Portrait of Terentius Neo, Pompeii, AD 20–30

December, 2023

December, and, upon first reading this month’s essay, below, I was struck immediately by the similarities of its subject — the poet’s life — and that of the Trappist monks’, whose Abbey of Gethsemane outside Louisville, Kentucky I happened to revisit before the Thanksgiving holiday.

I am thinking of the passage from the initial paragraph:

…We poets tend to be brooders over words and, although there’s a tribal sense of togetherness in a like activity, I suspect I am not alone in feeling alone in pursuing the art, one pursued, after all, on one’s own.

For, really, can’t we easily substitute “monk” and “cenobium.” or “community” for “poet” and “sense of togetherness” here? The poet, like the monk, at once uniquely solitary and avowed collectivist?

A paradox I saw with my own eyes: passing the opened door of one of the cells, a glimpse of a head posed in stern, almost painterly contemplation over a thick notebook – the same head I had seen just hours before after the communal noontime meal, its owner smiling with several of his brothers at the awkward pawings of a barnyard kitten.

A paradox, by the way, while not more specific to poets than other artists, seemingly more…necessary: for what are our readings, conferences, workshops and the like if not, in the scheme of our vocational lives, transitory communities we form and withdraw from as needed, like the monks and their  momentary audience with that kitten, a vital respite from the solitude to which we long ago dedicated all our days?

Anyway.

Let’s turn, happily, now, to the main attraction: as noted: Brian Culhane’s illuminating piece on Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art”:

“Sullen Art”

Perhaps it’s November that’s got me thinking of gloom, here in the Pacific Northwest, where the sky seems caught between flashes of autumn’s slanting light and thickening rain clouds, with the clouds mainly winning out. Or it may be that while my desk lamp casts its familiar warm spell, it can’t quite dispel the shadows in my study or diminish my sense of being alone once again, facing words. We poets tend to be brooders over words and, although there’s a tribal sense of togetherness in a like activity, I suspect I am not alone in feeling alone in pursuing the art, one pursued, after all, on one’s own. Notwithstanding readers, who may come, if at all, after composition; notwithstanding occasional publications or poetry readings, given in the spirit of sharing, but quite divorced from the activity of writing poems.

Of the poems that most memorably describe the radical aloneness of this wrestling with words (the phrase is Eliot’s), I think of a lyric by Dylan Thomas, published in 1939 when the poet was just twenty-five, long before he became famous.

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

This strikes me as a profoundly beautiful hymn, rather than a credo or an ars poetica, as some have called it. What does Thomas hymn if not the aloneness of the poet who writes “When only the moon rages / And the lovers lie abed. . . .”? The poet’s aloneness is a precondition for the act of creation, unlike that other act of creation the lovers embrace when not embracing their own griefs. Aloneness is not estrangement, nor is solitude necessarily lonely—though I must not be the only reader who feels there’s more than a touch of all these in this portrait of the artist who works through the night, who sees himself working in isolation, with only the image of the lovers providing company. I don’t want to subject the poem to an academic analysis and break its spell (it casts one: just read it aloud); rather, I’d like to look at just one of its particularly resonant words—an adjective.

Poetry has, like other arts, a history of being a kind of craft, a knitting together of words, not woolens, a chiseling of stanzas, not stones. It is, also, an art form closely allied to music, as we hear in the etymological ties between lyric and lyre. But no one to my knowledge has ever before called it a sullen art. Why sullen? Why not morose, bad-tempered, dour or (forgive me, Dylan) grumpy? Maybe because the poet knew there’s a history behind the word that accords with the poem’s emphasis on the solitary nature of poetic composition. Miriam-Webster’s entry points us to the 1570s, where we find the contemporary use of  “sullen” deriving from “an alternation of the Middle English solein, soleyn ‘unique, singular, remarkable, strange’; also ‘solitary, lone, unmarried’ (late 14c.), from Anglo-French solein, formed on the pattern of Old French solain ‘lonely,’ from sole ‘single,’ from Latin solus ‘by oneself, alone’.” These senses may have faded by the birth of Shakespeare, but somehow, or so I would like to believe, they remain subterranean sonic threads, making sullen art an art that’s singular, remarkable, strange, its practitioners lonely, its craft one practiced by oneself, alone.

Not surprisingly, this art is something exercised and labored over. It requires patience and skill and hard work—far exceeding the 10,000 hours of such that some claim is needed for mastery—but unlike other arts and crafts, it is a practice one performs by singing light (which even a desk lamp may cast), an indoor illumination fit companion to the moon’s. The overtones I hear in the etymology of sullen lend, as well, a certain poignancy to the solitary poet thinking of his audience, the lovers. For what kind of audience do they prove to be? In the first stanza, he hopes they may offer him “the common wages” of their “most secret heart.” Yet by the poem’s end, far from giving him praise or wages, the lovers don’t even heed his words. He may write for them, but they pay him no mind. This is stated as a fact, just the way things are, and the tone here is neither ironic nor self-pitying. Indeed, the poet seems oddly comforted by their embrace of other larger matters—the griefs of the ages—though I suspect he also knows them to be like any other lovers, clasping one another in the face of such. But why then persist in his art? Why write for an audience that you know will be—and maybe should be—deaf to your words?

This paradox gets at the heart of the practice of writing poems; it helps explain why it is such a solitary art, a craft necessarily practiced by oneself, an exercise best saved for the still of the night, when whoever is addressed is otherwise occupied. In Solomon Volkov’s Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, Brodsky states, rather offhandedly, that “the poet is always doomed to loneliness to one degree or another,” and he further says, the better the poet, the more terrible the loneliness. Yet if “In my craft or sullen art” lyrically describes this fraught, isolated enterprise, I’d like to think that its creator was happy anyway with the poem he’d composed as a hymn both to his art and to his audience of two, who would not be listening.
***

Beautiful, no? And who among us has taken the time to find the sense of “sullen” before this? Few, I imagine. (Not I.)  A wonderful meditation on, yes, the sullen nature of poetry, and the poet, a gift to the reader, I think, as to the practitioner.

Other news? No, not much this month. Only to say thank you to those who took us up on our offer of free volumes of the print anthologies, Plumes 7, 8, 9, and 10. It’s heartening to imagine those books in our readers’ hands.

Oh, and another — thank you, that is — to all who submitted poems to Plume in the most recent of  our ever-shortening reading periods: 500+ received through Submittable between 15 – 31 October. We – staff readers Amy Beeder, Nancy Mitchell, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Fran Richey, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Amanda Newell, and I  – have begun reading and are making headway, I promise, though I do ask for your patience.

Finally, a nod to a few of our gifted contributors, who have books recently published or forthcoming:

Dorianne Laux                     Life on Earth: Poems
Laure-Anne Bosselaar         Lately: New and Selected Poems
Natasha Sajé                       THE FUTURE WILL CALL YOU SOMETHING ELSE
Kelle Groome                       HOW TO LIVE: A MEMOIR-IN-ESSAYS
Eric Pankey                         THE FUTURE PERFECT: A FUGUE      
Chloe Honum                       The Lantern Room
Elizabeth Metzger                 Bed

That’s it for now – Happy Holidays! – and as always I hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume