A Note On Pauline Kael On The Godfather (1)

 So what’s the word on Pauline Kael? 

I just reread her review of, essay on, The Godfather (1.)It’s impressively showy. Her prose is vibrant. There’s breadth to the review. It’s spacious. She knows a lot. It’s popping with her vibrant, verging on the “know it all” sensibility. 

And yet, any yet, with all that said, I read preening. 

The Godfather becomes a subordinate, marshalled in the service of her strutting showy stuff, showing off. 

I can learn more about the movie, its story, the acting, the themes, the goods, the bads, the filmmaking itself by reading less spectacular reviews, ones that put the movie ahead of the reviewer celebrating herself. 

She doesn’t even begin to grapple with the movie’s romanticization of the Don, its sentimentality about the thugs’ life. 

When I actually penetrate all her discursiveness, some insights can be gleamed to be sure, but also too there is plenty to think is off target about the movie. 

I understand she’s held sacred by many but I have to wonder if that sacredness is but a lot of many getting  fooled by the sizzle hot off the Kael griddle.

Analysis Of Fiona Sampson’s Poem, The Lodger

The Lodger

Fiona Sampson 

You could figure it as a trapdoor, 
blur of hinge and 
down 
into the unconscious of this stranger 
moving around your garden like a trap— 
making all the greens unstable 
as the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you. 
Bang to rights 
is how he'd like to have your house. Cuckoo, 
wool-wearing garden-dweller, 
new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley 
and roses. 
Meanwhile, the unaccustomed heat. 
Meanwhile, a sky tunnelling upward— 
sense of proportion—golden section 
of elder hedge; then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.

A more elusive poem than Charles Reznikoff’s, see immediately below.

My analysis:

The poem starts informally, idiomatically, “You could figure it.” So it begins with explaining how the reader could figure; it also begins with the how the speaker thinks about it but generalizes her figuring into how anyone, “you,” could figure it just as she does. The figuring also suggests making poetry of it, figure it, make images of it, so to say, whatever “it” is. 

“it” can be figured and figured out as a trap door. We could fall through it. Quickly or dizzily too, the hinge is a “blur” as we go whizzing or dizzily past it. And we could figure that  we fall into the unconscious of it. This “stranger” is “it.”

So, a couple of enigmas among others:

How is it, the stranger, a trapdoor;

How do we fall into the stranger’s unconscious?

My idea is that it, the stranger, is like a trapdoor for us. Its presence is a shock that entraps/traps/entices us. But into what? Its unconscious? How can that be? Is it that we don’t see what is there: rather, we see what we see is there? In that, a stranger, something external to us, merges in us as we see not what is there as such but rather what we make of it, how we see it, perceiving as informed by all of what we are, what is beneath the surface of us, our unconscious. 

On this basis, falling into “the unconscious of this stranger” is to fall into our own. 

And on this basis, coming upon something strange to us, a stranger, traps us into immediately going inside ourselves to come to sense what it is. It’s a trapdoor to that trapping simply in virtue of what the unbidden “stranger” is to us.

So, it may be that it, the stranger, takes up space in our heads, is lodged there, is a lodger there just as the stranger seems to have lodged itself/himself on our property, taking up space there, indeed unsettling everything. And for yet another us, the stranger is now lodged in our heads as readers, unsettling us as we try to make sense of its presence in the poem.

The conceit of the trap as involving our instantaneous inner then outer journeys continues by those journeys’ result, our apprehension of it trapping the speaker’s garden, which we can figure is our own. As the stranger moves, it seems to us, in our figuring, the garden writhes in his entrapment of it, “making all the greens unstable” with its havoc-causing. So we get “the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you.” “Warble” nicely with onomatopoeia catches the inner sensation of a wave of nausea suddenly afflicting us, inflicting itself inside us, “come bang up to greet you.”

The vernacularity of some of the language, “come bang up,” juxtaposed with some of the more formal language, “the unconscious,” and with some of the poetic language, “blur of hinge,” “the greens unstable,” “warble of nausea” capture conventional everyday us mixed with intellectual, learned us, and mixed with the figuring us, all remaking reality. 

The nausea that comes “bang to greet you” is of a piece with figuring gone wild. For we might imagine that the stranger, now a he, “bang to rights,” would like to have our house.

“bang to rights” is suggestive. We imagine he assumes it’s his complete right to take what we principally own, our house, just as he seems to us to have lodged himself in our garden. 

But also “bang to rights” might suggest our uneasiness, perhaps guilt, over we what we as haves have and what the stranger as a have not has not.

After all, we come to see him, as “cuckoo” in a ragged wool coat of some kind, worn, it turns out, in “unaccustomed heat,” a crazy person igniting our sense of his denied rights, his right to have some of what we have and he doesn’t.

Then our figuring—thinking, imagining, in wild speculation—runs on further, turning sharply from the bedraggled assertion of rights to a, 

“new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley 
and roses.”

With this, figuring has reached its apex. 

Now, a certain detached, calm,  rational sobriety asserts itself in the poem’s last four lines. Vernacularity ends. The language is now formal 

“Meanwhile” which is to say, now or at the time, and is also to say, background becomes foreground, becomes actuality, there is “unaccustomed heat.” The actuality of the heat intrudes on and moves to the side all the figuring. It makes itself momentarily predominant.

Metaphor returns with the second “Meanwhile” as we have the metaphor of a sky “tunnelling upward.” We can think of the thickness, the enervating heaviness, of “unaccustomed heat.” We can then imagine the sky trying in effect to dig up through the heat to reach its own lightness, likened to digging underground or through massive rock to create a new opening. 

The poem’s end with the juxtaposition of  order—“sense of proportion” in tandem with managed prettiness, “golden section of elder hedge”—and a kind of subsuming finale—chaos, but, then again, chaos as observed and understood —“then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.” Paradoxically here, the speaker  intellectually notes the prevailing chaos.

So, might we theorize another aspect of lodging given the shift to the more formal language in the last four lines right after “your cow-parsley and roses”?

That aspect may be this: with the conversational vernacular—“You could figure it…”—gone, do the last four lines, with their echo of Wallace Stevens, signify a return to more conventional, formal poetry? 

If so, then has what’s gone before with its colloquial conversational quality lodged within the formal frame provided by the last four lines? Might it be that what precedes them is a poem within a poem? 

The poem ends with “then”  leading into the chaos of “the disgraced paddock gone wild.” Does this last portion of the last line recapitulate the unsettling shock of the stranger in the garden as evident in the wildness of the figuring welling up from the unconscious?  

Therefore, in sum, The Lodger immerses itself in how we might understand the unfolding of responses triggered by the shock of a strange, seemingly crazy man, seemingly come from out of nowhere, taking up lodging, so to say, in one’s garden and in one’s consciousness and imagination. 

A Reading Of Charles Reznikoff’s Poem, The city breaks in houses to the sea, uneasy with waves

The city breaks in houses to the sea, uneasy with waves, 

Charles Reznikoff

The city breaks in houses to the sea, uneasy with waves,
And the lonely sun clashes like brass cymbals.

In the streets truck-horses, muscles sliding under the steaming hides,
Pound the sparks flying about their hooves;
And fires, those gorgeous beasts, squirm in the furnaces,
Under the looms weaving us.

At evening by cellars cold with air of rivers at night,
We, whose lives are only a few words,
Watch the young moon leaning over the baby at her breast
And the stars small to our littleness.

The slender trees stand alone in the fields
Between the roofs of the far town
And the wood far away like a low hill.

In the vast open
The birds are faintly overheard.

My view of it:

The first stanza sets a scene from a distant perspective. It sees the city as a whole and it sets its edge, its breaking, suggesting the city itself breaking as in the break of day as does the day itself—daybreak, and also the houses like waves crashing or breaking on the shore. 

So “uneasy with waves” may suggest this imagined action of the houses and more directly the waves crashing on the shore. In that, “uneasy” suggests a foreboding, ominously creeping note, importing the speaker’s ominous sense of how he takes in the scene. 

Adding to the foreboding sense is the image of the sun clashing like brass cymbals, suggesting an analogue in onomatopoeic sound—clashes—to the what at times seems like a visible shock to us, the sudden glare of the sun as it breaks into the day.

The scene then in the second stanza moves into some of the business of the city. We’re put in view of the street and horse drawn carts or wagons, horse-trucks—with a striking and revealing image of the horses working—“muscles sliding under the steaming hides.” The horses are in labour, their hooves making sparks as they pound the pavement.   We might imagine a very hot day coming from the clashing lonely sun in the connected imagery of fire and heat in “steaming,” “sparks,” “fires” and “furnaces.” 

The perspective dances. We see the horses from the outside but moving to particular observation—hooves and sparks. Then the observation moves to the overarching and somewhat admiring, “fires” to “gorgeous beasts” that “squirm in the “furnaces”—the stifling heat of the day making the scene an environment of furnaces, as the sun bounces off the the pavement in more intense heat and as the pavement itself is brought to a boil—to, most overarching, “Under the looms weaving us,.”

This fuses looming, as in what ominously awaits us—looming ahead, and some design, forces weaving us, which sounds lyrical and contrasts with the harshness, though altogether something determinate.

The clash of the brass cymbal lonely sun is part of what joins the first two stanzas, generating the heat and fire that runs through the second stanza.

Then, next stanza, day becomes night and heat turns to cold as again after the overarching, particularity emerges, “an evening by cellars cold,” as we are grounded back onto the street and its houses and their cellars. 

We can imagine at night winds coming off an adjacent river (and the sea?) as the focus now turns for the first time to us, and we’re “downsized,” “We, whose lives are only a few words,” as though the commas bracketing this clause in punctuation signify how bracketed and small we are from an overarching point of view, what we’re only, it may seem: but there’s more.

Again the perspective shifts abruptly: we, comprised by our words, see a young moon, a sliver of moon, and imagine it maternally leaning over the baby it holds at her breast. And in an amazing line we watch “the stars small to our littleness,” fusing with some complexity our smallness yet with consciousness and imagination we create metaphors and imagery with what we see;  and we can reduce the size of the stars in our perception of them as small from our vantage point in watching them, “small to our littleness.”

The contrast of sun and moon and what is wrought from them by us is among what makes the first and this stanza cohere. 

And then next stanza, like in Hemingway, the scenes rolls out from immediate particular to the general. The city’s breaking houses structure our vision narrowing it to see only lonely slender trees in fields past the city, cut off in their wholeness from us by the roofs of the far town and then furthest away, far away, a “wood” seen “like a low hill.” 

Out there in the far away vast open, unlike the circumscribed and circumscribing-us congested city we faintly overhear birds, as though we’re listening in to something we shouldn’t or shouldn’t be able to, but nevertheless can still get an ear’s glimpse of.

Running through the poem is the idea of making poetry, with uneasy or unconventional breaks, with the poet as the muse weaving with his loom the words he’s made up of, of an encompassing vision of it all that delights:

in the poetic shifts; 

in the ideas made flesh in language; 

in the sheer poetry of what encompasses: 

overview; and 

particularity. 

And the encompassing vision delights in what take the measure of moon and stars and transform them, and in what can hear, overhear, a distant song, when it might be thought we can’t.

So, in a nutshell, what binds this poem? 

My view, the paradox of us as comprised by only a few words but by them we take in through art varieties of shifting perspectives and the moods they evoke; and by them we transform in size and meaning what surrounds us.