Modern Urban Life in Bissett Eliot and Blake

¶ … unconventional poetic form and breaking the laws of spelling and grammar, Bill Bissett's "Ode to Frank Silvera" presents a multilayered, multifaceted critique of modern poetry and modern life. Ironically, "Ode to Frank Silvera" does reveal a strong commitment to the traditional goals of poetry: including the use of verse to achieve intellectual and emotional reactions in the reader. The reader can recognize the elements of traditional poetic structure including the use of repetition and parallelism, and deliberate homage paid to ee Cummings in the use of all lowercase letters. Bissett also manages to achieve a sort of meta-analysis of the English language, distilling words to their essential phonemes and presenting them with blatant errors in spelling. Doing this, Bissett also draws attention to the words he misspells, such as the ubiquitous "yu," which is pivotal in "Ode to Frank Silvera." The content of "Ode to Frank Silvera" echoes that of T.S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," as well as William Blake in "London." All three of these poems depict modern urban life and the confusion, alienation, and ambivalence it brings out in people.

Writing in second person, Bissett directly engages the reader in conversation. Using vernacular speech and misspellings underscores the deliberate attempt to bring poetry to the level of the vernacular. Not too far from the lofty diction used by Eliot and Blake, Bissett creates an urban atmosphere that has blurred distinctions between social hierarchies. Using parallelisms to begin the first lines of each stanza: "yu might think," "yu might say," and "yu might hope" creates a sort of drum beat that anchors the reader to the content of the poem. There are deliberate discrepancies in the ways Bissett chooses to misspell his words, as the poet could have spelled "might" phonetically as well, "mite." Yet the poet chooses to render some words like "yu" and "th" differently and leave other words as they are, signaling the contradictions inherent in modern urban life. Eliot and Blake likewise rely on second person singular to connect with the reader, as they refer to the "anxieties" that accompany the speaker through his daily journey (Bissett).

Some of the imagery that Bissett uses hearkens to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." For example, Bissett refers to the "yellow colord air," and Eliot repeatedly mentions the color yellow in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," as with "the yellow fog," and "the yellow smoke." The color yellow is presented as a pollutant: a color that mars the otherwise clear light of day or crispness of evening air. Yellow is the color of halogen street lamps and noxious fumes, not of healthy living in the outdoors, the opposite of urban life. Blake takes the motif of pollution even further, as in the "blackening Church." Each of these three poems decries urban life for being dirty, filthy, detracting from human purity. This is why Bissett contrasts the imagery of the city with that of the country, to show the difference between "yellow colord air" and the "golden being" of the sun, or the "racing green" of the hills. Cities blur and obscure, rather than help people to see things more clearly. The "tenement" building is no substitute for the grandeur of the "mountain," which is "hard and eternal," according to the speaker in "Ode to Frank Silvera."

Ultimately, Blake, Eliot, and Bissett each present a bleak portrait of modern urban life. Escapism and alienation are core themes. In "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the speaker flits from dream to dream, related to disparate symbols from Lazarus to Hamlet. In "Ode to Frank Silvera," the speaker states, "yu dream" at the end of the poem, urging the reader to "move further out a town." Snyder (2015) suggests that the narrator of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is in fact a teenager, expressing angst at existence while reaching strongly for change and transformation. Of the three, only "London" uses concrete imagery to convey the disillusionment of modern urban life that one might need to escape from, as Blake does not provide any sense of hope for detachment. There is, however, some hope in the way that Bissett manipulates language, thereby taking back the power of the speaker and reader from traditional literary establishment. As Morrell & Duncan-Andrade (n.d.) point out, "literacy must initially be taught in the language of the people," which is precisely what Bissett achieves in "Ode to Frank Silvera," (p. 249). Bissett invokes the class struggles to achieve upward social mobility, and the ways educational institutions have systematically excluded underclass from attaining cultural capital, by fusing high literature (such as allusions to classically academic poetry like that of Blake and Eliot) with common vernacular. In fact, the hope that Bissett provides turns out to be qualitatively different, especially from the more pessimistic outlook provided by Blake in "London." Blake, who focuses on "blackness" and "blood," offers no way out for the underclass, whereas Bissett does provide the opportunity to dream and step beyond the shackles of modern urban existence.