The conversation between Alasdair Paterson & Stephen Burt began with a question: ‘what does it look like, / ruin?’
The poems turn over several answers: adulthood; a washed-up rocker; lost objects and landscapes; an ‘awkwardly solicitous’ god at a party. For the teenage boys that ‘drew / on almost everything’ of Burt’s “Rue”, ‘the ruin of boy is man’. And in my favourite lines, one boy wants to be a girl because, it seems, girls can ruin themselves better:
What else I heard I would not say,
.
wishing I were a girl,
or had ever been a girl,
or like a girl had secrets for some body to betray.
The ‘old rocker’ in Paterson’s “Like, so” has no secrets left. There is also subtle gender and sexual ambiguity here, in the bleak and funny end that the man (whose father was Burt’s boy) comes to:
[...] found dead
in a hotel room in downtown Vladivostok,
his czarina-sized bed stacked with empty
vodka bottles and the kind of Russian
who knocks at your door in the small hours
wearing nothing but a bad fur coat…
Burt’s “For Avril Lavigne” inverts Paterson’s relentlessly relaunching washed-up star. Lavigne wonders who she should be, and in the final stanza, covets the person she was before she was famous. In contrast to the rocker who ‘can’t let go’, she wants to keep the ‘planner in the mirror [...] who wanted to learn’. In these last lines, the regular rhyme breaks down: itself back in training.
Responding to the superabundant personalities of Lavigne, Paterson’s “Exile variations 1-3″ has its own, restrained list of brilliant particulars. They suggest the people those in exile might previously have been, and remind me of Robinson Crusoe’s knife that ‘reeked of meaning’ in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem (except Crusoe was back home). Lavigne is defined by her ‘black lace / and tennis shoes’. The poem of exile looks for lessons in a mouth-organ, a song, the river, pickle, seeds and tomatoes. Nobody is named here and the objects become archetypal rather than singular – an elaboration on Burt’s theme: identity as a choice between types.
But all these poems, and the sum of their reciprocal parts, don’t reduce easily to themes. How then to end the exchange? (Ruining everything must have been tempting.) Part of the pleasure of reading a poem comes from knowing it is going to end. The poem is always running out. So is an exchange – and here the final poem has to speak for two poets. It ends all the other poems as well as itself. Burt’s “To Aphrodite” has a wonderfully light touch in what I take to be a description of characters and their attitudes from the previous poems:
And at the camp
fire where you will make your
debut—forever
renewed, forever
naive, or pretending (nobody can tell) [.]
Its Greek gods also hark back to Paterson’s great (and probably marketable) idea of a sequel to the Odyssey – itself a sequel -, in which ‘blind Homer rattled to his feet [...] to launch Odyssey II’. “Like, so”, that poem’s title, is both something that the teenagers of Burt’s poems might say, and a description of Paterson’s poem’s structure – paragraph-long stanzas which begin with ‘like’ then ’so’. This is more than neatness. Both poets are writing about enjoyment (and what might ruin it); both are clearly taking it in what they write. Between Aphrodite – the god of sexuality and beauty – and Hephaestos, the gods’ blacksmith – , between desire and craft, lie these poems.
Thanks go to both poets. And to Burt for ‘camp fire’, which seems a great metaphor for Likestarlings itself.
Speaking of endings, I am looking forward to the final poem of the conversation between Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Gregory. More thoughts on that excellent conversation when it is over.
And, finally…new conversations will be starting soon. Do send us an email with some poems if you would like to be considered for the site.