Alfred Corn - A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (Small Works List)

Alfred Corn: A Call from the Midst of the Crowd

 

This post comes from finishing one of the works from the Shorter List, like my post on O'Neill. There is a whole raft of authors, poets, essayists, historians that would appear on the longer list because their works do no rise the occassion of a significant work on their own. I am thinking here largely of poets that some of their individual poems may have stood the test of time, but not a longer, contained collection of these poems, I am thinking here of Coleridge or Pope that the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" or "The Rape of the Lock", respectively, would not make it onto 100 books you have to read before you die, but are significant enough to be considered. 

For this time out, I pulled the name Alfred Corn of which I was wholly ignorant of. Corn is an American poet who is still with us. During this phase of the investigation, I will read the Wikipedia page and the Poetry Foundation page and any pertinent and related information. What I want to get a sense of is who this person is, where and when are they from, and what is their most significant work. Sometimes this is more difficult to ascertain than others. For Corn, it seemed that there is one of his volumes of poetry that stood out from the rest, A Call in the Midst of the Crowd. I was able to find this book on Kindle for free oddly enough, and began reading it right away.

There seems to be a few poems on the front of this text that don't seem to fit exactly with the rest of the work. From this section, I personally enjoyed the poem "Darkening Hotel Room." Then, there is a section in the work that is called "A Call in the Midst of the Crowd" which takes place in 4 seasons starting with January. Interspersed in this text, there are some pieces of prose and exposition from random seeming outlets but most notably from famous authors commenting upon the nature of the stuff that makes up America or more specifically New York. It would take some time to really get to know this collection of poetry. I get a sense from it of the ineffable, the occasion, and the struggle to put into words the ability to capture a moment. The struggle to be understood even if what you hope to be understood isn't even what you meant at all, the feeling of perhaps not knowing what you mean or if that is significant. This volume seems to be a hope of recording what it is like to be alive in New York during a specific time and the significance of chronicling that specific time. It happens that was an important time in New York, the 1970s and the crime and the rage I imagine that time replete with. 

There is one poem that captures that specifically, "Some New Ruins" which sort of telescopes the way we think of history of the before times as somehow more real or more concrete, a sense of importance to what happened before and an understandability of what came before juxtaposed with what is happening right at this moment. It is hard to capture what is significant about something as it is happening.

“In aristocratic countries a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries a vast number of insignificant ones. In the former, statues are raised of bronze; in the latter, they are modeled in plaster. When I had arrived for the first time at New York, by that part of the Atlantic Ocean which is called the East River, I was surprised to perceive along the shore, at some distance from the city, a number of little palaces of white marble, several of which were of classic architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more closely one which had particularly attracted my notice, I found that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted wood. All the edifices that I had admired the night before were of the same kind. The social constitutions and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which it is easy to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the soul to fix them exclusively on that of the body, and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought; in a word, they put the real in place of the ideal” (Tocqueville)

 

I love this quote from Tocqueville here as it represents an interesting linkage between Corn's work and Frances Trollope's work which I read just before this one. Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans seem to be remembered as sort of cousin-texts that were both deeply influential works with roughly the same scope and breadth that came out about the same time. I read Tocquevvile in college. I read Trollope now. Both speak strangely and accurately into our current political and social climate. Corn borrows from Tocqueville here to raise the issue of the thing itself versus the representation and why Americans speciically have such an interesting take on these things. This gap between the real and the reproduction speak loudly in the themes of Corn's poetry. 

“The dense ignorance of this solemn gentleman—his knowing nothing of the hero of Fort Stannix, aroused such an indignation in my breast, that, disdaining to enlighten his benighted soul, I left the place without further colloquy. Repairing to the philosophic privacy of the District Office, I then moralized upon the instability of human glory and the evanescence of—many other things” (Melville via Corn). I just thought this was a fascinating and humorous quote Corn decided to include from Melville. 

 

It is sometimes my reaction to a text that I want to ask the author a series of questions. It wouldn't have to be an interview but simply a curious person posing some of what I find mysterious about a text to the author, hoping for understanding. If I were able to interview Alfred Corn about this book of poetry:

 

What is Darkening Hotel Room part II about? I know the answer to such a question is fraught. I would simply like to know the who what where when of the poem itself, the meaning can be left to the ages, but what do you imagine is happening in these few lines here.

I have a strange connection to what I think this portion of this poem is about. My father left when I was young, maybe 3 or 4, and my family didn’t have much to do with him after that. I didn’t see him again until I was 25. I tracked him down though he was not hard to find. His second wife had just left him for a neighbor, I think, and I visited him at what was probably a very strange time in his life. It wasn’t until that reuniting that didn’t really amount to much that I was able to put together some of the pieces of his life. His mother died when he was young, and my grandfather – whom I met years earlier a few times – was not a warm man, much like those of his generation. That must have been a difficult thing for my father, and something that may have shaped him deeply. As I read your poem, Darkening Hotel Room, the second section of that poem reminded me of this misery, which you mention in this collection as well, and in someways it helped unlock a feeling I could only grasp at before reading this poem.

 

I apologize for the long wind up to this question, but is this strange set of emotions present in that poem? By extension, do you think that this is something your, or in general all, poetry is capable of? Giving voice or credence or a touchstone to emotions, memories, thoughts that we could never give voice to ourselves?

 

In this collection, you choose several pieces of nonfiction writing from much older authors to sit alongside your writing. In one section, you quote Alexis de Tocqueville which is a book I read as an undergrad and still sits with me today. In that passage, Tocqueville mentions something about how Americans built columns like the days of old but instead of making them of marble, we Americans would make them out of wood because the appearance of the thing and the representation of the thing is good enough for us, I recently read Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans which is often quoted or cited along with Tocqueville’s work. Do you think this striving for the real in American culture influences your work either on a conscious or subconscious level? Do you think that even that motivation would have influenced you to have included these quotes alongside your own writing?

 

That Melville quote about ignorance and a lack of history and context was hilarious, where did you find such a quote?

 

In another section of this exposition you included, the author mentions that there would have been 2 authors that one might have bumped into on the streets of New York at a certain time in history, Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant whom the author of the quote seems to think held within them the entire breadth of American literature at the time. Given the same sort of quote about New York in the 1970s, not attempting to be sycophantic with this question, Alfred Corn being one of them, who is the other author that a person walking the streets of New York in the 1970s would have bumped into to represent the breadth of literature of that era.

 

In another moment in the exposition added, you include a short quote from Frank O’Hara about two bars in New York. O’Hara mentions Barbara Guest who I have also drawn at random in this new project. Are you familiar with her work? He talks about these two bars and two worlds, writers and artists. You mention art quite often int this volume, Renoir and Monet come to mind, Guest also dwells on art in her poem “Roses” and elsewhere. Are you familiar with these bars? In your time in New York did you have the same attachment to these places, this type of writer community?

Why is that Walter Pater quote so eternal, so immortal to be shifted slightly here?

“Variousness: the great kaleidoscope Of time, its snowflake pictures, form after Form, collapsing into the future, hours, Days, seasons, generations that rise up And fall like leaves, each one a hand inscribed With the fragile calligraphy of selfhood; The human fate given a human face” (Corn Photographs of Old New York). This last quote feels like a podcast that I listen to Nate DeMeo's The Memory Palace. It seems his inspiration is finding old photographs that sort leap out of the pile and asked to be researched, and then he tells the story of this ephemera in a sort of first person narrative bringing to life these seemingly minor moments from history. The tone of this poem reminded me of this podcast project and I thought it significant enough to note here. 

As I noted in the compiling of these questions and response to this text, Alfred Corn was selected from the Shorter Works List, from the American 1945 to Present section. In reading this one significant volume of his writing, I feel like I have made an earnest approach to his writing and will consider this entry complete. The next randomly selected Shorter Works List author is Lady Mary Wroth, and upon my initial investigation, I feel like I am in for a confusing and challenging time.