Writing Back: Answering Marvell

 

ERROR #5210b

My computer hard drive, um, seems to be dying. At least I think it is. 

Every time I boot up the computer in the morning, I get a little alarm sound and the Dell Warning System tells me that there is an emerging error on my main drive. Tracing it down through the QR codes provided (like there’s some secret puzzle I must set out to solve) –anyway, tracing it down tells me that it’s a “write-buffer cache error.”  No ideas. So, we look that up.

In short (because the articles I find are not short at all), it’s when the files on my computer are writing anything to memory. For instance, right now I’m recording this, and my words are being written to some audio file. Then, when I’m done, I’ll hit “Save.” The time in between my recording and that “Save” button, there’s a bunch of words going “somewhere,” and that somewhere is a cache memory that I’m temporarily writing to. Got it? 

Put another way, if I don’t have this write-buffer cache thing working (and I don’t right now), if my program or computer go “crash” before I hit Save, it’s all gone. And, that would kinda suck. I’ve also found that because of this error, if I write so much to my write-buffer at one time that it overflows, my whole computer seizes up until the cache memory can catch up. And the risk of a crash goes up.  

Have you ever read something, closed the book with a thousand ideas, and thought, “Wow, that was really good. I never really thought about this before”?  Cool. I knew it. Now, how often has this happened? You get up from your reading chair and walk to the kitchen for a drink. While doing that, you see a few bits of mail and a To Do list on the table. Then by the time you get to the kitchen for your drink, the cat starts complaining. You glance at the time on your phone and realize that you missed seven notifications. But then there’s a strange sound on the street outside and you look out the window to be sure the garbage truck isn’t on fire or a chainsaw crew hasn’t started surprise work on your trees. (And I’m certain that has never happened to me once, at all, nope.)

But you see where this is going. What happened to all those crispy questions and powerful ideas you were experiencing not two minutes before? At some point, you remember that you were reading them and then forgot them, and now . . . disappointment. Your cache memory for the write buffer overflowed. And, in my case, my hard drive is crumbling.

Somehow, we need to hit the “Save” button before all of that happens. Now we could turn all of our reading into notebooks and lessons, jotting down what we think and know, perhaps to use those notes again. It’s a good strategy, and I recommend it especially for non-fiction where you want what we call “takeaways.”

But for poetry and fiction, this feels a little too unnatural, a little too much the “college classroom” approach, sometimes. And yet, you’re right: the best “Save” button we have is still writing it down. 

One thing I do is use a voice recording app that transcribes what I say to it. There’s a ton of apps that do this–even your Word Processor probably does–so little point in listing them all. I use an app called VoiceNotes. With AI doing the transcription, it can often synthesize points, clean up your pauses and umms, organize your thoughts across several readings, and then export them as you wish. I speak to it what I’m thinking before getting up from wherever I’m reading. Then by the time I sit down to a real computer to work on stuff, the notes are there in tidy order. It’s my Save button, and I don’t have to have a notebook with me.

Because my personal biological hard drive isn’t working as well as it always has. I’ll be replacing the one on my computer, hopefully as soon as I hit the “Publish” button on this episode. But replacing the mental hard drive? More challenging.

And still, what do I do with those notes? Once on the computer, they can also be forgotten pretty easily, set aside into a kind of digital dustbin, promising one day to enlighten me all over again. One day. Nah. I need these ideas in my brain. I need to have them stay with me while I pay a few utility bills, kick–er feed–the cat, and yell at the chainsaw dudes. 

Writing things down is good, but it’s not enough. The kind of writing I need to do–the kind that will burn my questions and big ideas into my persona more deeply–is writing back. 

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Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and we’re going to become a kind of expert on Andrew Marvell, by yelling at him.

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Matching Sabers

So I’ve been talking about talking about–that is, sending us out into the world to talk about literature, to be an active participant in the spreading of important ideas, if not for the world’s sake, at least for our own. 

But we can also, as a means of settling our heads around difficult ideas, write back, as well. Now I know,  for some this may be easier than talking, and for others it may seem a lot harder. After all, talking isn’t permanent; there is no record of what was said and we can revise our thinking easily as we go. And I gave you lots of easy ideas to get started, from casual literary fishing at the workplace to crashing author signings to talk books.

Writing though feels, well, more writerly, more permanent somehow, as if when we put something down, we’re taking “a stand” and are ready for slings and arrows of outrage.

I get it. And you’d be right. If we write and publish what we write (which I would also encourage), it can feel like this. What with people finding our MySpace posts from 2006 and holding them up for sinister examination, the world can seem cruel. Facebook keeps showing me reminders of what I was thinking fourteen years ago, and no, I certainly do not want to repost that memory of  the Limp Bizkit concert, thank you. (I thought I had repressed it.) (And update: I just found out while confirming my dates that they made another album after 2011’s hideous Gold Cobra. Who knew? Not even Eastern Europe liked that album, and they love music!)

Where were we? Yeah. Writing and publishing. Now relax. First, nothing says you cannot think about your writing like you do speaking, as a moment of time, not an eternal judgment. What others do with it is their business. And who you show your writing to is also your choice: that’s what I mean by publish, to push it into some sphere of public. Share your stuff with friends (which is largely what Marvell did with his poetry) or post it to a website, trusting that it will get lost among the scouring search bots for all time.

The point is, write those ideas down. And, if you compose something from notes and ideas you’ve written, that is what gets it burned into your brain. That is what makes you a kind of expert, what they say in the biz, literally an “author”ity. Imagine the talk! “Hey, you’re the one who authored that story about Andrew Marvell’s pet pig!” or “I loved it when you said that Marvell’s love of a ‘growing vegetable’ earned him a place on Freud’s couch! Love love love it!”

This is what we’re here today to do. And I’m going to offer you my approach and sample for doing it. Also, I’m going to suggest writing back to Marvell in one of the oldest and most traditional of approaches, one that will seem difficult but has more pay-offs for us in terms of evading accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More: we’re going to write poetry back to poetry.

The Sport of Kings

We’re not the first to do this, of course. For ages of poetry, this is exactly what bards and musicians, courtiers and rappers have done: match fire with fire. Use and build upon the old, turn about and refresh, tear down and stand on the dying corpse of who had gone before them. We have already seen how Marvell himself built upon a 2000 year old tradition of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More love poetry in writing “To His Coy Mistress,” and I’ve noted that the tradition of such poetry continued after him and even to today. 

We–that’s you and me–we will enter that tradition, as well, place by publishing our own verse into the great river of poem talking to poem, of the literary cultural currents. True, we’d best think of our inclusion as more a tributary, maybe a brook or stream. 

But we do it first for ourselves, to mark ourselves as part of the authorial discourse; second, we do it for all humankind, to perpetuate and elevate the topics that we ourselves wonder. No mere imitators, we. We have questions! We’ve carried them now a few weeks. We’ve turned them over, done some living and reading in other spaces, and now have arrived at a time to let them crystallize a bit. To dump the cache of questions into a firm foundation of memory for later use.

But like I said, we’re not the first to have done it. To refresh your memory, you may remember the famous Annie Finch poem, “Coy Mistress,” which I alluded to before and have linked in the Show Notes. In the poem, she has the previously silent mistress respond to Marvell’s speaker: “Sir, I am not a bird of prey;/ a Lady does not seize the day.”

But what I really like about Finch’s poem is that she argues exactly for what we are undertaking here. She says,

The Grave’s not just the body’s curse;

no skeleton can pen a verse!

So while this numbered World we see,

let’s sweeten Time with poetry.

 

She does not reject him outright, but gently points him back to his own facility with verse to use and praise her properly, to let love unfold. It’s a kinder rejection than I might have given him.

And it’s far kinder than A. D. Hope gave him in the poem, “His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell,” published in 1978. He writes also of the lady’s response, but to the word “coy,” she says:

The ill-bred miss, the bird-brained Jill,

May simper and be coy at will;

A lady, sir, as you will find,

Keeps counsel, or she speaks her mind

And also:

Readers will quote those lines, I trust,

Till you and I and they are dust;

But I, your destined prey, must look

Less at the bait than at the hook

It’s a long and extraordinary poem, and each of these is a lot of fun, calling Marvell out for his speaker’s nonsense. 

You’ll notice, too, that both of these poems grab lines and images from Marvell and imitate his style of iambic tetrameter couplets. These make a fine match of verse vs. verse, but let’s not hold ourselves to these standards.

After all, I read to you before M. Di Genova’s limerick, which boils all of Marvell’s metaphysical luggage down to a single carry-on package:

Past poets and I both know how 

To write elegant verse to your brow, 

But we don’t have time 

For that kind of rhyme

Let’s go at it like buzzards right now!

Yes, there are a lot of ways to go about this, but the path forward to writing back to Marvell is already open, but not so well traveled that there isn’t room for more of us.

But what do we write?

 

What’s On Your Mind? Marvell Re-Ironied

A few episodes back, I talked about what questions I carried with me after our close examination of Marvell’s poem, and I asked you to do the same, to form up some questions that bothered you, that stayed with you, the kind of thing you might have jotted down, thrown onto a Voice Recording app, or just been turning about in your head. 

Those questions are our way in. Notice with all three of the poems we just mentioned—Di Genova, Hope, and Finch—every one of them centered on the surface seduction that Marvell offered, the arrogance and ignorance of the speaker’s power play against a young silent woman. It’s good stuff, and maybe that’s where you are, too. But we, you and I, have looked at questions far broader than these, as well. It’s hard to get past those surface levels of the poem, as sexually provocative as they are. But if you have another approach you’d rather try, there are no rules!

That’s where I’m going, too. Finch and others have done the work they need to on Marvell’s seduction, and frankly, I’m already pretty set on my opinions about it. It’s the other parts of the poem, the ones that still trouble me, that I want to wrestle with.  In the earlier episode I offered six questions, actually, that I “carried with me.”

The first two were what I might do about my own mortality and my current life, questions that Marvell’s speaker only gives wrong answers to, and the poet offers no illumination. The others were on the relationship between rhetoric and Reason, why the biological urge to legacy is so strong, and Marvell’s own role and responsibility for what he has written. Finally, I worried about how I could keep all of this in my head, let alone try to solve it for myself.

I’m addressing that last question in part by this strategy of writing back. Now, it’s fair to say that I do not do this with everything that I read, and I’m not suggesting at all that you write a poem back for every poem you read or a novel for every Sarah Maas book you’ve seen. (I know that line probably won’t age well.) But it is fair to say that I write something for just about every single major work that I read. Sometimes it’s notes for another project, like for research; sometimes it’s a journal of writing and thinking ideas I keep in general; sometimes it’s a book review; but often it’s something more solid still, a poem, essay, story, etc. 

For this poem, I want to address my first two questions together: What should I do with my own mortality? And What should I do in the Now? The answer from Marvell’s speaker is that he can do nothing about encroaching death and time, so he hopes that seducing this woman into rough sex will slow it all down. It’s illogical, even in its best moments, though sinister in its persuasive power. The carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy of living life in full sensuality feels more like a clever excuse than a real motive from him, like he does not believe it. Or, stranger, that the seduction is the excuse for exploring the philosophical question, and he does not care whether or not it succeeds. Now, I’m not going to review all of that here, but there are four healthy episodes about a month ago that chew that all up pretty thoroughly.

So I can’t believe Marvell’s speaker. But what can I believe and do?  

My gut response, (that from having read some other carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poetry and some basic philosophy from the Greek Classical Age and in existentialismA broad name for a wide range of philosophies. Emphasis is o... More), offer me some ideas:

Marvell’s speaker is older; his death is imminent, at least in his mind. This is why he accuses her of growing old too soon. Like so many older folks looking back, he has regrets. He did not do enough, accomplish enough, mark his territory deeply enough. Now, nearer the end, those regrets turn to anxiety and fear: his life has not been meaningful. He seeks to postpone his death (thus all that stuff about slowing down Time) in order to make a mark. That he wants to do this through a mere sexual conquest while deceiving another is merely absurdly stupid … and damaging, dangerous. This is what I’m thinking. 

In short, what I’m thinking is that there is another layer of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More in this poem that we have not discussed: That the speaker makes a carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More plea but he has missed what carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More is. 

Carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More is something far larger of a philosophy than sexual hedonism. It may even be bigger than Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins” makes it out to be, or Peter Keating in Dead Poet’s Society. All of these talk about making love while you’re young, doing whatever you want without worry of consequence. Now, that’s a bigger question, still, but our Mistress in all this?  For Marvell’s speaker, she’s really a displaced symbol of his anxiety. Death is coming and there is no changing that; he will lose, his flesh will rot. Win her or lose her, it makes no difference. And he knows it. What he has really lost are the opportunities for a life of meaning.

Now, as I said, there are a lot of ways I could approach writing about this in a poem, but it’s clear to me right now that having the mistress reply again isn’t going to cut it. I have to go at it another way.

I could follow the Di Genova method and just knock out a limerick on the topic. It might go something like . . . 

All chariots winged he does loathe

Though Catullus and Horace he quoth

No nights seized or days plucked

All philosophies he’s ducked

His psych from age twelve proved no growth

 

Hmmph. Not even a very good limerick, at that.  Sure, it’s got that death image of the chariot, the references to Classical thinking and carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More (the seizing and plucking part), but then the rest isn’t even really addressing my concerns, is it? The limerick is more like rock-throwing than a real engagement with the ideas, Marvell’s or mine.

 

The School of Reply

To write back, to engage thoughtfully, to build upon an idea or refute it, is to look first at the object we reply to. We must use it, just as Marvell used Horace and Herrick and dozens of other Cavalier poets in the royal court of his day. And we must also add something of our own to it. But first, we must use the poem, demonstrate that it is the object of our scrutiny for readers and that we understand it. 

In general, there are three writing strategies, and we can use any of them in any combination to achieve our aim:

1. We can imitate its style, in the manner of a parody or satire. This is do-able (it’s what Hope and Finch did), but this is difficult, to match Marvell’s talent at poetry enough to then add to or change it.
2. We can offer an argument in response, a reply which alludes to his imagery and ideas, but to which we have our own take or application. 
3. We can revisit the scene of the poem, revising the moment to our own needs.

We can start from scratch, too, showing no dependency upon Marvell’s work at all, but this is much more difficult to offer readers a means to see the dialogue, the continuation of the former argument. 

I like the first three because they also attune us to the poetic techniques of Marvell or whoever else we respond to. We are compelled to meet those techniques and use them, whether style, allusion, setting, structure, or something else. Style too hard? Then try allusion: grab one or two of his images to wrestle with and re-use. It’s probably the most common approach. Or just rewrite the scene to suit your exploration differently. “That’s Marvell writing it, but if I had written that scene, it would have gone this way . . . “  Whatever happens, through the imitation and response, our writing improves.

But we need not imitate too closely. No need to hem us in tight. All we need to accomplish in our poem is that readers see it’s about Marvell. At the very worst (and this is done frequently by poets who don’t think their readers will see it), give the poem a title or sub-title that makes the relationship clear. “To Mr. Marvell” will do, or “A poem about ‘To His Coy Mistress.’” What do you care? We’re writing this to help cement ideas in our heads!

For myself, I tried parody at first, thinking that if the speaker is so afraid of Death, let’s have Death come and ironically seduce him:

Had you but world enough and time

This coyness, my Lord, were no crime.

But this soon struck me as lame, a simple reversal of lines and not very satisfying. 

No, I liked the basic scene of someone making a case or an argument, and I love so much of Marvell’s imagery. And, after having written so much formal verse, matching some of Marvell’s style is certainly possible, as well. 

What if . . . what if Death did appear to Marvell’s speaker? What would the speaker finally own up to? Would he confess? Or would he dare to try and seduce Death, too?  Now that sounded like fun. If so, I wanted to create three sections of argument, like Marvell’s poem, but perhaps ironically reversed to accomplish the task. I’d experiment with the imagery and even the rhythm and rhyme schemes along the way, the speaker “testing the waters,” as it were. 

Yeah. So, here is what I wrote. It’s still in draft form, but I think it will do to make the points I’ve been making:

 

To His Bold Master

 

To His Bold Master

 

Do not say it’s time, at last,
That’s all run through my hourglass

My heart deserves an age, at least:
This flesh infirm, though still a man
These legs, though lean, may hobble still
And make of life what worth they can

In action, true, I’ve done but part
(Though reason strong, I’ve idled set)
No diems plucked nor carpes seized 
My eyes too full to think regret

My thumbs have scrolled most ev’ry clip:
ASMRed, I’ve been Porn-hubbed,
And Prime sales, too, I’ve dealed and clicked
And thrice I’ve read Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

But do not say your Chariot’s here
When I’d embrace this life most dear

Each day you grant I’d live it vast
In public space and private home
In honor, ease, and open love
Spread arms wide, smell bud and loam

Sing full and bold, each moment kissed
I’d tailor shirts, I’d bow in streets,
Let echo cries of will and whim
In all things know fond beauty’s seat

And most of all, I’d world alight
With flame of choice and purpose bright
Spur each and all to find their path
And free be they to seek delight

So therefore, while your solemn eye
Doubts me, stands grim, my soul to try

Give this life one sporting chance
To demonstrate this flesh well used
Cycle back this time again
(Which, before, my course confused)

To cherish sun and languish not!
… And afterwards I’ll gladly go
(For no grief comes for those who act)
I’ll board your stage, my face aglow.

All this, regard, sweetness and strength,
Would shower on each human found
My lessons learned, each instant’s length,
Both love and logic locked and sound.

 

What To Do With It

I’m not unhappy with it, as a start. Personally, I really love the idea of rhyming Pornhub with an Ayn Rand novel, but that stanza really seems anachronistic that way. I just wanted to dispose of the idea that 1) the speaker sees that he has wasted his life, 2) can better see what a real life of meaning would be, and 3) therefore begs for the chance to do good. 

Of course, of course, that last section stumbles more in meter, in balance, and we have every reason to disbelieve him. More, we can imagine that–once he takes these same images and polishes them up some–he can use them to do some real seduction. Yes, my poem is a prequel to Marvell’s, exposing the elements which motivate the speaker and the reasons for our distrust of him. More, it begins to outline what I think carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More really is, not what Marvell showed it to be through this speaker’s more ignorant verse in the seduction. To “pluck  the day” is to embrace the days we have.

I’m not going to pretend that all my questions have been answered here, that I now understand what irked me so much in the original poem, but it’s a good start for me. I better grasp just where and why he’s wrong. He wants a chance to choose differently, and what’s more, he wants to help others see the same happiness and meaning in their own lives. But, at our backs, we always hear where this will turn, don’t we? We know that, as bold as he speaks here, we still cannot trust him, nor perhaps trust ourselves, to keep the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More promise. Shortly, he will use the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More imagery here infamously to deprive another of happiness. 

Did Marvell see all of this? I don’t know. Cannily, he offers no clear insight himself, only that his speaker is dangerous in his predation and in his philosophy. 

But what Marvell has done for me, at least at this point, is offer a wonderful opportunity to talk back to him, to engage the subject, to clarify my thinking about exactly what is wrong with that seduction, and thereby give me some ideas about what may be right. And we’re not done; there are other ways to write back to what we’ve read, other places to put our writing, but all that’s for a later talk.

I still have questions. As an older guy, I look back at some choices I’ve made that have been less . . . meaningful than they might have been. Who can’t do the same? But none of what’s past determines absolutely what is. 

As Annie Finch writes to us in “Coy Mistress,”

How could we two write lines of rhyme

were we not fond of numbered Time

and grateful to the vast and sweet

trials his days will make us meet?

That’s all for today. Think some more on your questions, what you might say to Marvell, and then,

Go write something.

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Outro

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Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.