Charles Tomlinson & America

Charles Tomlinson acknowledged a great debt to America. Its poets influenced and encouraged him; its landscapes offered countless opportunities to explore what D. H. Lawrence famously described as ‘the spirit of place’. Tomlinson’s poems focus on the individuality of places and on the way we see and understand them, a relationship in which the clarity of our perception comes by diminishing the ego.

Tomlinson identified with American landscapes almost as keenly as he did with Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, where he lived with his wife Brenda, and Italy’s Bay of Lerici which, he said, confirmed him as a poet. He also learned greatly from modernist American poets, who offered him encouragement and their friendship. These were reciprocated. For the American poet George Oppen, ‘it is [Tomlinson] and Basil Bunting who have spoken most vividly to American poets’. In a 2015 Guardian obituary, Michael Schmidt quoted Oppen and continued significantly, ‘Tomlinson bridged the vast gulf between old and new world poetry, and was an heir equally of Dryden and Williams, Coleridge and Pound’.

He was born in 1927 in Stoke-on-Trent (the ‘Potteries’, Staffordshire), from where he went in due course to Cambridge. According to his own account Tomlinson picked up a selection of Ezra Pound’s poetry in 1944, at seventeen, fascinated by his inability to scan the lines in the conventional way, by the ‘prosaic phraseology’ and ‘a sense of cleanliness in the phrasing’. Then he found Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse the following year, which brought Wallace Stevens to his attention, a poet of ‘evocations’.

Tomlinson married in 1948. He first taught primary school but then, after travel and work in Italy, pursued the academic life, his poetry and painting. Unfortunately, the poets who influenced him were largely unobtainable in

England, therefore his work lacked context and it was not until 1955 – with the intercession of his former Cambridge tutor and friend, Donald Davie – that Tomlinson’s booklet The Necklace appeared. He began teaching at Bristol University. A positive review by the Canadian critic, Hugh Kenner, appeared the following year in Poetry (Chicago) which led to continued encouragement by its editor. It was in America that his first full collection, Seeing is Believing, appeared in 1958. The following year he travelled there on a fellowship and met formative influences Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams.

This was the beginning of Tomlinson’s prolific career as a prizewinning poet, translator and artist and also the first of a number of visits to the United States. In the 1962-3 academic year, for instance, he became Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico, where new friendships included a number of other poets whose work influenced his own: the ‘Objectivists’, Louis Zukovsky and Oppen, and the ‘Black Mountain’ poets, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. In 1967 he met his first modernist hero, Pound, in Italy at the Spoleto Festival.

Tomlinson gave a reading tour in America in 1976, visiting New Mexico again and then again four and five years later, when he was also a Visiting Senior Fellow at Princeton. The University of New Mexico conferred an Honorary Doctor in Literature on the poet in 1986, the year after Oxford University Press had published his Collected Poems. He became an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Modern Language Association. More collections were to appear from Carcanet Press, the last, Cracks in the Universe, in 2006. By the time of his death, Charles Tomlinson had established an impressive international reputation.

He publicly recognised the major influence of American poets, but was keen to make it clear that they themselves had a debt to ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge and their exploration of how the self arrives at knowledge and identity, and of how mind and senses contribute to this process’. Then there was the influence of art, Tomlinson’s own paintings and ‘the sort of

visual and literary discipline’ he learned from Ruskin, which involved a combination of acute observation and the exploration of ways to articulate it.

Asked what had first drawn him to America, in his interview with The Paris Review (1998), Tomlinson replied, ‘All bits and pieces, to begin with’. He spoke of a monochrome reproduction of a Georgia O’Keeffe and of discovering American poets his Cambridge education had failed to prepare him for. His American Essays: Making it New (2001) opens with the words, ‘I found my own voice as a poet by learning from four Americans, a woman and three men – Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams’.

Moore’s poems captured his imagination with their originality: their cunning syllabics, their use of prose rhythms, their idiosyncratic logic and, of course, their content. To Tomlinson her best poems offered ‘resolutions of tough moral elegance’. They were not necessarily as warm, as intentionally cherishable as the popularity of the eccentric poet might suggest. Moore herself was. He was introduced to her through Kenner and they exchanged books and letters. In 1959 they met for the first time. His poem ‘Ship’s Waiters’ is dedicated to her and a snatch of their first conversation surfaces in ‘Over Brooklyn Bridge’:

I do not live in town I live in Brooklyn. I was afraid you wouldn’t like it here – it’s gotten so ugly.

Tomlinson began to read William Carlos Williams seriously in 1956. He ‘helped make clearer the inherent rubato of speech. Furthermore, I liked his ability to deal with phenomena unegotistically’. The following year he began using the ‘three-ply’ cadences that Williams used in the two books of his that Tomlinson had read. One poem he produced was ‘Letter to Dr. Williams’ and another ‘Sea Poem’:

A whiter bone: the sea-voice in a multiple monody crowding towards that end.

If he had hoped for a more enlightened response from editors, Tomlinson was to be disappointed. He received the same puzzled reception to his work in England: ‘When I began imitating Williams’s measure and applying it to the cadences of an Englishman’s English, I was still finding it difficult to place poems in my native country’. Their layout seemed too unusual. Again Hugh Kenner came to the rescue, first with promoting his manuscript, Seeing is Believing, and secondly by directing Williams to his poetry. In a letter to Tomlinson, thanking him for the poems which had appeared in ‘Spectrum’, Williams wrote, ‘Anyone who is influenced by a verse form which liberates English verse is my friend’. Although Tomlinson did not subscribe to Williams’s belief that the pattern of his verses was distinctly American, he nevertheless greatly admired the poet and gained confidence from his support at a time when he felt excluded from the British scene and alienated from The Movement poets.

On that same 1959 travel grant tour Tomlinson visited the ailing Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey, on two occasions. Thereafter they exchanged affectionate letters (before his death in March, 1963) in which Williams encouraged Tomlinson’s poetry. As Tomlinson remarked in Some Americans: ‘Moore, Williams, [Yvor] Winters, and Henry Rago [Poetry editor] are all dead. They cemented a bond of affection for America I could never have anticipated at the time of my earliest poems’. He acknowledged admiration for other American poets over the years, including Lorine Niedecker and Elizabeth Bishop, on both of whom he wrote.

Although American subjects surface in A Peopled Landscape (1963), Tomlinson began working with his American experience more systematically in The Way of a World (1969). The possession of place shades into his other great, allied preoccupation with perspective in Tomlinson’s well-known ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’. This poem, set in New York State, opens The Way of a World:

There is a geometry of water, for this Squares off the clouds’ redundances And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere All angles and elongations: every tree Appears a cypress as it stretches there And every bush that shows the season, A shaft of fire

Place and perspective are twinned, for space is what ‘the body is heir to’. The section ‘Western Pieces’ from later in the collection introduces us to the manners and rituals of the American Southwest: the Honda’s driver playing cards with a passenger while driving; the farmer whose revenge on a mountain wolf is misinterpreted; ritual dancing in San Antonio and at Zuni in New Mexico.

American Scenes and Other Poems (1966) explores contrasting regions of America. It is their landscapes and cultures which preoccupy him. His favourites were the Southwest (New Mexico) and Mexico. As Timothy Clark noted in his study, Charles Tomlinson (1999), his ‘poems pretend to and assert no very specialized knowledge about the cultures they visit. The stance is that of a sympathetic foreigner’. And a richly observant one as Tomlinson implied in 1975:

there’s a lack of myth in my poetry because it usually arises directly from something seen. I want to register that in all its clarity or in all its implications. The nearest I come to myth is that world ‘Eden’, which I can’t seem to get rid of and that fits what I’m doing with its implication of primal things, fresh sensations, direct perceptions unmuddied.

‘American Scenes’ is the second part of the collection, gathering nineteen poems from his travels in the Southwest and New England. These marvel at what he sees of the desert states. They hear the silence and imagine the subterranean in ‘Arizona Desert’, where ‘Eye / drinks the orange ground’ and:

Villages from mud and stone parch back to the dust they humanize and mean marriage, a loving lease on sand, sun, rock and Hopi means peace

The poems relish also the big skies, which match the endless lands ‘whose space outpacing sight / recede as speechless and as wide as death’ (‘A Death in the Desert’). The harshness is underscored with references to bleached cow skulls, shallow graves, desiccated villages, decaying shacks, locked churches, ghost towns:

Clear of the weight of human meanings, human need, gradually houses splinter to the ground

‘Two View of Two Ghost Towns’

The land is peopled, also, and by tough descendants of native American tribes and pioneers, some of whom Tomlinson encounters. There is humour even here, as in ‘Old Man at Valdez’ and ‘Las Trampas USA’, which records with wry amusement conversations that attend the poet’s visit to the Spanish-American church village in this northern New Mexico village, while the subjects ‘Mr Brodsky’ and ‘Chief Standing Water’ are eccentric representatives of this unusual culture.

The America of the 1960s is evoked in poems like ‘At Barstow’, concerning that unattractive Californian truck town (‘Nervy with neons, the main drag / was all there was. A placeless place’). Its ‘execrable conjunction / of gasoline and desert air’ is a short step to ‘Arizona Highway’ which also befuddles the mind while it saps the energy and deceives the imagination:

The windshield drinks the telegraphed desert miles, the tarmac river: tyranny, glass identity, devouring and dusty eye, pure duration, all transition, transformation.

In stark contrast to that orange ground, Tomlinson is introduced to New England. In the poem ‘In Connecticut’ all is white and clean and clear in the village church, in a first snow. It is a world of ‘shadowless conviction’. In this more anglicised culture, in Longfellow’s study, busts of the Classical greats ‘ambush’ Hiawatha, while in Dickinson’s ‘square cool mansion’ the poet retreats even from her letters. ‘A Garland for Thomas Eakins’ considers that supreme realist whose self-portrait reveals the ‘anguish’ at the enormity of his unheralded task. A similar artistry of the eye is found in ‘Maine Winter’, where a snow landscape proves the death of a fox which ‘flaringly goes / with more of the hunter’s caution than / of the hunter’s ease’ but is torn apart by ravenous crows anyway. The poem is reminiscent of Winslow Homer’s painting of ‘The Fox Hunt’.

Part three of American Scenes constitutes ten Mexican poems, again products of Tomlinson’s travel. Recurrently these cinematic poems consider the Catholicism and eschatology of the natives, through moments of Día de la Constitución (the anniversary of the 1917 constitution) or with a straw Christ, old buses, poor churches and peasants with their butchered saints (‘They / are in paradise now / and we are not’). The most successful of the poems focus on the most unusual scenes. ‘The Well’ captures the whisperings and turbulence of history. The well endures in an old Mexican convent, riddled with revolutionary history:

the standing

shaft of water sends its echoing up Catching, as it stirs

the steady seethings that mount and mingle with surrounding sounds from the neighbouring barrack-yard

A memorable oddity is ‘On the Tlacolula Bus’, which concerns an absent driver – one Lukenbac – who ‘flew for the Fuehrer’, as he boasts on his vehicle in Gothic script. To the poet, the Nazi is like the goat observing the bus and also passing into history (‘its narrow stare, looking / like Lukenbac in exile’).

Tomlinson returned to America and Mexico in Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984). The city seems almost eerily devoid of its citizens, since the poet is absorbing the geometries of light and shade on the buildings. His view begins in the air, overlooking the ‘mathematic of the suburbs’, and what holds his attention are the clouds over the City, how ‘they intensify for one that sense of things always moving, disintegrating, re-forming – the sense of a world which is never quite there because light and time have changed it’ (‘Sight and Flight’). It is, then, the fascinating ‘double mystery’ of sight that ‘haunts the mind’.

The first poems deal with the arriving jet (‘The map of land, the map of air’). The poet’s perspective changes as he leaves behind the plane and his consideration of the Iroquois construction workers (‘Above Manhattan’). He descends to the streets of beggars and the smells of food. Even at ground level, however, the poet looks at the city as an architecture of light and shadow. Like another poet and painter, Derek Walcott, Tomlinson seems preternaturally attuned to the play of light:

All afternoon the shadows have been building A city of their own within the streets, Carefully correcting the perspectives With dark diagonals, and paring back Sidewalks into catwalks, strips of bright

Companionways, as if it were a ship This counter-city. ‘All Afternoon’

At the end of Notes from New York, the poet is back among Mexican subjects: the dusty shells of grasshoppers, the ghostly house of Trotsky, the poor churches and their beggars (‘both prologue and epilogue / to each gold interior) and the dead gods of Teotihuacán.

Tomlinson returned frequently to America in life and inspiration, in such collections as The Return (1987) and Annunciations (1989) and on into his last, Cracks in the Universe. Here, in ‘Above the City’, he wishes to be walking rooftops, marvelling at the pigeons and their ‘airy acres’ and, from the ‘travelling eye’ of a car, in ‘New Jersey-New York’, witnesses ‘The merging of cars, the chains of light / Announcing bridges, intersections’. Always it is the poet-painter’s eye that thrills by what it sees in movement, light and shadow. Surprise is Tomlinson’s medium. It is the reward of a profound, romantic sensitivity to place.