The poem "Richard Noel" is Harry Thomas' slap atobscurantist modernism in all its forms, resisting the lure of diffuse and theoblique for the clipped, staccato version of Rudyard Kipling, although Kiplinghimself would have furnished the fife and brass to accentuate and enliven therattatatat of the military drums. Thomas' poem is a rhythmic straight jacket,the confined emotionalism of someone trying to keep their bleeding heart to asteady, unexcited beat. If only if he'd actually let it all go to provide uswith something fiercer, more explosive than this soggy parody of Hemingway'ssuccinct, staccato  effusions about aPersonal Code.

It is admirable, one supposes, that a student gets theirhomework turned in on time despite an affliction, but this tribute, with itshushed bathos, seems very, very silly indeed. There is something remarkable inthe attempt to overstate a point using such a crabbed rhetoric; the clichés andthe conventional wisdom toward the sick and the afflicted area boiled , chippedand chiseled to their irreducible essences, leaving only a salty residue ofuninteresting thinking. There is ossification here, there is poet tasting, butthere is no poetry, such as we understand it. So what does one do to mend thistendency of amateurs to compose and distribute this stanza'd insult to theeyes? Exactly nothing. Nothing can be done to cure the lagging tastes of thenaive.

There is that large faction of the otherwise diminutivepoetry audience that likes its verse rhyming, rocking in a cadence thatsuggests a three-legged clogging competition, stanzas that are morally coherentand as comprehensible as a stack of pancakes, and the seldom discussed aspectamong the rest of us self-declared elites fighting back gag reflexes is thatthis more or less a permanent state of affairs in this odd and contentiouscorner of the literary world. For all the chatter some of us offer up aboutbeing ecumenical. inclusive and appreciative of the broadness contemporarycontains with regards to style, aesthetics, and the subtly differentiatedconcerns each of the coexisting schools collectively undertake to have theirrespective poems achieve their results, many of us choke with contempt anddespair over the obvious if unacknowledged truth that doggerel, poesy, poettasting and all the loutish rest are permanent fixtures in the literary culturethat thrives beyond the ramparts.

There are no mass conversions forthcoming when it comes toconvincing the rest of the poetry world that they’d be better off reading thestronger stuff. Consumers know what they want to read, and the amateur poet,not beholden to particular school of poetics or allegiances formed while theywere a graduate student, will write exactly how they see fit, daring, strangeenough, to write poems that make sense.

I don't think there is anything subtle or understated about"Richard Noël”. This set up is basically the plot line of the old ABC-TVdisease-themed "Movies of the Week", where the usual tragedy wasintroduced in the first act, the resolve of the afflicted is tested as he orshe struggles to get on with their life is shown in the second, and the thirdact concludes with the victim teaching a doubting observer a lesson amountingto the life can be lived fully even with a hindering, perhaps fatal ailment.These soapy melodramas were churned out week after week, and what theirpopularity attests to is that this sort of by-the-numbers approach to conflictand resolution is what the public accepts as the height of dramatic action.

What's off putting to me is the patronizing tone Thomastakes toward his subject --the whole Kipling "Gunga Din" tone ofImperialist paternalism (where there is the narrator's surprise that what heregards as "civilized" virtues emerge from a heathen subject) weighsthis down with a sure paving of the narrative line to a limited series of genreconstrained conclusions.

It might be interesting for a writer to use this situationas a reason for soul searching and critical self-examination, but that is atricky balance to achieve, the getting the details of the afflicted's situationright with a delicately deployed tone , and having the narrator's introspectionnot overwhelm the poem and make the poem a bottomless confession. And whatought to be achieved by the third act, that final part of the dialectic, wouldneed to be an insight, an image, a phrase that is somewhat apart from theprevious two elements, something unique and not facile, as Thomas' finishingstanza was in "Richard Noel".

The execution is competent enough, although there isn’t aninteresting rhythm anywhere in the poem. It’s hemmed in by its lack ofdistinction or character. While I don’t the poet’s sincerity, this rhymes ofthe sing-song variety; each time a line alights upon a previous line’s phonictwin, there’s a perceptible crash, or a thud. It’s not that I’m opposed torhyme, but it is certain that in these days following the post modernistinsurrection a poet who rhymes should be exceptional. Thom Gunn gets the craftwrite with his verse, bringing in associations that surprise the readerexpecting a vague gloss of the subject matter due to the presence of rhyme. Hiswork is wonderfully controlled, musical, artfully constructed withoutindicating the labor it takes to compose with such a tuned ear:

There are other poets who write a fine poem in moretraditional modes who haven’t sacrificed their wit; one may argue onideological grounds that the formalism one comes across is a reactionarymovement linked in spirit and practice to a more rigid culturally conservativeimpulse, but for my part I prefer to judge the poet by the work. Eliot, Poundand others where profoundly nasty people who did work that with stood theirpropensities toward bigotry and general “A”-holism. It’s a simple matter ofjudging what works in the poem, and what doesn’t.