Larkin? Transcendent?

I guess I’m still in the “Painters and Poets” mode, but I just had to find a picture to fit Larkin. It sure took a while…but this picture finally seemed to fit. That one eye—not happy, not sad—just watching, observing, absorbing the outer world from within. Shadows of dim neutrality dominate the picture in somber blues and dismal grays. There is not a ripple in the water (no dreaded emotion or sentimentality) and the submerged body is alone, hidden (commitment? Hell, no!)
…But that’s not quite right either. There does not seem to be a word or phrase to describe Larkin. Heaney calls him the “transcendent anti-romantic.” I have to admit that is probably a fairly apt description, but “transcendent” seems too bright, too strong, too transformational for Larkin. The same would apply to “anti-romantic” too. Larkin seems to be too full of yearning to warrant the label “anti-romantic”…and too full of doubt and loss to warrant “transcendence.” And yet, there is a small sliver of light lurking in his reality. And then again, there is enough reality in his relationships to darken any romance. Go figure. His work is so full of complexities, irony, and cynicism that sometimes it takes a second or third reading to wrap a rope around the meaning. The thing about Larkin, though, is that you don’t mind having to re-read his work. He is just so damn in control of language that what he says is almost secondary to how he says it.
He can be profound or hysterically funny with equal skill. Larkin conveys such a haunting, distanced loneliness in “Here,” where “silence stands like heat” and “leaves unnoticed thicken,” “neglected waters quicken” in this “unfenced existence.” We are “swerving” right along with the speaker on this road “to solitude” passing the “tattoo shops” and “grim head-scarved wives.” Then from this same poet we get, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you” (This Be the Verse). He then deftly solves the dysfunctional family dilemma—something psychiatrists have been working on forever. Get the hell out as fast as you can “And don’t have any kids yourself.” This man swerves through the English language dishing out loss and laughter with uncanny adroitness.
I don’t think I can really choose between “dark, witty” and “yearning” because I am drawn to his use of language. I love “Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap” after life interferes with the fantasies derived from them in “A Study of Reading Habits.” I love how he tries to convey reverence with his irreverence in “Church Going” with the “brass and stuff / Up at the holy end,” where he donates a worthless “Irish sixpence” in the place where he “always end[s] much at a loss like this.” Despite all of this, he still somehow manages to suggest a withered hope because he keeps coming back where “it pleases me to stand in silence here.” And who couldn’t enjoy just the sound of “Lecturers, lispers, losels, loblolly-men, louts” in “Toads?” Or the “toad-like” something that “squats” in him with “hunkers [as] heavy as hard luck?” Then there is the sadness of “Coming” where one envisions a young man touched with the beauty of spring who feels like a child “who comes on a scene / Of adult reconciling, / And can understand nothing / But the unusual laughter, / And starts to be happy.” That “unusual” speaks volumes of the not forgotten childhood and might shed a clue as to why the young man of “Places, Loved Ones” “…never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground” in a relationship.
But his alligator eye was sharp, wasn’t it? He saw the world and knew exactly how to say what he saw in his definably unique way. He did find his “proper ground” after all.

Sheer Beauty in Schuyler's "The Bluet"

My favorite line in the movie “City of Angels,” is when Meg Ryan is eating a piece of fruit and Nicolas Cage asks her to describe what it tastes like. She responds, “Don’t you know what an orange tastes like?” Get ready. Here it is. This is IT…THE Line… “I don’t know what it tastes like to you.” That line gets me every time. It’s so tender, so caring, and so full of generous, attentive love.

The answer to that line could well serve as the mission statement for the New York School of Poets and Painters. Each painting and each poem is the embodiment of a particular moment in time seen through the lens of the artist. These men and women (probably breaking out of the post war “one-size-fits-all-June-Cleaver-ideology) suddenly say no to the strictures surrounding society, literature, and art. They are brave, courageous, forward thinking, and in the right place at the right time. Like an explosion, their “in and of the moment’s transcendence” is behind each image—written or painted. They collectively “see” how important transient, random moments are…that living, breathing art just IS. There needs to be no definitive line between the art and the artist—nor the art, artist, and receiver. These poets and painters seem to hold almost a collective consciousness in their friendships, their support, and their unity in projecting these vivid images via the pen or the brush.

Schuyler’s “The Bluet” is a perfect example of “painting” a moment with words. We are watching this scene emerge with him…as if we are sitting just inside his eyes. He brings to life this tiny, blue flower, “So small /a drop of sky that / splashed and held, / four-petaled, creamy / in its throat.” We “see” the brown woods, brown leaves, “gray trunks of trees” juxtaposed against the wonder of this blue flower. We “feel” the “air crisp as a / Carr’s table water / biscuit” that “smells” of cider. We can almost “touch” the “frozen apples” on this late October day. With him, we lift our eyes to the hills where the leaves are vibrant in “oriental rug colors.” Then he brings us back to the focus, that single bluet—freeze-framed against all the other images he has framed for us. He tells us nothing matters but this image in time, nothing before “last spring,” or after “next spring.” He not only takes us into the moment with him, but he takes us into the heart’s moment… “unexpected / as a tear when someone / reads a poem you wrote / for him: ‘It’s this line here.’” God! I love the New York Poets!