The Business of Poetry

How best to “see” and “hear” Norse’s poetry? Reading across the work brought together in In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems 1934-2003, and the collections that feed into it, this chapter seeks to establish the unique pitch of Norse’s verse from the more formal early writing to the freer later compositions. Taking a point of departure from the poem “The Business of Poetry” with its celebration of “music and love” as against the ravage of “savage and brutal men,” it so addresses four main arenas: love(s) and sex, geographies, pieces given over to other poets and to visual artists, and those reflexively taken up with poetry about itself. To this end emphasis is centred on issues of fashioning, measure, rhythm, spacing, the due recognition of Norse’s command of voice. Poems like “Paper Bodies,” “I See America Daily,” “Walt Whitman Called Today” and “Why I Am a Poet” supply bearings in this respect. Much as Norse rightly commands notice for his boldness as an out gay poet, a traveller and autobiographer, a key postwar countercultural presence, he left no doubt in design and practice of his commitment to working craftsmanship. The reading at hand explores that forte.