain any further laurels in his homeland. L’Express, Le Figaro Littéraire, Le Mondes des Livres, Les Echos all chant the same refrain: this is a great book. This should probably be seen by the American reader, in some degree, as a case of national pride. David’s iconic painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps (an intentional historical echo of Hannibal) adorns the cover of the book, the Corsican rearing back on his Arabian charger, his scarlet cape billowing in the wind. Herein lies the problem with commissioned art and later what would bloom into full-form propaganda. In reality, Napoleon rode a mule over the Alps, as mules are much more sure-footed on the icy passes. Napoleon, like many dictators before and since, possessed a great gift for manipulating appearances, making symbolic gestures, putting a gloss over successes that were, however strongly determined, in truth haphazard and close-run. When Balzac decided to write an historical novel about the Battle of Essling, he did so with the intention of eliminating women and Napoleon himself from the account: “only cannon, horses, two armies, uniforms.” Unfortunately, he was distracted from writing his book (largely by his love-affair with the Marchioness de Castries). Taking up the task more than a century later, Rambaud has added women and a close observation of the Emperor himself through the hours and days of the battle. Nevertheless, he achieved Balzac’s aim. Balzac wrote “what I have to do is make a man sitting quite coolly in his armchair behold the country, the inequalities of the ground, the masses of troops, the strategic events, the Danube, the bridges; he must admire the details and the whole of this conflict, hear the artillery, interest himself in every movement on this military chessboard, see everything.” If this were a battle plan laid out by the Emperor Balzac, Rambaud could not have followed his commander’s orders any more closely. The book, in its English translation by Will Hobson, stirs up the fires, raises the shouts and cries, inspires the reader to see and feel the battle as if it were falling down all around him. The clipped British style of diction in the translation actually fortifies this rhythm. Although Balzac never gave us his La Bataille, and while historians like Jean Savant and Elie Faure remain unable (or unwilling) to give us an unbiased portrait of Napoleon, Patrick Rambaud has: a Napoleon beginning to lose ground politically and mythically, as he is losing men en masse in the field; a little known corner of history has become, to the sensitive historical eye, a hinge, a turning-point. The reader is shown an Emperor grown a little less sure of himself, his charger not so white, his cape perhaps not billowing so high in the winds of art and history. Alexander Dumas once said: an historian chooses a view and then enlists heroes to help him defend it; only the novelist has the leisure to be impartial; “he does not judge, he shows.”

A Writer’s Life
Ernest Hilbert

A young Napoleon, his hair coursed back, ferine,
Was already, as a lieutenant in the King’s artillery,
Expert in ramrod and shot. Being of lower nobility,
And Corsican into the deal, he considered
A career in the military infeasible, and so set
To work on a novel. He soon found that fictions
Weren’t so agreeable as muzzle loading
And distance sighting, characters
Sometimes more defiant than whole
Nations and empires, some scenes more difficult
To capture than walled cities. A writer’s life being what
It is, then as now, he didn’t stand a chance,
So he went off, half-cocked one might think,
Dreaming of pyramids, Alps in winter,
The spires of Moscow aiming at the blank
Sheet of December sky like so many dried quills.

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I have an essay in the new book Poem, Revised, available now from Amazon and the publisher. The book examines the way poems are made, so to speak. Below I reproduce my own contribution. If you teach creative writing, you might consider requesting a free review copy from the publisher.

“54 Poems, Revisions, Discussions, Edited by Robert Hartwell Fiske. A behind-the-scenes look at the creation and revision of 54 published poems. A fascinating book for poetry students and poetry lovers.”

“The Magnificent Frigatebird,” by Ernest Hilbert. For many years I have enjoyed writing ekphrastic poetry. In ekphrasis, a poem is composed in response to a work of visual art, usually a sculpture or painting. The term derives from an ancient Greek descriptive rhetorical technique (the earliest example dates to 353 BC). Among the numerous opportunities afforded by my job at a large antiquarian bookseller is direct access to rare and exquisite examples of the bookmaker’s art. Over the years, I have been fortunate to handle assorted editions of John James Audubon’s iconic Birds of America. The plate that always struck me most keenly is that of the Magnificent Frigatebird (plate 271 of the elephant folio first edition, painted by Audubon in 1832, engraved, printed, and colored by R. Havell, 1835). Its nearly abstract structure recalled, for me, the imposing canvases of painters Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. The Magnificent Frigatebird is one of the few birds posed by Audubon as if in motion rather than resting or grooming. Instead of perching on a log pecking its tail feathers, it dives and, in so doing, seems impossibly sleek and dangerous.

Many poets—I would venture to guess most—who choose to write on Audubon, and they are legion, tend to focus on the story behind the paintings. Audubon hunted a bird and then posed it with tethers and wire, like a taxidermist. He then hurriedly painted it in order to capture the freshness of the bird before rigor and decay set in. He also made notes regarding the culinary preparation and flavor of his birds. This is all quite interesting, but I wanted to join Audubon as he imagined the bird hurtling down on its prey, and so partake in the artist’s fantasy. I believe that the Magnificent Frigatebird is one of his most successful creations, so I decided to charge my poem with purpose and energy, as he did.

After spending some time with the strangely captivating bird, I began to scratch preliminary notes in my Moleskine, which I use as a commonplace book. Those notes steeped for months, during which time I meditated about the subject’s potential, though I could not bring myself to begin the poem. When I finally decided one summery Saturday morning to start, I flipped through my commonplace book and found these puzzling notes (when making notes, I underline words that approximate what I hope to say but that will be replaced at a later date):

Dark message falling

[????] with

like a fighter jet or toy

spacecraft

Destroys its [????] prey,

Target

It strikes | feels no

assaults | moment of

hesitation, guilt

or remorse. It is a black

beacon, chevron of darkness

descending

so fast it makes

no mistake

_____________________________

Sinister beside a

listening sea

_____________________________

while a soft furred

life pisses the dust of

its hidden corner

helpless/powerless except to

lower before strength

as absolute as death

Had I scribbled this mess? Needless to say, it did not seem like a great deal to work with, but the tone and central images were there.

I had devoted the previous year to my own breed of sonnet—what my friend Daniel Nester termed the “Hilbertian” sonnet—working toward a book to be titled Sixty Sonnets. Each is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (though two examples in the sequence fall out of this meter: one is in octosyllabics, and the other, a string of epitaphs in trimeter), consisting of two sestets and a terminal couplet, rhymed ABCABC DEFDEF GG (I diverged from this scheme on one occasion to experiment with pararhyme, pairing fourteen high and low tones on a single rhyme). I find this modified brand of the classic sonnet serves me well in a variety of modes: satirical, elegiac, reflective, didactic, and absurdist. When writing in the ekphrastic mode, I tend to take my subjects seriously, and I endeavor to pack some gravity into the poems. I completed fifty-eight serviceable sonnets toward Sixty Sonnets (although I had more than sixty at one point, I discarded a number for their inferior quality). The final two required to complete the book eluded me. I chose The Magnificent Frigatebird to serve as muse for one of them (I have since completed the other, a Calavera).

After I baked my First Draft, I let it sit on the windowsill to cool a while. I thought I had better look into the zoological end of things before I proceeded, since I was so preoccupied with the purely aesthetic qualities of the painting. When I did, I realized that my line about “small furred things, pissing in the dust” (see below) would have to be struck. The Magnificent Frigatebird’s diet is pelagic, or “open sea,” so that ruled out any furred thing known to man. It is the largest of the five species in the genus Fregata and known for its swiftness and maneuverability. Because of its size, brute force, and highly aggressive nature, the Magnificent Frigatebird has also been called the Man-of-War or Pirate Bird (you will see that my additional research paid off). It supplements its diet of fish by attacking other birds, often robbing them of their catches. So, right out of my first draft, a line was struck (the preceding line would be struck as well, but for different reasons).

Here is what I will term the First Draft, constructed from my primary notes, with my first changes:

The sharp dark spike [thorn] plummets like a dive bomber,

Holding no moment of hesitation

Or stalled human position such as guilt.

The small furred things, pissing in the dust, are

Powerless beneath this black-light beacon, 5.

Long-beaked chevron of darkness, flashing, built

To kill, nightmare ink splatter [dash] aiming down hard

Like a stealth fighter, so swift [fast] it suffers

No lapse of purpose. Balanced, sinister,

Over a glittering sea, the lethal bird 10.

Lingers for new prey, swivels and hovers—

Earth its vast coliseum [arena] and theater,

Supreme as a blinding sun, terrible

And perfect, death’s own finished miracle.

Correcting for diet and habitat, I wound up with what I will call First Draft (A):

The sharp dark thorn plummets like a dive bomber,

Holding no moment of hesitation

Or stalled human position such as guilt.

[Fish, in their darting silvery clouds], are

Powerless beneath this black-light beacon, 5.

Long-beaked chevron of darkness, flashing, built

To kill, nightmare ink dash aiming down hard

Like a stealth fighter, so fast it suffers

No lapse of purpose. Balanced, sinister,

Over a glittering sea, the lethal bird 10.

Lingers for new prey, swivels and hovers—

Earth its vast arena and theater,

Supreme as a blinding sun, terrible

And perfect, death’s own finished miracle.

I was bothered by the weak use of the verb “are” as the fourth-line rhyme matching the all-important first line ending of the poem. The skittery verb was not up to the task I set it, but I decided to let it stand. I then packed up this modest First Draft—I was quite pleased with it at the time—and sent it to a friend, David Yezzi, the executive editor of the New Criterion. A casual chat over a glass of scotch with him is typically the equivalent of a master-class, and I trust him completely. He takes poetry very seriously and comments on the most meticulous aspects of rhythm and nuance as easily as the broadest of intention and symbolism. Upon reading my First Draft, the one over which I still glowed with pride, he telephoned me and straight away rebuked me on a startling number of points. My notion that the reader could somehow relate to the predatory bird was immediately dismissed as a naïve example of the sympathetic, or affective, fallacy. My evasive defence consisted of the argument that the bird could instead be viewed as majestically superhuman. This did not go over very well either. Yezzi pointed out that the grand, King James ending was not earned. The feeble poem could not support such weight, so the final couplet came to feel like a bit of sagging grandiosity. I asked him if he would let any living poet get away with it, and he answered no, though he provided a list of those who would be likely to do so anyway.

The poem also contained appalling redundancies, as one will observe in the third and ninth lines of the First Draft. There was room only for one of these lines, so the third was struck altogether. Yezzi insisted I needed to be more tangible, abandon the unmerited grandiloquent abstractions, and draw the tone far down from its original altitude, which he referred to as being “nose-bleed” high. My replacement of the second, third, and fourth lines required a recalibration of all corresponding rhymes down the chain. “Swivels” was abolished as being too Hopkins-like, and the word “balanced” did not, itself, feel very balanced in the line. The fish did not need to be described as “powerless,” so I gave them motion with a new verb placement (this also solved my problem of the flimsy “are” rhyme). The description of the bird as “lethal” was also judged superfluous and removed. I fought hard to keep “supreme,” and it has survived right to the finished poem. I proceeded to apply these numerous and acute changes to the First Draft:

The sharp dark thorn plummets like a dive[-]bomber,

Holding no moment of hesitation [No human moment of hesitation].

Or stalled human position such as guilt [It rushes through wind to unite with its goal].

Fish, in their darting silvery clouds, are [Fish gather in quick silver clouds, swell, veer].

Powerless [They swim] beneath this black-light beacon, 5.

Long-beaked chevron of darkness, flashing, built [vivid coal]

To kill, nightmare [Swiftly struck] ink dash aiming down hard

Like a stealth fighter, so fast it suffers

No lapse of purpose. Balanced, [Poised and] sinister,

Over a glistening [glistening] sea, the lethal bird [Pirate Bird] 10.

Lingers for new prey, swivels and [Studies the breakers for new kills,] hovers—

Earth its vast arena [blank canvas] and theater,

Supreme as a blinding [midday] sun, terrible

And perfect [Selected], death’s [fond emissary] own finished miracle.

Once these modifications were in place, I needed to gain more control over the rhythm and pacing of the poem. At some points, the language had to speed forward, as if diving. At others it had to brake, as if hovering and observing. I used hyphenated words to drive the first sestet forward: “dive-bomber,” “long-beaked,” and “black-light,” later “black-lit,” which is more compressed. The “blinding” sun was deemed cliché and altered to “midday,” which falls nicely midway through the penultimate line, forming a rhythmic fulcrum. Yezzi considered the presence of both “arena” and “theater” to be superfluous, since either can refer to both entertainment and war, thus introducing more texture than a single line will sustain. I eliminated “arena” (I originally attempted to wrench the impossible “coliseum” into the line) and replaced it with “blank canvas,” which reinforced my original thought of the bird as an abstract artistic gesture.

I then recast the final line into something resembling its finished form. “Fond” struck us both as suitably ambiguous and mysterious. (I acted out a scenario: “look, mom, I made ambiguity,” “that’s nice, dear, just hold it over the sink.”) What, exactly, was fond, and what was it fond of? I alighted on this line only after thirteen revisions. These fixes left me with a legitimate Second Draft, but I needed a new third line, something that could add to the sense of forward (or descending) motion. I moved “human” up to the second line and left the third line entirely vacant for several days. I tried five or six different lines and settled on “The world is wind. What goes below is prey.” Although it scans beautifully, I was afraid that it would sound too much like Ted Hughes. Yezzi felt it sounded too much like David Jones, which amounts to more or less the same thing. Either way, it had to go (I admire both aforementioned poets for very different reasons, but this sort of weighty diction does not match my style). So I devised the line “it rushes through wind to unite with its goal,” before deciding to enjamb and extend the second line into the third and altering it to “In its rush through raw wind to join its goal,” which is made up entirely of rapid monosyllables that create the sensation of increasing velocity:

The sharp dark thorn plummets like a dive-bomber,

No human moment of hesitation.

The world is wind. What goes below is prey.

[It rushes through wind to unite with its goal.]

Alternately:

[In its rush through warm raw wind to join its goal].

Fish gather in quick[,] silver clouds, swell, veer.

They swim beneath this black-lit beacon, 5.

Long-beaked chevron of darkness in day [vivid coal],

Swiftly struck ink dash, aiming down hard

Like a stealth fighter, so fast it suffers

No lapse of purpose. Poised and sinister,

Over a glistening sea, the Pirate Bird 10.

Studies the breakers for new kills, hovers [—]

Earth its vast blank canvas and theater [—]

Supreme as midday sun, brutal as the sea,

Selected [And chosen], death’s fond emissary.

The poem still needed to be polished. I aligned as many of the sounds and musical elements as I could without losing track of the sense of the poem, but the pace was not sufficiently defined. I added terminal M-dashes in the eleventh and twelfth lines to slow that portion of the poem down, in order to provide the feel of hovering majestically over the sea, and to set off the thirteenth line, which refers to human artifice in “canvas” and “theater.” I wanted to isolate it from the wild, authentic world of the bird. I then added “And chosen” to the last line and followed it with a comma. This final line is acephalus, or “headless,” since the first foot has an assumed, or inaudible, syllable, which, constituting the first half of an iambic foot would have been unstressed. This trait adds to the experience of airy suspension followed by sharp attack. Moving back up the poem, I added a much-needed comma between “quick” and “silver” to clarify that I was not using the word “quicksilver,” which is inappropriate in this environment. I changed “glittering” sea—which sounds a bit spangly and slows the line down with its unvoiced dental stop—and replaced it with the sibilant “glistening” sea.

This left me with a convincing Third Draft, which I took to be the Final Draft, with its newly installed lines and correlated later rhymes (some whole, some oblique; I tend to mingle both types in most poems unless I feel compelled to resort entirely to one or the other):

The sharp dark thorn plummets like a dive-bomber,

No human moment of hesitation

In its rush through raw wind to join its goal.

Fish gather in quick, silver clouds, swell, veer.

They swim beneath this black-lit beacon, 5.

Long-beaked chevron of darkness, lance of coal,

Swiftly struck ink dash, aiming down hard

Like a stealth fighter, so fast it suffers

No lapse of purpose. Poised and sinister,

Over a glistening sea, the Pirate Bird 10.

Studies the breakers for new kills, hovers—

Earth its vast blank canvas and theater—

Supreme as midday sun, brutal as the sea,

And chosen, death’s fond emissary.

I then added the title, “Magnificent Frigatebird” (dropping the definite article) and the note “Fregata magnificens, John James Audubon, 1832

.” I showed the Third Draft to Yezzi and he charitably responded: “Wow. That’s a knockout. Congrats.” This is greater approval than I could have hoped for. The balm of praise quickly relieved the stings inflicted by earlier burrs of disapproval.

The terms “first” through “third” drafts are used for the sake of convenience and are hence reductive. They do not give full merit to the complexity and number of changes made to this poem, but they allow me a convenient frame in which to present my compositional process. Of course, many more small changes occurred right from the start, but endeavoring to record them all is a bit like trying to hold water in cupped hands. This is typical of my compositional technique. My changes usually number in the dozens or hundreds for a single sonnet. Moreover, wretched late changes will sometimes occur when, after months of living with a poem that seemed complete, I notice something I disapprove about the syntax, rhyme, or even philosophy of a poem, and the revision begins again. A change to any part of the poem will reverberate to other parts and necessitate additional changes until the synchronized whole settles again. Some poets, like Allen Ginsberg and Donald Hall, changed poems decades after they first appeared in print, but most of us are not permitted such luxury. Once a poem is published, the public may never see it again, so it is tremendously important to have all of one’s prosodic ducks in a row right from the start. Brisk and therefore bracing criticism is an indispensable component of this process for me, and I rely heavily on the opinions of a small circle of exceptional readers, who offer no quarter and seek no prisoners. This level of exacting criticism and confidential exchange of ideas has led me to further assurance as a poet and, with hope, mastery of my chosen forms. And so, voila:

Magnificent Frigatebird

Fregata magnificens, John James Audubon, 1832

The sharp dark thorn plummets like a dive-bomber,

No human moment of hesitation

In its rush through raw wind to join its goal.

Fish gather in quick, silver clouds, swell, veer.

They swim beneath this black-lit beacon,

Long-beaked chevron of darkness, lance of coal,

Swiftly struck ink dash, aiming down hard

Like a stealth fighter, so fast it suffers

No lapse of purpose. Poised and sinister,

Over a glistening sea, the Pirate Bird

Studies the breakers for new kills, hovers—

Earth its vast blank canvas and theater—

Supreme as midday sun, brutal as the sea,

And chosen, death’s fond emissary.

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