Scrolling news and social media is how I misspend a lot of my time now, since the larger blocks when I can really bare down on artistic work are scarcer and less predictable in my life. Every so often someone famous in the 20th century will start to pop up unexpectedly in news article headings and post streams, a dreadful event. What is it this time, the back of mind thinks, nostalgia or death?
So yesterday it was Sinéad O’Connor that trended. One heading said the tense: “…she was….”
I was a little surprised at the building response, but shouldn’t have been. I have been aware, despite her shortish career in popular music, that her performances had a capacity to deeply touch people. There was a pure dialectic in many of those performances: fierceness and vulnerability simultaneously in an unstable state. When those two things exist at once, like flame and water, it’s dark and warm, bright and reflective, quenched and fueled.
When that combination resonates, it resonates deep with the listener. I myself have only the most inconsistent fierceness. There is an element of self-righteousness taken on as an armor that frightens me, no matter how just the cause, because I have seen the same armor worn on evil as often as good. But then, approaching injustice, as I may do with only questions and pain, seems to equivocate.
There was a pure dialectic in many of those performances: fierceness and vulnerability simultaneously in an unstable state.
My own oddest combination? I am something of a spiritual seeker deeply distrustful of every other pilgrim and certain that any mystical explanation obfuscates reality. This part of me may make me like and unlike O’Connor. As a human being I feel foolish and pretentious discussing any of this, though I hold my nose and type on today.
Yet, O’Connor, with her unstable and uncommon combination, should have taught me the insight that many are sharing in the past day: that there’s a human inside the armor. I knew that — but didn’t know that well enough. Art may be persistent in showing us that deeper knowing.
I’m going to return to an old favorite of this project, a poet who helped change modern English poetry and yet is largely forgotten: F. S. Flint.
Long-time readers (or those of you that have taken a stroll through the archives here) might remember the highlights. Born in 1885 a London slum kid for whom Dickensian would not be a literary adjective but a biographical point. Had to leave school to go to work at age 13. Found a trade as a typist—a male colleague to the bed-sit typist in Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Went to night school. Found out he had a knack for languages. By the time he reached his 20s in the first decade of the 20th Century he had read and translated many of the then modern French poets and helped propagate their techniques in English.
By the same time he’d also teamed up with Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme, the two men who are now largely credited with inventing Imagism, the initial Modernist poetry movement of the 20th century. It’s hard for me to tell, but at the time Flint seemed to be more of an equal partner to those two, though Pound and Hulme had famously extravagant and promotional personalities which Flint may have lacked. I’m not enough of a scholar to be sure of this, but to the creation of “The School of Images” Pound seems to have brought his take on classical Chinese poetry, which he thought was particularly imagistic by typographic definition because it was written in ideograms. Hulme brought a philosophic conviction that existing poetic language and imagery was corrupted by worn out 19th century images and an over-wrought romantic outlook to reality. Flint brought forward the idea of “free verse” or vers libre as the French were calling it. He called his English take on this “unrhymed cadences.”
None of those ideas had to happen. Images in the poetry of the time usually didn’t tell the story, they at best illustrated it and worst decorated it all too conventionally. Reflecting concrete and immediate reality as opposed to a rarified and “elevated” expression of the sublime was not a recognized poetic value. And good poetry was supposed to march to strict meters, uniform stanzas, and generally rhyme.* I’m not sure what alternate universe could be imagined if these poets hadn’t made their claims for these new ideas as being the way for their new century to go. Quite possibly it’d be a different poetic universe.
Change is Now: Flint, Pound and Hume replace Hillman, McGuinn and Clarke on the Byrds** album cover.
Pound gets his due on this, and has the poetic works to be included in anthologies to show his work. Hulme is largely forgotten save for footnotes, but then his entire poetic works could be printed on a postcard. Flint is even more left out than Hulme, but he wrote enough poems to be worth revisiting—so why aren’t they?
I don’t think most academic literary critics think Flint’s poems are very good. Even I, who feels a fondness for the man, is not immediately struck by some of them as I look through his published work. He’s not generally a lush and showy poet. Like Hulme many of his images can be so plainspoken that you don’t notice at first that they are images. And as befitting the man who seems to have brought the sense of a freer music to Imagism, many of his poems work better orally than on the page. That makes him a great candidate for the Parlando Project, even in this early pre-Imagist work of his.
And so Flint also fits in an occasional series I’d like to expand on this summer: “Before They Were Modernists.” My E. E. Cummings piece from last time was the first in that, a Spenserian stanza from the man who eventually spilled the entire font case over his free-verse pages, yet even in that wholly conventional looking stanza form of “Summer Silence” one can see E. E. Cummings later exuberances in places.
Today’s piece, Flint’s “A Song of Change” is from his first collection, 1908’s “In the Net of Stars” published while he was helping formulate the “Make it new!” Imagism—yet it’s a rhymed metrical piece. In another way it’s uncharacteristic of any later Modernist Flint I can recall reading: “A Song of Change” had a very Yeats-like political-mysticism about it. Directness is the point of many Modernist Flint poems, and this one isn’t. One of the virtues of allusive and elusive poetry in the William Butler Yeats style is that we can relate it to various political and social situations, even current ones (and given Yeats’ sometimes troublesome political views that’s a double virtue).
Here’s “A Song of Change” as it appeared in a Sept. 1908 issue of “The New Age.” “German War Scare?” I’m sure that’ll blow over…
What was Flint addressing when he wrote this poem? Edwardian erasure of some of the old English countryside and shore? The passing of childhood? Some of the images seem more dire than that. A carpe diem poem about the briefness of life? Some lines can be read as if Flint had a vision of the rest of the 20th century, the two World Wars to come, or even our own 21st century concerns with planetary survival. So, does “A Song of Change” deserve to be trotted out as often as Yeats’ “The Second Coming?”
That’s probably asking too much, to challenge Yeats outright on the field of lyrical political-mysticism. On the other hand, “A Song of Change” does have its own beauty and a rich catalog of natural images to decorate it. I performed it with a folk-rock guitar-centered arrangement after spending some of this summer with synths and keyboards. The opening riff is fuzzed out guitar, not a buzzy synth, and two 12-string electric guitars weave through it. Though it reflects my own limitations (particularly as a vocalist) it has a sort of “Notorious Byrd Brothers” vibe.
To hear my performance of F. S. Flint’s change song use the player gadget below.
*A scattered set of 19th century Americans had already explored deviation from this. Whitman of course, who while still living was translated into French by an influential French vers libre poet Jules Laforgue. Stephen Crane with his own free verse collection of short poems “Black Riders.” Just-published posthumously Emily Dickinson had her extreme compression and homey images, but still could be read as only sloppy with her meter and rhyme, though the first publications of Dickinson tried to regularize those “faults.”
**The unpictured David Crosby was all over the songs on this LP, but he’d just been fired from The Byrds. It’s been claimed that the horse in the 4th window was representing Crosby. One retort to that: if they’d wanted to represent the infamously cantankerous Crosby, they would have used a picture of the other end of the horse.
Frank Hudson 