This is by no means to say that the British are less inventive. Anyone who has ever savored the variety of dialects and usages in the United Kingdom knows that the mother tongue hasn’t been sleeping there.

But I have noticed what is to me a strange difference between the way well educated Englishmen and well educated Americans and Aussies come across, coming across being the operative term. The British have a way of sounding more persuasive, more compelling. There is, particularly in their public speech, a whiff of triumphalism. In social and political settings the British may engage in a verbal cannibalism unknown to Americans.

Take the recent embarrassment over Prince Harry’s obviously racist remarks. To listen to the palace spokesman you’d think the insensitive royal was a role model, his critics louts and the whole ugly incident a mere kerfuffle. On the lips of most White House spokespersons the matter would have become a three-day ping-pong game. The British know how the final word sounds.

Americans can put on a good triumphalist show, largely by harking back to the thirteen states’ British roots, as they do on ceremonial occasions, but anyone who ever witnessed a British military extravaganza will know what I mean about that British flair for triumphalism. And, of course, who can forget those film clips of Nazi militarism? But that was more fright show than ceremony.

As a poet I’ve toyed with this conundrum for a long time. I first encountered it in the United Nations in the early nineteen-fifties when I was a boy studying in a Manhattan high school. The British delegate, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, fascinated me because I knew just enough about Middle East history to know when he was dissembling in ways that sounded unassailable. Almost anyone with an ear for language would have rather heard Sir Gladwyn dissemble than the American delegate tell the absolute truth. It amazed me. Our man, equally articulate if a bit flat of tone, seemed assailable at every juncture. It seemed churlish to dispute anyone who sounded as cocksure as Sir Gladwyn. He spoke with hieratic authority, while our man spoke as if he dared not borrow the language of the gods. Perhaps the difference lies in the phrase “the unvarnished truth,” positing as it does that there is a varnished truth, and if there is a varnished truth I think the British must excel at the varnishing.

I had grown up in a boarding school where British accents were common. Indeed I had one myself, having acquired it by emulating starting at age five my East Anglian chums. But why were the British, even when they were saying demonstrably dodgy things, so convincing, while we Americans and our northern neighbors, the Canadians, sounded merely plausible?

I have looked for the answer in poetry. Is W.H. Auden, for example, more persuasive than Robert Lowell or any of the other important American poets of the time? No, to my mind he isn’t, much as I admire Auden. So perhaps the answer isn’t a superior literacy among the British; perhaps it’s their intonation, the demeanor of their speech. I sometimes wonder—here comes trouble—whether we North Americans are more cautious about the uses to which language may be decently put than the British. This is not to suggest that over here on the left side (which is, after all, the side sinister) of the pond we are more honest, but it is to suggest that we are by nature suspicious of too facile a use of language. I think we may push the language a bit harder than the British, we may take more liberties with it, as indeed we do with each other, but on the other hand I think our approach to language is not as utilitarian as the British approach; we have a sense that it is not entirely our servant and could at any time ambush us, as it often does.

The problem was excruciating for me as a boy because I had taken to watching British drawing-room movies for cues as to proper behavior, since my own family tended to soap opera. If I needed to decide how to act in a certain situation I called a black and white British movie to mind. There were several reasons. I had been living with British youngsters who had been evacuated to America during the war. But I felt instinctively that their use of English was more authoritative, not because they owned it, but because it imparted to them a certain syllogistic logic, whereas we simply used language the way we would use a screwdriver. I remember how bereft I felt at war’s end when my many British chums went home, not only because I would miss some of them but because I felt they were taking their language with them and I would have to learn a new one which seemed unlikely to serve me as well. It was as if they had taken my warranty with them. My relationship to language would never be the same. My British pals always seemed to know what they were talking about, even when they patently didn’t, so of course I was quick to recognize that facility in Sir Gladwyn—there it was again, that confidence that language was there to serve.

There was in Sir Gladwyn’s speech, for example, the implication that only an illogical boob would question what he was saying. His words were fragrant with this assuredness. It wasn’t just diplomacy, it was a familiarity with the usages of words and rhetoric. Not a manner of speech, as with the melodious manner of our Southern speech, but rather a willingness to use every tool in the box.

As we watch HBO’s John Adams we are probably watching a time when British speech in the colonies was acquiring a distinctly American sound. We know that Thomas Jefferson didn’t sound like us. But we don’t know to what extent he sounded like today’s Virginian or a British gentleman, which indeed he was. We don’t know to what extent their seafaring, their continual contact with the French, with Native Americans and African-Americans may have changed New England speech by the time of our revolution, but we suspect that the men who gathered in Philadelphia to voice their objections to British misrule no longer sounded precisely like their British overlords. But they probably sounded much more like them than we do. We know that what they wrote was more eloquent than what we are inclined to write, but we also know they hadn’t yet settled on standard spelling and grammar. Their style was more idiosyncratic than ours.

I have never deemed the English owners and us franchised borrowers of the language, although some Englishmen may indulge that thought. I did for a moment in 1946 wonder what I was going to do without a mother tongue, but that wasn’t quite like feeling I had rented one. Sometimes I impute a kind of eroticism to educated British speech; it seems to me to resemble the French throwing a few things together and coming off looking soigné. Language to the British sometimes strikes me as a kind of vindication of whatever point they were trying to make at the moment, whereas we thought that the point should prevail, not the language. What may come across as smug or arch to the American ear comes across as logical and cogent to the British ear. I think the British have more confidence than we do that language can carry the day, as it so often has for them, even in the twilight of empire.

We are, of course, at a disadvantage listening to the British because we are predisposed by the love-hate relationship between us to stereotype British speech and to impugn it. I suspect they, for their part, are similarly disposed to regard our speech as inept and boorish, and our now expiring presidency will have done nothing to dissuade them.

I used to consider the headiness of Charles Algernon Swinburne and compare him to our own mesmerist, Edgar Allen Poe, but the answer to my inquiry wasn’t there. Our poetry might be more audacious at certain times in our literary progress than British poetry but no less authoritative, no less impressive. I’m not sure, if I had, for instance, left for England with my childhood chums, whether I would have become a poet. My approach to writing has always—well, since 1946—been that language is a wild beast, a strange god, and I must befriend it. I have certainly never entertained the idea that I could put it on a leash and walk it around, which is exactly the feeling Sir Gladwyn had given me.

Was it the difference between a clipped delivery and a more leisurely one? No, I thought not. Nor did I think the answer was in vocabulary, because while it seemed to me that educated Britons were inclined to indulge a broader vocabulary than their American or Aussie counterparts, they were not as inclined to use Anglo-Saxon words for all they were worth. It had been a long time since an indigenous people, like the Picts, had rejuvenated the language, where American speech had recently been profoundly enriched by Native Americans, African-Americans, Yiddish speakers and many others in our ethnic melting pot. Indeed I’ve been chafing for some time at the oft-heard and feckless remark that poetry is unpopular; what, I have been asking, is it that we have been listening to from the rappers and rockers and country singers? And what is it, for that matter, that the French are hearing in Algerian rai?

I searched Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway for clues. Hemingway’s short story, The Killers, is a model of American restraint and taciturnity, foreshadowing as it does what we admire in Clint Eastwood. It’s hard to  imagine a Briton of that time writing it. It’s the study of Hemingway’s ear. It has elements of Midwest plain speech and New York gangster patois. It verges on poetry, modernist poetry, closer to Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams than to Longfellow or Lanier. And it embodies some of the most crucial differences between British and American speech. It’s as if an American kid had spread the language out in the yard and turned it into a hot rod. I don’t think Hemingway’s restraint, or Eastwood’s for that matter, would have been possible without Dickinson.

I thought for a while that the authority of British speech might be a social one. Perhaps the British were a bit more comfortable in their skins, but to watch their movies I wouldn’t think so. Did they simply feel more comfortable around words than Americans? Was that the origin of the taciturn American stereotype? And would this mean they were more respectful of words or less so? I thought of our Founding Fathers and could not entertain the notion that we were less respectful of words than the British.

Perhaps the heart of the mystery is that the British and Americans have different expectations of language. Americans often feel no compulsion to finish a sentence. This has been put down to intellectual slovenliness. But I think it’s rather a striving for intuitive connection, an impatience with the ordinary constraints of rhetoric. Yes, I do know the ellipsis in American speech is often laziness, but I sense something else, too, an impulse to dispense with a convention that Americans expect to fail them. I see this impulse in American poetry, particularly in Hart Crane.

But when all this speculation is done, the question remains, why do the educated British, using their language, sound so much more authoritative than we do, using the same language? I thought of all the half-truths and distortions and deceits I heard from Sir Gladwyn as a boy, and how convincing and intellectually engaging they sounded. Who wouldn’t happily believe him? And who would unquestioningly believe our flat-toned delegate whose name I can’t even remember?

It used to be a commonplace that a tony British accent would land you a good job in the States, not that all Americans know the difference between tony and tatty when it comes to British accents. I think the way American accents grate on the British is quite different from American audition of British accents. We hear either something classy that we want or something snobbish we resent. I think the British may hear something of the child abuser in our English usage; we’ve beaten up their nearest and dearest.

I can’t bring these musings to a helpful conclusion. I think they started when I arrived at Dwight School in Manhattan and the English teacher, a Maine native with a classic Maine accent, wrote out the word world on the blackboard and said, You do hear the “r” in this word, do you not, Mr. Marbrook? Yes, I said, wuhld. His palpable aggravation set me on this long journey of linguistic wonderment. I have been a long time in the world since I pronounced it by neglecting its “r.” But I will never forget how ugly that teacher’s pronunciation of the word sounded to me. I went home muttering wuhld, werld, whorled, wirrled until I was beside myself with the same aggravation I’d seen in the squire from Maine. Why had this nice little kid been singled out for a replay of our revolutionary conflict, especially when he had never in all his readings wished for a different outcome?

My puzzlement has nothing to do with the comparative merits of British literature and our own. I am as proud of American writing as any Briton of British writing. But I know that when our common tongue is spoken I hear in the American voice an earnestness that does not inspire unadulterated acceptance, and I hear in the British a conviction that beguiles. —DM

The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University in Ohio is celebrating its 25th anniversay. I have the privilege of taking part in this observance as the 2007 winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Prize in poetry. This article by Kyle Roerink, staff writer for The Daily Kent Stater, describes plans for the event.

I was in Provincetown, MA, when the book was released Friday. Wagnerian thunder and lightning storms were passing over that topsy-turvy arts colony. My mission there was relevant to the book, in a way. The cover of the book features Hole in Time, a Surrealist painting by my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione, and I had come to Provincetown for the opening of an exhibition of three of her Surrealist paintings and three gouaches by her sister and my aunt, Irene Rice Pereira. You can see Hole in Time if you click on Far From Algiers.

I was happy to be there because it’s a bastion of tolerance and thoughtfulness in a time of heightened intolerance and witlessness. There are more than sixty art galleries in Provincetown and people wander the streets, dropping into galleries and socializing as they go. The town is full of people who look as if they ought to be famous. Undoubtedly some of them are. But, unlike many art colonies, there is little exhibitionism. People don’t seem to go there as much to be seen as to see, to share the hospitable eccentricity. This is just where I want to be as my little book appears, I told myself.

I had another reason for being there, too. I had helped manage my aunt’s paintings when she died in 1971, as I manage my mother’s paintings now. They had devoted their lives to art, to the creation of beauty, and I thought Provincetown was a fitting place to pay my own homage to that achievement.—DM

When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all,  Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the web has not yet redressed its many Eurocentric biases. But the web is ahead of most textbooks in this regard.

In Sinbad’s case this historical tilt is particularly unfortunate because his native land and city have been making front-page headlines for many years. It’s not that Sinbad has been neglected—the Safari search engine shows 5,210,000 results for his name—but that he isn’t taken seriously in the same way we take seriously Greek mythological figures such as Odysseus and Achilles. In fact, there is a tendency to confuse Greek mythology with Greek history in the popular mind.

Sinbad is a Third Worlder, and although the Arabs are Caucasians he is regarded as a person of color, while the ancient Greeks, whether mythological or historical, are Europeans and therefore more important to the Western story.

All this is worth consideration now because the Western story has finally begun to be seen as no more important than the Eastern story or the pre-Columbian story, and the World Wide Web certainly ought to reflect this new dispensation instead of carrying the viruses of Western prejudices.

If anything, the Sinbad story is more interesting than Odysseus’s. It is certainly more imaginative. And it’s important as a historical corrective because the Arabs were for a long time written out of Western histories of maritime discovery and adventure.

The Arabs were and are great sailors. It is highly likely that the caravel, the Model T Ford of the 15th Century, whose development is slavishly attributed to the Portuguese, is in fact based on the kind of Arab vessels the Portuguese were accustomed to encountering at sea, not always under neutral circumstances. In fact, the Arabs, the Omanis to be specific, prevailed over the Portuguese in a protracted sea struggle for control of the Indian Ocean.

And yet a web searcher is hard put to find a serious discussion of Sinbad. One finds instead actors, movies, glue, hookah bars, travel agencies, restaurants, computer programs, hotels, almost anything but the young Basran of myth who sailed the seas in search of adventure and wealth. Why is the sulky Achilles more fit for discussion than the ebullient Sinbad? The answer is cultural bias, to be sure, but it is a particular kind of bias that has now come back to haunt Western society.

The Saracen, the Arab, is the Dark Other. In fact, much Western literature has glossed over the Arab as Caucasian in order, in effect, to make him darker than he is. This is, of course, racist in the extreme, presuming as it does that white is good, brown is less, and dark is bad or inferior. Hence, Odysseus, the white sailor, is worthier of discourse than Sinbad, whose mythological skin is presumably darker, if only because he spent more time in the sun. The Saracens themselves were so amused by their demonization at Western hands that they sometimes wore tails and horns into battle to mock their Western adversaries, and this is in fact depicted in Western art.

It’s a given that Douglas Fairbanks Jr. can play Sinbad, with the help of a little makeup, but it’s not a given that the rich mythology from which Sinbad arises is as worthy of our attention as Odysseus’s. Yes, Arabism has a long and honorable history in the West, but the element of exoticism and all the prejudices that go with it stands in the way of its entering our thought as an important part of the mainstream of human history.

I’m not, I think, making the same case the late Edward Said made in his controversial book, Orientalism. I’m rather making the case that with the advent of the World Wide Web we have little excuse for omitting the contributions of the Arabs, the Indians, the Chinese, the pre-Columbians, any non-Westerner from the human story.

This might mean paying more attention to Incan agriculture and engineering or to the fact that that great explorer, Vasco da Gama, employed an old Arab navigator named Achmed ibn Madjid, or that the Chinese plied the seas with huge vessels long before the European galleons. The list of such omissions is long enough to fill great libraries. We should use the web to begin to correct the imbalance. The case of Sinbad is only one of thousands of omissions and imbalances. —DM

We could mess with the oppressive logic of things and turn grave pronunciamentos all topsy-turvy. We could have a high old time at the expense of talking heads, headline writers, politicians, preachers, and everyone else inclined to telling us what’s important. We could make all the snake oil salesmen in the world reverse the order of their pitches until even they laughed at themselves. We could spend a whole day throwing verbal junk balls at each other and go to bed satisfied that the world might not be safer but it sure would be funnier.—DM

A good book of poems is not just a collection of good poems. Conceptualizing a book of poems is like conceptualizing a complex poem times ten. There are ways to play it safe: safe poems, safe structure. You employ what you know about prevailing tastes and show your competence. Nothing wrong with that.

But it’s not what Pardi (inset) has done. In this Brittingham Prize book he has pursued a vision with great intellectual courage and prosodic virtuosity. He has reached far and high. The difference between a poem that is merely pyrotechnic and a successful poem is the poet’s respect for the original sensibility of the poem. You can force an idea into a brilliant framework for effect or you can, as Pardi unfailingly does, work out the relationship between the demeanor of an idea and the metrics that most respectfully animate it.

In the poem The Roofers he tells of a man who is about to fall. He’s probably the hardworking immigrant we pass every day on the way to work. What we will not have noticed, what Pardi does notice, is that moments before the fall that we know is coming the man painstakingly frees a fly from tar paper, calling the insect amigo.

The poem is an alchemy of narrative craft, joinery, precognition and ordinary detail. The fly and the roofer become metaphors for heartbreak. We’re thunderstruck that this gentleman should have fallen to his death after an act of such exquisite compassion.

Pardi’s poems are remarkable for their technical restlessness, delicacy and precision. Among poets, he is a diamond cutter.

In Sonata, a poem appropriately in four movements, he employs different metrics and versifications for each movement. One might think the poem would suffer from being too obviously a tour de force, but it doesn’t. The reason it doesn’t is that Pardi isn’t trying to knock you out. He doesn’t care about the wow factor because he knows it’s cheap. He sings to himself, knowing that if a thing makes sense to him because he has put it well, then it may make sense to us. Poetry is as much gratitude as it is song.—DM

I’ve been dreaming about these banners. In my dreams the oceanic
Arabic script takes off and fills the sky with crystal ships and the carriers of the banners on the ground cheer and wave to the ships.

Why don’t we do something like that in Central Park— a vast poetry festival with banners from all the neighborhoods and their poets? Or in Prospect Park. Or both. Perhaps neighborhood associations could sponsor their poets. Or art galleries could participate. After all, New York’s art galleries have traditionally shown an interest in poetry. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, for example, was the first publisher of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and artists such as Donna Marxer regularly combine art and poetry in their work.

Let’s do this not only in the New York parks so familiar to me, but across the land and the world. Let’s remember that many of the people, including ourselves, who appear in today’s headlines of conflict have also marvelously contributed to the enlightenment and beauty of the planet. Let’s celebrate that in poetry. It will be an easy thing to do: poems in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Sanskrit—all the beautiful scripts of the earth.

Poetry is alive and well. And not just in academia. Readings and slams are popular, and many art forms, such as rap and rai, which are not usually associated with poetry, do in fact embody poetry. So let’s bring poetry to the beautiful fields of our parks, as the ancient and medieval Arabs did.
————————
Note: Speaking of poetry, Kent State University Press has posted a link where you can order my book, Far From Algiers. And yesterday my wife Marilyn sent out e-mails making friends and acquaintances aware of this link. The response has been lighting up our Inbox, renewing old friendships and encouraging new ones.         —DM

News organizations are like fastball hitters; they fear curve balls and knuckle balls, exactly the kind of pitches Noah Gordon is likely finding on all those twenty-sixth pages. For the average news anchor there’s ping and then there’s pong. There’s ho and then there’s hum. But lord knows what glories, temptations and recognitions are in those books.

I experimented in my own library. First I laid hands on A. Alvarez,
Autumn to Autumn (Macmillan London Ltd., 1978). On page 26 there was the poem Operation. Two lines in the last eight-line stanza nabbed my attention:

My blood stings like a river
lurching over the falls.

I closed my eyes and reached for another book in the poetry section:
Ann Lauterbach’s The Night Sky, Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Penguin, 2005). I searched page 26 and found a passage that resonated eerily with my own childhood experience of Manhattan’s east side:

There was the stench of chaos. Outside, the city contributed its harmonic: sirens, the Third Avenue el rasping along black tracks, cats, a distant foghorn, bells dividing the hours, planes ovefrhead. The boundary between outside and inside was porous, leaky.

I still remember all the snapshots of human drama I saw in the third and fourth floors of tenements as I rode that el.

I like Gordon’s fey and oblique eccentricity. It’s rather like ambling around a room peopled with fabulous beauties and slowly getting the notion that you’re the only one who notices they’re all cockeyed. —DM
———