We all know Robert Trent Jones, Jr. (Bob to his friends), is one of the greatest names in golf course design, but did you know he is also an accomplished poet? With a Yale-Stanford education, you can bet he couldn’t avoid classical literature. Moreover, Jones has a broad and deep palette for inspiration: T.S. Eliot and Percy Bysshe Shelley, (two of his favorites), a vivid imagination, a vibrant vocabulary, and years of world travel. His 2008 book has some great poems about golf, love and life, ordinary pleasures, and classical tributes to history and literature. While mostly free verse, there is the occasional foray into metered verse or rhyme schemes. Let’s explore a different side of this complex man. We’ll save the golf poems for next time. For today, we’ll discuss classic poems and travel verses.
It’s well known Jones is a oenophile, so his second poem in the collection, Wine, anthropomorphizes his favorite beverage in a ribald manner:
Corked sunlight, Dionysus’ gift,
Carmine nectar quenching the gods’ thirst.
Caress the awaiting chalice.
With a sensual pop the embedded cork
reveals his sweet sleek smoothness.
Jones slowly but smoothly begins erotic courtship: “caress the chalice,” “a sensual pop,” “the embedded cork.” But he’s just getting started:
The ripe cork slowly expands,
Plump with loving promise.
“Ripe” and “plump” speak for themselves. Finally, Jones brings the poem to a literal climax. Note the frenetic pace and forceful word choice:
Breathe the deep ambrosian fragrance,
Let the tongue go speechless
As it tastes immortality.
Now, quaff her down.
Now while she pleads a virgin’s breath.
Now, before mortal air turns her to vinegar.
The choice of a pagan god, Dionysus, the metaphoric use of the Olympian nectar “ambrosia,” and the pounding, sexually-syncopated rhythm make the poem at once heathen and classical. Eliot, one of Jones’s inspirations, made liberal use of mythology in his work as well. As a small critique, one more line would have made it a sonnet.
Also note that Jones correctly observes a complicated (and usually butchered) rule of punctuation. Jones properly formed the singular possessive of the noun “Dionysus,” but probably not why you think. Most people and newspapers – especially the New York City press, – botch this rule everyday. Even if the last letter is “s” (hereafter “ess”) you form the singular possessive of nouns by adding “apostrophe-ess,” so it’s “Jones’s poems” not “Jones’ poems.” I’ll cite two notable exceptions. The first is for ancient names like “Jesus” or “Isis,” so it’s “Jesus’ tunic” and “Isis’ temple.” Dionysus, as we all know, is an older name than Jesus. For the record, the second exception is “if the possessed noun also begins with ess and you would therefore have three esses in a row, you may elide the second ess, just as in speech, so it’s “Barry Bonds’ subpoena” and Roger Clemens’ steroids,” but it’s “Bonds’s lawyer” and “Clemens’s lies.”
Anyway, lets examine another free verse poem I rather like, Ice Brother Bear:
I see my silhouette reflected there,
Through the frozen mirror of my ice brother bear.
I embrace my brother’s cold encasement
But cannot unlock him from earth’s basement.
Raising high my Viking sword
I strike a blow for lord Thor.
The ice block splits its frozen visage,
Releasing his perfectly preserved visage
Once again, Jones channels mythology, this time Norse. He also evokes another Eliot motif, a cold, icy, barren, landscape, waiting for the spring. Jones’s almost cinematographic word choice then turns the camera-eye from one duty to the next: from depicting the lifeless arctic crypt, to the shattering of the ice block, which both literally and metaphorically brings the spring, a motif also explored in The Grail Legend, another source of inspiration for Eliot’s The Waste Land:
How much softening can you bear
Now you face spring’s brutal terror
Listen to the song of the wind
Hear the voices of the hind
Sing to the music of cascades
As time flows through your decades
Life is the soul’s holiday
Valhalla will greet you on another day.
It’s an interesting poem and it’s the right length: long enough to cover what’s necessary, but short enough to keep it interesting. With such old school, romantic motifs and inspirations, it really should be metered, for example:
My silhouette reflected there
Frozen! My Ice Brother Bear.
Frosts embrace his cold encasement
I must release him from Earth’s basement.
Raising high my Viking Sword
I strike a blow for Thor the Lord.
The ice block splits his frozen visage
Releasing is preserved image.
Free verse is usually fine for modern works, but for a heroic epic such as this – a short one to be sure, but in that vein – a poem such as this would feel more antique and would read more dramatically.
Jones is actually quite good when he follows meter. Take, for example, Fiji:
A flower fair
In Neptune’s hair
Born from the deep burst free
An emerald isle
on a turquoise tile
In the midst of a tropic sea
Awaiting you and me.
Bula!
See? Get in, get out, take a bow, and wait for the applause to die down before reading the next one. Greek gods, creation myth, a shining jewel, and a lovely sing-song refrain with a big cheer at the end. Bula! right back at ya, Bob.
Indeed, his endless travels provide a deep treasure chest for Jones. In Dalmatia, after casting his thoughts “into the moonless night” and his emotions into the “olive black sea” whose “swells swallowed” him and “wombed me rhythmically,” he was:
Awakened by lovely light
I surface on the morrow
Without a shard of sorrow.
In Africa, he extols “Yellow, yellow, yellow Africa” as the womb of all life:
Her Cape, backbone of the earth,
With mountains rising from two turbulent seas
Africa, whose plates were wrenched from Latin America,
Gemini continents. Once joined twins of Mother Earth….
….Her rhythms reverberate in every rib,
Beneath the drum skins, life’s pulse resonates
From timeless hands.
Again, like Eliot in Little Gidding of the Four Quartets, Jones highlights the interconnection between past, present, and future, uniting all places and times and having them enthralled by the hypnotic, life-giving music of the drums – again both heathen and primal.
Jones’s poetic strength in his travel poems and his traditional work comes from his classical education. In Poems 2008, he includes a reprint of Shelley’s master work, Ozymandius, then writes several derivative poems of his own following Ozymandius’ theme of the fall of man through hubris and vanity – even on the golf course as the game makes fools of us all. We’ll explore those golf poems in our next installment of The Reading List.
By the way, for those of you scoring at home, Ozymandius is an ancient name. It’s the Greek name for Ramses II, the pharaoh who Moses battled during the Exodus.
[All sections of poems are (c) Robert Trent Jones, Jr., 1999-2008, All rights reserved.]
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