Serious Glitz
On rhyme, ratbag poetry, and Hayden Carruth
“[Y]ou will notice that I repeat the eternal American tic of thinking about art in terms of its techniques. […] The danger is that we may take technical variations more seriously than they warrant.”—Donald Hall introducing Contemporary American Poetry, 1961.
On the day I first looked into what an iamb is, things were pretty quiet. It was mid-2020, and the rules in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia included mandatory masks, a one-hour limit on time spent outside (essential trips and exercise only), no visitors, no gatherings. Cops could pull you over to check you hadn’t travelled more than five kilometres from your place of residence, and the nightly curfew kicked in at 9pm. Given all this, I enrolled in an online poetry workshop.
This particular workshop, run by Brooklyn Poets, was on rhyme. I was confident I already knew everything there was to know on that subject, but my only other activities were drinking, picking fights, crying, and running slow laps of the neighbourhood during my exercise hour. The workshop gave me a precious opportunity to think about something other than case numbers, ICU admissions, and how many days had passed since I’d done something normal.
It turned out I was clueless about rhyme, and clueless about all the structural stuff that goes with it. It also turned out I’d lucked into a workshop that wasn’t just another six-week course of everyone’s-a-genius group therapy. Instead, Joshua Mehigan taught us the rules of “versification”—a word I’d never properly understood. Josh would later become a dear friend, but for now, he returned me to a version of myself I recognised: a nauseating teacher’s pet.
Josh’s assignments demanded time, attention, and a touch of obsession to get a result. I was more the dash-it-off-and-hope-it’s-brilliant type, and hated how slowly I had to go to write a decent draft. Eventually, finally, I pulled together a rhyming poem that worked—a Petrarchan sonnet on the topic of running (at least it wasn’t about sourdough). When Josh told me he liked it, I was smug as hell.
More blank months passed. Some glimmers of good news, much more bad. Melbourne haltingly returned to a distorted version of the city it used to be, and I kept enrolling in workshops with Josh. By the time we were allowed to gather in groups of up to ten people (indoors!), I not only understood iambs and trochees, I also knew about different types of rhyme, and could almost remember what the two parts of a sonnet are called. I still hadn’t managed to top my running poem, but as 2021 crawled to a close, I was waxed, vaxxed, and ready to debate the existence of spondees.
The only problem was that in my enthusiasm, I’d wandered away from the herd. There was exactly one other living Australian poet who relied on metre and rhyme—a Sydneysider I’d never heard of called Stephen Edgar.[i] For the first time in my writing life, “thinking about art in terms of its techniques” seemed like a serious, even urgent concern. And that left me stranded between the world I knew—the Aussie free verse free-for-all—and an entirely different world where these ratbag strategies would get me precisely nowhere.
Obviously, no one was asking me renounce anything, pledge any allegiance, or join any team. But even as a baby versifier, everything I’d written up to that point seemed deeply unimpressive. At the same time, I couldn’t easily abandon the free-for-all. Whatever standing I had as a poet—not much, but hard-won—I’d gained amongst the ratbags. The last thing I wanted to do was start again.
I settled into a kind of paralysis. Poems came out wrong, or not at all, for over a year. Then I happened upon a book called Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.
As he’s writing this book, Hayden Carruth is approaching 75, living in a tiny town in Madison County with his young poet wife Joe-Anne. As a writer, he’s pretty much incapable of producing a bad poem. As a man, he’s a wreck. He drinks Chablis until the sun comes up, then takes pills to sleep. He’s broke. He’s “exiled” himself, and misses his friends. He can’t stay out of the past. The present continues to throw tragedy in his face—his daughter is dying, wars keep breaking out. Joe-Anne is his fourth wife (“a disgrace but there it is,” he writes), and her presence is a shining thread running through his misery. When it’s published in 1996, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey will win Carruth the National Book Award.
I pulled this book off a library shelf in the middle of a desultory Melbourne winter, mainly because the title’s so weird. Leafing through it, I had a rare feeling—that mix of recognition and relief that comes with knowing you’ve found a friend on the page. I thought I was alone. You were there all along.
Because I could see, straight away, that here was a poet who could inhabit all worlds at once. Carruth takes technique seriously, but with that, he’s always moving—sticking close to a formal structure in one poem, then using a freer line in the next. He can play by the rules and he can improvise. Introducing Carruth’s 1985 Selected, Galway Kinnell puts it this way: “Technically, he is a virtuoso.” Kinnell might be overstating things, but virtuoso or not, I knew this was a poet I could learn from.
Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey is a good collection, not a great one. While Carruth can’t really write a bad poem at this stage of his career, he can get lost in his own specifics, and the arrogance that mars his earlier work hasn’t entirely left him. Still, when he nails it, the results are stunning. About halfway through the book, a little poisoned dart appears. I haven’t been the same since I read it:
The Last Poem in the World
Would I write it if I could?
Bet your glitzy ass I would.The entire thing is one hard-working title plus one rhyming tetrameter couplet. It sums up the insanity of poetic ambition in a couple of seconds. The choice of the word “glitzy” leaves me thunderstruck. It’s silly, girly, risky, and essential. The poem dies without it.
Kinnell describes Carruth’s free verse as “so invisibly artful that under its spell we are not in the presence of a poem, but of the world.” That’s clearly nonsense, but it’s not hard to see why he’s hyperbolic. “A Summer with Tu Fu” shows just how effortless Carruth’s line can be, and how casually he can break it without damaging the poem:
The evening rain is over. The flowers begin to raise their heads. What book shall I read tomorrow? Over what deathless poem will I fall asleep? Won’t these crickets ever shut up! Straining broken cork from my wine with broken teeth.
Writing about his various encounters with Carruth, W.S. Di Piero summed him up this way: “He lived so deeply inside himself that he makes the oily, after-dinner-speaker-type poets we’re all familiar with seem like carnie shills.” This explains why Carruth so often ends up talking to himself in his poems, as he does in “Alteration”—a poem that leans on rhyme to do its quiet work:
You thought growing older would be more of the same, going a little slower, walking a little lame. But you knew, or you were a fool, that alteration is what we keep; tonight will not be the equal of last night, even in sleep.
Plenty of poets include formal poems in their collections just to show you they can. A rhyming sonnet, a tedious pantoum, and an obligatory sestina are all there to make sure you know they know there are rules. But there’s something else going on in Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey. Carruth can’t stand to take just one approach. He must keep moving—between the poems, and within the poems themselves. In “Faxes to William”, written to an imaginary friend, he goes from flippant to severe in the space of a few stanzas. Here’s where the poem begins:
Some poets write blurbs, William, and some do not. And it is by a law of nature that the former envy the latter desperately though they, the former, can do nothing to release themselves from the trap, squirm and prevaricate as they may. They have unmade their beds and they must schlep in them.
“Schlep in” barely makes sense, but Carruth’s having too much fun to care. That doesn’t last. As he nears the end of the poem, he’s close to furious:
Let me tell you, William, something crucial, something absolutely basic, with which I know you’ll agree. Otherwise we have no basis for this colloquy. Justice can never contain injustice. I don’t care what the president says.
Unlike Kinnell, I’m not trying to make the case that Carruth is any kind of master. He’s not even the best example of a poet who works in and outside formal constraints (putting it that way, I can hear Josh’s voice in my head: free verse is a constraint!). If I merely wanted a poet who does both, I could’ve turned to Bishop, or Les Murray, or even Thom Gunn. But I needed more than that to get beyond my paralysis. I needed a ratbag who knew the rules—someone who could be funny and consequential, light and serious. I needed to remember that in poetry, there’s always room to move.
There are writers who never look sideways as they go after what they want. Then there are writers like myself, forever searching for another teacher, another guide, another person to grant permission. I loved learning the rules. I love playing by them today. But a ratbag can’t make rules her everything.
About once a month, a bunch of us get together to share poems—our own and other people’s—in between gossip and giggling. We’re pretty catholic in our tastes. As we go around the circle, a poem by Pope might be followed by some Chelsea Minnis, some Larkin, a little Mayakovsky, then a bit from the latest local collection before we break for tea and cigarettes. Officially, we just read the poems aloud without expecting much comment. Unofficially, we want to impress one another and, ideally, make each other laugh.
At a recent gathering, I started to wonder how those assembled might react to “The Last Poem in the World”. I argued with myself as my turn approached. Would it land, or would they be entirely turned off? I braced for the polite silence that always follows a dud, and read it out. They erupted.
“Glitzy?!” “Glitzy!” “That’s so good.” “Who’s Hayden Carruth?” “How does he get away with that?” “Can I see the book?”
I smiled to myself, smug as hell.
Alice Allan produced the long-running podcast Poetry Says and is a co-host on SLEERICKETS. Her debut collection The Empty Show was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award. Her work has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, Sydney Review of Books, HEAT, and Australian Book Review.
[i] I definitely should’ve known who Stephen Edgar was, given that he’s been publishing since 1979, is a favourite of Clive James’, and has a Prime Minister’s Literary Award to his name. I later interviewed Stephen and discovered he was a sweet, thoughtful guy who writes absolute killers.
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I loved this essay. "A ratbag who knows the rules"! Great phrase. I agree that "glitzy" is striking but am curious about its implications. It is upgrading "sweet" in the cliché "you bet your sweet ass." But what makes the interlocutor's (HC talking to himself and/or the reader) ass "glitzy" here? Is it an interest in poetry, which makes the word a self-undercutting comment on poetry's prestige -- that is, there is something genuinely glitzy, or luminous, or transcendent, about the art, though it also feels ridiculous & self-important to say so, especially when one looks upon the very un-glitzy details of one's own life, hence the word-choice that as it were heckles itself? A great trick, and one that requires something more, or other, than knowledge of "rules" to pull off!
Such a pleasure to read new prose from you. I know how much work went into this, and yet I can't smell any labor when I'm reading it. It all comes across as effortless ratbaggery. That's my girl.