SOURCE: Skinner, John F. “Semantic Play in the Poetry of Howard Nemerov.” Literature in Performance: A Journal of Literary and Performing Art 6 (April 1986): 44-59.

[In the following essay, Skinner examines the various manifestations of game-playing and word play in Nemerov's poetry.]

In Fear of Flying, Erica Jong has her precocious narrator-protagonist clash at one point with a figure familiar to many readers. Trembling in her purple-suede boots, Isadora Wing confides to Professor Stanton that she wants to write satire rather than criticize it, that she doesn't find criticism very satisfying:

“Satisfying!” he exploded.

I gulped.

“What makes you think that graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? Literature is work, not fun,” he said.

“Yes,” I said meekly.

“You come to graduate school because you love to read, because you love literature—well, literature is hard work! It's not a game!”

Professor Stanton seemed to have found his true subject.¹

Despite Stanton's protests, we can without much difficulty support the view that poetic composition is a form of play.²

Experimental literature yields perhaps the most obvious examples of play in literary texts. The computer-generated poem and the short story juggling four simultaneous plots in separate columns are both certainly “playing” with our expectations of what a poem or short story should look like and do. So we are not surprised to find concrete poet Eugen Gomringer describing his poems as “playgrounds” with definite boundaries, as models of “verbal play in action,” and challenging the reader to accept them “in the spirit of play” and to play with them.³ Gomringer's colleague Oyvind Fahlstrom further confirms a play impulse in concrete poetry when he “speaks of the element of ‘play’ in the interaction of the linguistic elements” in his texts.⁴

Turning from poetry to “new wave fiction” or metafiction, we can nod in agreement when critic Philip Stevick tells us that new fiction “seeks to represent, explicitly or implicitly, the act of writing as an act of play.”⁵ Even Sigmund Freud once observed, “Every playing child behaves like a poet, in that he creates a world of his own, or more accurately expressed, he transposes things into his own world according to a new arrangement which is to his liking.”⁶ Yet play is more than novelty or deviation from a norm, and the comments of more “traditional” poets reinforce a tradition conflating literary composition and play.

W. H. Auden, for example, was fond of quoting Thoreau's definition of a poet: “A poet is a person who having nothing to do, finds something to do.”⁷ Elsewhere, Auden says “there are no doubt natural causes, perhaps very simple ones, behind the wish to write verses, but the chief satisfaction in the creative act is the feeling that it is quite gratuitous.”⁸ T. S. Eliot termed poetry “a superior form of amusement.”⁹ Theodore Roethke admonished students in his many college creative writing classes to “play with it—if you know what I don't mean. The language has its cusses and fusses just like us.” His use of the term “play” was not accidental. Roethke cites Gerard Manley Hopkins as an example of a poet who “didn't play enough; dear, sweet, serious man, so full, in spite of all his rigors, of that dangerous pride in his intellectual self.”¹⁰ In his recently reprinted Play in Poetry, poet Louis Untermeyer says:

I think it can be maintained that, on the whole, poetry is as playful as it is profound.

By “playful” I do not mean merely the outburst of high spirits or the formal light-heartedness of light verse. I mean the essential spirit which unites and intensifies the figures of speech, the hyperboles and similes, all of which represent the poet's varying use of the invariable impulse to play.¹¹

And finally, in what sounds like a prayer for inspiration and creative energy, Robert Frost once said in an interview, “Give us immedicable woes—woes that nothing can be done for—woes flat and final. And then to play. The play's the thing. Play's the thing.”¹²

Recent and contemporary critics have also begun to describe and evaluate literature in terms of its play. Helen Vendler criticizes Adrienne Rich for her lack of imaginative play, for being “a stern, even grim, ringmaster” to her poems.¹³ Citing the poet's inflexible stance and stereotypical treatment of characters, Vendler concludes that “Rich deserves the rebuke of Schiller to Rousseau: ‘No doubt his serious character prevents him from falling into frivolity; but this seriousness does not allow him to rise to poetic play.’”¹⁴ In contrast, Mark Lilly offers a wholly positive assessment of Vladimir Nabokov's novels specifically in terms of their play.¹⁵ Lilly points to the wealth of surface characteristics (puns, anagrams, acrostics, and other verbal devices) and structural features by which Nabokov makes his novels elaborately artificial games and casts the willing reader into the role of “player.” Among other writers evaluated during the last twenty-five years for the quantity and quality of their play are Francois Rabelais, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Raymond Roussel, Dante Alighieri, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Max Jacob, Thomas Pynchon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and George Herbert.¹⁶ In short, poets and critics invoke play to describe the process and products of poetic composition too frequently for us to dismiss the metaphor as fanciful or accidental.

Though a full discussion of play, its various definitions, and the range of play possible in literature is beyond the scope of this paper, in what follows I will examine a specific type of play in the “work” of poet Howard Nemerov and will focus on the tensions and ambiguities that this type of play establishes. Nemerov's poems abound with play and often take the form of intricate games or puzzles, requiring careful sleuthing of the attentive reader. Because play is significant in Nemerov's poetry, it can inform the individual preparing a Nemerov poem for performance. The discussion of play in his poetry raises larger questions about the implications of play for the theory and practice of performing literature.

In attempting to define play, one can easily get bogged down in conflicting theories as to why people play. In one of the best books on play, Michael J Ellis untangles fifteen distinct play theories, and sifts through the considerable baggage of terminology that they employ.¹⁷ Yet most people can readily identify examples of play (children playing in a park or, I assume, writers playing in literary texts), without knowing the clinical or academic vocabulary of play.

Characteristics common to all play include at least the following: (1) It is a free, voluntary activity; it cannot be coerced without losing its essential nature. (2) It is intrinsically motivated and intrinsically rewarding. Play is something we do for the fun of it, and the reward is the enjoyment we derive. (3) Play is materially unproductive, yielding neither goods nor wealth. (4) It is separate, limned from ordinary life, both in time and space. (5) Play is controlled by conventions that suspend ordinary laws and enact temporary, new ones. In play we impose new obstacles for ourselves, just for the fun of it. (6) Play is uncertain; even if a game has a prescribed outcome, players must be allowed a certain latitude for innovation. (7) Finally, play is fictive, “accompanied by a specific awareness of a second reality or of a straightforward unreality in relation to everyday life.”¹⁸ Each of these characteristics applies to imaginative writing and also to the performance of literature.

“PLAY” IN NEMEROV'S POETICS

Nemorov seems an obvious choice for closer examination here because he thinks of poetry generally as a form of play: “Whatever is revealed, in poetry, plays at being revealed.”¹⁹ Present in all language, Nemerov says, play is most apparent “in expressions which time or custom has set free from the urgencies of exhortation and the immediate claims of life: inscriptions on tombs, the proud dominations of antiquity, Ozymandias in his desert. …”²⁰ That is, play is featured in superfluous language, used freely and gratuitously as the poet does. Nemerov even suggests that

in seeking to identify … the quality of expressiveness called “poetic” you might start, not with the sublime, but down at the humble end of the scale, with such things as … misprints, newspaper items, jokes … working your way up in Horatio Alger style to see how far your descriptions will take you. …²¹

Given the large number of epigrams and the pervasive wit in Nemerov's poetry, his comparison of poems to jokes is not surprising. Yet many of his poems are quite sophisticated and require a good deal of any reader. How then does he explain the comparison of poems, whose difficulty may vary from reader to reader, to jokes, whose success depends upon their apparent and immediate accessibility to most who hear them? The analogy is central to Nemerov's poetics, and reflects the primary role wit plays in much of his poetry.

The distinguishing characteristics of the joke, Nemerov says, include the following: (1) It uses its materials economically. Something already given reappears in the joke's resolution, so that the punch line seems both surprising and inevitable. We often feel that, given a few seconds more, we should have been able to deliver the punch line ourselves. (2) The joke reverses the relations of the elements introduced. (3) An element of the absurd is introduced, but “the apparent absurdity, introduced into the new context, makes a new and deeper sense.” (4) As the absurd comes to make sense, something hidden in the joke is revealed.²²

These same qualities inhere in the poem, according to Nemerov, with puns, metaphors, and other figures of speech demonstrating the economy of poetic form. He continues:

The “purely formal” arrangements of poetry, such as measure, rime, stanza, which it appears not at all to share with the joke, are in fact intensifications of a characteristic we have already noticed in jokes: the compound of expectation with a fulfillment which is simultaneously exact and surprising, giving to the result that quality sometimes thought of as inevitability, or rightness.²³

Though Nemerov claims that his poetry has become simpler, less calculatedly ambiguous throughout the years, he retains “a view that does not always sharply divide the funny from the serious and even the sorrowful. …”²⁴ To the charge of some critics that his poems are jokes, even bad jokes, he responds: “I incline to agree, insisting, however, that they are bad jokes, and even terrible jokes, emerging from the nature of things as well as from my propensity for coming at things a touch subversively, and from the blind side. …”²⁵ As an apostle of the well-crafted poem and as a “wit,” in the many senses of that term, Nemerov fills even his pensive and pessimistic poetry with a variety of play.

Linguist Ernst Cassirer once noted that while “the child plays with things, the artist plays with forms, with lines and designs, rhythms and melodies.”²⁶ To inventory a poet's “toys,” we might discuss his or her phonic play, or play with sounds; syntactic play, both within lines and in the larger syntax of available poetic forms; lexical play, or play with the various registers of language; and role play, that imaginative stepping into other real or fictive roles in order to evoke different personae.²⁷ With Nemerov, one other type of play commands our immediate attention, however. Semantic play, or play with meanings, takes four identifiable forms in Nemerov's poetry: (1) the use of play and games as subjects or motifs; (3) a variety of word play; (3) the intertextual play of poems calculated to recall other poems; and (4) the cultivation of tensiveness through ambiguity.

SEMANTIC PLAY IN NEMEROV'S POETRY

PLAY AND GAMES AS SUBJECTS OR MOTIFS

From his earliest volume to his most recent, Nemerov sustains a thread of poems either about play or with various games in their titles. A quick look at his tables of contents reveals “Warning: Children at Play,” “Instructions for the Use of This Toy,” “The May Day Dancing,” “The Puzzle,” “Hide and Seek,” “Playing the Inventions,” “Gyroscope,” and “Playing Skittles.” Significant too is Nemerov's translation of Rainer Marie Rilke's “Kindheit,” or “Childhood,” where play is the only relief from the stresses and loneliness of growing up.²⁸ The poem is particularly noteworthy because it is one of only two translations Nemerov has published.

Yet the play motif in Nemerov's poetry is not limited to the surfaces, to those poems with play or games titles. For example, in “To D—, Dead by Her Own Hand” (Collected Poems [hereafter abbreviated as CP], 431), addressed to his sister, photographer Diane Arbus, Nemerov compares the young woman's life to a child's courting danger by walking along a narrow garden wall. The poem concludes:

That was a life ago. And now you've gone
Who would no longer play the grown-up's game
Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark,
You go on running, and you don't look down,
                                                  Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.

Then in his poem “A Catch” (Sentences [hereafter abbreviated as S], 55), Nemerov uses the game of catch as a metaphor for the transaction between poet and reader:

Throwing alone wouldn't be fun,
And catching alone can't be done.
The two of them together, though,
                              Are among the very few
                              Things human beings do
That makes us look as if we know
          A world, and are at home in it,
          Where lock and key exactly fit.

Useful as it is for describing writing and reading, though, the metaphor extends beyond these activities, as the concluding lines suggest:

                                        A catch between anyone,
                                        A father and son,
makes visible something unseen
How from the father's hand is hurled
To be held the hard ball of the world.

In short, the poetry is replete with references to play and players. Nemerov turns repeatedly to the play world of children, most often to establish parallels with adult play: the games of poetry, the games of criticism and teaching, even the game of life. Though these metaphors are certainly not new, Nemerov uses them directly, creatively, and unself-consciously, saving them from charges of sentimentality and cliche by his novel treatment and intellectual rigor.

WORD PLAY

A second level of semantic play in Nemerov's poetry, most easily accommodated under the generic label “word play,” includes his use of puns; his revitalizations of proverbs, gnomic expressions, and familiar quotations; a device typical of much children's speech play, “concatenation”; and a device known as “verbal skidding.” Both the pun and the allusion to a proverb function semantically because they allow Nemerov to make language serve “double duty.” That is, they permit him to exploit the possibilities of text-context relationships, to make words mean more than they ordinarily would in a given context. At the same time, interestingly, both devices reduce Nemerov's responsibility for what he is saying. As Martha Wolfenstein says of the pun in children's speech play, “An allusive formulation insures immunity since nothing objectionable has been said. The teller may disclaim responsibility for what the hearer thinks.”²⁹ Whether the achieved effect is funny, serious, or some combination, these first two types of word play expand the semantic potential of Nemerov's poetic language.

Puns. Many of Nemerov's puns occur in poem titles. In “Lot Later” (CP, 263-267), for example, he puts the words of that Biblical character into the mouth of a contemporary Jewish businessman. Thus, we have “Lot” speaking “a lot later” about his escape from Sodom. Another example of syllepsis, the use of a word with two or more meanings,³⁰ occurs in the title “Polonius Passing through a Stage” (CP, 252-253). This brief, complex poem refers to Polonius's childhood, as well as to his presence on the stage of the Globe Theatre. The pun on “stage” in the title thus alludes to a stage or phase of development, as well as the physical site of the doddering character's performance in Hamlet. Nemerov's “Elegy of the Last Resort” (CP, 75-76) is, as the opening lines indicate, about the “last resort” to close at the end of the tourist season: “The boardwalks are empty, the cafes closed, / The bathchairs in mute squadrons face the sea.” However, the poem is also the utterance of a speaker under pressure of loneliness and ennui. That is, it is his last available means of expression, his “last resort.”

The subject of Nemerov's “A Full Professor” (CP, 375) is “full” in at least three senses. He has achieved the highest active academic level, full professorship. He is also “full” of his own concerns and full in the sense of being sated. These last two meanings coalesce in the following lines:

An organism highly specialized
He diets on, for daily bill of fare,
The blood of Keats, the mind of poor John Clare;
Within his range, he cannot be surprised.

Still another poem with a pun in its title, “An Issue of Life” (CP, 124), projects a picture of the future: “Soon now you may vacation on the moon.” It predicts what will “issue” from life as we know it today. Moreover, the entire poem seems to be based on a particular “issue” of Life magazine.

Some of the puns in Nemerov's titles are apparent before reading the poems. “Polonius Passing Through a Stage” is one example. In others, such as “An Issue of Life,” the pun is confirmed either during or after the reading. Whether they key the reading from the beginning or come as surprises later, Nemerov's puns allow him to speak on two levels simultaneously and thus to expand the boundaries of context.

Less prominent, though still significant, are occasional puns within individual poems. In one of his metacritical poems entitled “On Being a Member of the Jury for a Poetry Prize” (CP, 423), for example, Nemerov puns on the words “jury” and “sentencing”:

Jury's the mot juste under our ground rules:
I may say Guilty, and I mostly do,
But sentencing's beyond me, poeticules,
As, by your poems, it's beyond most of you.

The idea of a jury for an artistic performance and that of a criminal jury come together in Nemerov's witty and economical pun. Similarly, “sentencing” means both composing sentences and announcing a punishment. As a last example, “Money” (CP, 369-370) contains this rather heavy-handed pun: “The representative American Indian was destroyed / A hundred years or so ago, and his descendants' / Relations with liberty are maintained with reservations.”

Revitalizations of Proverbs. Related to his use of puns are Nemerov's revitalizations and transformations of familiar sayings. Play with epigrams features prominently in some of his fiction, as in the novel Federigo, where we find this bit of traditional wisdom transformed: “The future is in the lap of the gods, and they are standing up to see what is going to happen.” Similarly, an early poem is entitled, “Epitaph on a Philosopher the Reports of Whose Death Have Been Grossly Minimized” (CP, 27-28). The title is obviously playful, not only because of its unusual length, but also because it inverts Samuel Clemens' well-known cable from Europe to the Associated Press: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Nemerov makes an unconventional statement—“Some unnamed philosopher is more dead than any of us believes”—by playfully reshaping another witty saying; his title thus involves play with play.

One of Nemerov's many epigrams, “A Sacrificed Author” (CP, 270), is a simple and clever transformation of Christ's last words at the Crucifixion.

Father, he cried, after the critics' chewing,
Forgive them, for they know not what I'm doing.

The mock presumptuousness of the statement quickly becomes apparent: the poet, as Christ, the infallible Savior, forgives the fatally misguided critics. The quotation surprises the reader twice: first by its very presence in the poem, and then by the clever twist Nemerov gives it. Nemerov's play with proverbs and other familiar sayings forces the reader to “play” between the original context of the expression and its new position in the poem. That is, the revitalized saying functions as semantic play by allowing Nemerov to exploit the distinction between text and context.

Concatenation. Though not a prevalent type of word play in Nemerov's poetry, concatenation figures prominently in several poems and deserves attention as a third type of word play. One poem based on the concatenation, “A Primer of the Daily Round” (CP, 180), is central to a play analysis of Nemerov's poetry, and I will draw my examples from it. Concatenation, or listing, is significant as a play device because it typifies much of children's speech play. As Mary Sanches and Barbara Kirshenbiatt-Gimblett explain:

Concatenation involves joining a rhyme with another rhyme or with a series or list. These rhymes and series can also occur independently. Most common is the use of fixed-order series, such as the alphabet, numbers, days of the week, months of the year, or lists of members of classes (names of people, places, occupations, … etc.).³¹

Nemerov's “A Primer of the Daily Round” begins:

A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand. …

He uses the fixed-order series of the alphabet as proper names within a pattern of exact rhyme at line ends. To each “character” in the alphabet he also assigns a particular occupation or preoccupation. Thus, he simultaneously employs several of the possible devices for the concatenation.

Within this framework, however, Nemerov accomplishes something subtle and delightful. Some of the associations between the letters and their respective activities are based on sound associations: “A peels an apple” could have been taken from any number of children's alphabet books, as the word “primer” in the title suggests. Similarly, “M takes mustard” and V has “to give W the word.” If we look at the poem long enough, however, certain ideogrammatic relationships between the shapes of letters and the things they are doing begin to emerge. In the lines already cited, the letter C suggests the shape of the telephone receiver used to telephone D. “F” and “cough” are not only phonically related, but the gap between the two transverse lines of F suggests an explosive cough. The flourish at the end of the letter G connotes the action of turning up the sod for H's grave. Even the shape of the H reflects the wooden framework that gravediggers once laid on the ground to define the shape of the grave and to help them climb in and out of it. We can see how K, with one leg forward and arm raised, “brings down a nightstick on L's head.” That “O goes to bed with P” surely needs no explanation. The shape of the letter X, “now deceiving Y with Z,” suggests both the crossed fingers of deception and the child's “king's-X.” Moreover, Nemerov has playfully hidden the pronouns of the speaker and listener in the poem: “I do not understand. …” and “T, who tells U not to fire V.”

One critic called “A Primer of the Daily Round” the sort of thing that most younger English poets could toss off before tea,³² surely an unfair and superficial assessment of the poem. Nemerov has created a multi-faceted poem; not a primer to teach children to read, it is rather a catalog of the random violence and deceit in daily life. As we have seen, the shapes of the letter undergird the sense of the activities ascribed to them. In a poet so little given to typographical and ideogrammatic play, “A Primer of the Daily Round” stands out, perhaps recalling some of May Swenson's ideograms. Before dismissing the poem for its apparent simplicity, the reader should examine the different levels on which the text operates.

“Verbal Skidding.” A fourth and final type of word play in Nemerov's poetry is demonstrated in his highly convoluted epigrams. “Creation Myth on Moebius Band” (CP, 441) is an excellent example of this play strategy:

This world's just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

Because of its involved construction, its brevity, and the triple repetition of the word “being,” this poem creates an effect that Dina Sherzer terms “verbal skidding.”³³ In Nemerov's poem, the repetition of words and sounds, together with the inherent contradictions that emerge, give the reader a sense of slipping or sliding, of momentarily losing control. In this minimal poem, Nemerov has intentionally taken on more than he can handle—the question of God's ontology—and through his play he demonstrates the unwieldiness of such an issue. Each of the successively embedded elements in the second line contradicts the proposition before it. For example, Nemerov's capitalization of the nouns “Being” and “beings” establishes a primary-secondary relationship; this creator-created affiliation is then overturned, however, in only three words: “into Being prayed.” In this final twist, the created become the creators, the creator a mere creation.

Nemerov's economical tautology is also framed as a form of play by the mention of the Moebius band in the title. A creation of nineteenth-century German mathematician August Moebius, the band consists of a strip of paper or other material, one end of which is twisted 180 degrees and then joined with the other end. Simple enough to be a child's toy, the Moebius band is a unique continuous structure because its inside gradually becomes its outside. The physical form on which Nemerov's poem is placed thus mirrors what happens in it: the Creator is reduced from a position of autonomy outside our heads to the status of an idea inside our heads. From that point, this being is then externalized through our various religious myths and symbols, and the process repeats itself endlessly. The poem “does” what it is “about.”

Another example of “verbal skidding” in Nemerov's word play is his poem, “What Kind of Guy Was He?” (CP, 424). In this case, the verbal skidding matches the looseness of colloquial speech, and the poem ends with a “punch line,” as do many of Nemerov's short poems:

Just so you shouldn't have to ask again,
He was the kind of guy that if he said
Something and you were the kind of guy that said
You can say that again, he'd say it again.

Here again, the repetition of “say,” “said,” and the phrase “the kind of guy,” together with the repetition and alternation of pronouns—you, he, he, you, you, he—produces the effect of great looseness or “skidding” within a compact, highly ordered structure. In both of the poems cited, then, the form of the message augments the meaning.

INTERTEXTUAL PLAY

Nemerov's reworkings of familiar statements allow him to speak on several levels at once. Intertextuality is broader, however, since it invites or suggests the comparison of whole poems, rather than individual lines or phrases. The meaning of a highly allusive poem is enriched as it resonates in other poetic contexts. I am using the term “intertextual play” to designate a writer's strategic allusion to another work of literary art, rather than accidental or subconscious derivativeness. In several poems, Nemerov is deliberately “playing off of” another text. The widely-anthologized “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” (CP, 116-117) echoes not only the message delivered to Job (Job 1.15-19), but also Ishmael's words in the epilogue to Moby Dick. The title of the poem keys our reading, and the mention of ships, whales, and whalebone suggests that the poem alludes specifically to the Melville novel.

An equally clear example of strategic intertextuality is Nemerov's “Ozymandias II” (CP, 457). Like Shelley's “Ozymandias,” Nemerov's poem is a sonnet, though unrhymed. Both poems deal with monuments—Shelley's with a massive stone sculpture that crumbles, Nemerov's with a massive American automobile that continues to run. Nemerov's colloquial translation of the Shelley poem begins, “I met a guy I used to know, who said: / ‘You take your '57 Karnak, now, / The model that they called their Coop de Veal,’” and ends, “‘well, Jeezus what a country / Where even the monuments keep on the move.’” The reductio ad absurdum of Nemerov's text requires that the reader know Shelley's poem, and he reinforces this connection by titling his work “Ozymandias II.”

The paramount example of intertextual play in the corpus of Nemerov's poetry, however, is a poem entitled “On the Threshold of His Greatness, the Poet Comes Down with a Sore Throat” (CP, 274-275). That enigmatic title foreshadows the confusion that Nemerov cultivates in the poem. “On the Threshold …” is a parody of the Eliot-Pound tradition, generally, and of The Waste Land in particular. To someone with no knowledge of Eliot's poetry and his influence, Nemerov's poem might easily seem a put-on. It uses as an epigraph a quotation attributed to Paul Valery, “Enthusiasm is not the state of a writer's soul,” and begins with the following lines:

For years I explored the pharmacopoeia
After a new vision. I lay upon nails
While memorizing the Seven Least Nostalgias.
And I lived naked in a filthy cave,
Sneering at skiers, all one awful winter;
Then condescended and appeared in tails
At the Waldorf-Astoria, where I excelled
In the dancing of the Dialectician's Waltz
Before admiring matrons and their patrons.

What are the features foregrounding the intertextuality of the poem and reminding the reader repeatedly of Eliot's The Waste Land? Three prominent qualities of Nemerov's poem communicate his play with the Eliot poem. The first clue is the shape of the poem, how it looks on the page. Both Eliot's and Nemerov's poems are written in free verse; line lengths vary considerably. The left margin of both poems is straight and each line begins with a capitalized letter. These features establish a superficial similarity between the two poems. More telling, however, is another shared structural feature: direct quotations from other sources are italicized and usually indented. Whereas Eliot incorporates the “song of the (three) Thames daughters” in “The Fire Sermon,” Nemerov uses a fragment of Robert Burns' song, “Gin a body meet a body.”

Nemerov includes rather extensive notes to his poem, recalling Eliot's famous notes to The Waste Land. More considerate of his readers than Eliot, Nemerov does not merely refer to line numbers in his notes, but actually uses superscript footnote numbers throughout his poem and puts his notes at the bottom of the page. The notes indicate that Nemerov is lampooning Eliot's poem and having fun doing it. The sheer number of notes is striking: the thirty-six line poem contains seventeen footnotes, nearly one note for each two lines of poetry. Another index of Nemerov's play is the attribution of the notes, for these are not the poet's own remarks, but are rather “by Cyril Limpkin, M.A. (Oxon.), Fellow in American Literature at the University of Land's End, England” (CP, 275).

Some of the notes are funny because they labor the obvious. For example, along with explications of “the Seven Least Nostalgias” and other equally obscure references, we have the note that the Waldorf-Astoria is “an hotel in New York City.” Conversely, other notes are funny because of their tacit (and false) assumption that the reader understands something. “Note the increased profundity of the Burns song in the new context,” reads the note to “Gin a body meet a body.” Several of the notes are direct transformations of Eliot's notes. In lines 307-310 of The Waste Land, Eliot juxtaposes fragments from the Confessions of St. Augustine and excerpts from the Buddha's Fire Sermon. The note for that section reads, “The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.” When Nemerov juxtaposes phrases from the Fire Sermon and from the book of Ecclesiastes, “Cyril Limpkin” notes, “The collocation of these two representatives of Eastern and Western tradition, here at the collapse of the poem, may not be an accident.” In case the reader misses this connection, Nemerov also refers directly to three works by Eliot in his notes.

The exegetical notes to “On the Threshold …” are nearly as long as the poem itself, and they certainly command as much attention as the text. The persistent intrusion of the footnote numbers into the poem shifts the reader's attention from the text to the commentary. As Louise Rosenblatt might say, the notes, if taken seriously, interfere with an aesthetic reading of the text and force us to read it efferently, for what we “get out of it.”³⁴ This is, of course, precisely the trend in modern poetry that Nemerov is criticizing.

I said earlier that this poem initially strikes the reader as a put-on, an open-ended form with few precise clues as to whether the poet is serious or is gulling the reader. In the structure and content of the poem and notes, Nemerov eventually provides enough clues to communicate his play with the Eliot poem. In case the reader has somehow missed all of these clues, however, Nemerov includes a final “note on the notes”:

These notes have not the intention of offering a complete elucidation of the poem. Naturally, interpretations will vary from one reader to another, and even, perhaps, from one minute to the next. But because Modern Poetry is generally assumed to be a matter of the Intellect, and not the feelings; because it is meant to be studied, and not merely read; and because it is valued, in the classroom, to the precise degree of its difficulty, poet and critic have agreed that these Notes will not merely adorn the Poem, but possibly supersede it altogether.

(CP, 275)

Through overt clues such as this, as well as the more subtle ones, Nemerov makes the vital connection between certain of his poems and those of others. Intertextuality carries the message “This is play,” and helps the reader identify the particular text with which Nemerov is playing.

SEMANTIC TENSIVENESS IN NEMEROV'S POETRY

The last category of semantic play in Nemerov's poetry is his cultivation of “tensiveness” through ambiguity. Wallace Bacon says that “literature exists in tensiveness,” a pull of opposites.³⁵ Tensiveness in poetry may result from structural elements such as meter and rhyme, but Bacon notes that “one kind of tensiveness resides in the play between what words say and how they feel.”³⁶ Nemerov achieves semantic depth and richness by 1) casting some poems into the form of riddles or puzzles, and 2) incorporating “found materials” into selected poems.

Nemerov has said that the “riddle is very close to the source of poetry”; both are ways of “making perception something fresh and new by not giving it its ordinary name, by naming it according to its qualities, as if it didn't have a name.”³⁷ The riddle figures prominently in Nemerov's middle and later poems. For example, Gnomes and Occasions begins with “Quaerendo Invenietis” (“Seek and Ye Shall Find”), a three-part riddle poem. The first and third of these riddles are particularly significant since they deal with aspects of language:

I am the combination to a door
That fools and wise with equal ease undo.
Your unthought thoughts are changes still unread
In me, without whom nothing's to be said.

(CP, 413)

The answer to this riddle is the alphabet. More complex is the third riddle:

Without my meaning nothing, nothing means.
I am the wave for which the world makes way.
A term of time, and sometimes too of death,
I am the silence in the things you say.

The answer here: a sentence. Certain of Nemerov's riddle poems contain their answers. “A Riddle the Sphinx Forgot” (CP, 425) offers so many clues as to make the answer obvious:

What is this creature who must sweat all day
In the mill of making in the field of fight.
And then instead of sleeping, spend all night
To counterfeit the paper for his pay?

The closest Nemerov actually comes to the joke in his poetry is probably this riddle poem entitled “Power to the People” (CP, 420):

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents?
That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

A few of Nemerov's titles seem to be calculated puzzles for the reader Many allude to historical or literary figures. “The Baron Baedeker, Blew His Nose and, Sighing, Departed” (CP, 28), for example, refers to Karl Baedeker the German publisher of guidebooks and that information is crucial to under standing the poem. One of the most interesting puzzles in Nemerov's titles is “The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80” (S, 80-81). I had to read that title many times before convincing myself it was not a misprint. The sentiments of the poem are not those of a fifteen year-old: the persona thanks his “old” body for its lifetime of servitude. I knew that Nemerov was sixty years old in 1980. Is this a ten year-old poem intended to read “fiftieth birthday? Only when I remembered that most sources cite March 1, 1920, as Nemerov's birthday did I solve the puzzle. 1980 was a leap year, as was 1920. If Nemerov was actually born on February 29, or if he took the liberty of moving his birthdate back one day, then his calendar age would indeed be fifteen. This title does not key the reading of the poem in any particular way. It functions rather, to gauge the reader's attentiveness. As Roman Jakobson might say, serves a “phatic” function, checking to see whether the channel is open and whether the reader is reading carefully.³⁸

In addition to riddling, Nemerov is fond of using “found materials”—particularly portions of advertisements and newspaper articles—either as titles or epigraphs for some of his poems. Examples of “found” titles include “Instructions for the Use of This Toy” (CP, 123-124), “Student Dies in 100 Yard Dash” (CP, 193), and “Make Big Money at Home! Write Poems in Spare Time” (CP, 273-274). “Limits” (CP, 197-198) has as its epigraph, “Florida Frogmen Find New World,” from the New York Times. “Sonnet” (CP, 87) begins with an excerpt from an advertisement: “The one complete book for serious players … how to be a consistent winner … full information on all forms of cheating …” Much of the time the found item serves as counterpoint to the poem. For example, the simple-minded appeal, “Make Big Money at Home! Write Poems in Spare Time!” is the title of an ominous and funny poem whose main character Oliver, an amateur poet, is killed because he does not know what he is doing. The tensiveness of the poem arises in part from the play between that pedestrian title and the ruminating, almost brooding tone of the verse.

SUMMARY

An erudite and witty man, Nemerov capitalizes on the play of meanings throughout his poetry. His frequent use of play and games as either subjects or motifs alerts us to the importance of play in his poetry. In addition, he plays on a semantic level by punning, revitalizing and transforming proverbs, employing concatenations, and creating the effect of verbal skidding. These last four strategies I have labeled “word play.”

Nemerov also engages in intertextual play by strategically alluding to other literary texts, usually to comic effect. By also casting a number of his poems into the form of riddles or puzzles, Nemerov makes meaning something for the reader to “win.” Each of these semantic play strategies is calculated to arouse and maintain reader interest, and is therefore consistent with current thinking about play.

IMPLICATIONS OF PLAY FOR PERFORMANCE

The play inherent in a literary text is activated and elaborated as the performer translates it into vocal and gestural responses. Aesthetician Arnold Berleant reminds us of the attraction of speech:

Something about speech makes a claim on our attention; one cannot quite be indifferent to it. Speech is, in essence, what phenomenologists call an intentional object, one which is an object of our consciousness and toward which our consciousness is directed. As such it exercises a peculiar but powerful attraction on us.³⁹

Available to the performer, in addition to the words of the text, is a broad repertoire of metacommunicative (i.e., nonverbal and paralinguistic) signals. Play theorist Katherine Garvey notes that “most phenomena of speech and talking, such as expressive noises, variation in timing and intensity, the distribution of talk between participants, the objectives of speech (what we try to accomplish by speaking) are potential resources for play.”⁴⁰ Sounding the words of a literary text thus adds another level of play to a silent performance of the text; it adds speech play.

The play potential of the human body in motion should be apparent. The easily observed gross body movements of playing children make their activity ideal for description and analysis. While adults are capable, at least occasionally of playing with enthusiasm and abandon equalling that of children, the adult does not play as frequently or as long as the child. The chief function of the body in play is to provide what Desmond Morris calls “metasignals.”⁴¹ These “signals about signals” change the meaning of all actions being performed at the time. Among the physical metasignals marking human play are smiles, winks, and elaborate or uneconomical movements.⁴² This last metasignal is extremely important. In contrast to the streamlining, efficiency, and economy of energy that characterize our actions when something really has to be done, our play is deliberately uneconomical. In physical play, this lack of action economy takes the form of exaggerated movements, role shifts, and rhythmic, repetitive movement sequences. Different writers use a number of terms to describe this feature of play: “over-motivation,” “deliberate complication,” “physical damming up,” and “galumphing.”⁴³ These terms all denote the voluntary imposition of obstacles, serving to maintain attention on the process of our actions, rather than on their products or ends. Thus, the physical play inherent in performance is analogous to the poet's and reader's mental play with the shapes, sounds, and associations of words and word sequences.

Finally, the performance of literature is also a form of symbolic play, or make believe. Anthropologist Stephen Miller notes: “Play is not means without the end; it is a crooked line to the end; it circumnavigates obstacles put there by the player, or voluntarily acceded to by him.”⁴⁴ When the patterns of complication and elaboration “are derived from an organic model—when the obstacles we decide to make ourselves circumnavigate form the shape of ‘something,’” we call the play “symbolic” or “make believe.” Thus, according to Miller, the child who “flies” down the sidewalk with arms outstretched while making a roaring sound is making believe that he or she is an airplane; we recognize the organic model shaped by the child's play behavior. In the same way, the performer “accedes to” the patterns of complication and elaboration in the literary text. The only difference between the activities of the child above and the individual performing a poem is that the performer's play will typically define the shape of someone—a specific character in a specific set of circumstances—rather than something. Drawing clues from the text, the performer engages in symbolic play in order to define the shape of the literary experience.

A full exploration of the interrelationships between the play found in Nemerov's poetry, the sense in which all performance is play, and the specific play techniques available and appropriate for any given poem, is a subject that deserves further probing. Subsequent research could address such questions as “Should the performer be the ‘poet-player,’ that is, the ‘master’ of the games? Or should the performer be the ‘player-as-innocent-discoverer’ in the games, more or less the role of the silent reader? Must the performer somehow maintain both roles? Can a performer achieve an honest reading before an audience without reducing the sense of surprise and discovery in the poems? Or is any public performance reductive? In various performances of any one poem, will the amount of ‘playing’ vary? Will various examples of the performed texts yield additional insights into the kinds and amounts of play in the written texts?” These questions and others remain for scholar-performers to answer.

This discussion of the types of semantic play in Howard Nemerov's poetry has demonstrated the utility of this critical methodology for the individual preparing a Nemerov text for performance. One of the advantages of a play analysis is that it leads us quite naturally to consider figurative language, poetic structure, allusiveness, and the tone and attitude of the persona. Ultimately, however, play theory challenges both the critic and performer to avoid “over-intellectualizing” a text. Indeed, the research, analysis, and theories do inform our performances. But we cannot perform a theory, a metaphor, or a list of character traits; what we perform are characters in action, and surely one way to discover and demonstrate those characters and actions, especially when the characters or their writers are “at play,” is by “playing” and “playing with” the literature.

Notes

1. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: New American Library, 1973), pp. 196-197.

2. I use the term “poetic composition” to refer to all imaginative writing.

3. Eugen Gomringer, Preface, The Book of Hours and Days, ed. Eugen Gomringer, trans. Jerome Rothenberg (New York: Something Else Press, 1968), n. pag.

4. Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), p. 30.

5. Philip Stevick, “Scheherezade Runs Out of Plots, Goes on Talking; The King, Puzzled, Listens: An Essay on New Fiction,” Tri-Quarterly, 26 (1973), 361.

6. Sigmund Freud, The Relation of the Poet to Day Dreaming. Coll. Papers, IV, quoted by Robert Walder, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Play,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2 (1933), 223. I have found Freud's essay, in different translation and with different titles, in two other sources: Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 749-753; and Melvin Rader, ed., A Modern Book of Esthetics, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), pp. 126-132.

7. W. H. Auden, et al., Poets at Work, ed. Charles C. Abbott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948), p. 163, quoted by Richard Shelton, “The Poem in Context: Aiken's ‘Morning Song,’” Speech Teacher, 16 (January, 1967), 28.

8. W. H. Auden, “Squares and Oblongs,” in Play, ed. Jerome Bruner, Allison Jolly, and Kathy Sylva (New York: Basic Books, 1967), p. 638.

9. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Barnes and Noble, 1928), p. viii.

10. David Wagoner, “Words for Young Writers—From the Notes of Theodore Roethke,” Saturday Review, 29 June 1968, pp. 14-15.

11. Louis Untermeyer, Play in Poetry (1938; rpt. New York: Folcroft Library Editions, 1979), p. 4.

12. Quoted in Untermeyer, p. 105.

13. Helen Vendler, “All Too Real,” rev. of A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981, by Adrienne Rich, New York Review of Books, 17 Dec. 1981, p. 32.

14. Vendler, p. 32.

15. Mark Lilly, ‘Nabokov: Homo Ludens,” in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (New York: William Morrow, 1980), pp. 88-102.

16. See, for example, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968); Kathleen Blake, Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974); Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (London: Andre Duetsch, 1973); Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); R. Heppenstall, Raymond Rousell: A Critical Study (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967); R. Hollander, “Babytalk in Dante's Comedia,” Mosaic: A Journal for Comparative Study of Ideas (1975), 73-84; Philip Lewis, “La Rochefoucauld: The Rationality of Play,” in Game, Play, Literature, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 133-147; Sydney Levy, The Play of the Text: Max Jacob's Le Cornet a Des (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Edward Mendelson, “Gravity's Encyclopedia,” in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverentz (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), pp. 161-195; Bruce Morrisette, “Games and Game Structures in Robbe-Grillet,” in Game, Play Literature, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 159-167; Anna K. Nardo “Play, Literary Criticism, and the Poetry of George Herbert,” in Play and Culture: 1978 proceedings of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, ed. Helen Schwartzman (West Point, N.Y.: Leisure Press, 1980), pp. 38-48.

17. Michael J. Ellis, Why People Play (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973).

18. This list of characteristics of play is adapted from Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1961). Caillois bases much of his theory on what many consider the seminal work in play theory, Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).

19. Howard Nemerov, “Bottom's Dream: The Likeliness of Poems and Jokes,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 42 (Autumn 1966), 556.

20. Nemerov, 556.

21. Nemerov, 556-557.

22. Nemerov, 565.

23. Nemerov, 567.

24. Howard Nemerov, “Attentiveness and Obedience,” in his Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1972), p. 165.

25. Nemerov, “Attentiveness and Obedience,” p. 170.

26. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 182, quoted in Leland Roloff, The Perception and Evocation of Literature (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1973 p. 187.

27. The broad categories of play I mention here—phonic, syntactic, lexical, and semantic-were suggested in part by Dina Sherzer's essay “Saying is Inventing: Gnomic Expressions in Molloy,” in Speech Play, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 163-171.

28. Howard Nemerov, “Childhood,” in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 481. All further references to poems in this collection are incorporated into the text and labeled CP; references to poems in Nemerov's Sentences (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980) are labeled S in the text. His most recent collection, not treated in this study, is Inside the Onion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

29. Martha Wolfenstein, Children's Humor: A Psychological Analysis (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), p. 168.

30. Stephen F. Fogle, “Pun,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 681.

31. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Mary Sanches, “Children's Traditional Speech Play and Child Language,” in Speech Play, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 88.

32. Carolyn Kizer, “Nemerov: The Middle of the Journey,” rev. of Mirrors and Windows by Howard Nemerov, Poetry, 93 (December 1958), 181.

33. Sherzer, p. 165.

34. Rosenblatt distinguishes between “efferent” and “aesthetic” approaches to literature in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale, ILL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1978).

35. Wallace Bacon, The Art of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 39.

36. Wallace Bacon, p. 39.

37. Ross Labrie, “Howard Nemerov in St. Louis: An Interview,” Southern Review, 15 (Summer 1979), 613.

38. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1964), pp. 350-377.

39. Arnold Berleant, “The Verbal Presence: An Aesthetics of Literary Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 31 (Spring 1973), 340.

40. Catherine Garvey, Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), p. 59.

41. Desmond Morris, Manwatching (New York: Abrams, 1977), pp. 272-273.

42. For a full discussion of the metasignals marking human play, see Owen Aldis, Play Fighting (New York: Academic Press, 1975).

43. The terms cited here are used by the following authors, respectively: M. W. Curti, Child Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930); Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (New York: Norton, 1962); Karl Groos, The Play of Man (London: William Heineman, 1901); and Stephen Miller, “Ends, Means, and Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play,” American Anthropologist, 75 (1973).

44. Miller, 93.