21 Moll Flanders, though, says of a stolen trunk, or “Portmanteua,” as Moll spells it, which she has safely gotten past the Custom-House officers: “I did not think the Lumber of it worth my concern.” (Oxford ed., p. 266.) Owens and Furbank’s A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1985) took me there. Woolf’s and Nabokov’s customs-inspection similes are traceable to this scene in Defoe’s proto-novel.
22 Or I was reading it, anyway, until vol. III was stolen from the front seat of my car. The thief either was planning on pawning it, or possibly wanted to add to his book collection.
23 I don’t resent the witty Anthony Lane, who, in The New Yorker of February 20–27,1995, beat me to an American review of the English Poetry Database. Lane pursues the word lard for a moment, and mentions “the old Housman principle that good verse should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck” (did Housman really shave the back of his neck?), and he makes an excellent point: “Yet I found myself stirred, not engulfed, by the flow of mediocrity. ‘English Poetry’ offers a way out of the crucial, and frankly tedious, impasse that has stiffened within the academy in recent years — the standoff, in broad terms, between the élitist and the democratic.”
(vi)
Ah, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage (1993), a book-length poem of paired run-on lines, is the latest attempt at the ultramundane. It announces its age-old transfigurative hope right up front, on its dedication page, which reads:
to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers
,
wordsmiths — the transfigurers, restorers
Some of the poem, heavily metaled with lumps of arrhythmic Green-Party pulpitry, sounds surprisingly like Cardinal Newman’s little brother, quoted many pages ago. For example:
… the ditchwork of the deepest degradation
reflects waters brighter than common ground:
poetry to no purpose! all this garbage! all
these words: we may replace our mountains with
trash: leachments may be our creeks flowing
from the distilling bottoms of corruption …
But some of the dross-dressing is, on its bewildering syntactical spree, good, and aptly self-criticaclass="underline"
my
poetry is strawbags full of fleas the dogs won’t
sleep on or rats rummage: I am the abstract inexact’s
chickenfeed: I am borderlines splintered down
into hedgerows: I am the fernbrake ditches
winter brown, the shaggy down springs’ flows
accrue: but think what it would be like to get every word in
And at one point the grandly spatted old Wordsworthian commonplace of renewal gets suddenly reshod, made new by a kicker at the end about poetry’s post-transfigurational residue: the poem, Ammons writes,
reaches down into the dead pit
and cool oil of stale recognition and words and
brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays
with light and strings with shiny syllables and
gets the mind back into vital relationship with
communication channels:
1
but, of course, there
is some untransformed material, namely the poem itself
Ammon’s National-Book-Awarded Garbage is in fact the latest of many books of poetry and collections of essays or stories that, in low-mimetic contrast to Renaissance fardle-words like jewels or flowers or garland, point proudly to the unpromising material that will be remade in the trash-compaction of the book they entitle.
How might we find some of the others? One way is to begin with the second (1853) edition of the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (by Peter Mark Roget, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., F.G.S, “Author of the ‘Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology,’ etc.”), which gives several lumber groups. Under INUTILITY it has
Litter, rubbish, lumber, trash, orts, weeds.
And under UNIMPORTANCE it has
Refuse, lumber, litter, orts, tares, weeds, sweepings, scourings, offscourings; rubble,
débris
, slough, dross,
scoriae
,
2
dregs, scum, flue, dust,
see
Dirt.
If you search a library catalog with this handful of alternatives in mind, and add a few more as they occur to you, you can amass a relevant poets’ and writers’ Garbage checklist without too much trouble. There is an Orts by Ted Hughes (1977) and an Orts by George MacDonald (1882); an Orts and Scantlings by H. C. Dillow (1984), and Scantlings: Poems, 1964–1969, by Gael Turnbull. (An ort is a morsel of leftover food.) There is Tares, by a poet named R. S. Thomas (1961), and Tares: A Book of Verses by Rosamond Marriott Watson (1898). Or you can try the charming-sounding Chaff and Wheat: A Few Gentle Flailings (1915), by Francis Patrick Donelly, or Sweepings (1926), by Lester Cohen, or Slough Cup Hope Tantrum, by Alan Davies (1975). Stephen Vincent Benet brought us The Litter of the Rose Leaves (1930), following up on Frank William Boreham’s Rubble and Roseleaves, and Things of That Kind (1923). The poets of the Sludge Collective came out, in 1973, with Sludge: Daughter of Ooze, Son of Stain. Ohio University Press published Conrad Hilberry’s Rust: Poems in 1974; Turkey Press produced Michael Hogan’s Rust: Poems in 1977. Out of the Dunghilclass="underline" A Series of Fifty Odes by Gordon Jackson came out in 1981. Allen Ginsberg published 150 copies of Scrap Leaves: Hasty Scribbles circa 1968; Marietta Minnigerode Andrews gave us Scraps of Paper in 1929; Edwin C. Hickman is the author of Scraps of Poetry and Prose, from 1854, preceded by Scraps and Poems, by Mrs. R. A. Searles, published by Swormstedt and Power of Cincinnati in 1851, and by Scripscrapologia, or Collins’ Doggerel Dish of All Sorts, a collection by John Collins from 1804.3 There is a book of prose pieces by Rod Mengham called Beds & Scrapings, and Scrut,4 poems by George Roberts, published by Holy Cow! Press in 1983. Someone named Tuschen published Junk Maiclass="underline" Poems in 1970; Richard Le Galliene published The Junk-Man and Other Poems in 1920; Jack Kerouac’s “Junk” came out as a postcard poem in 1976. In Old Junk (1918, revised 1933), a little-known though moving collection of World War I essays intersprinkled with thoughts on toadstools and bedside reading, H. M. Tomlinson describes entering a French town after the German withdrawal and has a G. K. Chestertonian moment: